I'm surprised that some veteran members don't know that the forum was founded by Satoshi.

Maybe he wouldn't want to post here nowadays, since the signal-to-noise ratio is too low. But he also wouldn't have liked posting on a forum with oppressive moderation, which would be necessary to make the forum something like how it was in the early days. I think that Satoshi just wouldn't have liked using any large forum.

Whether Satoshi would agree with current forum policies is another matter. You can agree that a policy is correct without necessarily liking the end result. The existing forum policies are pretty natural extensions of the policies under the administration of Satoshi and Sirius, intended to maximize freedom while still keeping the forum usable. Though if he disagreed, he'd probably say that there is too much freedom and not enough usability.

And while it may be interesting to speculate, Satoshi's approval is not required. You should do what is correct, as far as you can tell, not what you think some person (who is really just an abstract idea to most people rather than a real person) would want you to do.

The selfMod bit will now be permanently cleared when a non-mod moves a topic into a section which doesn't allow selfMod.

I added to my OP:


I'm not a big fan of that one. While it does speak to the crypto-anarchist viewpoint of bypassing politics, I feel like it's more often read as an excuse to say, "I'm right, you're wrong, and I'm not going to listen to any arguments," which is not a good attitude in general.


It is possible, but I'm not sure that it's worth the trouble... If a local community has several factoids and really wants it, I'll probably do it.

In the ad area, there's usually a 10% chance of getting a factoid. The full list of factoids is here: https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adinfo . A few of them look like ads, or seem out of place - those are free factoids that Donators/VIPs get. Factoids are not normally supposed to look like ads.

Does anyone have any suggestions for new factoids?

 - They should be less than about 300 visible characters long.
 - They can contain links and basic styling.
 - A random forum user reading a random factoid should have a good chance of thinking that it was interesting, funny, or useful.

Also, while forum ads can't normally contain images, I would probably accept forum-related "fanart" here, perhaps in the style of 4chan's board banners. Max dimensions are 42px high by 500px wide.

3 or 4 ad slots ended up unfilled in the round running now. PM me an offer if you want one or more of them. See here for the full rules, noting especially that ICOs and similar are not allowed.

I don't use GDAX, but I'd guess:
 - You probably need to put the full USD/BTC price as the limit price (so ~8000), even if you intend to buy less than 1 BTC.
 - Or maybe GDAX just doesn't support such small amounts.

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 0.50 ChipMixer
1 0.50 Pivo
4 0.48 Wapinter
1 0.48 ColorlessK


Sorry, no ICOs.

Currently there are two big data dumps available which auto-update weekly, trust.txt.xz and merit.txt.xz. These auto-updating dumps are pretty easy to set up, so I was thinking that it might be a good idea to produce several more of these, perhaps in the end forming a "ghetto API". What dumps would be most useful? Some that I was thinking of were:

 UID -> name, merit, potential activity, posts
 post ID -> topic ID, time, UID
 topic ID -> board ID, first post ID
 board ID -> board name

I'm not going to dump post contents in any form, since that would both be a massive file and it'd make things very easy for those annoying phishing mirror sites.

This is not correct; it's a matter of physical location. If someone paid by the forum was not physically present in the US at any point, then his income was not US source income, and therefore no US tax would be due. (Local-country income taxes probably still apply.) US tax could in some cases be due if the person spent any time within the US, but even then tax is not necessarily due, and it is not necessarily required to file a US tax return. See Pub. 519, especially Ch. 2.

(This post is not to be interpreted as tax advice.)

Whenever I see a stat like that, it makes me wonder why someone doesn't just hire a ton of these people. You'd think that even totally-unskilled people could be made productive enough to support paying them $3/hr or whatever. I'm sure there are real government-related and cultural barriers or someone would've done it already, but it still seems like a shame.

The vast majority of great things in the world, including things in the Bitcoin ecosystem, were created by a community consisting of maybe 15% of the world's population. It'd be truly fantastic if the remaining 85% of the world was made generally capable of similar achievements. If this somehow happened overnight, it'd be the greatest-ever step forward for humanity. So I am very happy to see people from poorer countries on this forum and in the Bitcoin ecosystem generally, acting with ambition. IMO Bitcoin was created in part to help break down the artificial barriers which are keeping these people from prosperity. Though no amount of this sort of thinking excuses those who choose to post garbage posts, for whatever reason. I hope that we can eventually reach a balance on the forum which will satisfy the forum's primary mission of enabling real discussion while also continuing to create opportunities for many people.

If auto-translation was allowed, people would be posting auto-translated ads all the time. Though if any of the local sections want to try out allowing it, I'd be OK with it.

Oh, is that a cultural thing? 75% of my inbox at any one time is full of people calling me "sir", but I'd assumed that these people were just taught to be ultra-polite when they were learning English (maybe due to a delay between the real world and instruction vis-à-vis shifting politeness standards over the last ~century).

The first few times people used unnecessary politeness like this on me, I found it amusing. I was thinking, "who do you think I am, the president? LOL." But I've now grown to associate it with clueless people...

---

As jackg mentioned, English is a fluid and forgiving language. Even on a pretty global forum like this, I only rarely see English so bad that I can't understand it at all. As long as you actually have some ideas to express, you should be fine. You should keep in mind that poor English is more difficult to read, though, so if you know that your English is imperfect, it'd be courteous to keep your text to-the-point, and to do some extra checking to minimize errors as much as possible. (I do the same when writing imperfectly in my second languages.)

A good recent example which comes to mind is zentdex's Where the merit pours. He made several English errors, but he was entirely understandable, and the post was overall a very good contribution.

The real problem is people posting nonsense just to post, with no real contribution to make or ideas to express. That's bad enough as-is, and poor English makes it even worse.

You have 3497 posts. 3 of them are in the serious discussion sections, which don't count. 6 of them are redirection topics, which don't count. So your post count should be 3488, which is what it is.

I did a recount of post counts earlier today. There are several bugs which cause the post count to drift from its real value over time. The current count is the accurate one.

I'll get right on that, just as soon as hell freezes over.

The code is 10 random characters from an alphabet of 62 characters; you're never brute-forcing that over a network. You'd bring down the forum before you got to even 10000 attempts per second. Most likely the email was intercepted at his end somehow.

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.

Bids must be evenly divisible by 0.02. If they're not, they get rounded down.


We don't do that.


Sorry, you have negative trust from my perspective, so I won't accept your bids.


Sorry, no ICOs.


I still think that this is too ICO-like.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 0.28 bumbaio
1 0.28 Betex
4 0.28 ChipMixer
2 0.24 irfan_pak10
1 0.24 Gunthar

After further investigation, this was in fact a bug. It looks like about 10% of payments made between March 3 and now were not credited. I put a notice at the top of the unproxyban and promote page so that people can email me and I'll sort it out for them.

SaleerBot, I already fixed your balance, just revisit the promote page.