There would be some benefits to upgrading, but there aren't actually that many differences between 1.x and 2.x, so it hasn't been a priority. I could see it happening someday, but not anytime soon; there are tons of differences between bitcointalk.org and stock SMF 1.x, so it'd be a very major project.


The total amount spent was $5.9 million, spread across 11 years.


I'm very hesitant to undertake any major projects again anytime soon. So I'm mainly planning on incremental improvements to the current software, on the same trajectory as the last several years, but perhaps a bit faster since Epochtalk is no longer consuming time and money.


That's not true. 3116 BTC was donated, with a total value-at-time-of-transaction of just $68k. The remainder comes from advertising/fee revenue, with a total value-at-time-of-transaction of $3.2 million. (A lot of spending was also at these sorts of low prices.) Furthermore, donations were meant to be a way of supporting the forum in general terms; it wasn't like some Kickstarter project. The main pages about donations didn't mention the software project at all, and almost all donations were made before that project even started.


I don't think that that will ever happen, realistically. This whole style of forum is just not as popular anymore. To have even a chance of making it as popular as it was in its glory days, the whole structure of the forum would have to change, and I think that it's more important to retain the fundamental soul of the forum. So I envision the forum perpetually existing as a place for a certain niche crowd who still appreciates this kind of forum. This doesn't mean stagnation: the forum can still grow and improve while remaining niche.

Thanks to PowerGlove, who sent me a patch fixing this bug, this should no longer happen.

A very long time ago now, we hired a company to start developing Epochtalk, which was intended to completely replace the software which currently runs the forum. It was originally supposed to be done in one year; that target was totally missed, but it did eventually get to a usable state which was ~90% feature-complete. However, starting around 2020, development really seemed to stall. I could see that good progress was continually being made, so I didn't want to cancel it, but it never really seemed to get any closer to being ready for bitcointalk.org to actually use it, since it was still missing features, it wasn't stable/bug-free enough, and there was no solid plan to smoothly make the transition.

Recently, a live-data demo of Epochtalk was released. I had been pushing for something like this to be released ASAP in order to have a solid milestone to aim for, and also so that Epochtalk could be tested in a real-world context. The demo works, and in some ways it is actually useful, but I found it underwhelming, and subsequently the community found a really inexcusable number of bugs in it. After seeing the low quality of the demo, in combination with the many years of disappointing progress overall, my opinion on the Epochtalk project shifted from "this is going too slowly, but it might still bear good fruit eventually" to "this is probably going nowhere". Therefore, I've decided that the forum will no longer pursue Epochtalk. It's frustrating to pull the plug on this after investing a lot of time and money into it, but I've come to believe that continuing would be "throwing good money after bad" at this point.

For forum users, nothing has changed. The developers of Epochtalk were not working on anything actually used by forum users: they were working on a hope that we might someday move away from PHP/SMF. Most of the original goals for Epochtalk have in fact already been completed in the current software through work by myself, PowerGlove, and others in the 10+ years since the idea of new forum software was first contemplated. Since 2011, we've added trust, merit, 2FA, "evil fees", watchlists, drafts, a sane reports system, and many other improvements on stock SMF. Going forward, we will continue to make improvements to the current software. One of the most requested features is improving the forum's usability on mobile devices, and that is already being worked on.

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Epochtalk has always been open source under the MIT license, so you can still go run it right now if you want; the code is in the repos in this Github organization. The developers have indicated to me that they intend to independently continue its development, without our support. The Epochtalk proxy of bitcointalk.org will also stay up for at least a while.

This month 136 users were eligible.

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That can happen if you leave the PM-compose page open for a long time so that your session-code becomes invalid. Reloading the page should fix it.

(The JS autocompleter function should detect this and not dump the whole HTML error page, but it's a rare situation, and it's not immediately obvious to me how to fix it.)

Along with many other accounts, it's locked due to being affected by the 2015 data breach and then sitting inactive for a long time. If he wanted to access it, he'd have to go through the Recoveries team and provide proof that it was his account. And it's not immediately clear to me what proof he would use, since the account never posted a Bitcoin address to use for signing a message, or anything like that.

Also, since altoid directly posted a link to the Silk Road, I would guess (not sure) that Ulbricht argued in his court case that it wasn't actually his account. Maybe he wouldn't want to contradict his past testimony?

So he could regain access to the account and post something, but I don't think that it's very likely.

I have a lot of problems with Trump and many of his other recent executive actions, but this one is unambiguously good. Thank you, President Trump!

The headers in your .htaccess file should be sufficient, but the problem is that Apache isn't actually doing what you wrote there. In eg. Firefox, go to the Network tab of Developer Tools, visit your image, and look at the response headers; Cache-Control, Pragma, and Expires are not sent. I haven't used Apache in over a decade, but I would guess that either your Apache is configured to ignore .htaccess files entirely (which is generally recommended in production environments), or the ifModule test fails.

Since that DDoS a while ago, the imageproxy is now going through Cloudflare, which will do server-side caching if allowed by the final origin's headers, and client Cache-Control headers are (I think) always ignored now. (I haven't decided yet whether having the imageproxy behind Cloudflare is permanent.)

That pricing image doesn't send any cache-related headers at all, aside from Last-Modified. If that .htaccess file is intended for that image, then it's not working. One major issue in this case is that:
 1. The image doesn't send an Expires header.
 2. If an image doesn't have an Expires header, then the imageproxy sets an Expires 1 day into the future. *
 3. Cloudflare then server-side-caches this for 1 day based on the Expires header, and there's no way for the client to bypass Cloudflare's cache.

* I just now changed the default Expires timeout to 10 minutes instead of 1 day, at least as long as the imageproxy is behind Cloudflare. But for live content like this, it'd be better if the origin sent headers disabling caching entirely.

For the mixer policy to be reversed, the legal environment would have to improve a lot. I think that one of these would have to happen:
 - Some mixers win their court cases.
 - Congress passes laws which explicitly protect mixers.
 - The administration ends up being extremely pro-privacy, better than 99% of politicians in office.

It'll take at least a year before we have a good idea of what the new administration will really be like, but my expectation is that they will only be ~10% better than the Biden administration in this area. I would be surprised if they dropped the case against the Tornado Cash devs, for example.

The Trump administration could be a lot better than I expect, but they could also be a lot worse. I think for example that the Trump administration might be even more aggressive on sanctions (especially against Iran), and they might therefore see financial privacy as a threat to their sanction power. There are also several reasons why the Trump administration may want to restrict cross-border payments generally: to allow for financial repression in response to a debt crisis, to improve the US's hugely-negative net international investment position (which is often a major issue in the minds of Trump-aligned economists), to tariff services in addition to goods, or to control the value of the dollar. Severe restrictions on cross-border payments could also put them in opposition to financial privacy.

The Biden administration clearly wanted to move as close to banning crypto as they could get away with, so it's definitely good that they're gone, but it's not as if Satoshi has just been elected president. The Trump administration has some interest in pleasing their crypto donors, but that can be achieved mainly just by getting prices to go up. They don't much care, and don't have to care, about privacy, disintermediation, decentralization, etc.

The demo is up again now.


It's supposed to be very good on mobile devices. We would appreciate it if a lot of people test it on various devices.

Note that the demo is temporarily down. This will probably happen from time to time.

There's now a read-only demo of Epochtalk operating on live bitcointalk.org data which you can check out:
https://demo.epochtalk.com

Right now only boards, topics and user-pages are supported, and it's read-only, but over time I'd like this to become an increasingly-useful alternate interface to bitcointalk.org. (Only when it's feature-complete and bug-free would bitcointalk.org switch to Epochtalk.) Already, some people might like to use the demo on mobile devices, where it often works better than the current site. Also, if you look at the requests that the site makes, you can see that it has a JSON API; people who run bots might like to check that out, though we don't officially support/recommend relying on this API yet.

If you see any bugs, use the "Report a bug" link in the top right of the demo.

This month 140 users were eligible.

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Happy new year! 2024 was definitely an exciting year for Bitcoin, probably the best single year for Bitcoin since the earliest years.

I am worried that in the process of Bitcoin becoming a lot more mainstream, a lot of the Bitcoin economy has become more centralized via things like ETFs. (Some in the Trump administration are even talking about FDIC-insured banks being able to accept BTC and pay interest on it.) This centralization may work against the open-source ethos we care about. For example, if one ETF has all of its BTC stolen, I could see all of the ETFs getting together to fork Bitcoin and undo this theft (like ETH/ETC), and maybe they could get away with this, at least in terms of the popular perception. I suppose the only way to address this is to educate people, and also to improve trustless wallets to make them better competitors to centralized solutions.

Looking forward, it's definitely a very good thing that the Biden administration will be gone, since they were unbelievably anti-crypto. That said, I feel that the price has probably gone up too much. Here's the scenario I see as most likely at this point, though it'll probably be hilariously wrong: Since there's no particular catalyst that I can see, the price will slowly stair-step down to the $60ks; then in the last quarter of the year, there will be some recovery, and we'll end the year in the $80ks.

I hope everyone has a great 2025!

What we're talking about here is taking the same announcement and translating it into 16 different languages/topics. Local moderators need to decide on a case-by-case basis whether this kind of pure translation is actually worthwhile in their own local sections. It'd be totally reasonable for a local moderator to delete any of these topics due to being a poor translation, or even just because this sort of translation activity is simply more noise than signal in that local section.

The 4 topics deleted in this case were in low-volume language sections that don't have their own moderators, so Global Moderators who can't actually speak the language have jurisdiction. Given that, it's reasonable to assume that they're poor translations and/or non-additive. I'm not inclined to restore them.

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Happy 15^th anniversary!

Having such an old forum like this is really rare and special. It's a historical artifact, but one that's still living and evolving thanks to all of you who contribute. Thank you to all users and staff, both past and present, who have made the forum what it is today!

Great job, everyone!

I was thinking about this more, and I had another idea:

Most Democrats don't realize this, but it's very clear to me that the core of today's Democratic Party emerged out of mainline Christianity*. Mainline Christians established many Ivy League universities, now considered very leftist. The term "social justice", which now has very leftist connotations, was originally used in the context of mainline churches talking about the good work they'd like to do in society. If you've been to a few mainline American churches, you may have noticed that in many cases they basically preach the Democratic Party platform; this is usually viewed as these churches bowing to cultural pressure, but in fact I think that it's the other way around. Members of mainline churches have long believed in things like an interventionist government, civicism, communitarianism, trust in authority, etc., and in more recent times they've embraced ideas of social justice, equity, inclusion, environmental justice, etc. There's a lot of overlap between Democrats and mainline Christians, so they've both moved on these issues at around the same time, and probably it was actually led by the churches.

People who classify themselves as "not religious" are often the children of people who belonged to mainline churches, and are therefore also often part of the same culture, with similar sorts of values. And people who call themselves atheist or agnostic tend to have an even closer cultural affinity to mainline Christians than the "not religious", since "strong" atheism/agnosticism in the West is historically/culturally sort of an extension of the Protestant intellectual project.

So after all of that preface: I think that the Democrats could profitably lean into their Christian roots. Instead of being the party of atheists and people kind of embarrassed to still be Christian in today's age, imagine if you got a pastor from one of the more centrist mainline denominations (ie. not the type who talk absolutely-nonstop about LGBT issues) to run for President. Have him talk about God, love, and peace a lot, quoting a ton from the bible. This would resonate a lot with people still active in mainline churches, of course, but even many atheists and non-religious people who come from that culture will agree very much with the message if not the exact phrasing, and perhaps it could swing some Evangelicals. It addresses one of the big problems I see with many Democrats, which is that they seem fake and nihilistic. When they talk about creating a bright future, it feels like an empty political slogan. But if you put it in religious terms, then it can feel more honest and inspiring. And to the extent that this kind of messaging actually promotes participation in mainline churches, this could create a virtuous cycle similar to how Evangelical churches create more Republican voters and Republican politicians create more Evangelicals. I think that there's also demand for politicians who you can believe are actually good people, not psychopaths like Kamala Harris who will keep innocent people in prison one minute and then talk about human rights the next.

As with my last idea in this thread, this is just an idea for something that might work, and it's not my dream scenario or anything.

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* "Mainline Christianity" is a term of art, with "mainline" not intending to imply size or correctness. It more-or-less refers to old protestant denominations that are willing to read the bible non-literally, to varying degrees. Evangelicals, who read the bible very literally, are not mainline Christians.