I have to solve reCAPTCHA challenges via Tor all the time, and while it definitely takes longer than normal, I can still do it within a couple of minutes 95% of the time. Sometimes reCAPTCHA will totally block an IP address, or put an IP address onto a near-impossible level of difficulty, but it's rare, and the solution to that is to just get a different Tor exit.

Thanks for the well-wishes, everyone! ❤️ It's funny to think that I've been in Bitcoin since before I was 20, 30% of my whole life. Makes me feel both old and young, in different ways.

The forum sells ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page. This income is used primarily to cover hosting costs and to pay moderators for their work (there are many moderators, so each moderator gets only a small amount -- moderators should be seen as volunteers, not employees). Any leftover amount is typically either saved for future expenses or otherwise reinvested into the forum or the ecosystem.

Ads are allowed to contain any non-annoying HTML/CSS style. No images, JavaScript, or animation. Ads must appear 3 or fewer lines tall in my browser (Firefox, 900px wide). Ad text may not contain lies, misrepresentation, or inappropriate language. Ads may not link directly to any NSFW page. No ICOs^[1], banks, funds, or anything else that a person can be said to "invest" in; I may very rarely make exceptions if you convince me that you are ultra legit, but don't count on it. Ads may be rejected for other reasons, and I may remove ads even after they are accepted.

There are 10 total ad slots which are randomly rotated. So one ad slot has a one in ten chance of appearing. Nine of the slots are for sale here. Ads appear only on topic pages with more than one post, and only for people using the default theme.

Duration

- Your ads are guaranteed to be up for at least 7 days.
- I usually try to keep ads up for no more than 8 or 9 days.
- Sometimes ads might be up for longer, but hopefully no longer than 12 days. Even if past rounds sometimes lasted for long periods of time, you should not rely on this for your ads.

Stats

Exact historical impression counts per slot:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adstats

Info about the current ad slots:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adinfo

Ad blocking

Hero/Legendary members, Donators, VIPs, and moderators have the ability to disable ads. I don't expect many people to use this option. These people don't increase the impression stats for your ads.

I try to bypass Adblock Plus filters as much as possible, though this is not guaranteed. It is difficult or impossible for ABP filters to block the ad space itself without blocking posts. However, filters can match against the URLs in your links, your CSS classes and style attributes, and the HTML structure of your ads.

To prevent matches against URLs: I have some JavaScript which fixes links blocked by ABP. You must tell me if you want this for your ads. When someone with ABP and JavaScript enabled views your ads, your links are changed to a special randomized bitcointalk.org URL which redirects to your site when visited. People without ABP are unaffected, even if they don't have JavaScript enabled. The downsides are:
- ABP users will see the redirection link when they hover over the link, even if they disable ABP for the forum.
- Getting referral stats might become even more difficult.
- Some users might get a warning when redirecting from https to http.

To prevent matching on CSS classes/styles: Don't use inline CSS. I can give your ad a CSS class that is randomized on each pageload, but you must request this.

To prevent matching against your HTML structure: Use only one <a> and no other tags if possible. If your ads get blocked because of matching done on something inside of your ad, you are responsible for noticing this and giving me new ad HTML.

Designing ads

Make sure that your ads look good when you download and edit this test page:
https://bitcointalk.org/ad_test.html
Also read the comments in that file.

Images are not allowed no matter how they are created (CSS, SVG, or data URI). Occasionally I will make an exception for small logos and such, but you must get pre-approval from me first.

The maximum size of any one ad is 51200 bytes.

I will send you more detailed styling rules if you win slots in this auction (or upon request).

Auction rules

You must be at least a Jr Member to bid. If you are not a Jr Member and you really want to bid, you should PM me first. Tell me in the PM what you're going to advertise. You might be required to pay some amount in advance. Everyone else: Please quickly PM newbies who try to bid here to warn them against impersonation scammers.

If you have never purchased forum ad space before, and it is not blatantly obvious what you're going to advertise, say what you're going to advertise in your first bid, or tell me in a PM.

Post your bids in this thread. Prices must be stated in BTC per slot. You must state the maximum number of slots you want. When the auction ends, the highest bidders will have their slots filled until all nine slots are filled.

So if someone bids for 9 slots @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 9 slots. If the two highest bids are 9 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 8 slots and the second person will get 1 slot.

The notation "2 @ 5" means 2 slots for 5 BTC each. Not 2 slots for 5 BTC total.

- When you post a bid, the bids in your previous posts are considered to be automatically canceled. You can put multiple bids in one post, however.
- All bid prices must be evenly divisible by 0.02.
- The bidding starts at 0.02.
- I will end the auction at an arbitrary time. Unless I say otherwise, I typically try to end auctions within a few days of 10 days from the time of this post, but unexpected circumstances may sometimes force me to end the auction anytime between 4 and 22 days from the start. I have a small bias toward ending auctions on Fridays, Sundays, and Mondays.
- If two people bid at the same price, the person who bid first will have his slots filled first.
- Bids are considered invalid and will be ignored if they do not specify both a price and a max quantity, or if they could not possibly win any slots

If these rules are confusing, look at some of the past forum ad auctions to see how it's done.

I reserve the right to reject bids, even days after the bid is made.

You must pay for your slots within 24 hours of receiving the payment address. Otherwise your slots may be sold to someone else, and I might even give you a negative trust rating. I will send you the payment information via forum PM from this account ("theymos", user ID 35) after announcing the auction results in this thread. You might receive false payment information from scammers pretending to be me. They might even have somewhat similar usernames. Be careful.

---

[1]: For the purposes of forum ads, an ICO is any token, altcoin, or other altcoin-like thing which meets any of the following criteria: it is primarily run/backed by a company; it is substantially, fundamentally centralized in either operation or coin distribution; or it is not yet possible for two unprivileged users of the system to send coins directly to each other in a P2P way. The intention here is to allow community efforts to advertise things like Litecoin, but not to allow ICO funding, even when the ICO is disguised in various ways.

Rejected because I have no idea what you're advertising:

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 0.10 walleting.services
4 0.10 jimcroce
3 0.10 FortuneJack
1 0.08 bit.news

I read through the Tether manipulation paper. IMO it made two convincing points:

#1 Someone has a habit of doing this:
 - Issuing new USDT
 - Within days, moving that USDT to BitFinex, Bittrex, and/or Poloniex
 - Using that USDT to buy crypto (seemingly a portfolio of BTC & others). They especially like to buy crypto when the price is just below whole numbers.
 - Moving the resulting crypto back to BitFinex
 - Rarely or never selling the crypto for USDT again
 
The authors argue that this is Tether/BitFinex themselves, and I think that this is in fact the most likely explanation. But the authors didn't address the alternative possibility of this being a particularly ham-fisted whale who is a close partner of Tether.

#2 Due to end-of-month trading, Tether has probably always been trading with USD deposited with them (fractional-reserve), though at least until March 2017, USDT was probably not complete monopoly money, since they did go to the effort of achieving an end-of-month USD balance.

The authors also tried to argue some other points which I didn't find convincing.

---

I took the paper's data at face value. There were several points where I thought that they could be cherry-picking data, but it's too difficult to check this sort of thing. Cherry-picking / confirmation bias is especially easy to do with block-chain analysis. And I know for a fact that their method of grouping block-chain transactions is not robust in general, though it probably was sufficient for what they did here.

I've thought for a long time that USDT is almost certainly a scam, and this paper makes me think so even more. Though I was actually a little surprised that this provides evidence (via the end-of-month trading) that USDT ever had any real USD.

The paper estimates that if you removed the USDT issuance events which the paper's authors regard as most likely to be BTC price manipulation, the BTC price would be $4100 as of March 31. But that's based on a whole pile of assumptions; I wouldn't give it much credence. I think that the collapse of USDT will be mostly limited to the obvious direct effects (ie. some exchanges would have major troubles, there'd be many people stuck with worthless USDT, etc.), and there would not somehow be a natural "rollback" of any gains which monopoly-money USDT may have driven. Also, the paper makes clear that all major crypto was affected, often much more than BTC, so this isn't any sort of argument against BTC in particular.

This topic has been moved to Trashcan. Trademark claim by R3.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3040560.0

First and foremost it was a political move. It was meant to make Trump look unprecedentedly effective and peace-loving, and it was very successful in that. I was listening to callers on C-SPAN, and it seemed that about 95% of Republicans and 75% of Democrats loved it. It'll help Trump and the Republicans for a long time.

Whether something actually comes of it depends on how serious both sides are going forward. Kim is young, and it is remotely possible that he could've actually been convinced by Trump and his team to undergo a major shift. I'm not sure that it's likely, but it seems possible that Kim has long actually felt trapped in his role, and Trump is offering an attractive way out that he's never seen before. Trump seems to think that this is the case, and if it is, then IMO Trump's actions (even that corny trailer video) could've been very convincing to Kim.

Kim is in a difficult situation. If he gives up his nuclear weapons, then he's quite likely to be Libya'd. (Is he wise enough to know this, though?) But if North Korea continues on its present course, then internal conditions will continue to deteriorate until there is an uprising, or until war breaks out between NK and the US. Despite being Supreme Leader, there are probably also internal political issues preventing him from acting with complete freedom.

Probably, Kim is not really interested in change, and he'll basically just ignore this. Then it depends on whether Trump wants to pursue this issue hard going forward. If Trump makes it his #1 issue, perhaps progress could be made even despite NK resistance.

Most likely, both sides will be content to let it die, perhaps doing several more meaningless agreements in order to make it not look like a failure.

Despite my skepticism, I can't fault Trump on this. The meeting is a small but meaningful improvement in relations; far more than any neocon would do. (For this reason, I suspect that it was mostly set up by Tillerson before he was replaced...)

No, I'm imagining a game that's at least somewhat separate from normal posts. At the very least you'd have to specifically indicate your prediction in your post contents so that the system could understand. (But I'm really imagining a separate website that's not linked to posts.)

Interpreting post contents is too difficult. Modern AI is powerful enough that you could probably do it with >90% accuracy, but it'd still be too inaccurate to actually be satisfying, and designing and training an AI to be even halfway decent would take tons of time.


There are many possible ways of doing it. If I were to create the game, I think I'd do it in the style of parimutuel betting, but using play-money chips. So:
 - If you're willing to bet at least 10 chips, you could create a new prediction, like "I predict that the price will be between x and y at time t".
 - People could bet on either side of existing predictions.
 - Once the prediction is decided, the chips of the wrong side would be distributed amongst the betters on the right side, somewhat-proportionally to their respective bets. However, the rewards formula would need to give more reward to people who placed bets earlier than others. (You could copy the rewards formula from one of the existing parimutuel betting sites.)
 - Whenever you have less than 10 chips, you're given chips so that you have 10 chips. So even if you're constantly wrong, you can still keep playing.
 - Your speculation score equals your current number of chips.

It sounds like it'd be fun to write the game as I described, but it'd probably take me ~40 hours, and I just can't spend that kind of time on such a niche feature.


Something like that would be fine, but I don't want to run any manual competitions. If someone wants to do that, you'd just have to create an unchanging URL from which the forum can automatically import scores.

Meta idea: since people are always making price predictions, I was thinking that it'd be cool to add a "Speculation score" number under your posts/merit/activity while in the speculation section, with the score based on some continuously-running price prediction game. I probably don't have time to develop a game like that, though. But if someone else creates it off-site with the necessary APIs, your site could provide the scores for the forum. Anyone want to create it?

I tend to be a perma-bear, but this most recent crash feels really artificial.


There really should be no reason for 2014 to recur, since the overall situation is so immensely different, but I also can't help but see parallels. I've always thought that the upward movement after the 2015 doldrums was driven to a significant extent by the 2016 halving, though, which wouldn't apply to a time-accelerated model. And in 2013-2015 the price dropped about 83% from its ATH, which would lead to a price of about $3200 in the current situation.

Nope, forum ads can't be blocked in general using ABP-style (ie. EasyList-compatible) adblockers without also breaking the forum for you. The page is laid out such that the ad area can't be unambiguously selected by CSS selectors. If you use eg. ABP's Element Hiding Helper, it'll work on the page you're viewing, and then it'll either stop working on your next pageload or start hiding random posts and/or other bits of the forum.

 - If you logout on one session, all of your sessions are logged out.
 - When you change your password, your session length is changed to 1 hour, so you will soon be logged out.

There's no 6-month expiration or anything. If your "remember password" thing is being forgotten, then that'd be especially surprising.

Right. I posted about this somewhere when I did it.

IIRC MagicalTux also got VIP without paying 50 BTC because he contributed significant resources in other ways.

It was pretty good: I'd give it a grade of B+. The worst problem was that there were only a few, huge files, but if you ignored that then it made a lot of sense. It was written in (then-)modern C++, clearly with a lot of care. It was clearly not written in a stream-of-consciousness manner. There were very few bugs that you could blame on lack of programming skill.

My personal suspicion in this area is that Satoshi was never (or not recently) a full-time programmer, but he was pretty familiar with computer science (maybe a student or academic?), and he'd read some comprehensive C++ book just before starting on Bitcoin, so he made full and correct usage of C++ features in a slightly messy way.

I've also noticed romanticism of Rome, both in my surroundings and in myself. Often when I imagine how organizations/governments/societies ought to be structured, without noticing it I start thinking of the Roman system. Eg. a while ago I was thinking that bitcointalk.org has over its history usually had two admins, which reminded me of the system under the Roman Republic of there being two consuls, and I intuitively found this comparison satisfying. Then I had to remind myself that the Roman state failed in innumerable different ways (including in many ways that Romans cared about -- not just from a modern perspective), it was anti-technological, it was inherently, grossly immoral, it was almost diametrically opposed to my ideological viewpoint, etc. But Rome permeates our culture so much, even today, that I just can't help but have my thoughts colored by it sometimes.

The USA reminds me very much of Rome. The government is (intentionally) very similar, there is a similar breakdown in government function caused by a mismatch between how the factions are supposed to be balanced and how the factions exist today, there is the same sort of schizophrenic and expansionist foreign policy, etc. I've been increasingly feeling that the US government has entered a highly dysfunctional state similar to the Roman Republic in its last 50-100 years, and the mounting pressure of broken government will soon lead to crises and then major governmental changes, similar to Rome. (Though history is not actually cyclical, so I'm not going to predict that there will be an actual Emperor of the US at any point in the future...)

I'm not a fan of Microsoft at all. It seems that their plans as of late have been to transform their customers into their products by making everything free or cheap, but then spying on people as much as possible. That said, git is very decentralized by nature, and it doesn't matter too much what the repository is doing. It would be only a minor annoyance to move eg. the bitcoin repo to any of a number of different git repo sites. Roughly the same thing has already been done once, when SourceForge started going downhill. I don't think that any action is required until bad things actually start happening at github, though.

Accept no substitute!

No, we never sell accounts.

Your immediate thought upon seeing someone named "theymos" (or any other recognizable name) on any other site is that he's not really me. Typically, anyone can register whatever name they want, so you should treat a username as total non-evidence. In this case it's especially obvious because if I wanted to sell highly-ranked accounts, I would just create accounts with Ultra-Legendary status, 1 million merit, +9999 trust, etc. and sell those. (But we never do this sort of thing, either.)

If I tried dealing with every impersonator, I'd spend tons of time on it and still fail to catch them all. If you care about the site in question, you can report it.

The forum sells ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page. This income is used primarily to cover hosting costs and to pay moderators for their work (there are many moderators, so each moderator gets only a small amount -- moderators should be seen as volunteers, not employees). Any leftover amount is typically either saved for future expenses or otherwise reinvested into the forum or the ecosystem.

Ads are allowed to contain any non-annoying HTML/CSS style. No images, JavaScript, or animation. Ads must appear 3 or fewer lines tall in my browser (Firefox, 900px wide). Ad text may not contain lies, misrepresentation, or inappropriate language. Ads may not link directly to any NSFW page. No ICOs^[1], banks, funds, or anything else that a person can be said to "invest" in; I may very rarely make exceptions if you convince me that you are ultra legit, but don't count on it. Ads may be rejected for other reasons, and I may remove ads even after they are accepted.

There are 10 total ad slots which are randomly rotated. So one ad slot has a one in ten chance of appearing. Nine of the slots are for sale here. Ads appear only on topic pages with more than one post, and only for people using the default theme.

Duration

- Your ads are guaranteed to be up for at least 7 days.
- I usually try to keep ads up for no more than 8 or 9 days.
- Sometimes ads might be up for longer, but hopefully no longer than 12 days. Even if past rounds sometimes lasted for long periods of time, you should not rely on this for your ads.

Stats

Exact historical impression counts per slot:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adstats

Info about the current ad slots:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adinfo

Ad blocking

Hero/Legendary members, Donators, VIPs, and moderators have the ability to disable ads. I don't expect many people to use this option. These people don't increase the impression stats for your ads.

I try to bypass Adblock Plus filters as much as possible, though this is not guaranteed. It is difficult or impossible for ABP filters to block the ad space itself without blocking posts. However, filters can match against the URLs in your links, your CSS classes and style attributes, and the HTML structure of your ads.

To prevent matches against URLs: I have some JavaScript which fixes links blocked by ABP. You must tell me if you want this for your ads. When someone with ABP and JavaScript enabled views your ads, your links are changed to a special randomized bitcointalk.org URL which redirects to your site when visited. People without ABP are unaffected, even if they don't have JavaScript enabled. The downsides are:
- ABP users will see the redirection link when they hover over the link, even if they disable ABP for the forum.
- Getting referral stats might become even more difficult.
- Some users might get a warning when redirecting from https to http.

To prevent matching on CSS classes/styles: Don't use inline CSS. I can give your ad a CSS class that is randomized on each pageload, but you must request this.

To prevent matching against your HTML structure: Use only one <a> and no other tags if possible. If your ads get blocked because of matching done on something inside of your ad, you are responsible for noticing this and giving me new ad HTML.

Designing ads

Make sure that your ads look good when you download and edit this test page:
https://bitcointalk.org/ad_test.html
Also read the comments in that file.

Images are not allowed no matter how they are created (CSS, SVG, or data URI). Occasionally I will make an exception for small logos and such, but you must get pre-approval from me first.

The maximum size of any one ad is 51200 bytes.

I will send you more detailed styling rules if you win slots in this auction (or upon request).

Auction rules

You must be at least a Jr Member to bid. If you are not a Jr Member and you really want to bid, you should PM me first. Tell me in the PM what you're going to advertise. You might be required to pay some amount in advance. Everyone else: Please quickly PM newbies who try to bid here to warn them against impersonation scammers.

If you have never purchased forum ad space before, and it is not blatantly obvious what you're going to advertise, say what you're going to advertise in your first bid, or tell me in a PM.

Post your bids in this thread. Prices must be stated in BTC per slot. You must state the maximum number of slots you want. When the auction ends, the highest bidders will have their slots filled until all nine slots are filled.

So if someone bids for 9 slots @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 9 slots. If the two highest bids are 9 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 8 slots and the second person will get 1 slot.

The notation "2 @ 5" means 2 slots for 5 BTC each. Not 2 slots for 5 BTC total.

- When you post a bid, the bids in your previous posts are considered to be automatically canceled. You can put multiple bids in one post, however.
- All bid prices must be evenly divisible by 0.02.
- The bidding starts at 0.02.
- I will end the auction at an arbitrary time. Unless I say otherwise, I typically try to end auctions within a few days of 10 days from the time of this post, but unexpected circumstances may sometimes force me to end the auction anytime between 4 and 22 days from the start. I have a small bias toward ending auctions on Fridays, Sundays, and Mondays.
- If two people bid at the same price, the person who bid first will have his slots filled first.
- Bids are considered invalid and will be ignored if they do not specify both a price and a max quantity, or if they could not possibly win any slots

If these rules are confusing, look at some of the past forum ad auctions to see how it's done.

I reserve the right to reject bids, even days after the bid is made.

You must pay for your slots within 24 hours of receiving the payment address. Otherwise your slots may be sold to someone else, and I might even give you a negative trust rating. I will send you the payment information via forum PM from this account ("theymos", user ID 35) after announcing the auction results in this thread. You might receive false payment information from scammers pretending to be me. They might even have somewhat similar usernames. Be careful.

---

[1]: For the purposes of forum ads, an ICO is any token, altcoin, or other altcoin-like thing which meets any of the following criteria: it is primarily run/backed by a company; it is substantially, fundamentally centralized in either operation or coin distribution; or it is not yet possible for two unprivileged users of the system to send coins directly to each other in a P2P way. The intention here is to allow community efforts to advertise things like Litecoin, but not to allow ICO funding, even when the ICO is disguised in various ways.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
3 0.34 jimcroce
3 0.34 bestmixer
3 0.32 ChipMixer