Quality and usefulness (which compete with freedom) are things that are always on my mind, but I'm not bothered by popularity. Most people will always use the big, popular platforms, and bitcointalk.org will never compete with them. Trying to compete with them would require totally changing how the site works, not just tweaking around the edges and adding a fresh coat of paint. (Our next-gen Epochtalk software works fundamentally the same way as the current software, just better.) I tend to agree with poptok1's post.


We're at a local minimum, but registrations jump around a lot:

Almost certainly LN will be accepted at some point, but I haven't figured out yet how to do it in a way that I consider reasonable.

The payment is only registered when you revisit the page with the Bitcoin address. I'd guess that you paid, didn't return to the forum for some months, and the price increased in the interim. When I increased the price, there was an automatic grace period which prevented this from happening from eg. one hour to the next, but not over such a long period of time.

If you'd emailed the pbbugs address, I would've accepted the old payment.

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.

Footballcoin, which I assume you're going to advertise, looks too much like an ICO-type-thing. So I won't accept your bid.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
2 0.24 FirstGlobalCredit
1 0.24 acarli
5 0.22 blenderio
1 0.22 Renko

That's a bug.

The merit number is a cached value derived from the merit ledger. I think that the number got out of sync and weird here due to a bug which existed for a short time last week. The number would've corrected itself the next time this user received any merit.

I don't have the code on hand anymore, though if at least a few people are interested, it'd only take me 15-30 minutes to rewrite it.

Please provide PCRE patterns for each coin you're interested in, like the ones I gave in my last post in this thread.

No, I said if I get a subpoena from the US then I might have to turn over data, and that in any case you should not be trusting anyone with your IP if it matters to you.

To illustrate, consider this trust list with max-depth 3:

The system processes it by depth. So it goes through this as first (A, D, F), then (B, E, X), then (C, X), then (X).

If A or D exclude X, then X will still have 0 net inclusions (+1 from F) and therefore be included. If they exclude F, then this doesn't help because F is at the same depth. If A and D exclude X, then X will have -1 net inclusions and therefore be excluded. Excluding F still doesn't help/hurt.

If F changes his trust of X to distrust of X, then X has -1 net inclusions at depth 1, so his net inclusions of 1 at depth 2 and 1 and depth 3 don't matter: he's excluded at depth 1. Whether or not B, C, or E are included/excluded by anyone here doesn't matter.

If instead E and C both change their trust of X to distrust of X, then X still has 1 net inclusions at depth 1, so his net inclusions of -1 at greater depths don't matter.

If you ignore the "DT1 voting":
 - ~ing everyone who trusts user X without ~ing X himself often won't result in X being excluded from trust networks.
 - ~ing X himself without ~ing anyone who trusts X might result in X being excluded from trust networks.
 - ~ing X himself and everyone who trusts him might result in X being excluded from trust networks, but to the exact same degree as the above option. It doesn't function as some sort of "super-exclusion".

If you take DT1 voting into account, then there's one exception: if you're on DT1 and your exclusion causes someone to drop off of DT1, then this could help you in your goal.

That one was a duplicate of this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5107569.0

This topic has been moved to Trashcan. Duplicative & dox outside of Investigations

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5108717.0

I'm uncertain about Bezos. The Washington Post has a clear anti-Trump and left-leaning bias, but maybe Bezos purchased it because he wanted to prevent a major newspaper from dying, and he actually does give them a lot of independence. Maybe any pro-Bezos bias by the Post is more of a subconscious thing by their employees than anything (ie. if they know who butters their bread, it'll affect their thinking whether anyone realizes/wants it or not). Ignoring the Washington Post, do we actually know of many instances of Bezos personally attacking good things or promoting bad things? I remember a few things which gave me slightly negative impressions of him, but I don't remember anything major, and I can't find anything with a quick search.

Reading his Medium post makes me tend to respect Bezos more. (Which is the intent, of course.)

It's certainly within the capabilities of several government intelligence agencies to do this spying, but would they? I doubt that Trump would've given some official presidential order to spy on Bezos. Does he have sufficient personal connections within Intelligence to do it off the books? My impression is that Intelligence hates him; in fact, if they did this, I'd consider it most likely that their goal was to set Bezos against Trump.

But far more likely than a major technological attack is that Sanchez's security was shit and someone going through piles of hacked accounts stumbled across this. Or something like that. (Some sources are saying that she just gave the info to others...)

In any case, it doesn't look good for the Enquirer, having a multi-billionaire past the point of caring & out to destroy them.

Wasabi is probably the next best, though it's certainly missing a ton of features compared to Electrum. Nothing lightweight comes close to Electrum's features.

Wasabi recently passed bitcoin.org's strict criteria for being listed.

 - That's not plagiarism.
 - If there is dox outside of the investigations section, report it with that as the reason.
 - If someone is threatening violence against you, report it with that as the reason.
 - If you have a copyright claim, you have to PM/email me a valid DCMA takedown notice with all required elements, including your address, a declaration under penalty of perjury, etc. Note that I will forward your notice to the affected users.
 - The forum is not under EU jurisdiction.

Everyone like SOTU addresses. The speech is the end result of a lot of work by a team of speechwriters working along with the entire administration, and they're given the rare opportunity to have a captive general audience for an hour or more. So they always have a high approval rating, though the effect doesn't last long.

It was impressive that he got so much Democrat applause, and I appreciated the digs at socialism and endless wars. But overall I found it pretty typical for a SOTU. Unfortunately, everyone (including the president) will probably forget about it in a couple of weeks.

Email changes weren't always logged, and I wasn't always a forum admin, so I don't know that.

Epochtalk works like that. I think that currently the edit logs are all public, though users may end up being too uncomfortable with that.

Try actually reading the thread...

Not anymore. That's clear abuse, awarding merit for political reasons rather than any idea of quality. Only because he was a source, I effectively undid those merit sends. If he had not been a merit source, I still would've blacklisted anyone who got into DT1 through that type of shenanigans.

I hadn't read into the thread deeply enough to see that stuff. Those are better arguments against the trustworthiness of H8bussesNbicycles & co., but note that the current negative-trust-ratings were sent long before that. Before February, the thread looks like politics to me.


Since some people view account sales as fundamentally untrustworthy, I think it's an appropriate use.


I don't find it unreasonable to have a restrictive selfmod thread. You can guess from the banner & deletion stats that it's going to be a restrictive, single-viewpoint thread. You could always start another topic.

That said, using selfmod topics in a deceptive way can be an appropriate reason for negative trust.