To address phishing, I made the following changes to PMs sent by newbies:

 - Newbie PMs will not have the following bbcode tags parsed: font, glow, img, iurl, move, size, shadow, url. Not allowing clickable URLs may be annoying, but it should make phishing a lot more difficult.
 - The warning appears in a different area when you click the "reply to this PM" link in an email (or just reply to a newbie PM).
 - The body of a PM sent by a newbie will not be sent via email. You'll still get a notification, but you'll have to visit the forum to read the PM.

Also, where previously the newbie PM warning was actually attached to their PM (so you'd see it when quoting, etc.), now it's part of the page, and will disappear when the user is no longer a newbie. A bit cleaner. For all previously-sent newbie PMs, you will now see two warnings, though.

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. 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.

You guys don't have to manually cancel bids. The auction rules say:

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 2.48 GladuCame
1 2.46 thehun
1 2.46 GAT_Chris
1 2.44 mynhpark
1 2.44 SocialCloud
1 2.44 Latium
3 2.42 Bitcomo

Enable quick-moderation at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;sa=theme

This topic has been moved to Trashcan. DMCA.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2295418.0

Alright, I'll try to enable at least some of its functionality in the near future. (The trouble is that action=.xml has a whole bunch of options, and I know that some combinations of options end up resulting in minutes of computation. I need to figure it out.)

I probably won't make changes in the near future, but I've been thinking about the captcha issue, and I wonder what people think about reCaptcha.

Where reCaptcha is used now, something is required, and AFAIK all other captcha services can be OCRed and are therefore useless. End-users often like SolveMedia, but those seem really easy to OCR. I actually really like the image classification approach on a theoretical level, though I hate relying on NSA-lite Google, and occasionally on Tor they throw you into some insane black hole of difficulty (though you can change your Tor exit to fix that).

It's on the same level as other recovery requests. So don't do it lightly. But it's better than actually allowing your account to be/remain compromised.

When you click an account-lock link, there's a paragraph explaining this.

I added email notifications for some security events:

Whenever your password is changed (except by an administrator), you will get an email about it.

Whenever your email is changed (except by an administrator), your old email will get an email about it with a link to lock your account. The link is valid for 14 days.

Let me know if you find any bugs.

Most serious cryptocurrencies adopt Bitcoin's predictable-inflation model, where you can calculate from the time or block height the total number of coins in existence. I think that this is in fact the best model; however, the dominant schools of economics (Keynesianism and similar) would consider this type of currency to be inherently flawed. In the views of these economists, widespread usage of any currency with such an inflexible emission schedule would lead to a fragile economy prone to wild inflation, deflation, extreme booms and busts, etc. Even though I think that they're wrong about that, it would be interesting for someone to create a cryptocurrency which operates more similarly to central-bank-managed currencies like the dollar or euro.

How such a cryptocurrency would probably work is:

 - You'd have a "central bank", which could be a multisig setup among some fixed group of people, or a PoS voting thing, or something like that. I do not recommend giving miners central-bank powers.
 - The central bank buys and sells bonds issued by the system itself. When the central bank buys existing bonds, it creates money out of thin air to do so; when it sells bonds, the proceeds from the sale are destroyed. (Although money tied up in bonds still technically exists, it's removed from the economy for a long time until the money plus interest is recreated from thin air again at maturity, at which point the central bank can just issue more bonds if necessary.)
 - If the central bank thinks that prices are too low, it creates x bonds and sells them at auction. If the central bank thinks that prices are too high, it conducts a reverse auction in order to buy y previously-issued bonds. (Where x and y are guesses by the central bank.) If there are far too few bonds in existence, the central bank could instead create money by doing a positive-EV lottery or something.
 - The central bank typically aims to keep inflation at a target rate, often somewhere between 1 and 3 percent. In a debt-based system like this, it is difficult to keep inflation below about 1%, and you're definitely not going to keep it at 0% long-term. But as fiat currencies worldwide demonstrate, a few-percent inflation rate is entirely survivable. The central bank needs to be quite disciplined; if it isn't careful, hyperinflation is very easy.
 - There'd be an initial bootstrap period where the central bank wouldn't worry about inflation/deflation. You need enough currency issued to get things rolling.
 
The system could, if well-designed, remain somewhat decentralized by imposing hard limits on what the central bank can do (ie. not allowing it to issue too many bonds, or bonds with too high interest rates, etc.) and by having a fairly decentralized central bank (eg. multisig among 100 independent entities).

Investors would find this fun/different, because you'd invest in it in a very different way. You can't just hold the currency, since the currency is supposed to have a relatively stable value, and in fact decrease in value slowly over time. (By the way, this makes it especially well-suited as a short-term value store, possibly competing with things like USDT.) Instead, if you believe that the currency is strong, you'd buy and hold interest-paying bonds issued by the system, and if the currency became weak, you'd sell your bonds to other traders or back to the system in one of its reverse-auctions. A whole market would develop based on trading these bonds.

If someone is going to do this, you should try to get at least one person with a mainstream economics degree on-board.

Again: Although mainstream economists might like this cryptocurrency (if well-designed), and it'd be interesting, I don't think that this currency would be better than Bitcoin.

Note the following changes:

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. 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
1 2.45 papyrus.global
3 2.45 D_market
1 2.40 ColorlessK
1 2.40 Rumipl
3 2.40 Maximb

Yes, though it's a bit of a hassle.

There's currently no history of profile fields, though, so you definitely can't rely on your signature or anything like that.

Created: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=241.0

It's annoying how gmail still allows obviously-spoofed email like that...

Thanks for reporting it.

A cryptocurrency is self-sufficient, not relying on any other cryptocurrency to function (not including merged mining), and requiring its own software. A token works like a cryptocurrency at a high level, but relies on some other cryptocurrency's infrastructure in order to function, and often (but not necessarily always) lacks its own software.

Example 1
You create an Ethereum asset. This asset is entirely reliant on Ethereum's block chain to function. It is a token.

Example 2
You pick out 1 BTC and split it into 100 million satoshi. Each satoshi represents some part of a real-world thing, and gets a special ticker symbol. This is a token because it is completely reliant on Bitcoin's block chain to function.

Example 3
You create an Ethereum contract which allows anyone perpetually to trade 0.1 ETH for 1 YOURTHING and vice-versa. This is ambiguous, and may require moderator discretion. It may be considered a token, or it may be considered merely a flavor of ETH, belonging in Ethereum threads, etc.

"Bitcoin Gold" has virtually no economic support, so I'm not going to address it specifically. Anyone can create one of these minor forks, and I'm not going to start advertising every little one.

The S2X one I will make a guide for within the next couple weeks.

I have corrected this stuff many times, so those who keep posting it must be intentionally trying to deceive.


Wrong. bitcoin.org is ultimately controlled by Cobra, who was given it by Sirius, who was given it by Satoshi. The bitcointalk.org domain name is similarly controlled by Cobra, while I administrate the site.


It was put in place by Satoshi because the software clearly couldn't handle it. There were no tx spam attacks occurring at the time. In fact, we now know that Satoshi's original software couldn't handle even 1MB blocks. This caused the BIP50 incident, where nodes running the older database code written by Satoshi started randomly failing once miners started creating larger blocks. Satoshi's original software had soft limits which made it never produce blocks over 500kB, and very rarely over 250kB.


Wrong. The very first versions set aside some portion of blocks for free transactions. If that was full, then they started requiring fees. The fee logic worked much the same as today's code; it's just that free transactions were sometimes possible/allowed because there was essentially no tx volume. The same situation exists today on most altcoins.


Gavin had already resigned as Bitcoin Core lead dev at that point, and had not contributed in any significant way to Bitcoin Core for about a year.

XT had very little support.


If you want to use this ridiculous feudalism argument, I can "draw authority from Satoshi" in four separate ways: as bitcointalk.org head admin (originally Satoshi), as owner of bitcoins.org/bitcoin.net (originally owned by Satoshi), as one of the old alert key trustees (originally created by Satoshi), and as the backup domain administrator of bitcoin.org (originally owned by Satoshi). Gavin on the other hand voluntarily resigned as Bitcoin Core lead developer in favor of Wladimir.

(The above is not a good argument; I don't use it except in response to similar arguments.)


Gavin's original solution, which was to push through 20MB block sizes ASAP, was later shown in research by bigblockers to have been unsafe.


More like almost all experts.


This has never been a concern of mine -- I believe that mining is already hopelessly centralized and beyond saving --, and it's at most a tangential concern of other decentralists.


Absolutely false. All developers who worked for Blockstream rejected 20MB blocks, just like all developers who worked for Blockstream would've rejected the idea that the sky is green. But Blockstream employees are only a small percentage of Bitcoin Core devs, and almost all Bitcoin Core devs as well as almost all experts opposed Gavin's ridiculous 20MB proposal and the later still-ridiculous 10MB and 8MB proposals.


With Gavin's original proposal of 20MB blocks, the block chain would grow by up to ~1TB per year.

But storage is generally a straw-man argument -- due to pruning, storage is mostly solved, and has been for years. Storage is way down on the list of concerns for large block sizes. See my post here for the actual concerns. (Back in 2014-2015, bandwidth was also a very major concern, but since then compact blocks -- roughly the same thing as IBLTs mentioned by Gavin -- have been added to Core, improving this a lot.)


This agreement was between some miners and a handful of notable devs: Peter Todd, Luke-Jr, BlueMatt, and Adam Back IIRC. Those people were only representing themselves, not anyone else, and this was made extremely clear in the agreement. Even if they had been representing Blockstream or Bitcoin Core as a whole, a little group of people like this can't make decisions on behalf of Bitcoin. If every Core dev met with the main miners and agreed on behalf of Bitcoin as a whole to some "compromise" (ie. something technically bad, but done for political reasons), I would oppose it.


Funny how the Bitcoin Core lead developer works for MIT, then.

In reality, only a few Bitcoin Core devs are Blockstream employees. See for example this comment by the person who currently has the most commits to Bitcoin Core, and who does not work for Blockstream.


Blockstream is a for-profit company. I respect several of their employees, but I don't care about the company itself. I've actually always been critical of SPV-secured sidechains, which is one of Blockstream's flagship ideas, since it strikes me as being too insecure to be useful in most cases.

I recently warned against trusting any organization, as every organization will eventually be corrupted. I owe no allegiance to Core or Blockstream (which is separate from Core); I support good ideas.

---

Regarding /r/Bitcoin moderation: my position has always been that if you don't like how we do it, then you can leave. We try to make /r/Bitcoin as good as possible in spite of Reddit's many inherent flaws, but it's not going to please everyone. Reddit is a flawed platform, and in order to make a large subreddit useful, aggressive moderation is sometimes necessary. But we've never taken the position of banning all bigblockers or anything like that. When people get banned, it's usually for behaving in a way that would get you banned on a great many other subreddits.

/r/Bitcoin does not allow the dangerous and deceptive practice of trying to get people to run non-consensus software. This includes things like links to binaries of BIP148, since that was non-consensus software, even though I mostly agreed with what BIP148 was trying to do. If you don't agree with this policy, again, you're free to leave /r/Bitcoin.

Bitcointalk.org on the other hand has (and needs) much less moderation than /r/Bitcoin.

It's a large DDoS.