Coinbase announced that they will not support the "Bitcoin Cash" (BCC) splitcoin, which means that if you have any BTC in Coinbase, Coinbase will destroy or take for themselves the BCC that you should have been able to claim. I don't particularly blame them for this, since BCC is garbage, it will probably have very little value, and it'd be difficult to add support for another currency. But it clearly demonstrates why we've been recommending that people remove all BTC from custodial wallets no matter how much they assure you that they're safe.

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 0.05.
- 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.
- 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.

I only listed wallets that made it through the bitcoin.org wallet review process. Other wallets might or might not be OK, though I wouldn't recommend other wallets to people just starting out, at least. If you can export your private keys, then it should be OK from the perspective of the Aug 1 thing, though I don't know anything about its safety in other areas.

I added a list of OK wallets.

Although you should technically be able to get your keys from all of them, some of them might require a third-party tool, and I wanted to indicate those with italics. But I only briefly searched through their source code. Can someone who actually uses them confirm that there is a backup/export option for Electrum on mobile, Mycelium, Copay, Bitcoin Wallet for Android, breadwallet, ArcBit on desktop, and Bither on desktop; and that there is not a backup/export option for Bither on mobile, ArcBit on mobile, and coin.space?

One way to deploy softforks is specified in BIP9. This is how SegWit was supposed to be activated, but it requires miner cooperation. Miners are now doing a different weird thing called BIP91 which abuses the BIP9 mechanism in order to signal amongst themselves support for later hard-enforcing SegWit-BIP9 signalling.

So your Bitcoin Core thinks that sometime after it was released, a new softfork was released and is now about to be activated. You then might want to upgrade in order to continue verifying 100% of the consensus rules. But that's not actually what's happening: what's actually happening is that miners are rudely talking to each other over this sensitive channel without concern for the side-effects you're seeing. There is no softfork-enabled software that you could upgrade to.


There are several possible forks/splits on or around Aug 1. (Most of which will not actually happen/succeed.) This is a side-effect of one of them.

No, you can ignore that in this case. It's caused by BIP91 signalling.

I think that something in your password is confusing the command parser. Maybe take the issue to #bitcoin-core-dev on IRC or github.

That means that it doesn't recognize "walletpassphrase" as a valid command. Maybe you misspelled it.

There's basically no chance that "UAHF" will have any effect on Aug 1. It has no economic support and very little miner support.

Auction ended, final result:

Slots BTC/Slot Person
3 0.75 AlexBessonov
1 0.75 Gunthar
1 0.75 FirstGlobalCredit
2 0.75 TrueFlip.io
1 0.75 bowheadcommunity
1 0.75 Hash_Rush

IMO there are two factors in play:

I've long been thinking that $2000-3000 feels unnaturally high, and may well be a bubble. The 1-year low is like $400 or something, keep in mind. There have been a lot of upward changes in fundamentals, especially the subsidy halving, but a repeat of the 2013-2014 pattern (scaled up) wouldn't surprise me too much.

But the recent drop is almost certainly due to fork panic, and that's way overblown. Let's run through the scenarios:

 - Segwit2x fails to activate SegWit in time, BIP148 fails (my prediction): the status quo continues for 6-12 months, everything is more-or-less fine. I don't think that the market would mind continuing the status quo.
 - Segwit2x activates segwit in time, BIP148 therefore doesn't go off: We get SegWit, which I think would be a minor upward force. The market probably doesn't care that much, but it makes for a good headline at least. Segwit2x could cause further messiness in 3 months, but that's forever away in BTC terms.
 - Segwit2x fails to activate Segwit in time, BIP148 gets miners to activate SegWit quickly: Same as above.
 - Segwit2x fails to activate Segwit in time, BIP148 has significant economic force, but miners don't join it until days later (or never): This is the main eventuality motivating the various warnings, but it's really unlikely IMO, less than a 1% chance. It'll cause a couple days of "downtime" and a massive amount of confusion, but at the end Bitcoin will still be working. And you can keep your coins safe by following the instructions posted on bitcoin.org or in my forum post.
 
If I knew for sure it was all the latter factor, then I would be very inclined to buy right now. But the fork panic may have just kicked off a long-lasting bubble correction; I don't know.

Mycellium and Ledger are fine.


There is no universal decision. Bitcoin is about individual sovereignty, not democracy or dictatorship or whatever. Nobody can decide for you unless you give up your freedom/control by using a bank, etc.

If a split happens at all (which is uncertain), probably it won't be anywhere near a 50-50 split economically. One side will be a tiny minority both economically and in mining power, and this will be apparent only hours after Aug 1. For example, if I can find hardly any sites that accept one side of the split, and the market value of that side's coins is very low, and too few blocks are being produced to realistically transact on that side, then that one is almost certainly not going to survive in any economically-relevant way, and I'll probably call the "all clear" in 12-24 hours.

In the (IMO very unlikely) event that it's a closer split than that, then we'll need to give instructions for choosing a side (or using both) and splitting your coins, as both sides will have value and will probably exist independently for while, possibly indefinitely. Depending on how things look, I might immediately call one side the true Bitcoin for purposes of categorization on bitcointalk.org, or I might leave it undefined for some days to see how things develop further. Though the other side can continue to exist even if categorized by me as an altcoin, of course.

That's fine. Many wallets use 12 words, but some use 24. They do basically the same thing internally.

Don't do the bitaddress.org thing; it's too error-prone to deal with private keys individually.

How GreenAddress works normally is that when someone sends you money, they send to a 2-of-2 multisig requiring a signature from both your private keys and GreenAddress's own private keys. This allows GA to apply extra account protections such as 2-factor-authentication, which you normally can't do if you have a software wallet. But it means that you can't spend your money with just your private keys if you don't take additional steps. Therefore, for maximum trustlessness with GreenAddress, you should do one of these things:

 - Create a 2of3 account in settings, and use just that account. Then you will be able to spend your money with EITHER [your original 24-word mnemonic AND GA's cooperation] OR [your original 24-word mnemonic AND your additional 24-word mnemonic given to you when you create the 2of3 account].
 - Enable sending nLockTime transactions to your email in the settings. This will allow you to spend your BTC with just your private keys after an up-to-90-day wait time.

Again, it's better not to use a Web wallet at all, but GA plus one of those two additional measures is OK.

That's not true.

Some Android wallets should be OK. You want one that allows you to export your private keys. (I don't know which ones allow this, though...)

If you really need a Web wallet, I guess I'd go with GreenAddress. Make sure you either use a 2of3 account (preferable) or that you get your nLockTime transactions emailed to you.

Ziber prepaid now, so their bids are reinstated.

Current auction state:

Slots BTC/Slot Person
3 0.75 AlexBessonov
6 0.70 Ziber

Splitting the coins will be a bit complicated. If such a bad split actually happens, someone (maybe me) will write a detailed guide on how to do it. You can't just do what you're describing there and give one copy of your wallet to wallet software on one chain and one copy of your wallet to wallet software on the other, because any transaction you make from one chain will often still be valid on the other chain. So if there are two chains BTC-X and BTC-Y and you use your BTC-X wallet to send 1 coin to an exchange, your transaction will end up on both chains, and so you'll actually send both 1 BTC-X and 1 BTC-Y simultaneously to the exchange (even though the exchange might only credit you for one of them...). You have to create a special transaction that cleanly splits your coins before you can actually use them separately. (One way of splitting is to taint the coins in one of your wallets with a small amount of money generated post-split.)

Bottom-line: Don't try splitting your coins until someone trustworthy makes a good guide. And don't trust any websites to do it for you, since many scam sites claiming to split coins will probably quickly appear.

Ziber hasn't prepaid, so their bids are cancelled.


Bids must be divisible by 0.05.

(Note that I did approve bowheadcommunity to bid.)

The current auction state:

Slots BTC/Slot Person
3 0.75 AlexBessonov [more info requested]
3 0.55 TrueFlip.io
4 0.55 flippounits
4 0.50 ChipMixer

There is some chance that BIP148 will result in an economic split of the Bitcoin currency at midnight UTC on Aug 1. If this split is non-negligible, then action may be required by all Bitcoin users. Personally, I consider it most likely that the split will be negligible and that you won't have to do anything, but it's still a good idea to prepare just in case.

A very short summary of what you need to do:

1. Ensure that you have no BTC deposited with a Bitcoin bank or other trusted third-party before Aug 1. If there's no technical way for you to export the private keys for your BTC, then that BTC is at risk. Some Bitcoin banks may assure you that they'll definitely keep your BTC safe, but I absolutely wouldn't trust them.
2. Do not send transactions or trust received transactions starting 12 hours before Aug 1 at midnight UTC, and continue this until you hear the "all clear" from several trustworthy sources. For example, I will post a forum news item if everything is OK, or if everything is not OK and action is required.

See my guide here for more a lot more detail: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2012799.0

It's very annoying, but there's no reason to get depressed about it. BIP148 will fail because it was poorly-designed. BIP149 is similar, but well-designed (and therefore slower): it'll finally get the job done in about a year, and the sky won't fall between now and then.


I don't believe it. All of Bitmain's behavior is in-line with them desperately doing everything possible to preserve asicboost. No other theory explains their behavior nearly so well.