They pay 3 full-time Bitcoin Core devs, they've funded work on bitcoin.org, they do various legal/outreach work, etc. They do a decent amount of good stuff, though I always worry that an organization like this will become a dangerous point of centralization someday. It would be better if the 3 full-time devs they're hiring were hired by 3 separate organizations, for example. (But it's better that the Foundation pays them than no one pays them.)

I was trying to create a graph of the forum's web of trust with graphviz, but I don't know much about graphviz and I always end up with a big jumbled mess. Anyone else want to give it a try? (I don't need this for anything, but it might be interesting.)

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=z9uqM8iC

In case anyone's interested, here are the people with the most good reports:


And here's just the last 60 days:

What are you talking about? The Foundation is entirely separate from the Bitcoin Core development group. They don't have any power over the network.

Yeah, hearing that price makes me wonder how much my bitcoins.org and bitcoin.net domains would be worth nowadays.

Google Authenticator uses a standard protocol for 2FA. Neither the server nor the client needs to communicate with Google for Google Authenticator to work. This will definitely be supported in the new forum. (And maybe also added to the current forum.)

Yes.


Yes.

The forum sells ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page. About 25% of ad income goes to the forum moderators as thanks for all of their work. (There are many moderators, so each moderator gets only a small amount -- moderators should be seen as volunteers, not employees.) The rest is stored in the forum's treasury (verifiably), where it sits until the forum needs it.

Ads are allowed to contain any non-annoying HTML/CSS style. No images, JavaScript, or animation (no marquee or blinking). Ads must appear 3 or fewer lines tall in my browser (Firefox, 700px wide). Ad text may not contain lies, misrepresentation, or inappropriate language. Ads may not link directly to any NSFW page. 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. Eight 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.

The ad lasts at least 7 days starting from when I put it up. (However, if you look at the ad history you'll see that ads usually get at least 8 days, and sometimes as many as 10, but this is random and definitely not guaranteed.)

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 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 counts 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.

Auction rules

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

I reserve the right to reject bids, even days after the bid is made. In particular, bids from people with less than 15 activity points are likely to be rejected. I recommend not getting into a bidding war with someone who has less than 15 activity points, as their bids might not be accepted, but your latest bids will still stand. If you need to know right away whether someone's bids will be accepted, PM me.

So if someone bids for 8 slots @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 8 slots. If the two highest bids are 8 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 7 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 0.05.
- The bidding starts at 0.50.
- I will end the auction at an arbitrary time no more than 12 days from now. (I will probably end the auction 1-3 days before the ads are scheduled to go up.)
- 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.

You must pay for your slots within 24 hours of receiving the payment address. Otherwise your slots may be sold to someone else. I will send you the payment information via forum PM from this account ("theymos", user ID 35). 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
1 3.50 karolisgo
1 3.20 Seal
1 3.20 BitSimple_Support
3 3.15 CEX
2 3.15 MariaQin

The transaction will never be removed from listtransactions. If it's double-spent, then listtransactions will say that it has -1 confirmations. (In 2012, it would say that it had 0 confirmations -- this was improved fairly recently.)

The evil associated with an IP also decays over time. So even regularly-abused IPs such as Tor exit nodes shouldn't have super high fees (>$10) unless they were abused recently. However, once you've registered an account, your evil score will not decrease, and you must pay, be whitelisted, or abandon the account.

Fees are often less than $1 (see the inputs of this transaction), but they can be more if the particular IP you're using was banned fairly recently.

The forum makes more money from 2 hours of advertising than from a whole month of registration fees. It's just an anti-spam measure.

It'll be deleted if someone actually links to a CP site. Like "this person runs xxxxx.onion!".

Adding or removing text to/from a username is particularly likely to be accepted because it doesn't make it significantly easier for someone to scam. Your identity isn't really changed. I tend to ignore requests for complete username changes except from veteran members. (Even then, it's one of the lowest-priority requests I receive, so it can be forgotten. I have kind of a "leaky queue" for forum work -- if I don't get to a request in a couple of days, I usually drop it.)

Signature images would still be way too distracting/messy, and the problems with paid signatures would become much worse.

Yeah, I imagine so. I'll verify this before finalizing a deal with anyone.


I'm not entirely sure that I will sell it now, but I wanted to see what the interest and price level was like.

It is an interesting item. But no, I'm not much of a collector, and every time I see the image of this coin I think, "I should really do something with that thing..." It's just been sitting in my safe for 3.5 years. Maybe someone else will appreciate it more than I do. (If I needed quick money, I'd sell one of my 9 series-1-error Casascius coins .)

The coin is pretty famous, even if there hasn't been much media on the coin itself. The image in the OP is seemingly used as a stock image in ~5% of all news stories about Bitcoin. Try doing a reverse image search on it.

The copper doesn't go all the way through the coin. The obverse is just the semi-clear plastic stuff.

No. This is the only one...


He'll probably confirm that he sold it to me if you ask him.


Here are some photos I took.

http://imgur.com/dfOSHCs
http://imgur.com/WS6ZeWc

He's a core developer.

Probably no cost.

Yes, just a piece of art.