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The forum will soon be using a Cloudflare auto-generated key.

(Although I have the option, I see no value in generating my own key
and then giving it to Cloudflare, or using their "keyless" HTTPS.)
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With regret, I am (for now) admitting defeat on the DDoS front, and we will soon be using using Cloudflare to protect against DDoS attacks. This change is in progress, and will take ~24 hours for everyone to see.

I really don't believe in willingly putting a man-in-the-middle in your HTTPS like this, but my homebrew DDoS mitigation has been one of my biggest time sinks for the last 6 months or so, and the necessary servers are still pretty expensive. If I had more manpower, then I would prioritize maintaining our own DDoS protection, but with me as the only sysadmin and current-software developer, it's become unsustainable.

I especially dislike Cloudflare, which I'm almost certain is basically owned by US intelligence agencies. I considered several alternatives to Cloudflare, but the smaller ones (eg. Stackpath and OVH) didn't strike me as reputable/competent enough, and the enterprise-targeted ones like Incapsula and Akamai are around $3500/month. Even though $3500/month seems absolutely ridiculous to me, I was seriously considering Incapsula due to its pretty good reputation, but then they were having all sorts of technical issues while I was trying to set it up. So I gave up for now and went with Cloudflare.

The Internet is seriously flawed if everyone needs to huddle behind these huge centralized anti-DDoS companies in order to survive...

The security implications are that Cloudflare can read everything you send to or receive from the server, including your cleartext password and any PMs you send or look at. They can't access the database arbitrarily, though: they can only see data that passes over the Internet.

Tor users and benevolent-bot operators: please wait a couple of days for the current DDoS to subside, and then post your complaints here. I am able and willing to tune Cloudflare to be minimally annoying. Not every Cloudflare site has to do that "Using Tor? Here's an impossible captcha" thing.

It's a DDoS, I'm working on it.

Excellent news! I had heard about the French Polynesia thing, but I didn't know that construction was so close. That may be the first ICO I actually buy.

Now that we are officially the new wealthy elite, let's make sure that we do better than the old ones.

Fixed, thanks.


Yeah, I didn't really expect any non-newbies to buy it. I changed it to use the coin images for your post group.

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, banks, or funds; 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 0.1.
- 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.

No ICOs.


That's insufficient for forum ads IMO. That's already basically how it was before, since I wouldn't accept ads from people with negative trust. But I don't think that there was enough review.


No ICOs, sorry.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 0.50 ChipMixer
2 0.50 Rumipl
1 0.50 BitMixBiz
2 0.48 Gunthar

ICOs are no longer allowed, sorry.

Current status:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 0.50 ChipMixer
1 0.44 BitMixBiz
1 0.44 FortuneJack
2 0.44 Gunthar
1 0.42 Stunna

The auction continues.

I've been looking into USDT a fair bit recently, and it really stinks. At this point I would be a bit surprised if it's not some kind of scam. A lot of the USDT deposits may be legit, but let's assume for a moment the worst case: USDT was created as a scam from the start, and has been slowly leeching BTC from USDT-supporting exchanges; almost none of the $600 million in USDT is from real deposits, but was printed from thin air. If we assume that hypothetical, then what would the effect on the Bitcoin price be?

I suppose that it would be a big negative force, but not as bad as some might fear. Although USDT-supporting exchanges have a lot of volume, I think that there's vastly more money on regulated exchanges like GDAX, and arbitrage between the two won't be possible if USDT is illusory. So maybe a 15-20% drop in price and recovery over several months, assuming a total instantaneous USDT collapse? Thoughts on this?

I also suppose that altcoins would be hit far harder, since they are almost exclusively traded on USDT-supporting exchanges.

I think that someone or some group has been trying to manipulate the BTC price by spamming these worries on various social media over the last couple of weeks, which has created some natural pushback against the idea. But that doesn't make the idea false. One speculative (IMO plausible) timeline for recent events is:

1. USDT is printed out of thin air over a long period of time, and there's grumbling about it constantly, but nobody really does anything.
2. Someone looking to affect the BTC price grasps onto the above issue and spams social media about it. Eg. "Check out what this one guy says will crash Bitcoin to $0.01, you won't believe what this company did!".
3. Due to the spam, a USDT bank run starts, but USDT runs out of actual money.
4. To buy time, USDT creates the "theft transaction" as an inside job. This creates an excellent and essentially irrefutable excuse for stopping further withdrawals.

It reads to me like the growing hubub triggerring a bank run, and then Tether creating this incident in-house as a delaying tactic. Classic ponzi bank run behavior.

Some say that owning USDT is risky, and I'm wondering what the wider community thinks about this. I have my own opinions, but to avoid biasing the result of the poll I won't go into that right now.

Things to watch out for, to be sure, but past and fictional failures shouldn't prevent us from trying to create better societies.


That's why to start with you have to fly the flag of some country under a special agreement. Then any attacks will be equal to an attack on the flag country. Long-term, once there are a lot of seasteads, they can build their own independent militaries and work together for mutual defense.


Libertarianism isn't just for the wealthy. In fact, the reverse is true: today, the wealthy have unprecedented control via their huge influence over governments; as a result, the rich get richer and the poor are kept in their place. A seastead would at first probably be populated mostly by higher-income people due to the great initial expense, but over time this'd change. People go where opportunities are, and a minimally-regulated seastead will offer tons of opportunities for everyone. With the sweat of your brow, a seastead can become your city as well!

And while I support a libertarian seastead, the great thing about seasteading is that you can create many seasteads with different societies. If you want a mixed-economy government with whatever measures against corruption you think will work, you could do it.


I would be happy if they succeed at the stated goals, but I don't trust those guys at all...

You won't get logged off if your IP changes. You just need to save cookies for bitcointalk.org; there aren't even any third-party cookies.

It'd probably be fairly easily possible to create a bookmarklet which restores your cookies.

It's not linked anywhere else right now, so you just have to bookmark it or remember to search for it.

The Bitcoin price is amazingly high, and it has stayed amazingly high for quite some time. I've been expecting it to crash for the last year, and I was especially expecting it to crash in response to the various B2X nonsense, but it's still quite high. These high prices may well be long-term-stable. Therefore, since we gentlemen are in fact the new wealthy elite, I think that the time has come to work toward a project that I know a lot of early Bitcoiners (including myself) have always dreamed of: a mostly-sovereign libertarian seastead. There must be a lot of Bitcoin millionaires who would be willing to work toward this.

The Seasteading Institute (TSI) has an example seastead design with a total estimated cost of $115 million with room for 270 people. So that'd be an average of $425,000 per person up-front, plus a yearly maintenance cost of $13,000 per person. IMO it should be fairly easy to fund something this size from Bitcoiners, and you could probably go even bigger/better. TSI has already done a ton of research/engineering work and built a ton of connections, so a project to actually build something like this would have a great head-start.

The main goal of seasteading is to have a jurisdiction with minimal-possible regulation and government involvement, creating a space for extreme innovation. Like Hong Kong, but even better. At least to start with, you'd probably have to officially be under some government's jurisdiction (via a special agreement with that government), but it will hopefully be possible to keep this very minimal. TSI has already had some success in negotiating this stuff with some governments. Another goal would be to create a good environment for the people living on the seastead: fast Internet (maybe via laser links), high security, overall good facilities, etc.

Who here is interested in participating in this, and what would you want a seastead to have before living on one? I'm not going to collect any money from people, but if there's enough interest (maybe $75 million or so), we can hire some people who actually know what they're doing and create a proper company with a board of directors, etc. Maybe it could even be made into an ICO, though I'm pretty skeptical of those in general.

Did you try telling Tor to "use a new circuit for this site"? I use Tor a fair bit, and whenever I occasionally get reCaptcha problems, that fixes it.

Added:

FYI: 11 users paid for Copper Membership so far, which is more than I expected. I'm happy that the feature is being used.

Also, someone asked me about this in a PM: I named it Copper Membership because if I create other memberships, it'd make a nice theme to name them all after precious metals. Although copper is not traditionally a precious metal, it is today commonly found in bullion form, along with silver, gold, platinum, and palladium. I like that this theme feels very distinct from the Newbie -> Legendary scale so that it doesn't seem like you can just pay to get what others have spent years on. And to me while "Copper Member" doesn't sound bad, it also doesn't sound too prestigious, which it shouldn't, since it's pretty easy to get.