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

- Your ads are guaranteed to be up for at least 7 days.
- I usually try to keep ads up for no more than 12 days.
- Sometimes ads might be up for longer, but hopefully no longer than 14 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

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 5 mBTC.
- The bidding starts at 5 mBTC.
- 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.

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 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.

---

[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 BTC/Slot Person
1 15 lightlord
2 15 vertexmarket
4 10 DogecoinMachine
2 10 vertexmarket

aaforward's bids will not be accepted.

Current auction status:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 15 lightlord
2 15 vertexmarket
4 10 DogecoinMachine
2 10 vertexmarket

The auction continues.

There's clearly intense division, though it seems more blind tribalism than "conceptional differences of how democrats and republicans make their capitalism." If Trump supported New-Deal-type programs, most of his supporters would go along with it; if the mainstream media said that the best way to address the economic situation would be to eliminate capital gains tax, most Democrats would go along with that. (Democrats' allegence is toward a more amorphous "expert/establishment/media consensus" than any single person.) Similarly, if Trump had won by the same margin that Biden won by, I have no doubt that Democrats would be saying that the whole thing was illegitimate and hacked by Russia, and the Republicans would be calling them anti-American conspiracy theorists. It's clearly problematic for the long-term survival of the US as a unified country when only a minority of people seemingly place much value in nationalism or the rule of law, instead fighting for their tribe above all else.

I think we'll increasingly see all sides using every lever at their disposal to harm the other side: gerrymandering, frivolous court cases, targeted investigations/prosecutions/subpoenas, bad-faith legislative maneuvering, "vigilante justice", etc. This will lead to less and less belief that the rule of law exists or is worthwhile. Instead of people thinking, "I shouldn't do this because it's illegal," they'll think, "I shouldn't do this because it's the type of thing which will cause violence to be used against me by the state and others." The latter mindset encourages disobedience, especially if you're part of the tribe currently in power, since there's not nearly enough law enforcement to actually enforce laws when most people don't abide by them voluntarily. It'll also lead to a vicious cycle of even more tribalism and even less faith in the rule of law.

If anything like a civil war occurs, it'd probably be precipitated by the federal government trying to do something and local authorities of the opposite tribe trying to prevent them from doing so. "Sanctuary cities" are a current example, or you could imagine states trying to protect some or all their citizens from prosecution for certain federal tax crimes, for example. It's very difficult for the federal government as it currently exists to try to force these issues through military action; tons of courts, government officials, people in the military, etc. would fight strongly against federal troops acting against states. This is especially true if state operatives (eg. bureaucrats, soldiers, etc.) remain fairly mixed in tribal affiliation as they are now, and the composition does not become 90% Democrat or 90% Republican. If the federal government can't actually enforce its will militarily, and if this becomes obvious to everyone, then full secession might follow, or the federal government might have to restructure itself to become less powerful, allowing for more localism. (I'd been thinking that if Trump won in 2020, this kind of confrontation might've happened with California.)

If things change enough in government that the federal military could be used with impunity against disobedient states, then I think that the federal military probably just wins at that point, and any idea of federalism is dead. State governments, Guard, and Self Defense forces would be totally outmatched, defeated, and their leadership lost. A guerilla campaign probably could be effective (look at the Middle East, which the US military has still not been able to effectively control despite the local population having far fewer weapons and resources than the American population), but I simply don't think that enough Americans have the spirit for that kind of violent, protracted self-defense. I definitely can't see anything at all similar to the 1861 Civil War happening again, with two organized armies fighting protracted campaigns against each other.

If you're a US nationalist who wants to keep the US together, I think that more localism will be necessary. One major problem is that people in California have incredibly different cultures and politics to people in eg. Alabama, to the point where it can never be reconciled. Instead of trying to reach a national compromise between two irreconcilable policies, or trying to enforce your policy through political maneuvering, you should accept that Alabama can ban abortion while California simultaneously has its own universal health care, for example. The US political culture would have to change to accommodate that kind of view, which doesn't seem likely right now, but maybe that could change. A few decades of deadlock in congress along with a string of unpopular presidents from both parties might move politics in that direction.

Another major problem is that people are increasingly living in bubbles of lies. Many Democrats legitimately believed that Trump was Putin's puppet, while many Republicans legitimately believe that Trump only lost the election through massive voter fraud. This problem seems to be caused by the overall concept of social media (ie. not the policies of any specific platform, but just the ability of people to silo themselves into addictive bubbles of only very-like-minded people, and the weird effects that these online interactions have on the human brain), and I'm not sure how to fix it, though it is an important problem which we should be thinking about. Usually as an ancap I like to see established systems breaking down, but even I find it worrying that maybe something like 60% of people (regardless of political ideology) subscribe to several insanely stupid ideas which they've grafted onto their identities such that it's very difficult for them to change their minds even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

aaforward informs me that he made a mistake with this bid; it should be ignored. I'm also not sure at this point whether aaforward's future bids will be accepted, as I need more info from him.

Current auction status:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 15 lightlord
4 10 DogecoinMachine
4 5 lightlord

The auction continues.

Looking into it more, I think that I was wrong and you're right about that. It seems that both chambers have to first agree to accept an objection, which the House won't do under Democratic control. (Or maybe Trump will promise Medicare for All to get some Dem defectors? )

There may still be some doubt. I heard an interview with an unbiased legal expert on C-SPAN a while ago who seemed uncertain what would happen if there were objections and eg. Pence started playing games in the joint session.

Unlike much of the ICO stuff from a few years ago, I think that some of the yield farming stuff may have long-term legs. There's a global search for yield, and the fact that you can get substantial yields through crypto is drawing a lot of interest. This may in fact be part of the reason behind the recent BTC price rise.

Even though the yields paid by CeFi services such as BlockFi seem insane, it's actually reasonable due to the high demand and low supply of liquidity, especially in BTC, but also in stablecoins. Your instinct may be to see 6% interest or more and immediately assume that it's a ponzi, but I don't think that this is likely, at least for the major services. I do think that the risks are often underestimated: you're trusting the service itself not to get hacked and not to make stupid trades and go the way of Lehman, and if you're holding stablecoins, you're also trusting the stablecoin issuer.

In addition to dealing in liquidity, some CeFi services are able to offer things like "60% APY" witithout being a Ponzi by implementing something like a covered call options strategy for you, allowing you to sell the unknown and possibly huge ???% upside in BTC's price for a guaranteed lump sum while still holding onto all of BTC's downside risk. They then just market this lump sum options premium as a large "APY".

It seems plausible to me that you could do lending platforms and automated market makers in a decentralized way, and it's probably reasonable for these to provide pretty high yield in return for you providing liquidity. If these things could be done in a decentralized way, that would be very cool, very additive to the cryptocurrency ecosystem, and important for Bitcoin's wider purpose of creating a separate non-fiat economy. However, I haven't looked into the current attempts much at all, and I don't know if anyone has actually achieved anything even approaching real decentralization here. In any case, there are huge risks that the collateral coins fail due to counterparty risk (eg. with stablecoins) or technical risks (eg. 50% attacks). The automation could also be flawed in some way which causes losses.

Staking on any cryptocurrency that is not already established for other reasons aside from staking is super risky. That's basically a sort of ponzi scheme, because although you're going to get the promised nominal amounts of cryptocurrency, everyone is just playing a trading game where everyone attempts to extract as much real value from everyone else participating, with no actual real value being added. (Often these are combined with ICO-type promises of ways that real value could actually be added someday, but in 99% of cases it's total nonsense.)

When I look at something like https://harvest.finance, I'm very confused at how all of these tokens such as FARM and CRV work and interact, how decentralized each component is, what "governance" exists in the tokens, and what risks you're exposed to... My intuitive guess is that every component is actually pretty centralized even if it pretends otherwise, and the end result is quite risky, probably more risky than even the high yields warrant. But I haven't researched it.

If there are several fundamentally-sound, long-term-viable decentralized market making and lending systems, then I think that a DeFi section may actually be warranted, since this sort of thing could be important going forward. Maybe the section for this would go under Dev&Tech and be one of the more serious ones. Are there any actually-serious DeFi systems running? Separately, although I think that it's less valuable, there may be enough buzz around "yield farming" that a section could be warranted for discussing that, maybe under "Altcoin Discussion" and focusing on all strategies for making money via centralized and decentralized yields, discussion of the various risks, but not including announcement threads for specific tokens/services.

Theoretically, the Republicans could still take it on the 6^th by throwing out some states as "irregular". The House votes weirdly in this process, so the Republicans would control both chambers here. They'd have to all stick together, though: only a few Republican defections could be tolerated. McConnell is apparently completely against the idea, so unless this reporting is wrong and even most centrist Republicans like Romney and Collins can be persuaded to pretty transparently steal this election, it seems dead in the water.

(I would love to see it, though. Can you imagine the utter chaos? I think that it'd hold up in court, too.)


Both sides are interested in winning, not in truth or the rule of law. In an amusingly parallel situation, in Iowa a Republican was certified as the winner by a narrow margin, and instead of going through the proper court appeals process under Iowa law, the Democratic challenger is going to the House to try to have it overturned. If anyone expects Pelosi's House to treat this fairly and objectively, especially when she has only a few-vote majority, then I have a bridge to sell you...

It's kind of disturbing that many Trump supporters actually believe that there was fraud on such a wide scale, or that many Democrats honestly believed that Trump was literally on Putin's payroll, etc. There are too many people out there living in their own bubbles instead of in reality.

It was. In addition to prefetching links on the page you're looking at, Chrome apparently prefetches URLs it suggests in the URL bar before you actually visit them. I fixed the previous issue of unwanted prefetch side-effects by returning 403 errors to all prefetch requests, but Chrome was then actually remembering that error and returning it if you actually visited the URL.

For any other developers dealing with this problem, here's what seems so far to work:
 - On pages where you don't want to allow prefetching, go through all of the request headers and see if any of them equal "prefetch". The main one seems to be Purpose: prefetch, but there seem to be at least 3 different headers, which is why I'm just scanning through all headers.
 - Return an error if it's a prefetch, along with a Cache-Control: no-store header so that the error isn't returned if the user actually visits the page.

I probably won't take it anytime soon. Maybe if COVID is still a problem in 2022, I'd take it then.

As I see it, it's just a matter of weighing risks. If I get COVID, my chance of dying or getting post-COVID syndrome seems very low, since I'm young and healthy, and post-COVID syndrome is very rare. The risk from the vaccine also seems very low, but I'm worried that there might be some sort of long-term increase in the risk of cancer or something like that. Currently, I judge the risk of the vaccine as being higher than the risk of the virus for me. For people at a higher risk of dying from COVID, it's a totally different story, and for them I think it's probably overwhelmingly better to get the vaccine. But each person should make this decision for himself; the government should absolutely not force people to get it, and I hope that employers will try as much as possible to accommodate employees who don't want to get it (though in a few cases, like nurses in hospitals, the only reasonable course might be for employers to require it).

As I understand it, how the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines work is that they use mRNA to get your own cells to produce tons of COVID spike protein (ie. just a tiny piece of the full virus), and then your immune system eventually realizes that this spike protein floating around inside of you is a foreign substance and learns to fight it off. This has the potential to be a cleaner, safer vaccine than traditional vaccines which are composed of actual viruses cultivated in animal products. It's also easier to develop these mRNA vaccines because you just need to take some genetic code from the virus and plug it into your mRNA-vaccine template. There are several questions that come to my mind, though, like:
 - What else is in the vaccine other than mRNA? Presumably there are some preservatives and binders; how much testing has been done on those in other vaccines? How does the non-mRNA stuff compare to the flu vaccine, for example?
 - How exactly do they produce the mRNA? I'd guess that they genetically modified some bacteria or yeast to produce it, but I don't know.
 - I know that the mRNA should not normally integrate into your DNA, but what if you have some reverse transcriptase floating around from another virus? Is it possible, and would it be harmful?
 - I'm not sure, but maybe you're going to get quite a large amount of spike protein floating around inside of you, since each bit of mRNA can (I think) cause your body to produce many copies of spike protein. In other words, the total amount of foreign material that will be in your body is far more than the contents of the syringe. Is it possibly harmful to have so much spike protein in you? Could it destroy important cells? Could it accumulate in tissues and then cause problems later, maybe long after the vaccine?
 - DNA/RNA has a tendency to experience random mutation through exposure to light, temperature, etc. How likely is it that some mRNA in the vaccine will mutate into something really harmful?

I'm sure that the scientists thought about those concerns along with many more that I missed, but I'd like to know the answers to them before I'd get the vaccine. (I could get answers to many of them right now if I did some research, but I haven't; I'll wait for some journalist to write a comprehensive article on it.)

It was.


I think the difference may be that they renamed the header that was sent, the old one being already blocked by the forum, but not the new one. Not sure, though.

I think that's it: Chrome is guessing that you'll visit the page, and prefetching it in advance.

Is it fixed now? I'm trying to block these prefetch requests, but I'm not sure whether I'm getting them all, since I can't find good documentation on the headers Chrome is sending.

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

- Your ads are guaranteed to be up for at least 7 days.
- I usually try to keep ads up for no more than 12 days.
- Sometimes ads might be up for longer, but hopefully no longer than 14 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

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 5 mBTC.
- The bidding starts at 5 mBTC.
- 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.

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 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.

---

[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
4 30 sportsbet.io
4 30 ColorlessK
1 25 DogecoinMachine

Phore only paid about $500 for this ad. It wouldn't make economic sense, especially since many advertisers would have to be checked for every one ad that is accepted, wins slots in the auction, and ends up paying. By memory, I'd guess that in the last 3 years there's been only 2 or 3 ads pulled after acceptance due to something I missed. Bitcointalk.org ads are far more high-quality than eg. AdSense ads are. If even this low level of risk became unacceptable, then it'd make more sense to just not sell ads. (Not selling ads is something that I've considered, since it's a lot of trouble for not really that much return, but without ads the forum's cashflow would currently be way too far in the negative. I'd have to come up with an additional source of revenue first.)

This case seems to be a difference of opinion on policy rather than an issue of something I missed, though. I just see very little potential for harm from this ad, even if Phore's tokens are risky. It seems very unlikely to me that even a single person is going to view this ad and/or read the linked article, develop a desire to invest in Graphene despite the lack of any real suggestion from the ad/article to do so, do the research to figure out that they need to buy Phore tokens to get Graphene tokens, and go do that. Rather, the purpose of the ad seems to be to improve Graphene's reputation as a platform for dApps, not to attract investment. The state of the ad auction was such that rejecting Phore's ad would've resulted in no loss in revenue whatsoever; I allowed it as a matter of fairness/consistency.

Advertising Phore itself definitely wouldn't be allowed. That's why I initially rejected their bids in the auction. Phore is definitely an "ICO-type-thing", which is explicitly banned from advertising: buying these sorts of tokens is something like buying shares in penny stocks, but even far more risky. However, I interpret this ad as advertising a product of Phore, namely the Graphene ecosystem and apps built on top of it such as their Marketplace. By analogy, I see this like Nikola advertising their fuel cell technology and their maybe-soon-to-be-available vehicles, not Nikola advertising NKLA shares.

In evaluating these sorts of things, I try to determine whether the ad is intended to attract investment; if it is, then it's not allowed. Just because it's possible to invest in the advertised thing doesn't mean that it must be rejected: I'm looking at the intent of the ad. I was convinced in this case that the ad is aimed at attracting interest in the technology, not attracting investment. Neither the ad nor the linked article encourages people to buy Graphene tokens. You'd actually have to do a bit of work to figure out how to buy the tokens: you'd have to research further to figure out how that Graphene tokens will be airdropped to holders of Phore, and then you'd have to buy Phore. Phore also apparently has a working marketplace app, which makes me think that the whole thing isn't complete vaporware. So my overall sense here is that Phore is actually trying to build a product, and they're trying with this ad to generate interest in the product, not to generate interest in investing in Phore/Graphene. This is allowed. (Advertised things do not have to be good/useful to be accepted, BTW. Ads are not endorsements/recommendations. I'm just trying to prevent forum users from getting scammed due to ads.)

Now, I could be missing some context here. I don't follow this space very much at all, I never heard of Phore or Graphene before this, and there's a limit to how much time I can spend time researching this stuff.

I have on many occasions rejected ads for being for investments, often very significantly reducing ad revenue for that ad round. I would've done it here without hesitation if necessary.

This month 144 users were eligible.

Old:

New

Note that there have been two changes in the auction rules:

First, prices should now be stated in mBTC rather than BTC. 0.01 BTC = 10 mBTC; 1 mBTC = 0.001 BTC. If people still bid amounts that are obviously in BTC, then I will understand and accept them, but for clarity, please use mBTC.

Second, both the starting price and minimum increment have been halved from 10 mBTC (0.01 BTC) to 5 mBTC (0.005 BTC).

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

- Your ads are guaranteed to be up for at least 7 days.
- I usually try to keep ads up for no more than 12 days.
- Sometimes ads might be up for longer, but hopefully no longer than 14 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

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 5 mBTC.
- The bidding starts at 5 mBTC.
- 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.

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 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.

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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).