He and his administration probably does in fact believe that, but I still lean toward thinking that they're being played. I don't think that Russia will do anything that will result in most NATO countries saying, "Yep, that was definitely an invasion of Ukraine, so now we're doing all of the crushing sanctions we'd planned." If Russia fully withdraws without much incident like they've been publicly saying, then at this point it'd be a big blow to the credibility of Biden/America/NATO. Even more likely is that they continue their threatening posture to keep the West in an uncomfortable state of limbo for months.

I wouldn't bet much against an invasion, though, and on the other side of the argument, if Putin knows that he eventually wants to take a piece of Ukraine, now would be the perfect time. The energy market is currently uniquely favorable to Russia, German politics biases them strongly against cutting all ties with Russia, Putin needs a boost in his domestic approval, etc. Also, if Trump is president in 3 years (a distinct possibility), then an attack against Ukraine years in the past under Biden isn't something that Trump would particularly care about.

It looks like if they will do something, we're most likely to see it in the next few days.

I have a history of being long-term bullish but short-term bearish. I guess my outlook on the world is optimistic, but very cautiously optimistic. Even though I was selling at $0.003, I believed at the same time that BTC would almost certainly go above $1 at some point, and could get into the hundreds. (This was insanely bullish at the time.) I just thought that the price had gotten ahead of its proper trajectory, considering how cheap it was to produce BTC.

Even many years later, it's funny that I happen to have a similar view now: I could easily see BTC above $100k in a few years, but I think we'll probably drop well below $30k for at least part of this year.

I probably still have the CPU somewhere. Taken out of context, my 2010 post makes it sound like I barely had any idea of what a CPU was since I just used the over-broad "Pentium" label, but in fact this was a gaming machine I'd built around 2008, and I chose the specific CPU carefully. It was far from the best CPU available in 2010, but it was probably in the top 5% of retail-oriented CPUs.

I actually measured the energy usage with a Kill-A-Watt with and without mining a few months after that post, and I was getting 160 BTC/kWh. Because the cost of mining 1 BTC was less than a tenth of what 1 BTC was actually priced at at the time, I thought that BTC was substantially overpriced, and so I also have the honor of selling BTC at the lowest prices ever recorded, $0.003/BTC.

It's not against forum rules.

I do consider it rude to share to a PM without permission, though I do not consider it worthy of negative trust. Some others may consider it worthy of negative trust.

I'm like 70/30 on the side that Putin will not do a major invasion. The costs are just too high for Russia. He'll probably do something, but it'll probably be something that won't be clear enough to unify all NATO members. Something like sending only medical units into the Donbas to provide humanitarian aid. I think that this whole thing is most likely to be more of a mind game against NATO than anything.

But I'm far from certain of that. I could also see Putin wanting to really cement his place in Russian history before he dies by trying to achieve a conquest the likes of which the world hasn't seen in a long time. In my very-inexpert opinion, a likely path here would be a false flag attack which makes it look like Ukraine is attacking Belarus, which can then be used as an excuse to engage in a decapitation strike against Kyiv in order to protect Russia's ally.

My heart goes out to all of the innocent people put in danger for the sake of this stupid geopolitical game.

Thank you for mentioning this potential abuse, but I previously already excluded those users from the DT calculation; they are not the cause of The0ldl_lser being included. (You could not have known that I excluded them, since I don't generally announce it.) At the time of the last DT reconstitution, The0ldl_lser was included in this way:

Big requirement:

• Gangster-Hamster
• MoxnatyShmel

Small requirement:

• Gangster-Hamster
• MoxnatyShmel
• stoos
• Vadi2323
• Smartprofit
• F1ak
• Excimer
• DabLjat
• peloso
• airfinex

(Other "voters" may have been possible; these were the ones the system semi-randomly chose to satisfy the criteria.)

In this case I already excluded these users, but it is helpful if people point out potential abuse in the DT reconstitution process, since I don't spend all that much time on it, and I could easily miss things.

Done.

What matters economically is the deficit; the total level of debt doesn't matter much except insofar as the interest payments on the debt affect the deficit.

The main issue with the deficit is that it can cause inflation and/or slow growth (but doesn't always). The huge amount of spending and Fed QE in 2020 and 2021 is one of the main causes of the current high level of inflation, but over the next several years, I don't think that the debt/deficit will be a big issue unless we get more 2020-style spending+QE (which I don't expect soon, at least).

The biggest driver of inflation is when the Treasury runs a deficit and the Fed buys its bonds. From October 2019 to September 2021, the Treasury had a total deficit of $5.9 trillion, and the Fed bought about $3.3 trillion in bonds, so that's $3.3 trillion of pure money-printing. That's extremely inflationary.

From October 2021 to December 2021, the Treasury had a total deficit of $380 billion, and the Fed bought about $221 trillion in bonds. If you multiply by 8 to straightforwardly compare it to the $5.9/$3.3 trillion numbers in the above paragraph, you get a $3.0 trillion deficit funded by $1.8 trillion in money-printing, which is already a reduction. But in reality this is still far too high because spending will go down due to the expiration of certain pandemic-era programs, and the Fed is widely expected to stop buying any more Treasuries staring in mid-March.

Before 2020, the Fed was drawing down its balance sheet, which was actually "destroying" dollars. Soon, maybe as soon as March, the Fed is expected to start doing this again. We'll go from $3.3 trillion in money printed over 2 years to money being destroyed rather than printed. We're moving into an environment somewhat similar to 2019, not a continuation of 2020/2021.

There are other sources of monetary inflation, but they are much smaller in effect than the above-discussed monetization of government debt. For example, in the same October 2019 to September 2021 period as above, lending by private banks created $535 billion. The Fed's open market operations which it uses to set short-term rates, such as reverse repos, can also create money, but I believe that the effect of this on monetary inflation is minor.

There is also not a one-to-one link between monetary inflation and price inflation. For example, it is much more inflationary for the government to send checks to people who will immediately spend it on things than for the Fed's open market operations to enable money market funds to pay rich people more interest on their deposits. And idiosyncratic supply or demand issues can also have effects. But I believe that monetary inflation is the biggest factor in price inflation, especially when you look at longer periods of time.

QE without government spending or increased bank lending does not actually inject money into the economy in any effective way, which is why the QE after 2008 didn't cause inflation. Government deficits without Fed monetization is likely to actually be deflationary, since more and more private money will be sucked up into bonds and used on worthless government waste instead of being used by people to buy things. (Certain types of government spending could be inflationary without Fed monetization. Increasing the debt to send people checks would probably be inflationary, since this would be a transfer of dollars from people who just have their money sitting around to people who are going to use the dollars to buy things. But I think that most government spending will not be efficient enough to have this effect.)

Over the next several years, I expect us to go from an extraordinarily easy-money environment where $3+ trillion was printed, to a tight-money environment where the Fed is on net destroying money. The government deficit will probably go down from 2020/2021 levels toward levels more similar to 2019 because Congress won't be able to pass much, and even if it continues at elevated levels, this will probably make money even more tight. It will take a while for that $3+ trillion of money-printing to completely work its way through the system, but at some point over the next year or two I expect to see <2% in the CPI if things continue on the current track. The shift from extremely-easy money to somewhat-tight money has been and will continue to be very jarring to asset prices; if the Fed gets spooked by crashing asset prices and starts buying treasuries again, then that could change things, though it depends on the details.

Longer term, it's politically impossible for the debt situation to be resolved in any way but money-printing. There's a huge gap between spending and tax revenue, this gap is only getting wider, and literally nobody in Congress is serious about fixing this. Anyone who seriously tried to fix it would be voted out of office immediately. At some point, the debt/deficit will get large enough to create an obvious death spiral of increasing interest payments, the market will want to bring interest rates up to a level that would accelerate this even more, and at this point the Fed will be forced to artificially keep rates low and/or buy bonds. This will cause 4+% inflation for many years, until the inflation fixes the deficit situation. It could also cause the end of the dollar as the world reserve currency. But I don't think that the deficit is large enough to cause this soon. My guess is that the deficit would have to be in the 130-150% of GDP range (around the same as 2020/2021) and continue increasing for several years. The current inflation was caused by a one-time huge increase in both government spending and money-printing, but this is in the rear-view mirror, and the big deficit cliff is quite a bit further ahead.

I prefer the mRNA ones because they have the "cleanest" process. They're 100% created synthetically in a lab, with no ingredients from animals, and they contain just the lipid-encased mRNA and some inactive ingredients which I consider to be about as harmless as water. The flu vaccine for comparison is usually either grown in chicken eggs or in cells taken from dogs, which I see as a much "dirtier" process. Between Pfizer and Moderna, there doesn't seem to be a big difference. Pfizer has seen wider usage and testing, while Moderna seems to evoke a stronger immune effect. If I was worried about vaccine side-effects, then perhaps I'd prefer Pfizer, while if I had a weakened immune system, perhaps I'd prefer Moderna.

J&J, AstraZeneca, and Sputnik-V are very similar to the mRNA ones in that they contain genetic code which causes your body to create spike protein, but instead of delivering the genetic code directly via mRNA, it's delivered via a modified adenovirus. Some people are concerned about being injected with genetic code, and such people should not feel any better about J&J/AstraZeneca/Sputnik-V than Moderna/Pfizer, since it's basically the same idea. Involving the extra adenovirus seems like an additional complication and source of possible side-effects to me, and it seems that these vaccines are somewhat less effective than the mRNA vaccines, so I don't like this technology as much as mRNA. J&J was originally touted as only needing one dose, but from what I've heard more recently, it sounds like this was mainly a difference in marketing, and J&J should've really had 2 doses as well to evoke the same immune response.

The mRNA vaccines have been very rarely associated with myocarditis (especially in young men), while the viral-vector vaccines have been very rarely associated with serious blood clots (especially in young women). If you have a choice between them, perhaps you should therefore take your sex into account. Myocarditis is a more common side-effect for the mRNA vaccines than the blood clots are for the viral-vector vaccines, but it's also less likely to be serious.

For those worried about the genetic code aspect, Novavax, Sinopharm, and CoronaVac use a more traditional vaccine manufacturing process where they inject you with inactivated versions of the virus (Sinopharm and CoronaVac) or just pure spike protein (Novavax). However, these types of vaccines need to contain an adjuvant, a drug which boosts your immune response. Sinopharm and CoronaVac use aluminium hydroxide as the adjuvant, which I would not particularly want to be injected with because there is some slight evidence that it could have neurological side-effects. Novavax uses an adjuvant which comes from the soap bark tree, which sounds a bit better to me because it's more natural, though there hasn't been much study on long-term effects of this AFAIK. I personally feel a lot better with the vaccines which don't need to contain this additional adjuvant drug, but if you're nervous about the genetic-code aspect, you might weigh the risks differently than me.

So my final ranking would be:
 1. Pfizer / Moderna
 2. AstraZeneca / J&J / Sputnik V
 3. Novavax
 4. Sinopharm / CoronaVac

If I was afraid of getting COVID, then I'd take even the Chinese vaccines if that was all that was available. They're probably no worse than some over-the-counter drugs in terms of safety, and they will provide some protection from COVID. If I would only be annoyed to get COVID, then I'd personally probably only accept the other 6 vaccines I mentioned, and I'd greatly prefer the mRNA ones.

I've seen a lot of really good evidence recently about vitamin D, so I added that to my supplements about 6 months ago. Just recently I saw that it was strongly linked to a reduction in autoimmune disorders.

Some people can't digest B12 well via the stomach, so you might try a spray form or a tablet that dissolves under your tongue. Then it goes directly through the skin of your mouth into your bloodstream.

For increasing your fruit and vegetable intake, you might try dried, frozen, and canned options. Fresh fruits and veggies are a little nicer to eat, but they're more of a pain because you have to wash them, chop off the inedible parts, and figure out how to use them before they go bad. I often just take canned or frozen vegetables and add some oil and spices to make a quick side dish in less than 15 minutes. Dried apricots, cranberries, and prunes are quick & delicious.

This month 127 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 March 15 (US Eastern time) to noon April 14. (30 days.)
 - This auction will end sometime between March 7 and March 10, but March 8 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 March 14. 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 March 7 and March 10. Times closer to 8:00AM March 8 (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 60 Panxora_COO
4 60 frankie_one
2 60 WOW_Crypto
2 58 ColorlessK

Current auction status:
Slots mBTC/Slot Person
2 46 yahoo62278
2 46 Panxora_COO
5 46 frankie_one

The auction continues.

Note that frankie_one, bitblade, and WOW_Crypto have all been pre-approved.

Current auction status:
Slots mBTC/Slot Person
5 26 frankie_one
4 24 Hhampuz

The auction continues.

If an organization is the victim, then anyone authorized by the organization to act on the organization's behalf in these sorts of things can create the flag.

I'm bearish for the first half of the year because most of the world is transitioning from unprecedentedly easy money to, relatively, extremely tight money, and crypto feeds off of easy money more than anything. People talk a lot about interest rates, but it's that plus slowing growth, much lower government spending, and rapidly ending QE. Worldwide, the brakes have already been slammed on the economy, but people haven't quite realized it yet. I think that sometime in the first half of the year all liquid assets including BTC are likely to fall off a cliff. It then might quickly recover within days, or this might lead to a frenzy of panic selling which lasts a couple of months. I think that this crash will be an excellent time to buy, though, and we could see ATHs toward the end of the year.

My record of price predictions isn't great, and so I don't personally make large bets based on my price outlook. My prediction above will definitively be wrong if we get to July without a major crash, or if interest rates peak and then start to constantly fall without a crash in liquid assets.

Right, hotdog7 was apparently phished. The link uses strange characters to evade bitcointalk.org's detection of phishing links, but it was actually linked to a phishing site via [url].

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 February 8 (US Eastern time) to noon March 15. (35 days.)
 - This auction will end sometime between January 31 and February 3, but February 1 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 February 7. 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 January 31 and February 3. Times closer to 8:00AM February 1 (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
4 4 Panxora_COO
5 4 Hhampuz