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.

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.

You're too new. Next time, PM me first so you can pay in advance.

Auction ended. Final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
2 1.70 darbsllim
1 1.70 ppanther
1 1.70 LuckyBitSupport
1 1.65 MakeBTC
3 1.65 CEX

Legal and French only:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=recent;boards=74,13

He held 1000 BTC for a long time and then returned it at around the time of that rating (after annoyingly being MIA, but still). This is worthy of positive feedback in my book, and it's strong evidence that John will probably not intentionally scam anyone.

I agree that it's unprofessional for him to leave everyone hanging, but sometimes life happens and these things become unavoidable. (I don't know his exact circumstances.)

No, this forum is unaffiliated with the Foundation. Same for bitcoin.org.

I think that the Foundation has done good things in the past, and they'll probably do good things in the future. But over time, there will be a growing desire to centralize via the Foundation. Centralization is an easy way to solve problems, and the Foundation is the obvious recipient of centralized control. We must all diligently watch out for this and act to stop it if necessary.

This is misleading. It should say, "Some of the reference browsers choose not to select a forward-secrecy cipher." The server supports forward secrecy if the client requests it, and in fact most browsers do select a FS cipher. The server also allows non-FS ciphers because, among ciphers supported by older browsers, the non-FS ciphers are stronger.

Most of the current ads don't follow the guidelines I mentioned, so they can be individually targeted. Notice that the Private Internet Access ad (which I manage according to all guidelines) is not blocked.

OK, you can bid up to 2.5 total without paying more. Pay to the same address as before if you want to increase your bids beyond that.

Current status:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 1.30 Goat
1 1.30 victorhing
1 1.25 MakeBTC
2 1.25 ppanther
3 1.20 CEX

The transaction fee per kB is also set in the code. That doesn't mean that it can't be changed.

COIN is used in various places in the code to make BTC amounts easier for programmers to read. MAX_MONEY = 21000000 * COIN is the same as MAX_MONEY = 2100000000000000. Except in a small amount of code very close to the UI, all Bitcoin values in the code are stored as integer satoshi amounts. (MAX_MONEY is used in transaction verification, but its unit is not BTC.)

As I said before, I will not accept your bids unless you pay in advance.

Maybe, though the servers are located in a few different countries.


No, the attacker would only be able to affect new Tor connections.

I can just imagine future history books: "On January 27, 2014, bitcointalk.org banned giveaways, marking the beginning of Bitcoin's end and LiteRippleObamaCoin's ultimate rise to dominance."

Yeah, why do all Android browsers suck so much? Firefox on Android is even worse than Chrome, but Chrome also annoys me a lot (especially how it constantly tries to redirect youtube.com to the YouTube app, with apparently no way to turn this off).


I'll try something like that when I have a chance. Thanks.

There's usually an auction ongoing. You can find the current auction in a link below each ad.

The point of the quote I posted is to disprove your claim that Bitcoin is MIT-licensed because Satoshi wanted altcoins. He gave his real reason there: he didn't see any point in forcing people to duplicate his effort in creating a Bitcoin client. (If you read many more of his posts, you'll see that he also wanted Bitcoin-Qt to remain the main Bitcoin client for the foreseeable future. He didn't want competing clients destabilizing the network.)  He didn't say anything about promoting competition, decentralization, etc.

Satoshi was not a huge champion of decentralization. He viewed the Bitcoin network as being equal to his Bitcoin software, and he tightly controlled all code changes to this software. In several cases, he secretly changed some of the core Bitcoin rules in ways that would nowadays cause absolute outrage. For example, the 1 MB block size limit didn't always exist. He snuck that in along with some other changes without announcing it or asking anyone's opinion. Don't get me wrong: Bitcoin itself is very decentralized due to Satoshi's work, but if Satoshi returned, everyone complaining about current centralization issues would find him to be much worse. So your "appeals to Satoshi" are ridiculous.

On this forum, there is only one Bitcoin. Elsewhere, you can define things however you wish.

The opposite is true, in fact. He released it under the MIT license so that people wouldn't feel the need to rewrite the main Bitcoin client:

If you want to shut down Tor, just DDoS 6 of the 10 authoritative directory servers to keep them down for a few days, and the whole network will break. Or compromise these servers and you can umask any Tor user. Unlike Bitcoin, Tor is 100% centralized.

I wonder if there's a better way to get them to use the stylesheet than what the forum does now:

Next time, try actually PMing me instead of just saying that you did.

I've seen the same font thing on Reddit. I guess it's a browser bug.

I notice that Chrome doesn't use the forum's small-screen stylesheet, which is stupid.