That's a "newbie warning / type-1" flag, which requires only 1 net supporter. But TheUltraElite is not currently in DT, so the flag is not active by default. It's active for you because you have a non-default trust list.

No, he never used any avatar, at least while I was here.

This month 133 users were eligible.

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No, but as a one-time exception I'll leave that thread, since I don't like deleting so many posts over a borderline case like this which wasn't otherwise acted upon for over a month. If somebody does the exact same thing in the future, it should be deleted.

If somebody doesn't have to look up the URL to visit the site after reading your post, using Google or some other such resource, then you're posting the URL in a disallowed way. This includes things like posting "examplemixer dot com", using a URL shortener, using a simple "click here to continue" landing page, etc. If there are two mixers which can't be disambiguated except by posting their full domain name, or if their official name is a full domain name, then that's an annoying situation, but it would not excuse posting their full domains.

But there seems to be some confusion around promotion. It would be allowed to post even a positive review thread for ExampleMixer, just as long as you don't post the URL and you don't violate the other rules. Promotion is only disallowed in signatures, avatars, and profile-bios; not posts.

Tough competition this year! Thanks for organizing this!

You're right that a maximally-performant implementation would definitely omit the query entirely. Even a query like "SELECT 1;" is slower than just about anything done within PHP, since a network request introduces a (relative) ton of latency.

However, I would consider it a slightly worse patch if it fixed this because it would increase the code complexity a fair bit, and the only benefit would be saving a few milliseconds on a page that will probably only be accessed a handful of times each day. In fact, if I'd been writing this, I probably would've left the query as-is, since that would've only used a couple of additional miliseconds.

PowerGlove sent me a nice patch for this which I just added:

Previously, if you didn't check the "Show others your online status" option, it would still be pretty obvious when you were online because your "Last Active" time would still constantly update to be ~now. This has now been changed so that if you were last active within the last 72 hours and you have the show-online option disabled, then the exact time will not be displayed, and it will instead just say "(Recently)".

If you would like people to be able to more exactly tell when you were online, then you can of course just enable the "show others your online status" option in your profile settings.

Nice! It's a pretty self-contained patch, so I was able to add it fairly easily. I left a warning on the post page, though, since I don't think it was otherwise obvious enough what was going on.

That's not valid at all.


For other data, it will not be considered as part of that bounty, but I may award some amount, depending on the details.

This month 127 users were eligible.

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Added, thanks! What looked best IMO was to do the arrow and black color, but without the text-decoration:none or cursor: default.

Also, while I was messing around with the topic HTML anyway, I decided to just completely remove the ad area. I don't foresee selling ads again anytime soon, and while maybe the factoids were providing some value, many of them were outdated.

No-KYC exchanges, casinos, etc. are very intentionally not banned. This service is different in two important ways:

First, referring to the mixer definition, it "has a feature advertised for taking property, improving its privacy somehow, and then returning roughly the same type of property." It allows BTC->BTC "trades", which satisfies the "returning the same property" part, and it advertises itself as improving privacy of the returned coins. So it's a mixer. Most no-KYC exchanges neither allow BTC->BTC "trades" nor advertise their service as improving the privacy of your coins somehow, whereas a mixer would have to do both of those things.

Second: If somebody posted on the Currency Exchange board and offered to trade your stolen coins for clean coins minus a fee, or linked to a website meant to effect such trades, that would definitely be disallowed due to the prohibition on illegal trades, even before the mixer ban. The service in question here does not use the phrase "stolen coins": they say "dirty coins", which is definitely different and could include some legally-sourced coins. But when I look at all of their marketing materials holistically, it all feels too close to the stolen-coins-trader example. So I'd lean toward banning this particular service even if they didn't meet the mixer definition. "Make your dirty coins clean" is not something that typical no-KYC exchanges advertise.

I merged an updated version of this patch which PowerGlove sent me. It looks to me like it fixed the problem, and I haven't been able to find anything that this change broke.

Thanks for finally finding a way to cleanly fix this long-standing annoyance!

This month 131 users were eligible.

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I read the full indictment, and it looks pretty bad. The thing where he allegedly decided in 2016 to file a 2011 gift tax return saying that he had gifted bitcoins to his partner stood out as especially bad to me. (I wonder: why are they allowed to use quotes from emails between Ver and his lawyer?)

The indictment is just one side of the story, though. It seems to me that the best argument from Ver will be that it was an unintentional mistake. Ver apparently had a bunch of bitcoins floating around between himself-personally and mostly-disregarded-entity S-corps. Pre-expatriation, it may not have been important whether the bitcoins belonged to him or the corporations, so it may have been reasonable for him to not put much thought into the matter. But then it does very much matter during the appraisal of the corporations, and it all gets even more complicated when the S-corps automatically become C-corps after expatriation. That's all very confusing. If I was in that situation, I could see making some sort of honest mistake regarding all of that mess. Though the indictment does try to provide a lot of evidence for intent, and it would've been an awfully big mistake, apparently.

An important detail to note is that this was a grand jury empaneled in June 2023, with the indictment filed in February, and then it was just recently unsealed after he was arrested. There clearly is a DoJ-wide mandate to target crypto, but I don't think that this was intentionally planned to coincide with the Samourai case, or with Ver's book, or anything like that.

I'm not a big fan of the guy overall, but since he's having a very bad day, I'd like to say some nice things about him for a second. He put a lot of effort into building the very-early Bitcoin ecosystem. He's a anarcho-capitalist like me, which is cool. I saw that he once made a large donation to antiwar.com. He's a free-thinker and a freedom-lover, somebody who recognizes that something is terribly wrong with the world, and wants to do something about it. If I had to rank all people on Earth from my favorite to least-favorite, I'd put Ver above where I'd put "every person I don't know anything about", since there are way more experiences/ideas/values I share with Ver than I share with eg. some random farmer in China. So I hope this legal situation turns out well for him, especially since this seems to be part of a larger "war on crypto".

If Samourai in particular (the entity, not its protocol/code) pops up again via a Tor hidden service or something, that would be banned. There's no need to ban links to already-seized sites.

Other trustless CoinJoin services are still allowed. This case seems largely to rely on an idiosyncratic issue with Samourai, namely that there were allegedly instances of Samourai devs very directly marketing to people committing crimes.

I feel that this sort of thing justifies my decision, which was based in part on seeing a pattern of increasing "squeezing" of privacy services. This Samourai action is in-line with my predicted trend, which I think will only get worse. Since I am not surprised by this sort of action, it does not make me want to expand the mixer definition.

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There's a giant institution with guns out there which wants to destroy every centralized, destroyable component they can find related to privacy. Every centralized privacy service is at risk of being nuked from orbit at any moment, and you want to be nowhere near the strike zone. I think that the legal argument against Samourai is fairly weak, but the law is only ink on a piece of paper: it has no magical powers to protect you. I wouldn't be surprised if the Samourai devs win their case in the end, but their lives are still going to be ruined for at least the next few years, and they'll probably be bankrupted. The fact is that the powers-that-be desperately want these things destroyed, and they're eventually going to find ways of destroying them, if there's any way to do so.

I'm certainly not saying that privacy is a lost cause, but this environment requires a much higher standard of robustness and decentralization. This isn't as free a world as it was when Bitcoin was first created.

Sorry about those few minutes of errors. I was trying to update something which I thought wouldn't cause any issues, but it did cause major issues, which I wasn't entirely prepared for.

Happy halving! Once again, Satoshi's hand reaches out from the past and chops another bit off of the subsidy.

IIRC, in last halvings there was lull in the price for some time after the halving before the effect of the reduced supply really started to be felt. I wonder if that'll happen this time.

Previously, I was under the impression that Jambler was merely a software or platform provider, like Wordpress or AWS. But after reviewing it more closely, it meets the definition of a mixer as written. My mind was especially changed when I saw this diagram from their website:


The diagram clearly shows that Jambler is the actual mixer. They issue the "letters of guarantee", they send the BTC directly to the final customer, etc. The partners are just lightweight proxies in front of the true mixer, which is Jambler. Jambler "has a feature advertised for taking property, improving its privacy somehow, and then returning roughly the same type of property", and it meets the other two criteria, so it's a mixer.

(Maybe you could make the case that Jambler's actual customers are its partners instead of the final end-users, but even in that case Jambler is acting as a mixer for its partners. Jambler is the one doing the mixing. So it's still a mixer in either case.)

Since I had previously ruled that Jambler did not meet the definition of a mixer, and I've now changed my mind, there will be a short grace period: Jambler will be wordfiltered (and otherwise treated as a mixer) starting on April 22.

As with other banned mixers, please do not interpret this as a moral judgement. I'm not saying that Jambler is or is not bad.

I like the idea. All proposed styles seem OK to me, though some alternative styling ideas which come to mind are:
 - Change the color of the entire post <tr>, using a different color than the usual alternating blue and grey (but not too different).
 - Add a little red(?) asterisk or something in the lower-right corner of the post icon (ie. td.td_headerandpost table tbody tr td a img).


Those are decoy posts meant to confuse adblockers. This is also why a lot of the CSS classes randomize on each pageload. Now that there are no ads, I could remove both of these things. Would doing so break anyone's parsers?