This month 132 users were eligible.

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Congrats! How long did it take you? I estimated that it'd take an hour or two to reverse engineer, and honestly I didn't expect anyone to go to the trouble in the 24 hours available. I'm glad it was interesting enough to somebody that I was proven wrong here!

April fools!

Thanks to PowerGlove for creating this cool game. I was really impressed that he was able to create it from scratch in less than a month with no dependencies and in only about 21kB. Thanks also to the mods who helped test it.

Here are the "high scores", though keep in mind that there were cheaters. karmamiu performed the best on every metric, and it doesn't look to me like he cheated.

I disabled the "new replies since you started writing" error globally.  (In ordinary times, you can disable this in your settings, BTW.)

In order to reduce the number the low-value posts, I had PowerGlove design a state-of-the-art, AI-enhanced CAPTCHA which will identify all low-IQ people. You'll have to complete the CAPTCHA before posting.

You can adjust the CAPTCHA's size with the +/- buttons in the upper left and right. If you post without solving it properly at first, you can go back and edit your post to try again. The CAPTCHA gets more difficult in more active topics, and it gets more difficult the more you post. If you experience poor performance, typing "\" changes a setting which may improve it.

Right now the CAPTCHA is in beta testing, so it only shows a warning banner for likely spammers, but in 2 weeks everyone who fails the CAPTCHA will be immediately banned, so you'd better get used to it!

KFC/AMC will be required for all members. Get ready to buy chicken and movie tickets.

Thanks for doing this contest, RickDeckard! There were a lot of great submissions.

nioctib_100 had the best-looking final result IMO. I love the way the letters seem to be emerging chaotically out of the apples, but yet you can still read them in the photo.

Dickiy, puloweh555, loopes, and Helena Yu also had fantastic-looking pies.

The most interesting recipe was Betwrong's. That's a pie I'd like to try making sometime.

This month 128 users were eligible.

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That quote predates the introduction of flags, and is no longer generally accurate. However, negative trust ratings created before the introduction of flags are "grandfathered in", and can generate a flag-like-warning, as a special case.


In other words, this type of warning can be eliminated if the grandfathered-in negative ratings are deleted, or if new positive ratings are created to offset them, or some combination of the two.

Congrats to the other winners! I'm touched that so many people went out of their way to vote for me.

I decline any prize. Please reassign it to someone else, donate the value to Evidence Action, or keep it.

Thanks for organizing this, icopress!

This month 131 users were eligible.

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Not really. I don't know of any better solution which wouldn't require a lot of manual work to keep it working.

Cloudflare actually isn't even very good at identifying bad traffic or delivering on several of its claimed features, but it offers two extremely valuable tools:
 1. It completely blocks even massive IP/UDP/TCP flooding without any thought on the end-user's part. My custom DDoS protection was also able to block these attacks, but it required a significant amount of sysadmin work.
 2. My custom protection failed against layer-7 attacks from 100k+ IPs. To handle these attacks, there needs to be some sort of proof-of-work/CAPTCHA challenge before the application starts making database queries and such. These challenges must exist on servers which will automatically scale to handle any number of requests, as needed. The challenge servers must have the HTTPS key in order to function. It would definitely be possible to do this without something like Cloudflare, and I've posted a general description of how it could be done, but both the coding and sysadmin work are more than I want to deal with.

Cost is a consideration, but not the primary one: I'd consider paying 10-30x more than Cloudflare's $250/mo, if this came with significant improvements. But as far as I know, you don't actually get much more by paying an "enterprise" DDoS protection company $5000/mo than you do by paying Cloudflare $250/mo, and in fact you often seem to get less.

This month 121 users were eligible.

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This month 120 users were eligible.

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After reading your post, I realized that the stats I gave were highly misleading because mini-bumps occur (and super-bumps are possible by playing with URLs) across the entire forum, but they only have practical effect on certain boards, and the stats I gave previously were global. Restricting it to only the boards where modified-bump-ordering is default, it's:
30 days: 12901 super bump-power out of 13492 total bump-power
365 days: 220802 super bump-power out of 232874 total bump-power

In the past 30 days, there have been 397 super-bumps from 57 distinct users contributing 11355 bump-power. Over the same period, the total bump-power from both mini-bumps and super-bumps was 88127.

In the past 365 days, there have been 8850 super-bumps from 308 distinct users contributing 222971 bump-power. Over the same period, the total bump-power from both mini-bumps and super-bumps was 1041245.

Good point, edited. Thanks.

Thanks for your comments: I incorporated several suggestions. I think that the usefulness of this announcement decays with every passing hour, so I went ahead and posted it. I'll also link to it in the news bar for a couple of weeks. The post can still be edited, of course.

Has anyone used the Unstoppable wallet? Is it a good alternative to Trust Wallet?


"Withdraw now" strikes me as a bit too alarmist, and I prefer the term "online account". "Exchange" is too narrow, while trying to be more exact with a phrase like "centralized exchanges, yield sites, and many tokens" is too confusing.

Note that even USD in exchanges is at risk, whether or not it's a stablecoin or a non-stablecoin account balance. If the exchange goes bankrupt, typically the USD will be an unsecured liability owed to you by the exchange, the same as any other asset associated with your account.


I agree that yield-farming stuff (whether DeFi or CeFi) is very risky in general, and especially right now when $2-10 billion in "money" was just removed from the crypto economy overnight. I adjusted the wording to emphasize that yield products are included. "Inherently unstable" goes a bit too far, though, IMO. For example, some decentralized exchanges and over-collateralized lending pools seem pretty robust at least in principle, and many of them will probably survive.


I don't consider it to be an issue. Those clearly are the two leading hardware wallet manufacturers, and merely mentioning them is not an endorsement.

When you log into an exchange, yield platform, or other site, and it says that you have a balance of "1 BTC" or "1 USD", this does not actually mean that you have 1 BTC or 1 USD. Rather, it means that the company showing you this balance owes you that money. In other words, you've given a loan to the company. Maybe the company will pay you back, but history is littered with defunct companies which accepted deposits and were widely trusted for years, but which ended up not paying back their depositors in the end.

To the greatest extent possible, you should always avoid keeping BTC (or anything else) in online accounts. This is especially important right now because a very large exchange went bankrupt recently; this has already caused a contagion effect which has taken down other companies which accept deposits, and this contagion may continue to spread and affect more companies.

Ideally, you should keep as large a percentage as possible of your crypto assets in a wallet where only you control the private keys. Electrum for Android or desktops is one good option. For iOS, there's BlueWallet. If you have a large variety of different crypto assets that you need to store, there's Unstoppable wallet. If you have never used your own trustless wallet before, using a mobile app is probably safer than using a desktop app. An even safer option, which you should definitely consider if you have a lot of crypto assets, is to use a hardware wallet such as Trezor.

Also, note that many altcoins, tokens, and DeFi projects are either fundamentally centralized and therefore about as risky as online wallets, or they are still potentially vulnerable to the recent wave of insolvencies due to the way that they're designed.

I don't like the idea of a permanent banner, but a post in Important Announcements isn't a bad idea, especially since the FTX contagion is likely to cause several more bankruptcies over the coming weeks/months. Because the FTX issue is likely to trigger bankruptcies soon, this is time-sensitive, and so it'd be best to post it in the next ~36 hours.

A quick draft:

Which are the best wallets for total newbies? Anyone who will actually need the advice in this post will need something very easy, so I don't want to list something too difficult. Probably I should just list one app for iPhone, one app available on Android via Google Play, and maybe one hardware wallet. (Linux/Windows/Mac wallets are too risky for newbies, I think.)

I'm not very familiar with DeFi systems. Should more be said about them?