Royse777 requested that the thread be disassociated from his account, and although there is/was controversy surrounding Royse777, I didn't see any harm in it because it'd be blatantly obvious who created the topic for anyone who did a couple minutes of looking.

The rules require that bids be evenly divisible by 2mBTC. When someone violates this rule, I always round down to the next lower valid bid.


As I mentioned in previous auctions, your bids will not be accepted.

Auction ended, final result:

Slots mBTC/slot Person
1 28 BetCoco
2 28 Hhampuz
2 28 Myleschetty
4 26 Alpha Affiliates

This month 129 users were eligible.

Old:

New:

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/timing

 - Ad slots won in this auction will run from noon August 30 (US Eastern time) to noon September 30. (31 days.)
 - This auction will end sometime between August 19 and August 25, but August 23 is most likely.
 - You must pay within 48 hours of the auction ending. Only Bitcoin is accepted. If you fail to pay in time, your ad slots may be resold, and in cases where I feel that you're acting in bad faith, I may even give you a negative trust rating.
 - You must send me a valid ad (ie. one not breaking any of the styling or other rules) before noon August 29. If you fail to send a valid ad in time, then the ad round will start without you, and you will be "burning time". You can still send an ad after the deadline, and usually this ad will be put up fairly quickly, but no particular timeline is guaranteed after the deadline.
 - If extended downtime or similar issues cause your ad not to be displayed for a long time, we generally give prorated refunds (USD-denominated) for the lost time, but this is 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

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 2 mBTC.
- The bidding starts at 2 mBTC.
- The auction ends at an arbitrary time between August 19 and August 25. Times closer to 8:00AM August 23 (US Eastern time) are more likely.
- 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 48 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 mBTC/Slot Person
1 12 waveriderp
2 12 CrashinoAffiliates
3 12 Alpha Affiliates
3 10 BetCoco

Bids from minimax.finance will not be accepted.

Current status:
Slots mBTC/Slot Person
1 12 waveriderp
2 12 CrashinoAffiliates
6 10 BetCoco

The auction continues.

Bids from 8bethub will not be accepted.


Bids must be evenly divisible by 2 mBTC/slot. When this rule is broken, I always round down to the next valid bid.

Current status:
Slots mBTC/Slot Person
3 8 Alpha Affiliates
6 2 Hhampuz

The auction continues.

It's an interesting look back, though my predictions don't strike me as especially prescient or anything.

IMO it seems less likely now that Bitcoin will be replaced as a base-money/digital-gold asset. Bitcoin's network-effect and reputational advantage is too strong at this point. Any replacement would have to have overwhelming advantages over Bitcoin, with Bitcoin failing to compete against these advantages for years. I don't see ETH as a likely competitor in the base-money niche, though there is clearly intense demand for easy-to-use smart contract capability, so until BTC smart-contract tech advances to compete with that, ETH will have a place. It's definitely possible for off-chain BTC smart contracts to work just as well or better than ETH's smart contracts, but the development of this has been slow. And CBDCs are in a completely different niche, and don't compete against Bitcoin.

I've never been opposed to hardforks if they are uncontroversial and are phased in very slowly, though I underestimated how much could be done with softforks. There probably will be a hardfork someday, though probably not soon.

---

On the email-address thing, IIRC I was specifically thinking of a hub-and-spoke payments system where everyone would have a Bitcoin wallet provider of their choice (possibly self-hosted), similar to how everyone has an email provider like gmail and it's also possible to run your own email server on your own domain. You'd trust a small amount of your total BTC with your wallet provider, and small everyday transactions would be done in a process like this:
 1. You tell your wallet provider to send to client@wallet.com.
 2. If your wallet provider is wallet.com, then they just do an internal debit/credit, with no on-chain transaction.
 3. If your wallet provider has a payment channel open with wallet.com, then they debit your account, adjust the payment channel to move the BTC to wallet.com without an on-chain transaction, and wallet.com credits their client account.
 4. If there is no existing payment channel, then a payment channel is opened, requiring some on-chain transactions. This would require an automated negotiation about how large the channel should be and how the fees should be split between the wallet providers, though these fees would presumably be just a small cost of doing business for the wallet providers rather than a per-transaction fee for the end-users.

The idea was that you'd still send large transactions on-chain, similar to wire transfers vs ACH transfers. This would only be for small everyday transactions.

This is somewhat similar to LN, but LN improved upon it in almost every way.

This month 133 users were eligible

Old:

New:

I don't like identity politics: you shouldn't be proud of things that you had no control over, and you shouldn't consider yourself to be part of some political tribe based on your race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. So I'd support getting rid of things like Black History Month or Women's History Month. But I think that the idea of Juneteenth is worthy of a federal holiday if anything is. Slavery was a very evil institution; it's worthwhile to remember the harms that were done (without blaming anyone alive today for it), and it's worth celebrating the fact that despite slavery being commonly accepted throughout most of history in most parts of the world to varying degrees, humanity in general and the US in particular were able to move the moral bar forward and finally recognize slavery as evil. If I listed some of humanity's biggest achievements throughout all of history -- the things that actually mattered and show IMO what we're even here for --, recognizing slavery as evil would be near the top of the list, and it happened relatively recently.

That said, there are two things that bother me about Juneteenth. First, the name sounds incredibly stupid. I don't care if this is what they historically called it: it sounds ridiculous, and you can't tell from the name what it's even commemorating. Rename it "Freedom Day" or "Emancipation Day" or something. Second, there are too many federal holidays. Get rid of some of the more useless ones like Labor Day, Presidents' Day, or Columbus Day.

On a similar matter, my initial reaction to hearing that they were going to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill was pretty negative. Whoever came up with this idea almost certainly did it with the mindset of, "We only have white men on the money, but we need to check more identity boxes than that. Can we find a non-white LGBT woman or something?", and that sort of identity-based thinking is a stupid reason to do anything. But I later came to at least not hate the idea. After reading some of Tubman's biography, I came to think that she was in fact an impressive figure who exemplified some of America's best qualities. Maybe there are better people than her to pick for this, but she's not bad. And Andrew Jackson was one of the worst presidents in US history, so I don't mind diminishing his prominence, and in fact I wish they'd remove him completely from the $20 bill rather than keeping him and adding Tubman as they currently plan. (If they were going to diminish Jefferson or Franklin, who I actually respect, that'd bother me more.)

Fixed.

As others have mentioned, when you're dealing with floating-point numbers, different numbers can have the same internal representation. 10000000/pow(10,8) returns 0.1, but because this is stored as a floating-point number, it has the same byte-level representation as 0.10000000000000001 as well as infinitely many other numbers, and when echo converts this float to a string, it chooses that particular value to display. round returns a float, so that doesn't fix the issue: in this case it outputs exactly the same thing that it takes as input.

sprintf('%.8f', $satoshiValue/pow(10,8)) will do what you expected round to do because it returns a string instead of a float. There are other ways to address the issue, but that's what I'd do.


The exact behavior of floats might depend on the CPU, OS, compiler, C library, and PHP version. You can't rely on any specific behavior.

Fixed, thanks.

I never intend for posts to trigger that sort of "blocked" message, but Cloudflare has hundreds of rules, so sometimes it happens, and it's difficult to track down when it does. If anyone runs into this again in the future, please email both of these things to the bugs email address linked on the contact page:
 - The "ray ID" at the bottom of the "blocked" message.
 - Exactly what you tried to post.

A big part of the downturn in BTC's price is that liquidity is being sucked out of the system to an extent even larger than is generally realized. The world is starved for liquidity. I expected a crash like this:


When central banks add liquidity, they add bad liquidity. It gets thrown at useless things like wasteful government projects and zombie companies. But even with rates at 0%, credit is still either completely unavailable or very expensive to disfavored industries, people without the right connections, people in disfavored countries, most projects without collateral, etc. If you had some great business idea, do you think that you could get a big loan for it? The lack of good liquidity is a form of tightness which has been strangling the world economy. So when central banks and governments stop doing incredibly-loose things like sending people checks and start mildly tightening monetary policy, we get tightness on top of existing tightness. The world can't handle it.

Crypto is one possible solution to the liquidity crisis, since it offers a form of liquidity that's available to those that are excluded from the USD system (eg. El Salvador). I haven't personally experimented much with DeFi stuff, and I think that 90% of it is probably a scam, but this area has major potential vis-à-vis the liquidity issue, and BTC is the best monetary base for a DeFi monetary system. This can add the "good" liquidity that the world is starved for, having been fed only central banks' "bad" liquidity for years.

The recent crash is basically what I expected: a liquidity crisis causing almost every liquid asset on Earth to crash. But I expected it to be worse, and in fact I expected it to be so bad that it would cause the Fed to stop tightening. This crash wasn't nearly bad enough to make them hesitate, especially with inflation so high (higher than I expected in January). I suspect that we'll get one or more additional rounds of liquidity-crisis selling like this, though I'm not sure.

If things get so bad that the Fed stops tightening, that's good for BTC because BTC feeds on easy money. But if the Fed is seriously going to let rates go up several more percentage points, then BTC probably has a lot more to fall. We'd have to eliminate the portion of the price which comes from easy money and FOMO-buyers before rising on other fundamental strengths. In that case, I'd expect BTC to keep falling until monetary policy becomes restrictive across the board (ie. rates +/- other effects such as the balance sheet put us above the neutral rate, in nearly every sector and situation). After that point, I'd guess that further rate increases would not be particularly harmful to BTC, and could in fact help BTC. In other words, even if the Fed keeps tightening, I think that BTC can still perform well, eventually.

At the moment, my base case for the second half is that the liquidity crisis builds to such an extent and causes so much pain that the Fed seizes on some excuse such as a deceleration in CPI (but still staying very high), and they stop tightening. This will be bullish for BTC in several respects: easy money will flow into BTC, the Fed's failure and increasing financial repression will undermine the USD, inflation will boost the "BTC as an inflation hedge" narrative (even though it hasn't actually worked recently), and BTC+DeFi as a new global monetary system will emerge as a solution to a major problem. ATHs are still possible this year, but probably more likely is a drop even lower from here (to just under $10k, perhaps?) and then an increase toward the end of the year back to the $30-40k area.

As always, note that my record of predictions is not very good, and I don't personally make large bets based on them if I can avoid it.

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/timing

 - Ad slots won in this auction will run from noon July 29 (US Eastern time) to noon August 30. (32 days.)
 - This auction will end sometime between July 20 and July 26, but July 25 is most likely.
 - You must pay within 48 hours of the auction ending. Only Bitcoin is accepted. If you fail to pay in time, your ad slots may be resold, and in cases where I feel that you're acting in bad faith, I may even give you a negative trust rating.
 - You must send me a valid ad (ie. one not breaking any of the styling or other rules) before noon July 28. If you fail to send a valid ad in time, then the ad round will start without you, and you will be "burning time". You can still send an ad after the deadline, and usually this ad will be put up fairly quickly, but no particular timeline is guaranteed after the deadline.
 - If extended downtime or similar issues cause your ad not to be displayed for a long time, we generally give prorated refunds (USD-denominated) for the lost time, but this is 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

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 2 mBTC.
- The bidding starts at 2 mBTC.
- The auction ends at an arbitrary time between July 20 and July 26. Times closer to 8:00AM July 25 (US Eastern time) are more likely.
- 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 48 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 mBTC/slot Person
1 26 Coinbox1
2 24 waveriderp
1 24 bitblade
2 22 CrashinoAffiliates
3 20 BK8.Official

If we could automatically detect phishing with 100% accuracy, we'd just prevent the PM from being sent. These warnings can appear on totally legit PMs; they just mean that you should be extra careful. Also, note that often accounts are hacked and used to send phishing PMs, so don't rely on the fact that the sender is trustworthy.

Thanks!


The market has gifted me with a great buying opportunity.


People have long expected me to be in my 40s, and I'm getting closer and closer to meeting those expectations!

This month 121 users were eligible.

Old:

New:

There's nothing fancy going on. The Bitcoin-specific part of the payments handling code is only 94 lines, and most of this deals with interfacing with bitcointalk.org. It uses Bitcoin Core via JSON-RPC; specifically, the only two JSON-RPC commands bitcointalk.org uses are listreceivedbyaddress and getnewaddress.

You could create a page which displays a user-unique address and says how much that address has received in like 10 lines of PHP if you use a JSON-RPC library. However, in reality you need to handle a large number of edge cases (eg. overpayment, underpayment, very-late payment, etc.), so I recommend using BTCPay Server, which tries to handle all such edge cases in reasonable ways.