Ah, that sounds pretty good. I can't think of a way to manipulate that without wasting a lot of money. I guess only bitcoind servers will be online enough to get good data, though.

You've probably seen this coin in various Bitcoin articles:


It was created in 2010 by Bitcoin core developer Nils Schneider (tcatm). I bought it shortly afterward. I believe that it might be the first-ever physical Bitcoin coin. It doesn't have any sort of private key embedded in it or anything, though. It is one-of-a-kind (AFAIK).

I'm thinking about maybe selling it. Is anyone interested?

That would be deleted, of course.

Trust isn't viewable by people who aren't logged in, and untrusted ratings are hidden by default even for logged-in users, so you needn't really worry about nonsense ratings hurting your reputation.

Wow, I forgot how bad the user response was after that. Now hardly anyone even remembers it...


I guess I decided that it was worth the trouble after all.

IMO, wallets that use memorized seeds should do something like this instead:
- Ask the user for some impossible-to-forget information such as their full name to use as salt.
- Generate random words to use as a passphrase. The number of words can be user-configurable, but 5 or 6 should be OK on fast computers.
- Depending on the number of words, apply enough key stretching to make attacks infeasible.

Then you only have to memorize ~6 words instead of a full ~12-word seed mnemonic, which is a lot easier. And there's still no risk of users choosing bad passphrases, since the wallet does it for them.

(The rough passphrase utility I made a while ago works a bit like this, though it doesn't generate passphrases.)

The OP_NOP is executed, but it doesn't change the result. It's spendable.


Yes.


That's unspendable. If the top stack item is false (zero, negative zero, or an empty string) when the script ends, then the script fails, regardless of what else happened in the script. (This is how OP_CHECKSIG works to begin with: it pushes OP_0 or 1 onto the stack, depending on the result of signature validation.)

Right. He apparently used an empty string instead of a hash160. EQUALVERIFY compares strings, not numbers, so the 20-byte output of HASH160 will never equal the 0-byte OP_FALSE.

All of the pools would lie about their fees. They have little reason to reject transactions with any non-dust fee, but every reason to tell people to pay more. So advertising fees like that would be useless.

Looking at the fee statistics in the last few days' of blocks is probably also not a good idea because pools can send high-fee transactions to themselves to skew statistics. These transactions would be private until accepted into the block, so there'd be very little risk of the fees being claimed by other pools. I predict that no matter how the client attempts to avoid this sort of manipulation, pools will figure out how to manipulate calculated fees anyway.

I think that all we need is for people to be able to cancel 0-conf transactions. People can then experiment and see what fees they can get away with without worrying about transactions getting stuck. The client might even do this automatically, starting transactions at some fee level based on user-specified transaction priority and past data about confirmation times, and increasing the fee if the transaction takes too long.


Assurance contracts would probably be a good solution if there is ever insufficient mining power.

I decided that PHPSESSID is too unsafe, so I disabled it. Every browser supports cookies anyway. I know that you like to mess with your browser settings, but you really should not disable first-party cookies. It breaks a lot of sites, and if bitcointalk.org still supported PHPSESSID, it would make you less safe.

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 4.20 betcointm
1 4.15 BetVIP
3 4.15 MariaQin
2 4.10 CEX
1 4.10 vbbb.com

As has already been said, there aren't enough Bulgarian users to warrant an entire section, but altcoin stuff doesn't belong in the Other Languages section. So there is no valid place for Bulgarian altcoin messages, and this stuff is therefore not allowed anywhere on this forum.

Oh noes, mah rights
bitcointalk is literally hitler
EU save me!

User bans can't be removed by paying a fee. Fees only apply to IP "bans".

Ban evasion is not allowed. If it becomes known that someone who was banned created a new account, then they'll be banned again and they'll lose the registration fee that they paid. The fee discourages ban evasion without totally preventing people on shared IPs (especially Tor) from registering.

If someone publicly posted a death threat here, report it. That's not allowed.

Removing personal information is a pointless reduction in freedom. If someone found your personal information to post it, then anyone can find it (probably very easily).

You should report the threat to police. They won't do anything about it, but the record of the threat will be helpful in court in case someone does attack you and either you or attacker gets injured.

I don't know for sure either way. I suspect that it was not sold, though.

That's caused by your Adblock Plus.

I know of a few that were definitely sold. For hero accounts, the price is apparently pretty good.

This confusion is why I request that (non-standard) signed message format. 75% of people were sending me just the signature without the message or address...

"Evenly divisible" means that the result of division must be an integer.