So many great entries! My favorites are:
1. KrispyKrypto
2. polymerbit
3. BigBos
4. geophphreigh

This month 124 users were eligible.

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It's nice to see some people actually eating their pumpkins! Every year I see hundreds of pumpkins sitting outside of people's houses and then getting rotten: it makes me feel like it's a secret Halloween ritual where everyone sacrifices perfectly-good-to-eat pumpkins to Nurgle.

Added.

One minor point of criticism I have with the site is that in places the issue is framed in a similar way to pro-X/anti-X political action sites, where you're asked to lobby various people. But Bitcoin is meant to escape politics: if you run your own full node, you can't be subject to changes to Bitcoin which you don't consent to, regardless of what anyone else does.

This month 130 users were eligible.

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Note that I've decided to suspend ad sales. These auctions will probably be permanently ended, and I'm not sure whether or in what form advertising in general will be continued. Maybe some ads will go up again fairly soon, or maybe there will never be any more ads; I haven't decided yet. The main reasons for this decision are:

Firstly, I'm finding it too difficult to determine which services are legit/safe and which are not. It takes me 30+ minutes to research each new service to reach at least some level of confidence in it, but at the end of this I often still don't feel fully confident. Bitcointalk.org is meant to be operated "as a service to the community", so it's very important to me that bitcointalk.org not be seen to be putting profit above the interests of its users. (I've been kind of shocked at the crypto-related ads that are shown on TV, which are often way beyond anything I'd accept here. And I'd like to tighten our standards.)

Secondly, there is a high amount of friction in the current process of auctions and manual ad processing. I often feel that it's more trouble than it's worth on bitcointalk.org's end. I also think that the revenue is substantially less than it could be because the market of advertisers willing to deal with this difficult process is much smaller than the market of advertisers who would be willing to advertise here if only they could do so effortlessly. So I think that we're "leaving a lot of money on the table" due to friction, which makes the other issues feel even worse.

Finally, bitcointalk.org has a large reserve of BTC, so we're able to continue operating without ad revenue for many years. It's not even necessary to cut expenses or find replacement sources of revenue anytime soon, and I currently have no solid plans to do these things. I do regard it as less than ideal to be operating at a constant loss, especially because it constraints any desired future growth in expenses. Improving this situation will be on my mind in the coming years, but luckily it need not be a high priority.

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If you'd like to advertise: I will consider offers to advertise, especially if you've advertised before. Send me:
 - What you want to advertise
 - How long you want to advertise for, and starting/ending when
 - How much you'll be willing to pay
 - If you would prefer some change in the format of ads (ie. something different than the banner below the first post), let me know and I'll consider it

However, my standards for the type of service I will accept will be stricter than previously, and I will also not accept advertising if I don't think that the proposed price is high enough to make it worth the trouble. Due to these changes, I will probably accept few or no offers to advertise, and the majority of the time there will be no ads.

A possible good long-term solution would be if we could use some ad network in the same vein as AdSense which has extremely high standards, does not track users, and is otherwise as visitor-friendly as possible. If you know of or operate something like this, please let me know.

The main thing that I'll miss about these auctions is being pushed to closely investigate a wide variety of different crypto-services, many of which have been very interesting and innovative, even ones which I've had to reject. Thank you to all advertisers, auction participants, and ad designers over the nearly 11 years since the first auction. I'd especially like to point out that many, maybe the majority, of ad banners over the last few years were designed by jayce.

I probably never would've spent the ~hour figuring out how to add it because it strikes me as unnecessary, but I also don't see the harm in it. Since you wrote the code, I added it. Thanks!

This month 127 users were eligible.

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Royse777 requested that the thread be disassociated from his account, and although there is/was controversy surrounding Royse777, I didn't see any harm in it because it'd be blatantly obvious who created the topic for anyone who did a couple minutes of looking.

The rules require that bids be evenly divisible by 2mBTC. When someone violates this rule, I always round down to the next lower valid bid.


As I mentioned in previous auctions, your bids will not be accepted.

Auction ended, final result:

Slots mBTC/slot Person
1 28 BetCoco
2 28 Hhampuz
2 28 Myleschetty
4 26 Alpha Affiliates

This month 129 users were eligible.

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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.

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. Hero/Legendary members, Donators, VIPs, and moderators have the ability to disable ads; these people don't increase the impression stats for your ads.

Design & ad restrictions

Ad text may not contain lies, misrepresentation, or inappropriate language. Ads may not link directly to any NSFW page. No ICOs^[1], loggable mixers^[2], banks, funds, or anything that a person can be said to "invest" in; I may very rarely make exceptions if you convince me that you are ultra legit, but don't count on it. Ads may be rejected for other reasons, and I may remove ads even after they are accepted.

See the ad design rules for info on designing forum ads.

When advertising a new service, you should always check with me in advance whether your service is OK. I will sometimes accept bids of people who don't do this, but such people are taking the risk of being rejected at the last minute. It's also a good idea for you to have me check your ad's HTML+CSS in advance, especially if this is your first time advertising.

Duration/timing

 - Ad slots won in this auction will run from noon August 30 (US Eastern time) to noon September 30. (31 days.)
 - This auction will end sometime between August 19 and August 25, but August 23 is most likely.
 - You must pay within 48 hours of the auction ending. Only Bitcoin is accepted. If you fail to pay in time, your ad slots may be resold, and in cases where I feel that you're acting in bad faith, I may even give you a negative trust rating.
 - You must send me a valid ad (ie. one not breaking any of the styling or other rules) before noon August 29. If you fail to send a valid ad in time, then the ad round will start without you, and you will be "burning time". You can still send an ad after the deadline, and usually this ad will be put up fairly quickly, but no particular timeline is guaranteed after the deadline.
 - If extended downtime or similar issues cause your ad not to be displayed for a long time, we generally give prorated refunds (USD-denominated) for the lost time, but this is not guaranteed.

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

Auction rules

New members are likely to have their bids rejected unless they PM me first, telling me what they're going to advertise. New members might also be required to pay some amount in advance. Additionally, 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 mBTC per slot. (10 mBTC = 0.01 BTC.) 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 @ 50 mBTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 9 slots. If the two highest bids are 9 slots @ 40 mBTC and 1 slot @ 50 mBTC, then the first person will get 8 slots and the second person will get 1 slot.

The notation "2 @ 50" means 2 slots for 50 mBTC each. Not 2 slots for 50 mBTC 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, like "5 @ 10 and 1 @ 50".
- All bid prices must be evenly divisible by 2 mBTC.
- The bidding starts at 2 mBTC.
- The auction ends at an arbitrary time between August 19 and August 25. Times closer to 8:00AM August 23 (US Eastern time) are more likely.
- If two people bid at the same price, the person who bid first will have his slots filled first.

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.

Price flattening

At the end of the auction, after the winning bids are all determined, I will do a "price flattening" operation. This has no effect on which bids actually win, but is instead just meant to make the prices actually paid by bidders more equal. For each bid, in order of lowest to greatest price/slot, I will reduce each bid's price/slot to the highest value which is equal to or only the minimum increment greater than the next-lower bid. This allows you to bid higher prices without worrying so much, but you still mustn't bid more than you're willing to pay. Example:


Payment, etc.

You must pay for your slots within 48 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.

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[1]: For the purposes of forum ads, an ICO is any token, altcoin, or other altcoin-like thing which meets any of the following criteria: it is primarily run/backed by a company; it is substantially, fundamentally centralized in either operation or coin distribution; or it is not yet possible for two unprivileged users of the system to send coins directly to each other in a P2P way. The intention here is to allow community efforts to advertise things like Litecoin, but not to allow ICO funding, even when the ICO is disguised in various ways.
[2]: A loggable mixer is a service marketed primarily for improving transaction privacy which accepts full custody of cryptocurrency for a time and has the technical ability to log where the cryptocurrency comes from and goes to (even if they promise not to log).

Auction ended, final result:
Slots mBTC/Slot Person
1 12 waveriderp
2 12 CrashinoAffiliates
3 12 Alpha Affiliates
3 10 BetCoco

Bids from minimax.finance will not be accepted.

Current status:
Slots mBTC/Slot Person
1 12 waveriderp
2 12 CrashinoAffiliates
6 10 BetCoco

The auction continues.

Bids from 8bethub will not be accepted.


Bids must be evenly divisible by 2 mBTC/slot. When this rule is broken, I always round down to the next valid bid.

Current status:
Slots mBTC/Slot Person
3 8 Alpha Affiliates
6 2 Hhampuz

The auction continues.

It's an interesting look back, though my predictions don't strike me as especially prescient or anything.

IMO it seems less likely now that Bitcoin will be replaced as a base-money/digital-gold asset. Bitcoin's network-effect and reputational advantage is too strong at this point. Any replacement would have to have overwhelming advantages over Bitcoin, with Bitcoin failing to compete against these advantages for years. I don't see ETH as a likely competitor in the base-money niche, though there is clearly intense demand for easy-to-use smart contract capability, so until BTC smart-contract tech advances to compete with that, ETH will have a place. It's definitely possible for off-chain BTC smart contracts to work just as well or better than ETH's smart contracts, but the development of this has been slow. And CBDCs are in a completely different niche, and don't compete against Bitcoin.

I've never been opposed to hardforks if they are uncontroversial and are phased in very slowly, though I underestimated how much could be done with softforks. There probably will be a hardfork someday, though probably not soon.

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On the email-address thing, IIRC I was specifically thinking of a hub-and-spoke payments system where everyone would have a Bitcoin wallet provider of their choice (possibly self-hosted), similar to how everyone has an email provider like gmail and it's also possible to run your own email server on your own domain. You'd trust a small amount of your total BTC with your wallet provider, and small everyday transactions would be done in a process like this:
 1. You tell your wallet provider to send to client@wallet.com.
 2. If your wallet provider is wallet.com, then they just do an internal debit/credit, with no on-chain transaction.
 3. If your wallet provider has a payment channel open with wallet.com, then they debit your account, adjust the payment channel to move the BTC to wallet.com without an on-chain transaction, and wallet.com credits their client account.
 4. If there is no existing payment channel, then a payment channel is opened, requiring some on-chain transactions. This would require an automated negotiation about how large the channel should be and how the fees should be split between the wallet providers, though these fees would presumably be just a small cost of doing business for the wallet providers rather than a per-transaction fee for the end-users.

The idea was that you'd still send large transactions on-chain, similar to wire transfers vs ACH transfers. This would only be for small everyday transactions.

This is somewhat similar to LN, but LN improved upon it in almost every way.

This month 133 users were eligible

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I don't like identity politics: you shouldn't be proud of things that you had no control over, and you shouldn't consider yourself to be part of some political tribe based on your race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. So I'd support getting rid of things like Black History Month or Women's History Month. But I think that the idea of Juneteenth is worthy of a federal holiday if anything is. Slavery was a very evil institution; it's worthwhile to remember the harms that were done (without blaming anyone alive today for it), and it's worth celebrating the fact that despite slavery being commonly accepted throughout most of history in most parts of the world to varying degrees, humanity in general and the US in particular were able to move the moral bar forward and finally recognize slavery as evil. If I listed some of humanity's biggest achievements throughout all of history -- the things that actually mattered and show IMO what we're even here for --, recognizing slavery as evil would be near the top of the list, and it happened relatively recently.

That said, there are two things that bother me about Juneteenth. First, the name sounds incredibly stupid. I don't care if this is what they historically called it: it sounds ridiculous, and you can't tell from the name what it's even commemorating. Rename it "Freedom Day" or "Emancipation Day" or something. Second, there are too many federal holidays. Get rid of some of the more useless ones like Labor Day, Presidents' Day, or Columbus Day.

On a similar matter, my initial reaction to hearing that they were going to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill was pretty negative. Whoever came up with this idea almost certainly did it with the mindset of, "We only have white men on the money, but we need to check more identity boxes than that. Can we find a non-white LGBT woman or something?", and that sort of identity-based thinking is a stupid reason to do anything. But I later came to at least not hate the idea. After reading some of Tubman's biography, I came to think that she was in fact an impressive figure who exemplified some of America's best qualities. Maybe there are better people than her to pick for this, but she's not bad. And Andrew Jackson was one of the worst presidents in US history, so I don't mind diminishing his prominence, and in fact I wish they'd remove him completely from the $20 bill rather than keeping him and adding Tubman as they currently plan. (If they were going to diminish Jefferson or Franklin, who I actually respect, that'd bother me more.)

Fixed.

As others have mentioned, when you're dealing with floating-point numbers, different numbers can have the same internal representation. 10000000/pow(10,8) returns 0.1, but because this is stored as a floating-point number, it has the same byte-level representation as 0.10000000000000001 as well as infinitely many other numbers, and when echo converts this float to a string, it chooses that particular value to display. round returns a float, so that doesn't fix the issue: in this case it outputs exactly the same thing that it takes as input.

sprintf('%.8f', $satoshiValue/pow(10,8)) will do what you expected round to do because it returns a string instead of a float. There are other ways to address the issue, but that's what I'd do.


The exact behavior of floats might depend on the CPU, OS, compiler, C library, and PHP version. You can't rely on any specific behavior.