If you lose a post due to the limit, a draft will be saved.

Yeah, the incentives for miners are wrong. I think that some changes to how mining works will probably be necessary eventually, though it unfortunately might take a serious incident to make this palatable for Bitcoin users.

I really like Proof of Activity. It fixes several problems at once:
- 51% attacks are made much more difficult, and pools have greater disincentive to even try them.
- Users are incentivized to run full nodes, which is important.
- Miners lose all power over choosing which transactions to confirm. Instead, this power goes to randomly-selected Bitcoin users. I think that this will tend to make the fee and standardness policies more varied and fair.

Some people have proposed making pooling impossible, but I think that this would actually make the problem worse. Everyday people would be even less inclined to mine because their chance of winning would be almost 0. Only people who could afford to buy a significant amount of mining power would try mining, and economies of scale would still favor larger miners. Ideally, everyone would be required to use GBT with a full node or something like P2Pool, but enforcing this seems difficult or impossible. We might just have to learn to live with big pools (and learn how to do this without giving up on decentralization).

That sucks. The creditors would've probably gotten much more money from this auction than whatever will happen now. (Maybe it'll be given to CoinLab for next to nothing? CoinLab seems worse than even MtGox...)

Mark should think about selling it on an auction site outside of the US. (Maybe this isn't legally possible, though.)

I very rarely conduct forum business outside of forum PMs. If "I" do, you should ask me to PGP-sign my messages.


Go reread the emails I sent out after those incidents and you'll see that I told people to assume that their email addresses were compromised.

However, since no one has ever published any accurate data from the forum's database, I tend to think that the attackers did not download large chunks of the forum's database, or at least they didn't share this data. For example, as far as I know, no one has ever published a list of Satoshi's IP addresses as used on the forum or his password hash. There have been very few cases of people complaining of increased spam on their forum email addresses, so I believe that these cases are actually unrelated to the forum (even if you think that your email address was unused anywhere else).

The vertical height is limited to 42px. 728px is OK for horizontal height, though 700px is recommended for maximum compatibility. If you have a banner ad, remember that images are not allowed...

Also, you're too new to bid. You'll need to prepay. PM me if you want to bid.

Any address that starts with 3 is P2SH. There is no address format defined for "native" multisig AFAIK. Even if there was, using it would just be a shortcut to including more public keys directly.

You can only use an address in addmultisigaddress if the address is in your wallet. Bitcoin Core gets the public key from your wallet and uses that.

No. A script can only contain at most one P2SH script evaluation. Trying to do a m-of-n with P2SH addresses would require more than one P2SH script evaluation (you'd need an OP_EVAL). Also, standard m-of-n scripts deal with public keys directly, not addresses.

I think that the only two hardforks were:
- The change in the version message which took effect on February 20, 2012 after two years of advance notice.
- BIP 50

The other changes are all softforks.

Each OP_CHECKMULTISIG has a limit of 20 public keys, but you can chain them together in Script to use more. The actual max number of public keys you can put in a transaction is probably 20,000 (the max number of sigops per block).

I think that it's valid. Try paying a higher fee.

Fixed. In the future, you should preview posts before posting them.

The forum sells ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page. About 25% of ad income goes to the forum moderators as thanks for all of their work. (There are many moderators, so each moderator gets only a small amount -- moderators should be seen as volunteers, not employees.) The rest is stored in the forum's treasury (verifiably), where it sits until the forum needs it.

Ads are allowed to contain any non-annoying HTML/CSS style. No images, JavaScript, or animation (no marquee or blinking). Ads must appear 3 or fewer lines tall in my browser (Firefox, 700px 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. Eight 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.

The ad lasts at least 7 days starting from when I put it up. (However, if you look at the ad history you'll see that ads usually get at least 8 days, and sometimes as many as 10, but this is random and definitely 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

Ad blocking

Hero 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 counts 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.

Auction rules

Post your bids in this thread. Prices must be stated in BTC per slot. You must state the max number of slots you want. When the auction ends, the highest bidders will have their slots filled until all eight slots are filled.

I reserve the right to reject bids, even days after the bid is made. In particular, bids from people with less than 15 activity points are likely to be rejected. I recommend not getting into a bidding war with someone who has less than 15 activity points, as their bids might not be accepted, but your latest bids will still stand. If you need to know right away whether someone's bids will be accepted, PM me.

So if someone bids for 8 slots @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 8 slots. If the two highest bids are 8 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 7 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 no more than 12 days from now. (I will probably end the auction 1-3 days before the ads are scheduled to go up.)
- 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.

You must pay for your slots within 24 hours of receiving the payment address. Otherwise your slots may be sold to someone else. I will send you the payment information via forum PM from this account ("theymos", user ID 35). 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
1 3.00 1987xgm
1 2.50 earnabit
2 2.45 MariaQin
1 2.45 flyonwall
1 2.40 coinbroker
2 2.40 CEX

See GetMyExternalIP and GetMyExternalIP2 in net.cpp, which uses an HTTP API to get your external IP. You can mostly copy GetMyExternalIP2 for your use.

Yeah, it's prophesied that one day Satoshi will emerge from the block chain and save us all from the evils of Fiat once and for all. When that day comes, his forum status will change to "online" and we will all revel in the beauty of his 5 platinum coins.

[flash] has never been enabled on this forum. That'd be terribly insecure.

I received a complaint from FIFA regarding GoalCoin's usage of the the FIFA world cup trophy in their topics. I believe that the complaint is legally valid, so I have removed all topics posted by the user goalcoin. While the complaint only specifies one topic, I decided to remove them all because further complaints seem extremely likely otherwise. (All of the topics were filled with the offending image.) Hopefully goalcoin can recreate the topics without using the trademarked images/terms. If any important information was lost in a deleted post, let me know and I'll restore it.

I am opposed to all intellectual property, but it doesn't really make sense to expend resources and expose the forum to additional risk in order to fight intellectual property complaints of this sort. Unfortunately, we'll just have to live with these stupid laws for now. (Trademarks are the least-bad form of intellectual property IMO, but I think that this case demonstrates how they can hurt innovation and destroy value in some cases.)

Here is the complaint:

Right.

I do feel for innocent victims of doxxing, though. I welcome suggestions on how to improve forum policy in this area. However, forum policy must be consistent, and I'm not going to start deciding who's guilty and who's not (again).

I've been thinking that maybe it would be an improvement to require that dox be posted along with sources for all of the data, and ban dox that doesn't come from a "public source" (government site, news story, Facebook, etc.). This would make casual doxxing more difficult, help readers determine whether the dox is actually accurate, and hamper distribution of info obtained from illegal sources (hacking, etc.). I'm not sure that it would help enough to be worth the trouble, though.

You seem to think that this generates keys based only on personal info, but that's just the salt used to prevent pre-computation attacks. You also need a strong passphrase.

I wouldn't use this code for large sums of money because it doesn't have much review, but I think that the basic principle is very solid if the user can make a decent passphrase (which is maybe not a good assumption in general).

They pay 3 full-time Bitcoin Core devs, they've funded work on bitcoin.org, they do various legal/outreach work, etc. They do a decent amount of good stuff, though I always worry that an organization like this will become a dangerous point of centralization someday. It would be better if the 3 full-time devs they're hiring were hired by 3 separate organizations, for example. (But it's better that the Foundation pays them than no one pays them.)