Logged-out users will now see a warning in trust-enabled sections if more DT members neg-trust the topic starter than positive-trust him.

This increases the responsibility of DT members not to give negative trust for stupid reasons, but only for things that cause you to believe that the person is a scammer.

BitFinx responds: https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/356

Confirms that a ton of money is at least "tied up".

914


You're not there yet. 


775, the minimum. Only a 0.4% chance of that.

No. Previously IPs were logged sporadically but usually kept indefinitely; this is an overall significant reduction in retention.


Right. Though if someone really wants to know, I might consider manually giving them their logs after verifying that their account doesn't look hacked.

I wrote a new unified IP logging/retention system, and I changed the way backups are done in order to ensure limited retention on certain privacy-sensitive things. See: https://bitcointalk.org/privacy.php

Previously I said that IPs are only logged when you post and in some limited other cases, such as when you encounter certain errors. This is no longer true: you should now think about IP logging as happening constantly.

There's now an option in your account settings which will allow you to reduce retention of your logged IPs to 3 months. You should only consider enabling this if you've staked a pubkey in the thread and you're sure that your account email is correct. I'm not sure if 3 months is enough to respond adequately to all abuse; we'll see, and I might change it later or perhaps restrict it based on rank.

I considered putting a warning on trust pages for users who have enabled limited retention, since it theoretically might make legal action against them more difficult in case they scam you, but my current thinking is that this is kind of pointless because someone could just not enable the setting and use Tor for the same effect. And it'd be both privacy-invasive and futile whack-a-mole to try to indicate when people are using proxies. On the other hand, scammers are often pretty stupid, so I could be convinced to add the warning.

1007


It is.

I'm performing database maintenance which could periodically slow down certain things. Post again if it's still notably slow on Saturday. (Though the watchlist is something that's always been not-very-performant. It helps if you edit your watchlist to make it smaller.)

Probably, but the flaws and biases mostly don't make themselves apparent to me at this time. I perceived a strong pro-DoJ bias, and of course the whole thing comes from a statist and establishment perspective, but nothing caught my eye as pushing a false narrative or anything like that.

One thing I noticed on this front is that the report states witness testimony as fact when the author finds it convenient, and in particular treats Cohen as 100% reliable. But I couldn't detect any actual false statements due to this.


They had huge followings on Twitter and Facebook, and they organized rallies in the US by sort of social-engineering people into being rally leaders. Also, the report convincingly argues that the hacking/leaking operations were specifically carried out with the intent of influencing the election, though this was not necessarily coordinated with the main social media campaign, which was done by a separate Russian group.


Yes, they weren't pro-Republican or pro-Democrat:



Mostly "grand jury", with some "harm to ongoing investigation".

Wait no more, as I have in fact now read the whole thing. It was actually very interesting, moreso than I'd expected. While it's very far from an exoneration, it's about as good as Trump could've hoped for, since it doesn't go into his personal business very much, he is personally rarely involved in anything too incriminating in the report, the number and severity of negative things are relatively small considering the massive scope of the investigation, and overall Trump comes across as more bumbling than criminal.

If you're interested in the report, I recommend reading the executive summaries at the start of each volume. Here are several scattered thoughts/notes of mine:

Volume I - "NO COLLUSION"

The Russians come off as kind of disorganized, like a few rich Russian guys who wanted to mess with American elections and casually threw a few million dollars at it. They achieved quite a bit, but no more than a few dedicated and skilled people could do. Their goal seems to have been primarily to see Hillary defeated, and so they focused on attacking her and helping everyone else, especially Trump and Sanders. They interacted with both left-wing and right-wing groups.

Today's social media is basically the perfect tool to manipulate people, and by using social media the Russians were able to achieve impressive results. It's quite possible that the election would've gone differently without them.

I wonder how the US got such detailed info on the Russian DNC/DCCC hacking. It makes me think that they might be logging most/all Internet traffic globally (which has long been suspected but unproven).

The hacking operations against election systems strike me as loud and primitive, and were probably intended mostly to sow distrust in the election system.

Trump's campaign was disorganized and naïve. They were used to these things being far away and not bothering them, so nobody was really thinking about the possibly criminal nature of the Russian stuff. They weren't prepared to be in the crosshairs of so many hostile actors both foreign and domestic, so they weren't nearly paranoid enough. I'm pretty sure that if the Russians had tried, they could've gotten the Trump campaign to do some super illegal things by abusing this careless attitude, but they either didn't think to do this or they didn't think that doing this would be in their interests. I'm not personally bothered much by the Trump campaign's outlook, since in my view law/democracy are things that you live with rather than values you fight for, and furthermore the campaign's activity in this matter was basically passive. They were being tempted by "evil", and would've fallen for it if the temptation had not been removed, but they were not the ultimate source of the "evil". If you do care about lawfulness or democracy as fundamental values, then I could understand condemning the Trump campaign's actions and outlook here, since they pretty clearly had a willingness to play very dirty in order to win and to perform acts that would break laws (even if in some cases they arguably didn't know that they would be breaking laws). (Note: IMO Clinton is probably far dirtier, but she's more experienced in hiding it.)

Bannon comes across as dirty, but too smart to leave a paper trail. Manafort comes across as very effective campaign-wise, and possibly a key in Trump's ultimate success, but he was completely ineffective at hiding his activities. It sounds like Trump himself basically has everyone else do all of his work for him, which is a decent way to stay out of trouble, at least. A whole lot of other people in both Trump's campaign and Russia come across as pretty stupid.

It's clear that there was no true conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign, and in fact the Russians were having a lot of trouble after Trump won in figuring out how to achieve effective communication with the incoming presidency.


Good analysis by Assange! I was thinking along the same lines at the time, and it turned out to be somewhat correct, though I've been disappointed at how much Trump has been able to continue/expand the wars. Ironically, Trump has probably been motivated to be extra hawkish due to the Russia hubub, which Assange contributed to. (Though hindsight is 20/20, and IMO Assange had good motives, at least.)

The report contradicts the idea that Wikileaks was some kind of puppet of the Russian government, though they were clearly not at all neutral.

Why is everyone sending sensitive communications via Twitter DM? Twitter's obviously going to turn that over to the government, maybe even without a warrant. It's even worse than email.

Reference to possible dirt on the Clintons on pages 61 and 109. I'm suspicious that a lot of the redactions elsewhere may also be protecting establishment figures.


LOL

Volume II - "WITCH HUNT"

Volume II is just hilarious. It basically makes the Trump administration look like a sitcom. I could seriously imagine it as a great dramatized comedy manga series or something (it'd be difficult to do a live-action show without being cringy).


Trump is portrayed as someone who has no idea what he's doing, who just randomly vents his thoughts to whoever he happens to come across. I actually laughed out loud several times reading volume II.


There are many examples like the above; it's like Trump went through the presidential phonebook and said to everyone, "Hey, how's it going, you're fabulous. By the way, do you have any idea how I can get rid of this Russian nonsense?" Trump was so ineffective at handling his people and the Russia thing that he comes across as totally harmless, not as any real schemer.

More funny quotes:

An important point is that Mueller went into this with the intention to refuse to say that the President was guilty of anything, though he would've been willing to exonerate him if this was absolutely clear. Some media outlets seem to present his non-conclusion as Mueller thinking that it was just too close to call, which isn't the case. After reading all of the report, I get a strong impression that Mueller thinks that Trump is guilty of obstruction of justice, but that he feels compelled not to explicitly say so. Instead, he lays out a very compelling case for obstruction of justice over 182 pages, and implies that either congress should impeach Trump or Trump should be prosecuted after he leaves office:

Note that there are a bunch of grand jury redactions in volume II, which makes me think that they could be preparing to jump on Trump after he leaves office.

I find the arguments for obstruction of justice pretty convincing on an intellectual level, especially the witness-tampering-type stuff in Flynn's and Cohen's cases. Mueller makes a lot of good arguments for Comey's firing also being obstruction, but that I find more difficult to accept. But in reality this is 100% political, so the legal arguments don't matter all that much, and I also don't care whether Trump broke any laws. My opinion of Trump was a bit negatively impacted, but mostly due to his general disloyalty to his subordinates. On the whole, my opinion of Trump remains the same: 1) he's a bit crazy and rather ineffective, which is from my libertarian perspective good; 2) his policies are mostly objectively terrible; 3) but if you grade him on a curve with other recent presidents, he's above average.

I just recently started watching this movie, but I hated it and ended up just skipping around in the last half of it. I found the whole situation on and near Earth to be distractingly unrealistic: even with the (probably impossible) wormholes, it'd be far easier to fix Earth or in the worst case live in airtight shelters. The writing was terrible: everything was poorly-explained, plus cringy "love can bypass the laws of physics" nonsense.

Although it was all fairly unrealistic, some of the space stuff was cool to watch and think about. I thought the whole situation with Dr Mann was especially interesting and compelling.


It's total nonsense.


In this case, he would've gotten burned alive by the black hole's accretion disk, which was energetic enough to produce significant light on the nearby planets. The inside of the black hole would have all of this superhot material falling in, so it'd be sort of like falling into a star.

In theories where black holes could somehow be traversed, you'd need to use a very special black hole and approach it in a very special way.


In a supermassive black hole, you can theoretically survive a while past the event horizon without the gravity ripping you apart (though various other things will probably still kill you).

But the movie as a whole isn't particularly scientifically accurate...

129 users who were wearing a yobit signature and had at least 1 good report against them in the last 14 days are banned for 14 days. All yobit signatures are wiped. Signatures containing "yobit.net" are banned for 60 days.

Some people were talking about neg-trusting spammers for spamming. This is not appropriate; report the posts, and if that doesn't seem to be working well, come to Meta with specific examples and suggestions.

Local rules are enforced entirely at the discretion of the relevant moderators. It's intended to be for stuff like "you must post a picture", "you must make a price prediction", "do not go on tangents about services other than <this one I'm interested in>", etc. Not really "these people are banned: ...". (Though I have been thinking about adding a function to ban specific users from your selfmod threads.)

Pages 36-37 and 41. They mined and bought bitcoins and then used them to buy domain names and hosting, it seems.

This is a also a nice quote:


Lesson: always use encryption.

I see nothing that would cause that on my end. The main possibility which comes to my mind is: Tor gets its DNS from a random semi-untrusted Tor exit node, and it gave you a Cloudflare IP for bitcointalk.org, but the wrong one, possibly as part of some attack (though this would seem to require a flaw on Cloudflare's end), or possibly due to some weird network conditions at the exit node. It could also just be a Cloudflare hiccup.

I've only read a little of it so far, though I'm planning on reading the whole thing. At least in the first couple dozen pages, it seems much better for Trump than I expected.

There's a brief mention of Bitcoin being used by the Russians for certain things, though it's pretty neutral.

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.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 0.06 ChipMixer
1 0.06 SlavaVendo
2 0.06 SwC_Poker
2 0.06 lightlord

I'm not planning on doing that here. People have enough trouble figuring out the sort-of-similarly-designed Trust system. That was just an idea that I wanted to share in case anyone was making a decentralized forum and wanted to have a merit-like system.

No, several people looked into it, but nobody was able to make contact with anyone who knew anything about what he did with the BTC or who might've stolen it after his death. The 25% reward still stands on any returned amount.

That sounds pretty interesting and on the right track, though their website is incomplete, and it sounds like it might be fractional reserve:

I'd really love it if it's not fractional reserve and the "bank" is actually a multisig of several independent entities. But as long as it works well and actually uses blind signing, it'll be good to see.