One of the deleted posts:


Nothing in that huge rant has really anything to do with the case involving HostFat and therocktrading. You mentioned HostFat, but you didn't actually address anything related to the topic; you just tried yet another filibuster on your DT talking points.

We see you doing this over and over again. There are 61 good reports against you in the last 60 days. You're going to get banned if you keep this up.

I did. Feel free to rant all you want in your own topics, but quit derailing unrelated topics.

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, 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], banks, funds, or anything else 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:
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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 0.02.
- The bidding starts at 0.02.
- 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.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
2 0.10 bizzyb
1 0.08 BoXXoB
3 0.06 tsk0101
3 0.04 SwC_Poker

Sure, with that kind of attitude.

I'm not fighting on the streets, and I'm on the other side of the world, so probably my thoughts here don't mean much, but if I were you I'd make it my #1 priority to get an ambitious but solid plan together amongst all yellow-vest stakeholders for what you want to accomplish and how to do it. Quite possibly, a left-right coalition is possible without compromising anyone's principles as long as you're willing to define exactly where your common ground is and where exactly you want to work together. From what I've heard, there is consensus on having more referenda, which is a start, but honestly this isn't very ambitious, and I doubt that it'd change much. Having an end goal of a multi-state federation might be one way to get huge changes via a left-right coalition, though I'm sure there are many other ideas.

If you have a dozen groups just thrashing against a vaguely-defined status quo for vaguely-defined goals, you're not going to get anywhere, and in fact you just give more credibility to the status quo.


Interesting idea, though IMO that'd end up being an Orwellian groupthink state where every imaginable minority is eventually persecuted.

Direct democracy is problematic in many ways, but most obviously because you can't actually vote on every little thing, even with technology. It isn't practical to vote on every proposed line in a trade agreement which most people won't even understand, for example. So you end up delegating, especially on the decision of which things warrant a vote, and this creates a bureaucratic class which really controls everything. This is basically how General Secretary Stalin came to be a dictator.

"Nazis and commies" are typically extremely authoritarian, so if either of them actually gained power, the result would be severe oppression and the elimination of all political rivals. The status quo is pretty bad, and part of me hopes that the yellow vests manage to tear it all down (somehow), but replacing the status quo with an even more authoritarian regime wouldn't be an improvement.

Maybe the two sides could get together and agree to some sort of actual anarchism (not the weird doublethink kind that some communists ascribe to), like the system described in The Machinery of Freedom. Or you could split the country into far-left and far-right states, but allow for free movement between them so people can go to the side that they prefer and/or the side that works better.

To prevent scams, spam, alt accounts, and similar abuse, and to promote an environment of trust, all forum users must now submit know-your-customer (KYC) identity info to the forum here. As we all know, Bitcoin was built on the principle of "if you have nothing to hide, what's there to fear?", which is why the block chain is a public ledger. And Satoshi even famously said, "sacrificing a little liberty for increased security is the foundation of blockchain technology."

Additionally, you can get extra-verified by posting a selfie in this thread. (Upload the image to imgur or something first and then use the bbcode [img]DIRECT_LINK_TO_IMG[/img].) Make sure it's a very serious selfie. After posting a selfie, our advanced verifAI™ algorithm will choose whether to verify you or not, and will also assign you with an accurate verification assessment to be displayed next to your posts.

The letter makes the final report sound more positive toward Trump than I expected. I'll be interested to see the final report, especially the obstruction-of-justice part which seems less conclusive and which the AG's letter only briefly summarizes.

We need women in blocks and chains? You monster!

---

People should do what interests them. The whole idea of forcing diversity is ridiculous. (Now, if people are being assholes, such as by making sexist attacks against women who are interested in Bitcoin, then that's different & inappropriate. But I haven't seen much of that, especially in more serious contexts.)

I think that it'll basically portray Trump as the center of a large group of shady people and criminals, but not actually have any hard evidence of crimes by Trump. The whole process was a clear witch hunt, so the report will probably on the whole be more beneficial to Democrats, though Republicans will probably also be able to say "Mueller cleared Trump!"

I fixed it with a dirty hack for now, probably I'll have to add pages at some point. It's a pain, though, since there are three separate sections which need pages...

Yeah, he's still very pro-war, but better than average, and better than all but a small handful of the Dem candidates.

I think that Sanders is intuitively much more anti-war than Trump, but he'd also be more willing to be a mere cog in the machine, which might give results similar to Obama. Not sure.


Even if Sanders wins, the US is not going to become socialist overnight (thank goodness...). The Senate, Supreme Court, and (periodically) the House will block basically every little thing he does. If he plays his cards right, he might be able to push through one or two major things, but it won't be exactly what he wants, and it's not going to completely reshape US politics.

Maybe this year I won't do anything, and that'll be the real april fools.

Gabbard has been knocking it out of the park on foreign policy, and making this the central issue of her campaign. Eg.:

Speech: https://youtu.be/4VOUuylYHIc?t=813

She's become by far my favorite of the bunch, though she has little chance of winning. It looks like she might not even get enough donations to satisfy the DNC's requirements to get into the debates, the deadline for which is approaching soon.


I wouldn't dismiss it as completely impossible. In the primaries the DNC will try to stop him, and socialism polls very poorly in the general election electorate. But he has excellent name recognition along with a large group of die-hard supporters/donors, many of his individual policies poll well, and Trump isn't very popular, so it's definitely within the realm of possibility for Sanders to become president.

I'd be really happy with a Sanders vs. Trump race, since they're both anti-establishment and skeptical of the endless wars.

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, 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], banks, funds, or anything else 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 0.02.
- The bidding starts at 0.02.
- 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.

I won't accept this bid. Rahakott claims, "All the data on the servers is securely encrypted, even the developers cannot reach it." However:
 1. You don't charge fees for "internal" transfers. Without some complicated tech which I see no evidence for, this implies a single pool of funds.
 2. When I created a wallet, the mnemonic was returned in the HTML, not via JavaScript. So if it's a real mnemonic at all, it was computed server-side.

Therefore, I don't believe that your service is honest or secure.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
5 0.16 blenderio [flattened from 0.18]
2 0.14 bizzyb [flattened from 0.18]
1 0.12 SwC_Poker [flattened from 0.14]
1 0.10 BoXXoB

The attacker's motivation was apparently to promote worldwide racial and political balkanization by increasing the solidarity of all groups while also pushing them apart. He wanted to increase tensions between Muslim and Christian, white and non-white, left and right, etc. So he's probably very happy with the world's response so far, including some of the reaction in this thread.

The attack itself was evil, of course, and this underlying goal of promoting collectivism was both particularly evil and worryingly effective.

For the last month:
 - Total unique visitors: 2,225,590
 - Maximum unique visitors per day: 237,632
 - Minimum unique visitors per day: 137,979

No, it's based on data collected server-side on every ad impression. No JavaScript analytics is used.