One of the few things you and I agree on... Those people should never have been in prison in the first place, so releasing them is #1, but some compensation would be appropriate as well. In addition to the clear moral case against imprisoning people for victimless crimes, if you got this many people out of prison and back on their feet, imagine how good that'd be for the economy.

I love that Yang is promising to pardon non-violent drug offenders like this. Have any others made the same promise yet? This is absolutely something that any president could do on day 1. Ron Paul promised the same thing when he was running in 2012.

Note that after this round, there will be a period of about 30 days where ads will not be sold.

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.

Ads are allowed to contain any non-annoying HTML/CSS style. No images, JavaScript, custom fonts, or animation. Ads must appear 3 or fewer lines tall in my browser (Firefox, 900px wide). 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.

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, and only for people using the default theme.

Duration

- Your ads are guaranteed to be up for at least 7 days.
- I usually try to keep ads up for no more than 8 or 9 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

Ad blocking

Hero/Legendary members, Donators, VIPs, and moderators have the ability to disable ads. I don't expect many people to use this option. These people don't increase the impression stats for your ads.

I try to bypass Adblock Plus filters as much as possible, though this is not guaranteed. It is difficult or impossible for ABP filters to block the ad space itself without blocking posts. However, filters can match against the URLs in your links, your CSS classes and style attributes, and the HTML structure of your ads.

To prevent matches against URLs: I have some JavaScript which fixes links blocked by ABP. You must tell me if you want this for your ads. When someone with ABP and JavaScript enabled views your ads, your links are changed to a special randomized bitcointalk.org URL which redirects to your site when visited. People without ABP are unaffected, even if they don't have JavaScript enabled. The downsides are:
- ABP users will see the redirection link when they hover over the link, even if they disable ABP for the forum.
- Getting referral stats might become even more difficult.
- Some users might get a warning when redirecting from https to http.

To prevent matching on CSS classes/styles: Don't use inline CSS. I can give your ad a CSS class that is randomized on each pageload, but you must request this.

To prevent matching against your HTML structure: Use only one <a> and no other tags if possible. If your ads get blocked because of matching done on something inside of your ad, you are responsible for noticing this and giving me new ad HTML.

Designing ads

Make sure that your ads look good when you download and edit this test page:
https://bitcointalk.org/ad_test.html
Also read the comments in that file.

Images are not allowed no matter how they are created (CSS, SVG, or data URI). Occasionally I will make an exception for small logos and such, but you must get pre-approval from me first.

The maximum size of any one ad is 51200 bytes.

I will send you more detailed styling rules if you win slots in this auction (or upon request).

Auction rules

You must be at least a Jr Member to bid. If you are not a Jr Member and you really want to bid, you should PM me first. Tell me in the PM what you're going to advertise. You might be required to pay some amount in advance. Everyone else: Please quickly PM newbies who try to bid here to warn them against impersonation scammers.

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 @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 9 slots. If the two highest bids are 9 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 8 slots and the second person will get 1 slot.

The notation "2 @ 5" means 2 slots for 5 BTC each. Not 2 slots for 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.
- 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. I have a small bias toward ending auctions on Fridays, Sundays, and Mondays.
- If two people bid at the same price, the person who bid first will have his slots filled first.
- Bids are considered invalid and will be ignored if they do not specify both a price and a max quantity, or if they could not possibly win any slots

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
1 0.06 mareker
2 0.06 lightlord
6 0.05 sportsbet.io

The statement is complete nonsense, clearly written by someone who doesn't understand this stuff whatsoever. It sounds like the IRS asked around the office, "Hey, anyone know what this hardfork/airdrop stuff is?", and one guy said, "Oh yeah, Coinbase gave me an airdrop in my account that one time! Something about a hardfork. Dunno what it was about, but I guess it's income?"

Coin Center says:
So it seems that the accounting that everyone was already using (ie. when you sell it, it's capital gains with zero basis) holds up even under the nonsense guidance except perhaps when it's an exchange giving you the "airdrop".

If they try to go after someone for this sort of thing, they're going to have a hell of a time pinning down a market value. If you're Mark Zuckerburg and you want to gift all of your Facebook shares to a charity, you don't get to deduct the current market price of FB shares times the number of shares you donated: firstly because if you actually sold those shares, it'd crash the market; and secondly because many of those shares are of an untraded class. In this scenario, Zuckerburg would have to get an appraisal done by a specialist appraiser to estimate the actual cash value of the shares.

It is a really cool idea, but it's just too big of a project for a one-time thing. In many ways it's like setting up a new merchandising business from scratch.

If people want to get this done, I think you should do it by partnering with a business that already has a web storefront, BTC payment, delivery, etc. set up. At the end, once things are ready to ship, I'd be willing to "bless" some particular product as "official", if it's good. And I could also work with them to give out 100 50%-off coupon codes to worthy forum users as well, or something. (Coupon codes would also have privacy benefits, since there'd be no link on either end between forum users and shipping info.)

But I am going to spend zero time on this until/unless it's basically already done, so it'll have to be a community-led effort.

I decided that I won't have time to see through the creation of a coin myself. If one or more other people want to create collectibles, I can advertise them into the 10-year-anniversary topic which I will eventually create. And if there's a really good product, I would be willing to partially subsidize the cost of them for the top n forum members, or something in that general vein. But I decided that there'd be far too many things to figure out from scratch with an official forum giveaway (eg. creating the design, getting the coins made, delivering items, safely/privately sharing data with various new service providers, debating exact giveaway conditions, etc.), so if anything is going to be done here, it'll have to be done independently.

Sorry if I got people's hopes up.

I hadn't been following this closely for a while, but the class action complaint against Tether/BitFinex makes things look pretty bad for them... How important are they to the current ecosystem at this point? How much has the risk of Finex+USDT going the way of MtGox already been priced in?

The complaint doesn't completely convince me that Finex was printing USDT to manipulate prices, though it's certainly possible. I've been skeptical of USDT's backing for a long time. If they weren't manipulating, then the whole matter looks like the US government stole their money and then turned around and said, "Now you're operating at fractional reserve, so you're fraudulent!"

My phrasing was inexact: when you post in a thread, the system checks whether you minibumped the thread in the last 7 days. If so, there is no bump effect. If not, you minibump the thread. But separately, at bump score calculation time, minibumps from now-deleted posts are not counted, even though they will continue to count for the 7-day window.

---

It sounds like people really want a "do not bump" option, so I'll probably end up adding that.

Unbanned.


Good reasoning.


That post is long, but irrelevant to this case since bubbalex is neither banned nor linked to mdafjal786.

Our moderators are highly accurate, so it makes sense to start out biased against appeals. But mistakes happen: ignoring relevant evidence and accepting irrelevant evidence leads to injustice.

This month 111 users were eligible.

Old:

New:

No, every thread forum-wide has a bump score, with the same mechanism of operation everywhere. Moving doesn't affect it. The only per-section differences are UI-related:
 - "Bump" links are displayed in targeted sections.
 - The default ordering is different in targeted sections.

It's even possible by playing around with URLs to superbump any thread, but since the default ordering doesn't take this into account, it's pointless in non-targeted sections.

When a topic is moved, bump-wise it's as if the topic always existed in the destination section. There's no advantage to bumping in one section and then moving it to another.

It's an XML sitemap file. Search engines use that file to keep up-to-date on forum posts. It's designed for computers to process, not humans; different browsers display it differently.

I don't like or use Twitter, but this isn't a fair criticism against them. If Twitter receives a DMCA takedown, then they have to remove the offending content or else they're sticking their neck out legally. If they say, "this is fair use," then they're liable for copyright infringement if they're wrong. You can't expect a company like Twitter to take risks like that if there's any possibility of them being wrong; nor can you expect them to dedicate resources to having lawyers carefully analyze each case. This is just the natural result of the way the DMCA law works: service providers always take things down after receiving a DMCA takedown unless the takedown is so obviously invalid that any court in the world would immediately throw it out.

Under the DMCA, Trump could in this case theoretically send Twitter a counter-takedown in which he asserts that the DMCA takedown was illegitimate (eg. due to fair use), and then Twitter could restore it without liability. I don't know if Twitter actually has a process for handling counter-takedowns, though. (They should.)

IANAL, but it's not clear to me that it is fair use, mainly since Trump isn't commenting on the work itself (ie. the news piece), but rather the subject of the work. If he was criticizing the handling of the reporting, then that'd more likely be fair use. Probably a lawyer could convincingly argue in court that it isn't copyright infringement (maybe due to the excerpt being insubstantial moreso than fair use), but again, if there's any ambiguity at all, then service providers like Twitter aren't going to stick their necks out.

If people were using a decentralized, uncensorable version of Twitter (which technologically isn't even that difficult), then this wouldn't be an issue...

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.

Ads are allowed to contain any non-annoying HTML/CSS style. No images, JavaScript, custom fonts, or animation. Ads must appear 3 or fewer lines tall in my browser (Firefox, 900px wide). 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.

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, and only for people using the default theme.

Duration

- Your ads are guaranteed to be up for at least 7 days.
- I usually try to keep ads up for no more than 8 or 9 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

Ad blocking

Hero/Legendary members, Donators, VIPs, and moderators have the ability to disable ads. I don't expect many people to use this option. These people don't increase the impression stats for your ads.

I try to bypass Adblock Plus filters as much as possible, though this is not guaranteed. It is difficult or impossible for ABP filters to block the ad space itself without blocking posts. However, filters can match against the URLs in your links, your CSS classes and style attributes, and the HTML structure of your ads.

To prevent matches against URLs: I have some JavaScript which fixes links blocked by ABP. You must tell me if you want this for your ads. When someone with ABP and JavaScript enabled views your ads, your links are changed to a special randomized bitcointalk.org URL which redirects to your site when visited. People without ABP are unaffected, even if they don't have JavaScript enabled. The downsides are:
- ABP users will see the redirection link when they hover over the link, even if they disable ABP for the forum.
- Getting referral stats might become even more difficult.
- Some users might get a warning when redirecting from https to http.

To prevent matching on CSS classes/styles: Don't use inline CSS. I can give your ad a CSS class that is randomized on each pageload, but you must request this.

To prevent matching against your HTML structure: Use only one <a> and no other tags if possible. If your ads get blocked because of matching done on something inside of your ad, you are responsible for noticing this and giving me new ad HTML.

Designing ads

Make sure that your ads look good when you download and edit this test page:
https://bitcointalk.org/ad_test.html
Also read the comments in that file.

Images are not allowed no matter how they are created (CSS, SVG, or data URI). Occasionally I will make an exception for small logos and such, but you must get pre-approval from me first.

The maximum size of any one ad is 51200 bytes.

I will send you more detailed styling rules if you win slots in this auction (or upon request).

Auction rules

You must be at least a Jr Member to bid. If you are not a Jr Member and you really want to bid, you should PM me first. Tell me in the PM what you're going to advertise. You might be required to pay some amount in advance. Everyone else: Please quickly PM newbies who try to bid here to warn them against impersonation scammers.

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 @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 9 slots. If the two highest bids are 9 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 8 slots and the second person will get 1 slot.

The notation "2 @ 5" means 2 slots for 5 BTC each. Not 2 slots for 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.
- 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. I have a small bias toward ending auctions on Fridays, Sundays, and Mondays.
- If two people bid at the same price, the person who bid first will have his slots filled first.
- Bids are considered invalid and will be ignored if they do not specify both a price and a max quantity, or if they could not possibly win any slots

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
7 0.10 sportsbet.io
1 0.10 HatuSS
1 0.09 FortuneJack

Some other candidates would be able to continue after this, but since the media hates Sanders, they'll constantly portray him as near death. Probably it will hurt his support enough to kill his inertia and force him to drop out after he performs poorly in the first few states.

According to the latest Morning Consult polling, Sanders supporters say that their second choice is:
 - 30% Biden
 - 28% Warren
 - 6% Harris

If you assume that Sanders drops out now, go based on the above numbers along with the current RCP average, and give one-tenth of Sanders' remaining support to candidates not listed in the Morning Consult poll, you get adjusted numbers of:
 - Biden 26.1 -> 31.1
 - Warren 24.4 -> 29.1
 - Buttigieg 5.6 -> 6.2
 - Harris 4.7 -> 5.7
 - Yang 3.3 -> 3.9

This (incredibly rough/unscientific analysis) makes it look good for Biden and to a slightly lesser extent Warren, but it really solidifies it into a 2-person race.

---

I would've really liked Sanders vs Trump because it's win-win in some ways: compared to previous presidents Trump is above average in most areas, while Sanders is excellent on foreign policy and civil liberties and terrible on policies that a president is more limited in affecting. Now I probably have to hope for Trump beating Biden or Warren.

In Trump vs Biden, I think Trump would probably win, but it wouldn't be a sure thing. President Biden would be like a mix between Obama and Bush. Biden himself is very authoritarian and pro-intervention, but he would probably appoint some Obama people to his administration, which might improve things somewhat on average. On the plus side, he is definitely not anti-capitalist.

In Trump vs Warren, Warren would have a very low chance of winning, but it'd be high stakes because Warren is really terrible. Warren is a horrible fusion of authoritarianism, interventionism, anti-capitalism, and corporatism, and her victory would embolden progressives while also giving them an opportunity to say, "Warren is destroying the country only because she's not progressive enough: she's no Bernie!". On the plus side, if she loses (which is the most likely outcome), it might diminish AOC-type progressivism in the Democratic party for a while.

All posts you can see should be listed there, though due to database concurrency limitations, ones made in the last few seconds might not show up, even if others before/after them do.

Note that if you don't need to get posts ASAP, it may be more easy and efficient for you to use https://bitcointalk.org/sitemap.php. All of the last-modification times are accurate to within a couple of hours.

I love the idea of space travel/colonization, but I'm skeptical about the economics of it currently.

Imagine it's the 17th century and Europeans learned of America, but America was a completely barren landmass with no plants or animals, just a ton of untouched minerals in the rocks. Maybe they could've imported some soil and plants in order to try living there, but there's no way that anyone would've taken the long and dangerous journey and invested so much in order to live on a barren rock. I'm not so sure that it'd even now have much population: consider that there's still low population density in difficult regions like Antarctica, northern Canada, and mid-ocean.

Space is that rich-but-barren separate content in the 17th century, but hundreds of times worse. Sure, we could move all kinds of stuff over there to make it theoretically livable, but it's not economically worthwhile, and the colonists are basically marooning themselves on a desert island.

Rather than trying to get people there ASAP, it'd be better to focus on technology which would boost the economic practicality of it, like:
 - AI & robotics which can independently do everything on Mars that a human might want to do, especially mining and construction.
 - Technology for passively & efficiently turning CO₂ + energy + water + trace elements into food.
 - A space elevator, mass driver, or incredibly cheap & safe rocketry systems. (But the above things are also useful on Earth, so I'd do those first.)
 
By the time a human arrives for colonization, you want to make it so that they don't have to do any work at all or rely on any imports in order to stay alive. Then they can focus on fulfilling & possibly-economically-useful activities like research, instead of on scraping out a meager existence on a barren rock with no real hope of ever being able to live comfortably.

They could impeach him over real things, like:
 - Waging wars without a declaration from congress.
 - Supporting the Saudi genocide in Yemen.
 - Emoluments issues with Trump's hotels, etc.
 - Wiretapping and other executive overreach.

But they don't want to impeach him for this sort of stuff because Democratic presidents have done the same things (even emoluments), and furthermore they like having an all-powerful presidency which they can exploit when they get into power and use as a scapegoat when they're out of power. So instead of pushing a powerful impeachment case which the public could actually get behind like, "bombs made in the US are as we speak being used to blow up children, at Trump's order and without congressional approval," the Dems instead search for these little "gotcha!" things which are totally Trump-specific and meaningless in any wider context, and which nobody actually cares about.

One of the most harmful trends has been the centralization of power into the presidency. Donald Trump is the ultimate head of an organization with ~4 million employees, and congress has in the past and present basically given him free reign to do whatever he wants with this insane amount of power. I'd love it if outrage over Trump leads to removal of executive powers and more skepticism of the status quo, but so far I'm not seeing any effective move in this direction.

IMO there's some chance (not a high chance, but some) that the loser of the next election will attack the legitimacy of the election, which will result in some serious chaos not seen in our lifetimes. And this will just be ridiculous bickering over who the next emperor will be, rather than actually trying to fix the problem at its source by making the presidency less powerful or otherwise fixing things fundamentally.