The police has now officially announced that they think that Warner was behind it, and that he was in the RV when it exploded; the human remains found at the scene were DNA-matched to him. "Going out with a bang" was one of the first ideas that occurred to me, so it's not surprising, and I don't particularly doubt the official story so far. It was also the most boring possibility... Regardless of his motives, this is something that'll be forgotten in weeks. I'd guess that he was just suicidally depressed, without much larger motive, and he wanted to do something loud/flashy/"fun" as a suicide. Maybe part of him was hoping that law enforcement would come stop it and maybe save him before he exploded (if he didn't shoot himself beforehand - not known yet AFAIK).

It's tragic for him and for everyone harmed, though I'm glad that he remained altruistic enough to go out of his way to avoid killing people. Someone suicidal has many ways of easily killing a lot of people if they choose, as seen for example in the Las Vegas shooting. Even though it's tragic that Warner was willing to kill himself (for any reason), and it's tragic that he chose to multiply his own pain across many additional people, in some ways it gives me a little extra faith in humanity to see that even in his final position of absolute power - when there was absolutely nothing outside of his mind constraining his behavior, when he had fewer chains than most people ever have - he very actively chose mercy as opposed to wrath.

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/531662-emergency-crews-respond-to-explosion-in-downtown-nashville

Normally I don't pay much attention to bombings, mass shootings, etc., but this one is really intriguing. The RV which exploded had loudspeakers on it which first apparently played loud gunshot noises to wake everyone up, and then it started playing a message warning people to evacuate. It also exploded in a non-residential area, at a time when the area would not have much traffic. Because of these measures, it seems that nobody was seriously injured, but the explosion did cause a massive amount of property damage, affecting several city blocks. The RV was near an AT&T facility, and damage to this facility caused widespread outages in Internet & phone service, though it's not completely clear that this facility was the target.

There are just so many interesting possibilities as to who could be behind this:

1. Initial reporting is that there may have been human remains found near the blast. This has not been confirmed. Maybe this was just a really flamboyant suicide?

2. This could could an attempt by a US enemy to sow division. Trump-aligned people will think that it was a leftist plot (maybe a false flag by the deep state, or an attack by an IRA-like left-terrorist group), while anti-Trump people will think that it was white-nationalist or QAnon domestic terrorists. I will be especially inclined to think that this is the case if we don't get much more info about who was behind the attack; doing an attack like this without leaving traces would be very difficult, so that points to a very sophisticated attacker, and leaving the issue perpetually hanging so that both sides can fight about it forever suits the motives of a foreign-nation-state attacker.

3. This could be the opening salvos of some terrorist group. By doing it this way, you can multiply the efficiency of all of your future attacks, since you can put loudspeakers on a vehicle very cheaply, and if only 1% of them actually explode, this is enough to cause widespread terror and disruption in potentially hundreds of cities. The whole setup of this attack was more sophisticated, well-planned, and constrained than I'd expect from the big terrorist groups of the past such as ISIS, which is interesting. If it was a terrorist group, then I'd expect them to eventually take credit for it and use it as a recruiting tool, though note that other terrorist groups will probably also falsely claim credit for the attack soon enough.

4. The whole point might've been to create a distraction for something else which hasn't been found yet. The damage to the AT&T facility took out Internet and phone service (including 911) and also made everyone look in one particular direction for a long time. This would be very convenient if you were infiltrating a facility 20 miles away at the same time, for example.

5. You never know, but:
    a) I tend to think that this was too sophisticated for the QAnon or anti-5G people.
    b) A bunch of big, terrifying attacks could conceivably be used by Trump as part of a coup to stay in power. But I don't think that Trump's inner circle is competent or far-looking enough to do this, I don't think that Trump is ambitious enough for it, I don't think that enough of the military/bureaucratic apparatus would support him in any case, and I don't think that something like this would stay secret for more than a few hours in Trump's notoriously leaky administration.
    c) While there have been a few true false flag attacks by the US government in the past, they're incredibly rare, and they're done secretly by small conspiracies within the intelligence community, not as a matter of policy. I won't completely rule out that this is some action by groups within US intelligence, but this isn't an idea I'd take seriously without seeing a lot more evidence. I'm also not sure what the motive would be. (Trump supporters might say that it's part of a plot to make Trump leave office, but that'd happen anyway... This line of thinking points back to the "promoting division by a foreign state" hypothesis.)

---

More info will presumably come up as time goes on; right now, everything is very preliminary. I'd find it pretty unbelievable if there is no surveillance camera footage of the RV being put into position, for example. Surveillance cameras are so ubiquitous nowadays that it should probably be possible to trace the path of the RV at least to the edge of the city, though it will take a lot of time to collect all of the footage. It's also not clear to me at this point whether the RV was right outside the AT&T facility, or whether it was half a block or more away -- different news outlets report different info here, and this info is important for determining whether the AT&T facility was specifically targeted.

What do you think? I look forward to hearing the insane theories of BADecker and others, along perhaps with some less insane theories.

PPP, direct bailouts, etc. just prop up businesses that should fail. Theaters and airlines are probably going to be less popular going forward: they should have fewer employees, and they should probably cut their operations overall, at least temporarily. If they think that continuing to operate will be useful, then:
 - They should've been saving for these sorts of emergencies. If they haven't, then they're bad businessmen and they should be replaced in the economy by more competent businessmen.
 - They should be able to get private loans from someone who agrees that the business can survive. If there is no one willing to lend, then the company is too risky, and that means something.
 - Public companies should be able to issue more stock, to be bought up by people who think that the industry and company will recover. If there is nobody willing to invest, then the company is clearly unlikely to be profitable anytime in the next ~5 years at least, and it would be better for it to be liquidated and for its resources to go elsewhere.

But instead, airlines for example are getting a bailout on the condition that they re-hire their employees for a few more months, even though the airlines admit that they will furlough these employees again if they don't get even more stimulus, and they admit that they don't anticipate this situation changing for years. And airlines wasted tons of cash buying back stock over the past several years. So billions of dollars in resources will be tied up in businesses uselessly operating at above-needed capacity, while these businesses were recklessly not saving for this sort of eventuality. People will be paid to do a job that isn't particularly useful to the world right now, and may never become as useful as it once was.

If there was no government support whatsoever, then businesses run by idiots would go bankrupt, which is good. Businesses that have no long-term potential for actually contributing to the economy and therefore making a profit wouldn't be able to get loans or investment, and they'd go bankrupt, which is good. People who worked for these businesses would either go work for a more competent company which could use their labor more effectively, or they'd go do something else that is more useful in the current environment. For example, maybe airline employees could get training in administering vaccines, or providing childcare, or working at a shipping company, or doing some sort of virtual work: all in high demand now. Or they could start their own business: maybe some airline employees could come together and make a company specializing in private flights, which have been massively more in demand lately due to COVID. When people are unemployed, they go find useful (=profitable) things to do, and that's how the economy adapts and grows. Economic growth doesn't happen magically at an average 2% rate or whatever, as a fixed economic law, but due to the combined effects of millions of little bits of personal innovation/adaptation, which can be as simple as the decision of a furloughed theater employee (less useful) to become a grocery checker (more useful), for example.

This reorientation of the economy in the face of changing conditions is how you ensure long-term economic growth. Artificially propping up the status quo is less painful in the short-term, but it prevents the economy from adapting, weighing down growth in the long-term. This economic scarring can last decades. It also rewards idiot executives and investors (eg. airline executives and shareholders who promoted buybacks instead of investment/preparation), who are often higher-income. It's like learning that you have early-stage, treatable cancer, but just deciding to take ever-more-powerful painkillers rather than undergoing chemotherapy: it's more pleasant in the short-term, but long-term, it's a very bad idea.

Now, if you think that some sort of help needs to be provided to low-income people hurt by the economy collapsing around them, then do that directly. I can't find the quote right now, but I think Milton Friedman said something like, "If the problem is that poor people don't have enough money, then just give them money." If you're worried that airline employees, theater workers, etc. are going to be fired en masse, give $20k to every person in an affected industry with an income less than $100k, or something like that. Let the airlines and theaters fail, and let the workers go do something else more useful. The idea of helping workers by propping up failing businesses (ie. using the businesses as middlemen) just drags down long-term economic growth while helping the rich executives and investors who in part contributed to the problems.

If you're a Republican who voted for the past relief bills, then it would've made more sense from your ideological perspective to instead do something like a very large one-time check for people making under <some amount>, plus a very large increase in the earned income tax credit (for everyone, not just people with kids) which would last at least 3 years, and no business bailouts. The actual past relief bills were results of economic ignorance combined with various political realities such as the need to appease tons of special interests.

The bill was 5000+ pages long, so I'm most worried that there was something nasty hidden in there which hasn't even been found yet by the public.

I'm opposed to all of this, though I think that direct aid is the best thing that the government can do if they're going to do anything. The bailouts keeping alive industries that should die or reform are the worst, like the massive airline bailouts in both relief bills, or even PPP. For the CARES act, it would've been better to just send everyone making below <middle class income> a check for about $8000 than have all of the various bailout programs. Let businesses that haven't saved and can't get private loans go bankrupt; let their employees find somewhere more economically-useful to work.

With the Fed creating unprecedented amounts of reserves and this unprecedented fiscal spending aimed largely at lower-income people, I could definitely see price inflation finally appear, which people aren't really expecting after so long a period of low inflation. And even more than price inflation, we'll probably see continued asset-price-inflation in all assets: stocks, real estate, BTC, etc.


It depends on the area. In some places, it might last a couple of months, especially if you're already using SNAP, housing assistance programs, etc.

You definitely shouldn't trust Trump, but it's sad to see a leftist like you implicitly trusting an ultra-neocon like Pompeo or "intelligence experts" just because they differ from Trump. Pompeo's the type who would jump at any opportunity to start a war, and he will resist any attempts at backing away from existing foreign intervention. He probably pushed for the assassination of Soleimani; he's one of the main people behind the dangerous, escalatory "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran; he downplayed the murder of Jamal Khashoggi; he's called COVID-19 a manmade Chinese virus; he supports torture; he supported the Iraq war; etc. People like Pompeo, Bolton, Bush, etc. are not good or trustworthy just because they sometimes oppose Trump, and in many ways they're actually worse. And "the intelligence community" is full of similar people, with similar histories of intentionally lying to the American people in order to further their ideology of escalation and intervention.

Figuring out who's behind a hack like this is difficult, and you can never be 100% sure. Maybe Trump is just pulling the China connection out of his ass based on nothing, but it also wouldn't be surprising if he wrote that tweet right after reading an intelligence report which said something like, "There are a lot of indications that it was Russia, but there's a 30% chance that it was an independent non-governmental attacker, and a 20% chance that it was China," and this gave Trump the idea to bring China into his election disinformation campaign. He's done this kind of thing several times before. When you're dealing with liars like Trump, Pompeo, and "leaks from the intelligence community", you can't trust that they're 100% lying, and you can't trust that they're 100% telling the truth.

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.

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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
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.