Due to recent unfortunate events, there was concern among the community that the previous host of the Bitcoin Wiki might no longer be able to maintain this important community resource. As of today, the Bitcoin Wiki is under the protection of the forum. The wiki’s existing policies and community will continue (separately from this forum’s community), but the forum will be providing hosting and related technical services. The wiki is now hosted on a dedicated VM, so software changes will hopefully now be easier and more frequent. In my opinion, the Wiki’s quality has declined over the last couple of years due to a number of mostly technical problems which I hope can be fixed eventually.

Security Improvements

The new forum has been updated to the latest version of MediaWiki + extensions, with a custom SELinux confinement policy for Mediawiki, bitcoind and the CryptoPayment processor. Furthermore, a part-time sysadmin has been hired by the forum to be responsible for maintaining long-term security and maintenance of the Wiki. reCAPTCHA is now used only for account creation, merely to slow down bot-driven account creation.

Automated Anti-Spam

CryptoPayment is a MediaWiki extension to limit spam by requiring a small one-time Bitcoin payment before a user is allowed to edit or create pages. While the payment is deliberately small for a normal user, it presents a barrier to persistent spammers. Formerly known as BitcoinPayment, CryptoPayment no longer relies upon MtGox as the payment backend. It now uses a Node.js backend which interfaces with bitcoind. The plan is to rewrite the plugin and backend to be high-quality code and then to release it as open source so other wikis can benefit from this very effective anti-spam mechanism.

CryptoPayment fees have been reduced from their previous level.

Requiring payment for every user is certainly non-optimal. It prevents exactly the kind of “drive-by contributions” that wikis are great for. In the future, CryptoPayment might be improved by allowing users from “high-reputation” IP addresses to join without paying a fee. If you have any other ideas for improving the anti-spam system while making contributions easy, let us know.

dump.bitcoin.it

dump.bitcoin.it will soon be restored. Going forward there will be weekly dumps in XML for the public to download.

Configuration Cleanup

Some Templates are currently not fixed in non-English languages to correspond with the s/BitcoinPayment/CryptoPayment/ replacement that is currently described in English. If you are fluent in the other languages supported by the Wiki, please fix any pages you can or talk to the lead Wiki moderators nanotube and SomeoneWeird if you have text for a non-English Template that you are unable to edit.

Additionally, other pages such as the Login dialog need to be fixed to display the CryptoPayment notice in a similar manner to how it was presented with the previous Wiki. Do you notice anything else that needs to be fixed?

Bitcoin Wiki Discussion and Support

This new sub-board is the best place to discuss the Wiki. We would be very interested to hear if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions to further improve the Wiki.

You can alternatively find people in Freenode channel #bitcoin-wiki.

Note that I am not personally administrating the Wiki, and you should not contact me about Wiki problems (other than hosting).

If images aren't working (and the source image is working and smaller than 2.5 MB), post links here and I will investigate.


No. The proxy never saves images to disk. It will pass on Expires headers, though, so your browser might cache the image.

Today's 502s were due to a bug. I fixed it.

Specifically, when certain URLs were given to the image proxy, they caused the script to hang for 30 seconds and eat up connection slots because PHP's fopen() apparently doesn't respect timeouts in some cases. I'm not sure whether someone intentionally exploited this to take down the site, or whether it was accidental. Anyway, I changed the script to not rely on PHP for handling timeouts.

This feature is tabled for now. We'll see if BTC deposits can be avoided. If they can, then credit is unnecessary and maybe not worth the trouble.

Paying the fee whitelists your account, not the IP address.

Bots can't post in threads (unless they somehow post on-topic, substantial posts), and posts consisting mostly of bot commands are off-topic will be deleted. You can do it via PMs, though.

Operating a full wallet service creates unacceptable legal and technical problems. To get around this, forum credit can only be bought from the forum, not sold. But you can sell forum credit to other people. And because there are real (though limited) uses for forum credit such as buying ads, there will certainly be a market for them. Once a market develops, few people will buy credit directly from the forum. 1 forum credit will be worth something like 0.9 BTC if you can buy 1 credit for 1 BTC directly from the forum. I expect that the exchange rate with BTC will remain fairly steady after a while, so it will be an acceptable short-term medium exchange for small tips. I do not want or expect anyone to use forum credit as a store of value or a medium of exchange for large transfers.

This is a very minor feature. It's mostly intended for buying ads, but it may have additional value for very small tips (too small for the Bitcoin network) and other small things.

(I actually have this entire feature written for the current forum, but it's mostly disabled because you can't actually buy anything major with credit.)

It's not a wallet. You can't withdraw forum credit.

If someone wants to write a patch for it, I will seriously consider adding it. I believe that safely adding 2FA would be very time-consuming, so I'm not willing to do it myself or direct Slickage to do it.

That's already in the requirements.

Work is underway by Slickage on new forum software for this forum. The software will be written in Node.js. The goal is to create new open source forum software that will directly compete with software like SMF and phpBB. Unlike Discourse, the software will be featureful and information-dense. Unlike Reddit, the software will support and encourage lengthy, high-quality posts (while allowing shorter posts). The software will be a jump forward from our current forum, but not something entirely new. The basic concepts will stay the same, but with significantly better code, better methods of filtering the huge amount of content, and many other useful features. All old forum data will be retained and migrated to the new software.

Here is the current master requirements document. This document is evolving. If you have any ideas for new features or changes that are reasonably high-priority and realistic, discuss them in this section.

Insubstantial posts are off-topic and have never been allowed.

Now that I think about it more, I don't think that duplicate transactions are possible anymore. Non-coinbase transactions can't be duplicated because their inputs will be double-spends, and a rule was added a while ago that coinbase transactions must include the block height in their inputs, which prevents them from being duplicated.

The community has definitely been diluted quite a bit with non-libertarians. In the early days, this was basically an ancap forum. But I always expected that this would happen, and while it makes things a lot less fun and more tiresome, it's not all bad. Now is a great opportunity to spread the idea of freedom. Bitcoin is at its core a force for freedom, and nothing will completely eliminate that. There's also still a "libertarian conspiracy" controlling many important Bitcoin assets, and many of the early adopters who made a ton of money are libertarian, so we're in a great position to make some real advances in the direction of a free society.

No, it really is a duplicate transaction.

Allowing this was a bug in the Bitcoin protocol. It's no longer possible for one transaction in the block chain to make another transaction in the same chain unspendable. However, a single transaction can still exist in more than one block if the older copy is completely spent before the newer transaction is added.

Good news. I was afraid that the UN would replace ICANN or that the US would start taking a more active role, but it sounds like they're just handing things over to ICANN. ICANN does an OK job IMO, and no one is forced to use the ICANN DNS or Internet constants in any case (especially if ICANN isn't sponsored by the US government).

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 frequently get 1-2 extra days, 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.

Auction ended. Final result:
Slots BTC/slot Person
1 1.85 vineyard
1 1.85 gigabytecoin
1 1.80 topminingcontracts
4 1.80 betcointm
1 1.80 TD Games

This has been the case since 2009...

I think that someone is trying to brute-force passwords. Bad login attempts were handled very badly/slowly. I fixed the performance issues there, though the brute-forcing is presumably still going on. I don't have time look into it. A single IP can attempt logging in no more often than once per 45 seconds, though, so it shouldn't be too easy to brute-force passwords.