More than 100 would be selected, so a random subset of eligible users will be chosen each month to bring it down to 100. This month 111 users were eligible.

Old:

New:

You can't make an unmoderated forum as a clearnet site due to legal issues. And even if you set up SMF as a Tor hidden service and promised never to do a single moderation action, soon your forum would be 99.9% spam, and all of the real users would leave. Eventually, every centralized site comes to a policy of at best "everything is allowed but spam and illegal stuff". And this is in fact not too far what bitcointalk.org does, though I guess you think that our definition of "spam" is too broad.

If you want a decentralized forum (with all of the spam and other headaches that entails), it's existed for years on Freenet.

"Opposite of your political spectrum" is a bit ambiguous.

I'm a libertarian. Within libertarianism, I think that the biggest division is between those who came to libertarianism from the left and those who came to it from the right. I came to it from the left, so among libertarians I have rather liberal views on virtue, LGBT issues, some race-related things, the role of selfishness, the basic justification for libertarianism, some economic-theory nitpicking, etc. But on the most divisive left-right split within libertarianism, abortion, I was actually flipped from pro-choice to pro-life due to effective arguments by right-oriented libertarians.

More broadly, the opposite of libertarianism is authoritarianism, including fascism and communism. I don't agree with these groups much, but authoritarian regimes often have self-sacrifice as a core value, and I appreciate this. (But I despise collectivism, which I basically define as sacrificing the valuable few for the convenience of the ignorant many, and fascist/communist self-sacrifice is often oriented toward collectivism.) Also, communists are often pro-technology, which isn't bad on its face.

It's an interesting question to think about. IMO you can find common ground with basically anyone. Oftentimes, I find dedicated centrists the most difficult to understand, since they're basically saying that the world is not massively screwed up, which is ridiculous.

It's tricky to get email notifications right so that they're not too spammy. Maybe later.

For now, I added this page where you can see your IP logs for the past 30 days: https://bitcointalk.org/myips.php . You could pretty easily write a userscript to periodically check this and warn you if it's weird. (But don't scrape it on every pageload.)

I don't want to make older IP logs automatically accessible because that'd give a hacker a bunch of useful/sensitive information. But 30 days is probably not too harmful.

"Hate speech" is a really anti-freedom concept which too often amounts to just "unpopular speech". Unfortunately, a lot of people believe in the idea, on both the political left and right. In the end, YouTube may end up losing too many creators with these kinds of actions, and they may suffer financially for it. YouTube Premium's original series for example are all completely soulless corporate boardroom creations -- if that's what they envision as YouTube's future, then they're going to be out-competed eventually.

If I was YouTube, I would make in-house monetization much more selective, but give creators the ability to add their own advertising using the exact same systems (eg. text pop-ups, wait-5-seconds, sidebar ads, etc.) for a monthly fee dependent on the view count. Then all creators would have the option of negotiating ads out-of-band, and YouTube could more reasonably position itself as just a platform.

Are there any good YouTube alternatives? https://d.tube/ is one which seems vaguely decentralized, though its underlying steem and ipfs platforms are naïve "do the first thing which comes to mind" systems. I have zero confidence in the robustness of these systems, and it's not even a "perfect is the enemy of good" situation, since dtube is also pretty janky. It's disappointing, though I guess there just aren't enough people interested in this stuff to put enough man-hours into it.

I really doubt that YouTube is bad enough at this point for any centralized YouTube clone to become popular enough to be profitable. Delivering video is expensive, dealing with copyright complaints is expensive, and YouTube has the advantage of a huge historical library, a pretty good AI, and network effect. IMO you could throw $100 million at the problem and still not out-compete YouTube at this point, unfortunately.

The voting could be proportional, so if you donate 1 BTC and vote to donate it to the EFF, 1 BTC will be donated to the EFF.

More seriously, this sort of donation pool might have some extra positive effects due to its ability to more effectively market itself and its ability to engage in more complicated projects than just "donate to x charity". But for it to be better than just having donors donate to whoever they want, the pool should probably be an actual tax-exempt nonprofit.

I've thought before about giving forum badges (or maybe even forum BTC credit) for donating x BTC to Bitcoin-accepting charities, but it's difficult to track. There's no way to prove that you donated to the EFF, for example, as far as I can tell. It'd be nice if there was some standard protocol for this sort of thing.

Antitrust laws are anti-free-market and shouldn't exist. Where monopolies exist, they're almost always created by government action. Google's dominance is largely due to it beating competitors fair-and-square, though they've also been helped by the fact that their size allows them to more efficiently deal with legal issues (eg. copyright on YouTube) than smaller competitors could. The correct solution is to remove regulatory/legal barriers preventing competition, not to interfere directly in any business's operation.

Also, while I certainly don't support everything they do, out of the major tech companies, IMO Google is one of the more reasonable. Their privacy practices seem pretty good, YouTube is much freer than Facebook or Twitter, Google's handling of subpoenas etc. is basically the gold standard, etc.

That said, I'd much prefer antitrust actions over regulations. If for example the US tried to weaken section 230 in order to address perceived abuses by Big Tech, that'd be a true disaster for the free Internet.


From what I've heard, all US antitrust law requires some sort of anti-competitive overt act. So even if you have 100% market share, no antitrust action whatsoever can be taken unless there's evidence of you plotting to prevent competition in some way or other.

But I'm not an expert.

It's not as though countries have vaults full of millions of barrels of oil just waiting to be taken -- or at least not to such an extent that stealing it would be remotely worth the cost. And the US doesn't need resource-rich land, especially when it would have to fight off insurgents constantly in order to use it: the US itself is already hugely resource-rich. So direct "looting" isn't something that anyone wants. This isn't the time of Alexander the Great, where you can go looting through an area and still have it be profitable in the end. Modern wars are too expensive.

What other countries do have is people willing (and often happy) to buy American products for dollars and then do cheap work in return for dollars. American companies want to sell their intellectual property or whatever on a stable market, and Americans want cheap clothes, toys, iPhones, etc. From this perspective, the US wants things like:
 - Low barriers to trade.
 - Productive but low-cost workers in other countries who won't complain too much.
 - Stable (but not necessarily free) governments that will keep commerce safely moving.
 - The USD as the world reserve currency.

You'll notice that the above is in fact what the US government often aims for and achieves. However, the US is not entirely rationally self-interested like this. US foreign policy is also motivated by things like:
 - The military industrial complex, which wants to waste taxpayer money on military hardware and wars in order to enrich certain groups.
 - Politicians who find wars or trade barriers useful.
 - Politicians and Americans who honestly believe that certain interventions are the right thing to do.

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 0.02.
- 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.
[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
2 0.26 CryptoSlots Casino [flattened to 0.18]
1 0.26 sapta [flattened to 0.16]
1 0.20 ColorlessK [flattened to 0.14]
1 0.12 BoXXoB
2 0.12 acarli
2 0.10 lightlord

The "increase risked BTC to increase the strength" thing only applied for a brief period of time. It didn't work well, so I removed it. It has no effect on anything, and I will probably remove "risked BTC" entirely in the future.

I don't think that it's a big deal to put ridiculous values in that field, though probably you shouldn't. For reporting something second-hand, there's never been a standard, and as far as I'm concerned you can do whatever you want. Since it doesn't actually affect anything, it's basically the same to have riskedBTC=1 with a comment of "he stole BTC" as to just say in the comment "he stole 1 BTC".

SlavaVendo informed me that he has to cancel his bid. Current status:

Slots BTC/Slot Person
2 0.26 CryptoSlots Casino [would be flattened to 0.18]
1 0.26 sapta [would be flattened to 0.16]
1 0.20 ColorlessK [would be flattened to 0.14]
1 0.12 BoXXoB
2 0.12 acarli
2 0.10 lightlord

The auction continues.

I don't like changing policies suddenly like this, especially after you managed to get your (unrelated) red trust removed, but seeing your bids in light of the bestmixer situation gave me serious pause. Your site reminds me too much of bestmixer, with roughly the same method of operation, claims, ability to log, etc. Therefore, I feel that your service is too high-risk for forum users, and I won't accept your bids. I will add a rule to future ad auctions prohibiting this entire class of service.


I have no idea what you're going to advertise since you didn't PM me, and also I'm not sure whether I should interpret your bid as "2@0.28". So your bid is rejected.

---

Current status:

Slots BTC/Slot Person
2 0.26 CryptoSlots Casino [would be flattened to 0.18]
1 0.26 sapta [would be flattened to 0.16]
1 0.24 SlavaVendo [would be flattened to 0.14]
1 0.20 ColorlessK [would be flattened to 0.12]
1 0.12 BoXXoB [would be flattened to 0.10]
1 0.08 bit-endian [tentative - may be rejected due to insufficient info]
2-3 0.08 acarli

The auction continues.

Blinded bearer certificates (bb-certs) are a very old and fairly simple technology, though for some reason it's never seen widespread use. It basically allows a "bank" to issue tokens which can be transferred 100% anonymously. These tokens could be something like "IOU 1 BTC", or they could indicate other things like "whoever holds this token is entitled to a bitcointalk.org copper membership". Unlike Monero or Wasabi, bb-cert transactions aren't merely mixing coins around to make the transaction graph (hopefully-)prohibitively difficult to follow: transaction histories simply can't exist at all. A bb-cert system would also be very scalable -- easily scaling to Visa-level volumes --, and with instant confirmation of transactions. The main downside is that it's fundamentally centralized, since each cert has to be issued by some entity (though this entity could be a multisig arrangement).

I wrote a little article here with several example use-cases. Note that since I wrote that:
 - I learned that Cloudflare implemented an anti-captcha bb-cert thing in the form of Privacy Pass, which is really cool, though it doesn't work perfectly yet and it seems that there isn't that much attention on this.
 - Someone started working on hookedin, which is a project for a complete bb-cert-based BTC payments system, though it's in the very early stages of development and isn't really usable yet.

I suggested bb-certs to ChipMixer in 2017, but they weren't at that time interested. (Not too surprising, since I wasn't offering to create it for them, an easy-to-deploy solution doesn't exist yet, and ideas are a dime a dozen.)

Congratulations to the Wasabi and JoinMarket developers! JoinMarket pioneered a lot of CoinJoin science (and BTW, belcher wrote an excellent & comprehensive wiki article on privacy), while Wasabi is the first wallet that implements CoinJoin in both a highly-usable and sound way. As both a signer and a donor to the CoinJoin bounty fund, I'm thrilled that these two pieces of software exist!

For everyone looking to improve their privacy, I highly recommend checking out Wasabi, especially over centralized "mixers".

---

Further work is still necessary toward achieving default-fungibility, which is IMO the end goal. Even with Wasabi, you need a fair bit of expertise to maintain privacy, and the vast majority of people are using wallets that are terrible privacy-wise. Without intending to say that the bounty fund will reward people for these specific things, I'd personally like to see:

 - Improvements to make Wasabi more of a complete wallet.
 - CoinJoin integration in other wallets, especially Bitcoin Core.
 - Research on doing CoinJoin in decentralized ways. (Wasabi's method is pretty secure, but requires a centralized coordinator.)
 - Other research (and, perhaps more importantly, usable products) for improving day-to-day privacy.

It's best to leave it somewhat distributed. It wouldn't be ideal, but it also wouldn't be the end of the world if the forum split into several pieces. And since political processes are ripe for corruption, I prefer to leave these things a bit vague and let all of the involved individuals figure it out to the best of their abilities.

Should I disappear, Cyrus and/or others-I've-established will take over day-to-day operations and decision-making. You and the non-profit organization would act as checks upon them and each other to ensure that the forum doesn't just turn into some business, but would continue to have a "soul".

Done. I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I started working on it in earnest last month.

I very much appreciate OgNasty's willingness to perform this high-risk role for years! Returning 500 BTC is a more trustworthy action than most people will ever do.


I came to 1.2% yearly by looking at gold storage companies and commodity ETF/ETN fees. GBTC for example charges 2% per year, plus a significant premium, etc. Some past treasurers were paid about the same rate, BTW -- it wasn't just OgNasty. It should be BTC-denominated, since their risk and responsibility varies with the value of what they're protecting. In a multisig any fee should be split several ways, though, not multiplied.

Nowadays the fee should maybe be a little lower, since the ecosystem is more developed/competitive. But mere hundreds of dollars per year for what OgNasty was doing? Anyone who would accept that is either willing to act as an unpaid volunteer, essentially, or they aren't properly considering the risks.


paraipan was the only loss. Past treasurers John K., Garr255, Ian Knowles, Rassah, Ryland R Taylor-Almanza, and now OgNasty all returned the funds with which they were entrusted.

(Talking about blinded bearer certificates:)


In that system there'd be an expectation that people would usually keep their BTC in the bb-cert system, so redemptions could be batched and only occur once per week or month. If you needed the BTC faster, you could sell the cert on the market; it's sort of like how fiat-backed stablecoins are supposed to work.


Every time you transfer it, you have to register it with the bank. The bank:
 1. Checks that it previously blind-signed the cert (but doesn't know when/where it blind-signed it, making it anonymous).
 2. Checks that it hasn't already been spent by checking a database that it maintains.
 3. Adds it to its spent database so it can't be double-spent.
 4. Blind-signs a new cert for the recipient. When they want to spend it, they'll start at step 1 again, but it won't be linked to this event due to the blind signing.


Doing it in usable-currency form has too many risks/challenges. It's way out-of-scope for the forum. I have thought about doing it as a purely-for-fun demo system, but it's extremely low on my to-do list.

Someone's working on a usable version here, but it's very early:
https://www.hookedin.com/
https://github.com/hookedin

Then binance can link together all of your outgoing BTC, which serious hurts privacy. Also, as mentioned, these exchanges all seem to randomly hold users' BTC hostage. It's best to use no-registration changers like flyp.me or xmr.to.

You want to use a KYC-free, no-registration coin changer. flyp.me seems the best right now, but these services tend not to last long KYC-free.

Note that although bisq is decentralized and therefore more likely to survive long-term, it's pseudonymous, so an observer can link together all of your bisq transactions. This is very bad for privacy.


If ChipMixer keeps logs (which you can't possibly know for sure), then they know exactly where the coins are coming from and going.