I'm behind on the accounting. 2015 is basically done, but I need to double-check it and apply the results of taxes (even when there's a net loss, there may be capital gain taxes). 2016 is still very incomplete: I've had to do half of the work in order to pay taxes, but I basically need to go through everything again to figure out forum balances. Sloppy, I know, but I've been disincentivized to spend many hours figuring it out exactly because the reserves so obviously exceed the expenses. There's currently about 1250 BTC(+BCH) in reserve.

Keep in mind that if I make an accounting mistake, almost certainly the result of this will be that I pay forum expenses out of my own pocket accidentally. The income is almost all very obvious/public, and I have to list all of the expenses that I temporarily paid out of pocket in order to be repaid from the forum income or reserves. So it's very unlikely that I would take too much money.

Here are approximate numbers.

BCH is so boring technologically... ETH has better tech for cash-like transactions, with their effectively-unlimited block size, short block intervals, and uncle blocks, and ETH isn't even specifically designed for that. (Note: I have never owned any ETH.) People are going to claim that I'm saying this just because I have a personal grudge against BCH (which isn't really true), but I just can't take BCH seriously at all.

I've been feeling that the price jump has been built on FOMO speculation for a while now. I think that the real, solid base is around $6k (roughly following the longer-term linear trend), but I expect speculators to stabilize it if it reaches $10k, at the very least, and then those prices might or might not stabilize.

So IMO $6k and below is "solid", $6k-$10k is semi-solid, and everything above $10k is a house of cards. No idea what'll actually happen in the next few days, though; it's pure speculative madness. In the next hour, I wouldn't be surprised to see a drop to $10k or an increase to $16k.

I have not yet gotten this checked by an accountant. This is not legal/tax advice. But since I'm seeing all sorts of weird and almost-certainly-wrong theories, here is my interpretation of US tax law in relation to forks.

Imagine the following hypothetical:

 - Canada somehow gets access to a database of exactly how many US dollars each person owns, updated live.
 - At some exact instant in time, they take a snapshot of this database.
 - Anyone who has a balance in Canada's USD snapshot is automatically and involuntarily given a bank account in Canada containing an equal number of Canadian dollars. You can walk into a Canadian bank and withdraw the CAD, or sell it, or whatever.
 
Forks are like that, but since Bitcoin is decentralized, anyone can create one of these forks with no cost whatsoever. I could personally create a million such forks, and everyone who owns bitcoin would receive a million different currencies. You cannot avoid receiving the coins, it is done without your permission, and very often you will not even know that a fork had occurred. Furthermore, in many cases it would be unsafe to access the fork-coins due to the stupid ways in which forks are done. Due to all of these factors, I consider it impossible to account for forks at time-of-creation, and forks therefore cannot be treated as dividends or other income at time of creation.

Given that, the closest similar handling seems to be a stock spin-off. In a spin-off, you have to adjust the basis of the original asset according to the spin-off's value at time of creation. However, it is not always clear that anything is being taken from Bitcoin when these forks are created. Often, the Bitcoin price does not decrease upon the creation of one of these forks, but the fork sometimes still attains a somewhat-significant value. Some would argue that the money flowing into the fork-coin is being redirected from Bitcoin, and so the basis for the fork-coins should not be zero, but it is unclear. For example, here are the prices of Bitcoin and BCH near the creation of BCH on Aug 1, 2017:

As you can see, although the BTC price dropped slightly on the day that BCH was created, BCH had a much higher value than the drop in BTC price would account for. You could theorize that the price of BTC would've been higher if the fork had not happened, but this is subjective and impossible to quantify.

An additional complication is that in a stock spin-off, there will be an official initial spin-off price based on trading on regulated futures markets and price as of market-start. But there are dozens of Bitcoin and other-cryptocurrency exchanges, none of which are "official". Forkcoins have no regulated futures markets (or regulated any markets in most cases). There is no single unambiguous starting price for the fork-coin. Trading is also 24/7 and continuous, not broken up into days. So you can't get a good initial price for forks.

Plus, if forkcoins are treated as spin-offs with non-zero value, then the following scheme seems possible:

 - Some tiny fork-coin is created, and it attains an "initial market price" of $1 on absolutely minuscule volume. In other words, although the charts show it as having a price of $1, anyone who cared to do so could bring it down to nearly nothing with just a bit of money.
 - Using spin-off basis calculations, all Bitcoin holders can now reduce the basis of their bitcoins slightly by treating the above tiny fork-coin as a spin-off, even if that fork-coin very soon disappears to basically nothing.
 - Repeat hundreds of times, reducing everyone's Bitcoin basis significantly.
 
With all of the above in consideration, my conclusions are:

 - Forkcoins are not adequately handled by current US tax law.
 - The most justifiable thing to do right now, which avoids as many of the above issues as possible, is to handle it as a capital gain at the time of sale with a basis of zero and an acquisition date of the fork time. I do not think that it is necessarily fair for BTC holders to have to use a basis of zero here, but anything else seems too difficult to calculate/justify.
 
Again, this is only my interpretation based on my own research, and it is not tax advice. Consult an accountant.

Fixed, thanks. Whenever this happens, please email or obfuscate-then-PM me what you posted. Cloudflare has a ton of rules, some of which seem useful (like detecting fake robots), but others do stupid stuff like that.

Yes, thanks to every image hoster on Earth for resolving this issue so quickly. It's kind of embarrassing to the industry for them all to fail at exactly the same time, but such is life.

(But really, you guys were right, it was a problem on my end. I was only seeing complaints related to imgur, and imgur has blocked the forum several times in the past with similar effects, so I assumed that it was that.)

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.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
2 0.50 Gunthar
4 0.22 ChipMixer
1 0.16 yvo
2 0.14 Aengus

What are everyone's ideas for improving post quality?

I have mostly ruled out:

 - Removing signatures or sig ads globally.
 - Requiring payment to wear sig ads.
 - Banning account sales.

A couple of ideas that have been floating around in my head:

1. To attain ranks above Member, you'd have to earn some number of merit points. Merit points would be awarded in a monthly vote on best posts of the previous month, with various measures (TBD) to prevent gaming of the vote. Winning merit points might also come with a BTC prize.

2. Create or designate some sections as "serious discussion" sections, with no signatures. In those sections or maybe in different ones, also have poster restrictions such as Member rank or above only. And/or allow topic-creators to set these restrictions on their topics, similar to selfmod topics.

What do you think of these ideas, and what other ideas do people have?

Sorry, no ICOs.

Current auction status:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
2 0.50 Gunthar
4 0.22 ChipMixer
1 0.12 yvo

The auction continues.

I fixed the *Link removed* thing (which is only triggered if you have less than 10 posts). You have to be wearing your copper membership when you set your signature for the links to not be removed.

I might've figured it out. A bunch of things are currently disabled; I'll work on safely enabling them in the coming days.

Lots of traffic, not sure yet whether it's mostly legitimate or a DDoS getting through Cloudflare. In any case, I changed some things which may help.

The auction starts at 0.10, while the minimum increment is 0.02.

0.5 is evenly divisible by 0.02. Something is evenly divisible when it divides without remainder. Division is defined as dividend = quotient * divisor + remainder, and in this case quotient must be an integer. 0.5 = 25 * 0.02 + 0. 0.1 = 5 * 0.02 + 0. So 0.5 and 0.1 are both evenly divisible by 0.02. But for example 0.17 would be invalid because 0.17 = 8 * 0.02 + 0.01. It has a non-zero remainder.

But I usually just round down to the nearest lower valid bid when someone posts a bid with an invalid increment.

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.

ChipMixer's bid was way too high, so I will reduce it. I might not always do this in the future; please be careful.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 0.22 ChipMixer
1 0.18 FortuneJack
4 0.16 Stunna

It doesn't automatically adjust, but I update it every now and then. Same for the evil-IP registration fee.

Activity	Max recipients	Max recipients if whitelisted	Max PMs per hour	Max PMs per hour if whitelisted	Max PMs per day	Max PMs per day if whitelisted
0	2	10	1	40	2	120
15	3	10	10	40	15	120
30	5	10	10	40	30	120
100	7	14	20	80	150	600
250	15	30	120	120	300	1200
500	30	30	120	120	1200	1200

You are automatically whitelisted if you buy a copper membership. You don't need to wear the copper membership, just own it. You can also be whitelisted for free by any staff member and a few non-staff, but we're going to need some reason to think that you actually deserve it. Do not ask me for free whitelisting.

Whitelisting is a not a license to spam. You will be immediately banned if you're found spamming, even if you bought a copper membership (and you will not be refunded).

Ads are not allowed to be misleading. I replaced that one with their other one until they respond.

Here's what would need to be done to replace Cloudflare: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2497008.0