You're right. It should be fixed now: revisit the promote page. Sorry for the inconvenience.

The system was confused because years ago you paid an evil fee, which gives credit toward the copper fee, but it was never registered as having more than 0 confirmations, and then in the intervening years the wallet containing that address was taken offline. I think I fixed it so that this shouldn't happen anymore.

Maybe not doomed, but in hindsight, it would've been surprising if it had actually turned out as well as expected. In 2011-2014, I thought that all forum software in existence was trash, and I thought that if we threw a bunch of money at a solid dev team, then it'd be easy for them to make something better from scratch. This was a very naïve plan. First of all, the "not invented here" instinct is just stupid: existing solutions need to be really bad to justify starting from scratch. We should've just stuck with SMF, or at least modified some existing software like Discourse. I also vastly overestimated how easy it is to solve big, complex problems by just throwing money at them. (Which is a common mistake I see people making all the time now.) You need effective managers/executives to turn money into solutions, and few/none of those were involved here.

My open solicitation of bids on the project was probably a good instinct, and I tried to do it reasonably, but I had zero skill/experience in this. After years of soliciting bids without anything panning out, everyone was getting frustrated with various annoyances with SMF, and a lot of people were complaining about me not spending money -- just sitting on a ton of BTC and doing very little with it. So I found it very convincing when somebody way more professional- and competent-looking than any prior bidder appeared, coming with the recommendation of someone I'd already been successfully working with for quite some time.

It would've been better if it had been a total scam, or if it had just completely exploded at the start somehow. But they actually were a halfway-decent group of developers, and they did produce a halfway-decent product eventually. And after something very substantial had been produced, it just kept feeling more reasonable to continue trying to make it work than to kill it, even though the slowness was obviously ridiculous. My thought process was always: "I'm seeing them making good progress. This could eventually turn into something useful. Why destroy what's already been invested? Let's just continue it a little longer and see how it goes."

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With hindsight, clearly it would've been better in wealth terms to be ultra-miserly, but this isn't supposed to be some weird investment fund. From this point forward, should I spend as little BTC as humanly possible, in the hopes that in 10 years it'll be worth way more? I don't think that that would be appropriate now, and I didn't think that this was appropriate in the past. I regret the specific unskillful decisions I made which led to this failure, but I don't regret my attempt at making progress.


Warren was involved with the forum for several years in total, but he drifted away a couple of years after that, after which he stopped providing any oversight on Epochtalk. Since he was a business student in addition to having a lot of tech knowledge, I relied on him for a lot of business-related advice around that time. In hindsight, this wasn't a good idea. I definitely don't think that he was intentionally misleading me, but a lot of the advice he gave me was pretty bad, looking back. (He was fairly young at the time - I don't blame him.)


IIRC, my perception at the time was that the rate was only a little on the high side. I was thinking:
 - If I hired full-time the same number of developers, it'd be about the same cost, assuming they were very-high-skill developers. (And if I actually did that, there's no way that I would have the skill to manage those developers.)
 - It would be much cheaper, and likely to be of higher quality, than if I hired some huge software development company.
 - It was easily within the forum's budget.

If they had delivered the intended results, I would agree even now that it had been a reasonable rate.

Because they failed to deliver the intended results, I subsequently negotiated their rate down a lot.

Thinking of the two "voter" criteria...
Somebody PMed me pointing out an example of someone included in DT1 only because they were trusted by a permabanned member. I was aware that permabanned members were allowed to be voters, but I thought it'd be too rare to matter. But now I'm leaning toward excluding them.

Also, I've increasingly been feeling that something should be done about inactive voters. Currently, a user can be inactive for years, but still contribute toward those two criteria. The specific way I'm leaning toward addressing this is to require that voters must have received merit from at least 2 distinct users in the last 3 years.

I did a pretend reshuffle, and compared to the 136 users who were eligible for DT1 last time, with the above 2 changes, these users were no longer eligible: bavicrypto, be.open, Best_Change, comit, digicoinuser, ekiller, ezeminer, finaleshot2016, Gunthar, Harkorede, Heisenberg_Hunter, hybridsole, joniboini, Koal-84, Lachrymose, mandown, and witcher_sense. (Some of these users may have become ineligible for reasons other than the above two changes; I just compared the output today after the changes to the output on Feb 1.)

If instead it was "voters must have received merit from at least 3 distinct users in the last 3 years", then these users would also become ineligible: Baofeng, MinoRaiola, and Russlenat. I'm leaning toward 2, mainly just on the principle of preferring a larger list generally.

What do people think of these two changes?


To be eligible, you have to have 10 people in your trust list, which is pretty unusual. So I think that PMing me to opt out is good enough.

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While I'm here, here's a thought that's been floating around in my head for a while: A while ago I realized that if you are among the ~136 people eligible for DT1, then your probability of being in DT (DT1 or DT2) after the cross-DT1 exclusions are applied is the CDF of the hypergeometric distribution, with the shape of the function largely dependent on [the number of people eligible for DT1 trusting you minus those excluding you] (ie. your "net DT1 inclusions"). If your net DT1 inclusions is very positive, then you will almost always be in DT; if your net DT1 inclusions is very negative, then you will almost never be in DT; if it's within a few of zero, then it'll switch randomly back and forth. This got me thinking that maybe it'd be more elegant to determine either DT1 or perhaps even all of DT by just directly computing a probability distribution based on net-inclusions (perhaps with other inputs) for every user, and then shuffling according to these distributions every month. But it's just a vague idea in my mind at this point; I don't plan to do anything with this soon, and I might never pursue it.

There would be some benefits to upgrading, but there aren't actually that many differences between 1.x and 2.x, so it hasn't been a priority. I could see it happening someday, but not anytime soon; there are tons of differences between bitcointalk.org and stock SMF 1.x, so it'd be a very major project.


The total amount spent was $5.9 million, spread across 11 years.


I'm very hesitant to undertake any major projects again anytime soon. So I'm mainly planning on incremental improvements to the current software, on the same trajectory as the last several years, but perhaps a bit faster since Epochtalk is no longer consuming time and money.


That's not true. 3116 BTC was donated, with a total value-at-time-of-transaction of just $68k. The remainder comes from advertising/fee revenue, with a total value-at-time-of-transaction of $3.2 million. (A lot of spending was also at these sorts of low prices.) Furthermore, donations were meant to be a way of supporting the forum in general terms; it wasn't like some Kickstarter project. The main pages about donations didn't mention the software project at all, and almost all donations were made before that project even started.


I don't think that that will ever happen, realistically. This whole style of forum is just not as popular anymore. To have even a chance of making it as popular as it was in its glory days, the whole structure of the forum would have to change, and I think that it's more important to retain the fundamental soul of the forum. So I envision the forum perpetually existing as a place for a certain niche crowd who still appreciates this kind of forum. This doesn't mean stagnation: the forum can still grow and improve while remaining niche.

Thanks to PowerGlove, who sent me a patch fixing this bug, this should no longer happen.

A very long time ago now, we hired a company to start developing Epochtalk, which was intended to completely replace the software which currently runs the forum. It was originally supposed to be done in one year; that target was totally missed, but it did eventually get to a usable state which was ~90% feature-complete. However, starting around 2020, development really seemed to stall. I could see that good progress was continually being made, so I didn't want to cancel it, but it never really seemed to get any closer to being ready for bitcointalk.org to actually use it, since it was still missing features, it wasn't stable/bug-free enough, and there was no solid plan to smoothly make the transition.

Recently, a live-data demo of Epochtalk was released. I had been pushing for something like this to be released ASAP in order to have a solid milestone to aim for, and also so that Epochtalk could be tested in a real-world context. The demo works, and in some ways it is actually useful, but I found it underwhelming, and subsequently the community found a really inexcusable number of bugs in it. After seeing the low quality of the demo, in combination with the many years of disappointing progress overall, my opinion on the Epochtalk project shifted from "this is going too slowly, but it might still bear good fruit eventually" to "this is probably going nowhere". Therefore, I've decided that the forum will no longer pursue Epochtalk. It's frustrating to pull the plug on this after investing a lot of time and money into it, but I've come to believe that continuing would be "throwing good money after bad" at this point.

For forum users, nothing has changed. The developers of Epochtalk were not working on anything actually used by forum users: they were working on a hope that we might someday move away from PHP/SMF. Most of the original goals for Epochtalk have in fact already been completed in the current software through work by myself, PowerGlove, and others in the 10+ years since the idea of new forum software was first contemplated. Since 2011, we've added trust, merit, 2FA, "evil fees", watchlists, drafts, a sane reports system, and many other improvements on stock SMF. Going forward, we will continue to make improvements to the current software. One of the most requested features is improving the forum's usability on mobile devices, and that is already being worked on.

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Epochtalk has always been open source under the MIT license, so you can still go run it right now if you want; the code is in the repos in this Github organization. The developers have indicated to me that they intend to independently continue its development, without our support. The Epochtalk proxy of bitcointalk.org will also stay up for at least a while.

This month 136 users were eligible.

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That can happen if you leave the PM-compose page open for a long time so that your session-code becomes invalid. Reloading the page should fix it.

(The JS autocompleter function should detect this and not dump the whole HTML error page, but it's a rare situation, and it's not immediately obvious to me how to fix it.)

Along with many other accounts, it's locked due to being affected by the 2015 data breach and then sitting inactive for a long time. If he wanted to access it, he'd have to go through the Recoveries team and provide proof that it was his account. And it's not immediately clear to me what proof he would use, since the account never posted a Bitcoin address to use for signing a message, or anything like that.

Also, since altoid directly posted a link to the Silk Road, I would guess (not sure) that Ulbricht argued in his court case that it wasn't actually his account. Maybe he wouldn't want to contradict his past testimony?

So he could regain access to the account and post something, but I don't think that it's very likely.

I have a lot of problems with Trump and many of his other recent executive actions, but this one is unambiguously good. Thank you, President Trump!

The headers in your .htaccess file should be sufficient, but the problem is that Apache isn't actually doing what you wrote there. In eg. Firefox, go to the Network tab of Developer Tools, visit your image, and look at the response headers; Cache-Control, Pragma, and Expires are not sent. I haven't used Apache in over a decade, but I would guess that either your Apache is configured to ignore .htaccess files entirely (which is generally recommended in production environments), or the ifModule test fails.

Since that DDoS a while ago, the imageproxy is now going through Cloudflare, which will do server-side caching if allowed by the final origin's headers, and client Cache-Control headers are (I think) always ignored now. (I haven't decided yet whether having the imageproxy behind Cloudflare is permanent.)

That pricing image doesn't send any cache-related headers at all, aside from Last-Modified. If that .htaccess file is intended for that image, then it's not working. One major issue in this case is that:
 1. The image doesn't send an Expires header.
 2. If an image doesn't have an Expires header, then the imageproxy sets an Expires 1 day into the future. *
 3. Cloudflare then server-side-caches this for 1 day based on the Expires header, and there's no way for the client to bypass Cloudflare's cache.

* I just now changed the default Expires timeout to 10 minutes instead of 1 day, at least as long as the imageproxy is behind Cloudflare. But for live content like this, it'd be better if the origin sent headers disabling caching entirely.

For the mixer policy to be reversed, the legal environment would have to improve a lot. I think that one of these would have to happen:
 - Some mixers win their court cases.
 - Congress passes laws which explicitly protect mixers.
 - The administration ends up being extremely pro-privacy, better than 99% of politicians in office.

It'll take at least a year before we have a good idea of what the new administration will really be like, but my expectation is that they will only be ~10% better than the Biden administration in this area. I would be surprised if they dropped the case against the Tornado Cash devs, for example.

The Trump administration could be a lot better than I expect, but they could also be a lot worse. I think for example that the Trump administration might be even more aggressive on sanctions (especially against Iran), and they might therefore see financial privacy as a threat to their sanction power. There are also several reasons why the Trump administration may want to restrict cross-border payments generally: to allow for financial repression in response to a debt crisis, to improve the US's hugely-negative net international investment position (which is often a major issue in the minds of Trump-aligned economists), to tariff services in addition to goods, or to control the value of the dollar. Severe restrictions on cross-border payments could also put them in opposition to financial privacy.

The Biden administration clearly wanted to move as close to banning crypto as they could get away with, so it's definitely good that they're gone, but it's not as if Satoshi has just been elected president. The Trump administration has some interest in pleasing their crypto donors, but that can be achieved mainly just by getting prices to go up. They don't much care, and don't have to care, about privacy, disintermediation, decentralization, etc.

The demo is up again now.


It's supposed to be very good on mobile devices. We would appreciate it if a lot of people test it on various devices.

Note that the demo is temporarily down. This will probably happen from time to time.

There's now a read-only demo of Epochtalk operating on live bitcointalk.org data which you can check out:
https://demo.epochtalk.com

Right now only boards, topics and user-pages are supported, and it's read-only, but over time I'd like this to become an increasingly-useful alternate interface to bitcointalk.org. (Only when it's feature-complete and bug-free would bitcointalk.org switch to Epochtalk.) Already, some people might like to use the demo on mobile devices, where it often works better than the current site. Also, if you look at the requests that the site makes, you can see that it has a JSON API; people who run bots might like to check that out, though we don't officially support/recommend relying on this API yet.

If you see any bugs, use the "Report a bug" link in the top right of the demo.

This month 140 users were eligible.

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Happy new year! 2024 was definitely an exciting year for Bitcoin, probably the best single year for Bitcoin since the earliest years.

I am worried that in the process of Bitcoin becoming a lot more mainstream, a lot of the Bitcoin economy has become more centralized via things like ETFs. (Some in the Trump administration are even talking about FDIC-insured banks being able to accept BTC and pay interest on it.) This centralization may work against the open-source ethos we care about. For example, if one ETF has all of its BTC stolen, I could see all of the ETFs getting together to fork Bitcoin and undo this theft (like ETH/ETC), and maybe they could get away with this, at least in terms of the popular perception. I suppose the only way to address this is to educate people, and also to improve trustless wallets to make them better competitors to centralized solutions.

Looking forward, it's definitely a very good thing that the Biden administration will be gone, since they were unbelievably anti-crypto. That said, I feel that the price has probably gone up too much. Here's the scenario I see as most likely at this point, though it'll probably be hilariously wrong: Since there's no particular catalyst that I can see, the price will slowly stair-step down to the $60ks; then in the last quarter of the year, there will be some recovery, and we'll end the year in the $80ks.

I hope everyone has a great 2025!

What we're talking about here is taking the same announcement and translating it into 16 different languages/topics. Local moderators need to decide on a case-by-case basis whether this kind of pure translation is actually worthwhile in their own local sections. It'd be totally reasonable for a local moderator to delete any of these topics due to being a poor translation, or even just because this sort of translation activity is simply more noise than signal in that local section.

The 4 topics deleted in this case were in low-volume language sections that don't have their own moderators, so Global Moderators who can't actually speak the language have jurisdiction. Given that, it's reasonable to assume that they're poor translations and/or non-additive. I'm not inclined to restore them.

This month 140 users were eligible.

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