It's truly inspirational how you've faced such immense challenges without giving up. And it's always exciting to see that you've posted something here -- your projects are always very interesting!

That's a status update, not the final result.

I share Luke-Jr's view that hardforks should usually have two years of advance notice, but this hardfork is definitely necessary sooner. The behavior of old nodes is closely tied to the behavior of BDB: the limits are not on the number of transactions or bytes, but on database-specific things which aren't easy to track. Without this hardfork, all full nodes would be required to either use BDB or come up with some very complicated heuristics (which don't currently exist) to guess at what BDB would do. Even worse, old nodes don't always have consistent limits. It isn't reasonable to leave the network in this messy state for two years.

Sorry about last week. Usually I try to wait a while after the last bid to prevent sniping, but in that case I was far behind schedule in switching out the ads.

strip4bit 1 6
Surpbitcoin 2 2.5
Inaba 4 2.25

Talk to the Spanish moderators about it and have them PM me if they want a new section.

A part of the forum's money is managed in accordance with the Treasury Agreements. There, the forum as an entity is defined as consisting of three bodies: the Head Administrator, the Trustees, and the Community Council. Below is the official list of trustees and community council members.

This organizational structure does not extend to other aspects of forum governance.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Each person is listed with his PGP public key or Bitcoin address.

Trustees
theymos 5E6B3F3BA961193C5C9B4435C6555693DAB591E7
Martti Malmi E526A9B27841593BC2439EB2E904B7FE1BBA4244
BadBear D93B006570C59D6B2D247534A0233B74B5797C4F
Stefan Thomas D16E7B0442B9F02E0660C094C9473700A4B08BF3

Community council members
nanotube D8B11AAC59A873B0F38D475CE7F938BEC95594B2
Maged F7F974C4D111E276FF243A8D59A6076B32733620
SaltySpitoon 83F47CC601C25A3C85C0141990F7A516600E0ADD
psy 7FB4272D4D2285DCEA2503EC8957CE7E0ECB3344
Raize 94426F4250C7F1837667B9319960F226D610B5E1
casascius 25AD1933B0D3FE72113595CC5A2EE8F1F1175A23
Meni Rosenfeld 71A3B6A007510238CEE8A2C2AF79F1252A608F15
BCB D8249B78EB762933E1402A477ABE99DB1179678E
Cobra 61559B1EEFB3F8DA6C40BAAC6F85594478CE4C7A

Updated July. 11 2015
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

iF4EAREIAAYFAlWhPrIACgkQxlVWk9q1kec9bAD+Kmaf1+ZPsbib32jYcXvzYhJL
qJUKHfSb0ah6IvkuX1EBAJN9jUZ+H9BNNw+bFLkuZjoquiyASQScFVnECYFVyc7o
=odxc
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

I have pledged to invest all after-expenses BTC-denominated forum profit back into the forum or the community. Due to BTC price increases, forum profitability, and conservative spending, there is a substantial reserve of forum-earmarked funds, currently about 1226 BTC. The cold-storage addresses are bc1qj33689f6edzjst72w6nzs02qd0w68spw49qgcv and bc1q9md45gnwykdkf2r79fdzxyrs96rwejq5nkpca6, though due to accruals the actual amount of forum-earmarked funds might be somewhat higher or lower than the amount in these addresses.

Note that the balance of the forum's old donation address is not meaningful, and cannot be added to the above figures. Also, the old multisig arrangement which was previously detailed in this post is no longer in place.

I'm going to start sending BTC to the treasurers. Here are the treasurers I've chosen and the BTC amount that I'm willing to store with them:

1000 casascius
1000 John
750 Meni Rosenfeld
750 Rassah
750 eleuthria
500 DeathAndTaxes
500 OgNasty
250 CIYAM Open
250 Ryland R. Taylor-Almanza
250 paraipan
250 Garr255

This accounts for more BTC than the forum currently has, so if all treasurers are still interested in holding the BTC, not all of them will have to do so right away.

Here is the final contract. I added an "outlawry" sentence. The initial list of community council members is too small, but that's something I'll have to fix later.

---

This is a non-legal agreement between The Bitcoin Forum ("Forum") and ___ ("Treasurer"). This agreement is intended to be enforced in a non-violent, non-legal way by the community.

Held Amount: ___
Monthly Fee: ___
Deposit address: ___

TREASURER OBLIGATIONS

After the treasurer receives the Held Amount of bitcoins, the treasurer owes the Forum the held bitcoins and must keep the entire amount safe at a particular address, never transferring them except:

  Transactions

After the head administrator requests that the treasurer send the held bitcoins somewhere, the treasurer must send the bitcoins as directed within 14 days.

Exception: 1 trustee or 3 members of the community council may order the treasurer to temporarily stop all payments. After such an order, the treasurer must not obey administrator transaction requests until the order is reversed by those same trustees or community council members, or until the trustees or community council members are removed.

The treasurer *should* delay transactions as long as possible if the administrator is believed to be compromised, under duress, or acting against the best interests of the Forum.

  Treasurer wrap-up

The treasurer may always send the entire held bitcoins amount to any trustee in order to end his obligations in this agreement. He then must also return any fees that were paid in advance.

FORUM OBLIGATIONS

The forum must pay the Monthly Fee by the first of every month when it is due. These fees may be paid in advance. If the forum is late in paying, the treasurer may take fees out of the held amount. If the held amount is not enough to cover the monthly fee, the contract is ended and neither party has any more obligations or debts.

The forum cannot incur any debt. Under no circumstances will the forum's staff members, trustees, or community council members be liable for anything whatsoever.

DISPUTES

Because this contract does not define any obligations for the forum except monthly fees, and since that issue is completely handled in the previous section, it is not possible for anyone to have a dispute with the Forum under this contract.

A dispute may be raised by the Forum (represented by the head administrator) against the treasurer.

In case of a dispute, both parties may agree on an entity to act as arbitrator.

Only if the parties cannot agree on an arbitrator: the arbitrator will be the first person in the list of community council members excluding trustees and the head administrator, assuming that the person is willing to arbitrate for free and the person is not involved in the dispute.

If a party is non-responsive at any point in this process for more than 7 days, that party loses the dispute.

The arbitrator can only decide whether the treasurer is in violation of this agreement or not. The arbitrator cannot award damages, order either party to do anything, or decide that the Forum is in violation of the agreement.

If the treasurer is in violation of this agreement, he has an absolute moral obligation to correct the violation as soon as possible. If he does not correct his violation within 7 days, he agrees to be ostracised by the Bitcoin community. Additionally, anyone who has obligations to the treasurer is no longer required to follow those obligations in order to be considered to be acting in good faith by this community. The Forum can forgive the violation at any time.

THE BITCOIN FORUM

Trustees and community council members are added, removed, and reordered by the head administrator. Any change in the list of trustees takes place 60 days after a public announcement. Any change in the list of community council members takes place 30 days after a public announcement.

The head administrator can be replaced in any of five ways:

  Method 1

The head administrator resigns and assigns someone to be head administrator.

  Method 2

1. One of the trustees publicly and formally states his desire to replace the head administrator.
2. 7 days pass.
3. Any trustee higher on the trustee list except the head administrator can cancel this process.
4. The trustee becomes head administrator if one half of community council members agree.

  Method 3

1. One half of trustees and two thirds of community council members vote to remove the head administrator.
2. The head administrator is considered to be removed.
3. A plurality vote determines the new head administrator.

  Method 4

1. One third of community council members agree that the head administrator should be replaced.
2. This is announced as publicly as possible so that no interested party is likely to miss the announcement.
3. 7 days pass.
4. Any trustee, including the head administrator, can cancel this process.
5. A plurality vote determines the new head administrator.

  Method 5
 
If it is absolutely clear that the head administrator is inactive and there are not enough active community council members and/or trustees to replace him, the treasurer should consider the head administrator to be whoever seems most capable of continuing the Forum.

  Voting

Above, a fractional number of voters means the fraction of voters rounded down, but at least one.

Votes should be delivered to the treasurers once there are enough votes. Treasurers must take appropriate measures to verify the identities of the voters.

When a plurality vote is called for, the treasurer should contact all voters. 7 days from this contact, all votes received should be tallied and the person who received the most votes wins. In case of a tie, the vote is repeated.

Initial roster with PGP fingerprints / addresses:

Head administrator:
- theymos - 5E6B3F3BA961193C5C9B4435C6555693DAB591E7

Trustees:
- The head administrator
- Stefan Thomas (justmoon) - D16E7B0442B9F02E0660C094C9473700A4B08BF3
- Malmi Martti (Sirius) - E526A9B27841593BC2439EB2E904B7FE1BBA4244

Community council members:
- All of the trustees
- psy 7FB4272D4D2285DCEA2503EC8957CE7E0ECB3344
- John 42B6DC513D9DFDEC4C287CD78353E637B3AAEEB0
- hazek 0475D4C3B9C988B8B396BB6D4FD343B39E8803E7
- FreeMoney 1Kwbu2Am9L2zbpUTUQ4c6PzhT6bD5CYqC4
- BCB D8249B78EB762933E1402A477ABE99DB1179678E
- Maged F7F974C4D111E276FF243A8D59A6076B32733620
- nanotube D8B11AAC59A873B0F38D475CE7F938BEC95594B2

Why are you bidding so high?

That's still my position.

Blatant illegal trades are only disallowed because they would make it difficult for the forum to survive. In this case, even assuming that the FinCEN ruling is an absolute law without loopholes (which I'm not sure about), people could have all of the necessary licensing. I'm not going to go around asking people to show me their licenses.

The forum isn't based in the US.

I agree that it is important to have a random, unguessable passphrase, but 12 random words with 128 bits of entropy is overkill. My passphrase utility allows you to safely use 6 random words.

True. In fact, he once asked me not to talk publicly about a new hard network rule he was adding (max sigops per block).

For the minimal bitcoind build:
- Berkeley DB
- Boost
- LevelDB (packaged with Bitcoin)
- OpenSSL
- C++ standard library and compiler

Libraries are no more or less safe than other software. Security-wise, using the OpenSSL library functions is nearly the same as executing the standalone openssl program in a shell. In both cases, the software could be malicious, and if used it could read keys from memory, etc.

Bitcoin actually has very few dependencies, and they are common libraries that should be secure.

Yes.

You will now receive a PM whenever someone deletes one of your replies. This includes deletions by regular moderators. I will probably extend this to other mod actions in the near future.

Who?


Cablepair also bought many ad slots, and he now has a scammer tag.


I don't.

The "choose your wallets" page is too wide.

https://i.imgur.com/WFEM0Di.png