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

- Your ads are guaranteed to be up for at least 7 days.
- I usually try to keep ads up for no more than 11 days.
- Sometimes ads might be up for longer, but hopefully no longer than 12 days. Even if past rounds sometimes lasted for long periods of time, you should not rely on this for your ads.

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 BTC per slot. 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 @ 0.5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 9 slots. If the two highest bids are 9 slots @ 0.4 BTC and 1 slot @ 0.5 BTC, then the first person will get 8 slots and the second person will get 1 slot.

The notation "2 @ 0.5" means 2 slots for 0.5 BTC each. Not 2 slots for 0.5 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, like "5 @ 0.1 and 1 @ 0.5".
- All bid prices must be evenly divisible by 0.01.
- The bidding starts at 0.01.
- I will end the auction at an arbitrary time. Unless I say otherwise, I typically try to end auctions within a few days of 10 days from the time of this post, but unexpected circumstances may sometimes force me to end the auction anytime between 4 and 22 days from the start.
- 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. 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 24 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).

thathanka failed to prepay, so his bid is rejected. Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 0.06 dai100905 [flattened to 0.05]
4 0.05 btb88.com [flattened to 0.04]
1 0.05 BitDouble.io [flattened to 0.03]
1 0.04 SwC_Poker [flattened to 0.02]
2 0.01 sportsbet.io

Imagine that 95%+ of people on Earth were forced to stop working for years, but the government paid everyone's old income. What would happen? ~Nothing would be produced, so the world would become a zero-sum game. Prices for everything would approach infinity: due to storage, maybe there'd be enough to keep prices sort-of sane for a month or two (though they'd rise due to expected scarcity), but quickly there'd simply be nothing to buy at any practical price. If the government wanted to increase their payment to people in order to account for this, then they'd have to exponentially increase the payment, and very quickly there would either be hyperinflation or a bankrupt government. Moving money around does not create value.

What's happening now is still pretty far from that situation, since 50-85% of people still seem to be more-or-less working, and imports from more productive countries are also possible (especially since USD is the world reserve currency). Still, it's important to realize that government payments are not creating any value whatsoever, but are merely moving around now-more-limited resources. The virus and the response to it took a bunch of toothpaste out of the tube, and now the government is squeezing the tube in various ways. As with the extreme example, I would expect to see price inflation (perhaps to infinity; ie. shortages) in areas where production/supply have been stopped/curtailed, though in the short-term this may have been counteracted by a one-time cratering of demand due to shifted lifestyles.

So when the government gives everyone $1200, they're moving value around, not creating anything. An important and difficult question is where is that value coming from? The economy is complicated, and I'm not 100% certain, but AFAICT the main way the value will be transferred will be something like this:
 - It's not really coming from tax revenue, since taxes have not been increased and probably won't be increased due directly to this spending.
 - On the surface, it will be funded by issuing bonds, and the cash will come from the buyers of bonds. Buyers of bonds are mainly the Fed (ie. money creation), other central banks, other banks, pension funds, and other institutional investors.
 - But the interest payments on the bonds are long-term-unsustainable, and are almost certainly going to be paid for with money-printing long-term. Basically the government prints money, gives it mainly to rich people, borrows it back from those rich people a little later, and the cycle repeats. You get an endless cycle of people who already hold assets getting increasingly more assets via money-printing, while it will be increasingly difficult for anyone else to become rich in the future, since yields on future investments will be reduced, and the economy will slow down due to misallocation of resources, debt "crowding", etc.

I certainly don't support tax increases, but in some ways it'd be more fair if this sort of thing was actually funded through past or future taxes instead of the Fed monetizing the debt. MMT increases inequality.

---

The bailouts for companies (including small companies) and the Fed's efforts to reduce volatility across every area of the market are really bad. Businesses that can't survive should die, even in a black swan event. That's how capitalism weeds out bad businesses. Businesses should either structure themselves to be able to survive this sort of thing, or they should buy insurance. But since the government keeps bailing out companies, it creates moral hazard: companies think (correctly) that they'll get bailed out, so they increasingly don't prepare for disasters (by eg. having sane amounts of debt), they don't buy appropriate insurance, and they don't properly hedge their investments against black-swan volatility. In fact, some in the mortgage market lost a lot of money because they were hedging against interest rate increases, and the Fed's MBS purchases screwed them; maybe they've "learned their lesson", and will in the future just rely on the Fed to save them from volatility. All of this intervention causes mispricing of time (ie. interest rates) and risk, leading to the increasingly-widespread existence of companies which don't actually provide optimal value to the economy, and may in fact be net drains on the economy. It's a (long & slow) path toward economic collapse.

The stated justification for the business bailouts is to save jobs. If that's the goal, then they should just give everyone a UBI payment for 6-12 months. The bad businesses will fail, and the newly-unemployed-but-not-starving people will find something more productive to do, such as starting businesses that won't fail and are maybe more useful in the post-recession environment. If you want to stop people from losing their paycheck, just give them a paycheck: don't prop up garbage businesses to act as a middleman. It seems as though a lot of people view businesses as immovable machines which distribute money to the immovable proletariat class, when in reality things are and should be much more fluid.

An additional largely-unstated reason for the business bailouts is to keep the stock market from crashing even more. Members of Congress and their donors tend to have large net worths, almost all of which is in the stock market. A lot of Americans also have a lot of money in the stock market, and they will not be happy with their representatives if their retirement fund is cut in half. But bad businesses should fail, and if you're not prepared for this, then you shouldn't invest in them.

On principle, I don't support the individual relief (ie. the $1200 checks and expanded unemployment benefits), either: people should save for disasters on their own, and if they can't/won't, private charity should be the answer. But people have been trained to load up on debt and rely on the government to save them from disasters, so they don't generally have a lot of savings, and in these conditions, something like the individual relief was politically inevitable. Without it, a lot of people would be totally hosed. So I don't mind the individual relief too much, though I don't think that it'll have much effect aside from keeping (some) people afloat for a month or two, and the longer the government wants to keep people at home, the more they'll have to pay due to the inflation/production effects I mentioned at the beginning of this post. The economy is basically halted, so it won't really stimulate the economy. Even though the total spend is large, because it's so widespread, I suspect that the payment itself won't have many long-term positive or negative economic effects, though the lockdown/virus which prompted it is economically disastrous, of course. Short-term:
 - Since the individual relief is actually going directly into the real economy, unlike a lot of what the Fed does, maybe we'll see some inflation from it. Probably in food and other Walmart-type stuff.
 - Since the unemployment insurance is pretty generous, employment numbers (and therefore production / economic growth) will probably be somewhat depressed for as long as the boosted benefits last.

I think that Trump will take and get credit for the payment. Maybe people will call it the "Trump check" or something, even. It could be pretty helpful for his campaign.

(Unrelated to the payment: I keep thinking that this would be a really bad time for some other black swan event, like an attack by Russia on a NATO member or something like that. It could happen, though.)

This month 130 users were eligible.

Old:

New:

Note that bids from ultramining.io will not be accepted, and thathanka's bid will require prepayment, so it is tentative. Current auction status:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
2 0.10 thathanka [tentative - may be removed]
4 0.05 btb88.com
1 0.04 SwC_Poker
4 0.01 sportsbet.io
(Price flattening would affect the final prices paid.)

The auction continues.

How it worked is that whenever a post was made, an infection had a 50% chance of passing from the new post to the previous post, or from the previous post to the new post. In other words, it was passed between adjacent posts. (But the random number generation was deterministic, so you couldn't "force it" by repeatedly deleting&reposting something.)

Asymptomatic infection had been happening for about 12 hours before symptoms started appearing. There was only one "patient zero", Sanitough, who I chose by looking at the latest posts at an arbitrary point in time and picking the most recent one which mentioned "virus". It was basically random, and definitely not meant as any statement about Sanitough.

On Apr 1, symptoms started appearing, though the spread of the virus continued exactly as before. After 30 minutes, your name got corrupted; after 3 hours, your posts got increasingly corrupted depending on the amount of time since you were infected. The roughly 150 people infected before Mar 31 @ 23:30 had their symptoms shifted forward in time, so they ended up as "asymptomatic carriers" for up to ~12 hours.

Here's data on the virus's spread. Note that I designed this "forum virus" to be easy-to-implement and interesting; my goal was not to create any sort of realistic coronavirus model. I suppose it could perhaps serve as an illustrative example of some general concepts, though, such as exponential spread.

Happy April Fools, and stay safe & sane in these unusual times!

If you choose to see-as-evil acts which were clearly done in the spirit of fun & good faith, then you're creating demons for your personal living hell...

There is a rare worldwide shared cultural experience going on in the form of the pandemic and the resulting unprecedented social distancing policies. It's similar to a world war in terms of its widespread cultural significance. So this little game came to my mind to connect with it. As with several past bitcointalk.org April Fools things, it's more of a new/weird/fun way for people to interact with the forum and generate discussion, not a joke as such. Certainly it wasn't meant to somehow poke fun at the many real tragedies created by the coronavirus situation; it was meant to connect with the huge thing dominating the minds/lives of basically everyone on Earth.

It's funny how a lot of Democrats are feeling buyer's remorse with Biden now, and are longing for someone else. On PredictIt's "Who will be President?" right now, the odds are:
 - Trump 50%
 - Biden 40%
 - Cuomo 6%
 - Sanders 4%
 - Pence 3%

That 40% Biden number is pretty shocking, since he's the presumptive Democratic nominee. I wonder if the DNC will actually change the rules at this point in order to pick someone else. It's a wild idea, though they can do it.

How coronavirus will impact the general election is unpredictable. There seems to be a "rally around the flag" effect which is boosting Trump right now, but that won't last until November, and the media is slamming Trump's handling of the virus constantly. Trump has also lost the huge advantage that was the apparently-roaring economy. On the other hand, Biden has been performing terribly.

Trump will claim credit for the $1200 that most Americans will get, and he will claim credit for turning the economy around "even through wartime" if the economy does indeed start to recover by November. The government/Fed actions are pretty terrible long-term, but they may be enough to juice up the economy by November, possibly even to the point where a lot of people feel as if the whole quarantine thing was sort of like a government-sponsored, Trump-led paid vacation for a few months. Keep in mind that in the rust belt, $1200 goes a lot further than in eg. California: $1200/adult may be enough for 3 months' rent in many areas.

If a lot of people in swing states start knowing people who have died from the virus, or if the economy enters a death spiral from which it hasn't even really started to extricate itself by November, or if the holes that have been created in the supply chain start creating serious shortages, then Trump would be in trouble.

The local sections are primarily divisions based on language. The moderators of each local section are allowed to set different standards for how fluent your posts have to be, but you should never be excluded based on residency/ethnicity/nationality.

India is unusual because they mainly speak English, and also they don't currently have a local mod. I suppose that as long as your posting is on-topic and the regular posters in that section don't get annoyed, it should be OK.

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

- Your ads are guaranteed to be up for at least 7 days.
- I usually try to keep ads up for no more than 11 days.
- Sometimes ads might be up for longer, but hopefully no longer than 12 days. Even if past rounds sometimes lasted for long periods of time, you should not rely on this for your ads.

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 BTC per slot. 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 @ 0.5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 9 slots. If the two highest bids are 9 slots @ 0.4 BTC and 1 slot @ 0.5 BTC, then the first person will get 8 slots and the second person will get 1 slot.

The notation "2 @ 0.5" means 2 slots for 0.5 BTC each. Not 2 slots for 0.5 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, like "5 @ 0.1 and 1 @ 0.5".
- All bid prices must be evenly divisible by 0.01.
- The bidding starts at 0.01.
- I will end the auction at an arbitrary time. Unless I say otherwise, I typically try to end auctions within a few days of 10 days from the time of this post, but unexpected circumstances may sometimes force me to end the auction anytime between 4 and 22 days from the start.
- 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. 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 24 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 BTC/Slot Person
3 0.11 Best_Change
1 0.11 SoloTraveler777
1 0.11 keesdewit
1 0.10 dai100905
3 0.10 sportsbet.io

I decided to end these 7-day bans early. Altcoin giveaways involving incentivized posting are not allowed anywhere on the forum, but certain incentivized-posting games (not altcoin giveaways) are allowed in Games & Rounds. The topic was incorrectly posted in Games & Rounds, possibly causing some understandable confusion among participants.

I am something of a transhumanist, and I would like for death to be completely eliminated someday. The idea of death making people enjoy life more, or making people more virtuous, or strengthening our descendants, are largely just comforting excuses to not be so bothered by what is actually the ultimate tragedy: the apparently-inevitable destruction of each and every sentient being who has ever lived or will ever live. But you have to maintain a sane balance between hopes/dreams and practicality. The panic right now is unreal. Any of us could die of this, even those of us who are young and healthy, but you could also die of a small meteor hitting you, or a car accident, or a lightning strike, or a sudden pulmonary embolism, or any number of other things. You could take various actions to significantly reduce your risk for all of these things, but if you want to die without regret, you cannot live in constant fear.

The global shutdown demonstrates a classic mistake that people (and especially governments) often make: they see something that is clearly costly, like "doing nothing about the virus", and so they want to do something to address it, but without even thinking about the cost of this "something". The economic damage from this shutdown, which will probably have measurable negative impacts for every person on Earth for 10+ years, will very likely cause more damage from any utilitarian perspective than even doing absolutely nothing and letting a ton of people die. And there are reasonable middle-ground options aside from "doing nothing" or "shutting down the whole world", like for example only quarantining people at high risk and letting everyone else build up herd immunity. I understand the idea of "flattening the curve", and it's a fine idea from the perspective of minimizing deaths without regard for anything else, but requiring everyone to wear helmets 24/7 would also be effective at reducing deaths... It also seems as though people don't realize that grocers, restaurants, and Amazon don't just magic food/products out of thin air: by shutting down all but the endpoints of the supply chain (and also doing things like condemning "price gouging"), we're going to have real shortages at some point.

The complete capitulation to fear above all else -- freedom, good living, economic sense, etc. -- really shows me the degradation of our society, though I'm not sure of exactly the philosophical/social flaws which caused it. Maybe culture is breaking down in response to our instant/global/ever-present communication, which is very new and way outside of the evolutionary environment. It warrants a lot of thinking in the coming years. I hope that people eventually recognize the shutdown as a mistake, and don't just forget it or incorrectly consider it worthwhile. Since people are apparently even far more willing to shoot themselves in the foot and give up absolutely anything in return for some idea of "safety", it does make me even more worried about expanded authoritarianism than I was already. A lot of evil was successfully done after 9/11 in the name of "fighting terrorism" (which was never much of a realistic/practical threat to people), and now 15+ years later people seem to be even much more willing to give up their freedoms.

I was a bit heartened by Trump actually having the guts to say recently that the cure mustn't be worse than the disease, though the political winds against such an idea are hurricane-strength.

(Personally, I'm probably one of the people least negatively impacted by this virus/shutdown/recession, at least in obvious short-term ways. I was already kind of expecting a recession around Q3-Q4 2020, even. I'm moreso just dispirited at the widespread human weakness on display here.)

Right. I won't hold my breath waiting for the OP to post a complaint if BTC goes to $20k and the fee ends up about a quarter of its present BTC-wise amount.

Previously I did this kind of randomly a few times each year, but lately I've taken to updating the BTC (& grin) price sometime around the 15^th of every month, unless the price hasn't changed very much since last time. I like the idea of the price being somewhat stable in BTC terms, but I don't like the real value to drift too far from what's intended.

Lots of economic havoc. Everything is down; it's like the opposite of the "everything bubble" which has been happening for the last several years. Stocks are down, which is expected, but GLD, Bitcoin, and even TLT (=long-term treasuries) are also down. Where is the money disappearing off to? Are institutional investors really selling everything and then putting the cash "under their mattresses"?

I was especially surprised by long-term treasury yields. People are saying that the high yields are because the US is about to spend trillions of dollars on the coronavirus response, but I always thought (based on past behavior) that the treasury markets didn't really care about US debt. It'd be interesting if yields went way up -- to several percent --, which would turn this recession into a full-blown debt crisis as well. I don't think the Fed would let it happen, though, and I suspect that their intervention would not be enough to cause hyperinflation or any other short-term disaster, either, this time.

The Fed was already propping up the economy, and now they've turned it up to 11. At some point this is going to cause so much mal-investment & disconnection between the real economy and the financial system that everything really just collapses. It could happen this time, though maybe not: the USD being the global reserve currency strengthens it a lot. I've previously predicted that the collapse would come in a few decades. Regardless, the Fed's actions here very much reinforce my skepticism of the fiat economy in general. I'd much rather own a lot of BTC than participate fully in the Fed's/US's crazy game of Monopoly.

I think that the recession is good for BTC medium-term. People are selling now because people are selling everything now. But 2008 was what motivated the creation of Bitcoin, and the same things are happening now. I could see ATHs this year.

I don't think that any plausible amount of real traffic would typically cause issues. When you've seen the forum falter under DDoS attacks, that's the result of over 100x more traffic than usual, typically coming in a particularly inconvenient (ie. unlike-real-traffic) pattern.

Neither the virus, nor any plausible economic downturn, nor any plausible drop/rise in BTC price will cause the forum to stop functioning long-term.

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

- Your ads are guaranteed to be up for at least 7 days.
- I usually try to keep ads up for no more than 11 days.
- Sometimes ads might be up for longer, but hopefully no longer than 12 days. Even if past rounds sometimes lasted for long periods of time, you should not rely on this for your ads.

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 BTC per slot. 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 @ 0.5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 9 slots. If the two highest bids are 9 slots @ 0.4 BTC and 1 slot @ 0.5 BTC, then the first person will get 8 slots and the second person will get 1 slot.

The notation "2 @ 0.5" means 2 slots for 0.5 BTC each. Not 2 slots for 0.5 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, like "5 @ 0.1 and 1 @ 0.5".
- All bid prices must be evenly divisible by 0.01.
- The bidding starts at 0.01.
- I will end the auction at an arbitrary time. Unless I say otherwise, I typically try to end auctions within a few days of 10 days from the time of this post, but unexpected circumstances may sometimes force me to end the auction anytime between 4 and 22 days from the start.
- 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. 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 24 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 BTC/Slot Person
2 0.09 Technomage
2 0.09 btb88.com
1 0.09 BitDouble.io
4 0.08 sportsbet.io

People are panicking about this to an unbelievable extent. It's a bad disease, to be sure, and some precautions should be taken, but it's not worth putting the entire economy on hold. For example, maybe it'd be a good idea to 100% lock-down nursing homes, but cancelling all university classes and sporting events, or locking down entire countries, or stopping trade between the biggest economies in the world? I think we'll look back at this in a couple of years and see this as a huge hypochondriacal overreaction which kicked off quite a damaging recession. (Though the economy was already unstable in many ways: it's not just the virus.)

Genetic engineering tech is moving along very quickly, and in a decade or two we could very well start seeing "black hat gene hackers" producing genetically-engineered viruses. After seeing the utter chaos from this only-somewhat-worse-than-average virus, I have to wonder how the world will react to those. Can you imagine seeing a new "coronavirus" pandemic every year, or one with even worse spread or symptoms?

(I recently had all of the symptoms of the virus. I wonder if I had it, or if it was just the ordinary flu. It was very unpleasant, though I got over it in a few days.)

Edit: Bonus haiku.
Fear! Virus! Unplug:
Still see sky above my head,
Dirt below my feet

Apparently. There's a book about this, Piety and Power: Mike Pence and the Taking of the White House. (I didn't read the book, but I watched a long interview with the author.)