blockchain.info is notoriously unreliable. If a miner had attempted to claim a subsidy higher than 12.5 BTC, then every full node would've rejected the block.

Happy halving day, everyone! The last four years have been very productive. Bitcoin was so much smaller in 2012 -- it's sometimes hard to believe how much the community, technology, and economy have expanded. I hope that the next four years are even better!

As for the price, I'm sort of expecting it to go the same as last time: nothing major in the short-term, but an increasing degree of upward pressure over the course of a few months due to the reduced supply of BTC.

As Lauda said, it's no good to set a precedent for creating a section per altcoin. Then we'd need thousands of altcoin sections.

I do think that Monero is probably the best altcoin right now, since it actually does something major that Bitcoin doesn't, even if its scaling is terrible and it'll probably be replaced by a Bitcoin sidechain someday. Achieving Monero-style anonymity for everyone should be a long-term goal of Bitcoin.

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.

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 0.50.
- 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.

Auction ended. Final result:
6 0.85 BitcoinVideoPoker
3 0.80 Stunna

If the private key is d, then the public key is d * G, where G is a specific point on the elliptic curve (everyone uses the same G), and * is not normal multiplication, but elliptic curve multiplication.

There's a good guide on elliptic curve math here:
http://www.johannes-bauer.com/compsci/ecc/
Your main goal will be to do "scalar point multiplication", which is what d*G is. To do that you'll need to do elliptic curve addition & doubling. And all math must be done using modular arithmetic, also explained on that page. It's actually fairly simple, but when dealing with Bitcoin's huge 256-bit numbers, it'll take a very long time.

Bitcoin's values for the constants G (the generator point needed for getting a public key point from a private key number), a, b (used to define the curve itself), and p (the modulus used for modular arithmetic) are listed here:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Secp256k1
There G is encoded in a standard way; what it means is that G is the point (79BE667E F9DCBBAC 55A06295 CE870B07 029BFCDB 2DCE28D9 59F2815B 16F81798, 483ADA77 26A3C465 5DA4FBFC 0E1108A8 FD17B448 A6855419 9C47D08F FB10D4B8).

Here are the top 50 reporters by total good reports.

Thanks to everyone who reports! Even one good report is helpful. But massive thanks to those in this list: without you, moderation would be basically impossible.

Although most people in this list have very high accuracies, in general there's no need to worry about accuracy too much.


"Unhandled" means that every moderator with jurisdiction over the post was unsure about the correct thing to do with the post and so left it for other mods to deal with, but no mod ever decided to act on it. I suppose it can be thought of as a "weak bad", though it's ignored for your accuracy percentage.

Since so many people have so many reports, I changed the percentage on the reports page so that it uses proper rounding instead of ceil() and shows 1 decimal. Actually, I changed my mind. This would probably make people feel subconsciously paranoid about reporting.

If a mod splits a stickied topic, the split post(s) also end up stickied. Mods sometimes forget to unsticky it. Thanks for letting us know.

You're in second place for total number of correct reports. Thank you!

Both get credit unless it becomes unclear what the later one was reporting. For example, if one person reports that a topic is in the wrong section and you also report it with the report text "wrong section", then sometimes:
1. One moderator moves the topic due to the first report and marks that report as handled.
2. Another moderator sees your report, sees the text "wrong section", sees that the topic is in the right section, and marks your report as bad.

So you should try to put in the report text enough detail to prevent this, like "Wrong section: Bitcoin Discussion -> Service Discussion".

I think that I fixed the bug. I think that any topic movement of a rather old topic could've done that, but you only saw it now because so many topics were moved.

I created Online wallets and Exchanges. Not sure about Stores -- I kind of feel like the top-level Service Discussion board makes the most sense for general discussion of stores. And I guess there aren't enough threads for Adult.

OK, I changed both errors to "close of unopened tag in table".

There are a variety of ways to produce invalid HTML, but usually it's not a huge problem because the effects are confined to within your own post. It's possible that there are additional undiscovered ways to do especially disruptive things. In this case, the old code path was for inline tags and the new code path which I missed last time was for block tags. (They're in very different places in the code, and not obviously related.) I don't think that anyone really understands the SMF bbcode parser: it looks like someone quickly coded up some mainly regex-based parser that sort of worked, and then people have been constantly tweaking it to fix its bugs for 10+ years. It's terrible. I've long been thinking that I should write a proper parser in C using the traditional lex+yacc tools.

That seems very unlikely.

I think that this is no security risk whatsoever, but just to be safe I made the bbcode parser return an error in this case.

I'm sure it's possible to fix, but I haven't been able to figure out why it's happening.

Hm, I don't know why that's happening. I don't remember changing anything recently that would obviously affect this. Both images are being displayed, but the first one is being resized so that it fits in the table instead of forcing the table to expand. This is in some way caused by the image having the CSS rule max-width:100%, but this CSS rule has existed for years without causing problems, and it doesn't stop your trick from working on other pages (eg. the preview page).

An alternative to using an image is to do something like this:

_______________________________	_______________________________
Under ASIC status, one chip is always an "x"?	Will the miner ever beep?
- There is a faulty chip - nothing we can do. Hash rate will be affected by ~1%.	- No, there is no beeper on this controller.

The bottom of help decoderawtransaction shows you how to execute the command using JSON-RPC via curl:


You can put the {"jsonrpc":... stuff into a file (omit the single quotes) named for example TEMPFILE and then change the command to:

This requires that you set an RPC user and password in your bitcoin.conf. Change "myusername" above to your actual RPC user.

Since the data is in a file and never passed through the shell, I think that this should work, though I haven't tested it.

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.

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 0.50.
- 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.

Auction ended. Final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
5 1.00 victorhing
4 0.55 Stunna