In the spirit of Christmas, can we on bitcointalk.org try to find some political consensus? Can Flying Hellfish and TECSHARE agree on anything?

Some points which might find general agreement:
 - The freedom of individuals is important.
 - The prevailing banking/fiat system is on the whole bad.
 - In most places, the people would be far better off if major changes were made to their respective governments.
 - As long as scarcity exists, the existence of some form of trade is good.
 - Technology is good.
 - Humanity should dominate the universe.

Any others? Do you disagree with even those broad statements?

Merry Christmas!

I actually hadn't read Mattis as a huge neocon, but his resignation letter indicates that he must've at least largely bought into the neocon argument. I suppose the whole Pentagon culture which he has been immersed in has been very pro-intervention.

I'm surprised and very happy with Trump's actions here. In addition to the Syria withdrawal, it wasn't widely reported that Trump simultaneously also ordered withdrawing half of the troops in Afghanistan. It seems that he's finally starting to go with his instincts even in opposition to his neocon advisors. While his instincts are far from ideal, they're a hell of a lot better than eg. "bomb-everyone Bolton". I'm a little doubtful that Trump will keep up this policy with any consistency, but if he does follow a consistent anti-intervention path from here on out, I will probably end up considering him the best president in many decades even despite his many other flaws.

So far, Trump has always picked establishment, neocon cabinet members. If he picks an anti-war Secretary of Defense, that might indicate a true shift.

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Pick any point on the map at random and you will find horrible injustice. The US can't intervene everywhere, and history has proven that it usually causes more evil in intervening than it sought to prevent. For example, in trying to fight the admittedly-evil regime in Iran and "stabilize the region", the US is propping up the even more evil regime in Saudi Arabia, which is itself perpetuating what is essentially a genocide in Yemen. It's better to just get out of there completely. These wars are also all unconstitutional.

I wish the Kurds the best, especially given that Bitcoin's own Amir Taaki was fighting in their ranks for some years, but it's not the US's war to fight.

Note that I have added a new rule:

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.

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[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.

You have your own token, and you currently have no product, so I classify your site as an ICO.


Rejected, see your PMs.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 0.16 FirstGlobalCredit
4 0.12 ChipMixer
1 0.10 SwC_Poker
3 0.08 lightlord

I don't believe in politics as an effective way of doing anything. Look at Nigel Farage: he seems like a nice enough guy, and I more-or-less agree with his position, but he spent decades getting a brexit vote, and in the end it might all be for nothing. That's decades of time, effort, and pay down the drain. Even if he gets his desired no-deal-brexit, was all of that work really worth it to him and the people who funded him? I tend to think that the world would've been better off if he'd stayed a commodities trader and the UKIP donors used their money for something more fun/useful. (But people can choose what to do with themselves, of course.) And Farage is just an easy-to-understand example: I believe that nearly all political action is similarly a waste of resources, with each rare success being bought at a far higher price than it's worth.

I recommend against political donations, political volunteering, protests & similar political action, and I don't particularly encourage voting. That's all a waste of time. Instead, people should try to work around / in-spite-of politics. Wherever possible, don't put yourself in positions where you have to ask permission, even on small and/or non-governmental scales. Satoshi's creation of Bitcoin is a perfect example: in just a few years, Satoshi changed the world more than just about any politician, and he didn't have to compromise his principles whatsoever or ask permission from anyone. This is ideal.

So you'll probably never see me canvassing for any candidates or policies.

That said, I ironically very much enjoy following and discussing politics on a personal level, much like some people follow sports, and it can also pay to follow it because it can strongly affect eg. the prices of assets. If you look, you'll find that I do talk about US politics a fair bit. Brexit is especially interesting because it's unusual and unpredictable, unlike a lot of stuff in politics. IMO a no-deal brexit would at this point probably be the best result for the UK and the world, but again, I'm not recommending that anyone waste time on the matter.

Your most recent deleted posts were for posting multiple times in a row. Hence why one of your posts in the same thread was not deleted. Knock if off if you don't want deleted posts and/or bans.


Yeah, Jihan and I are best buds.

No.

This is a component of a comprehensive new set of recovery procedures which will be fully rolled out in the very near future (before the end of the year). This will allow recoveries to move forward at a reasonable pace again. But there is no immediate impact of this component to most people; I just needed to document it because the seclog entries are starting to appear.

If you are given an email address on the page which tells you that your account is locked, then it may have recently changed. If so, sending an email to the new address may expedite things.

No, the queue only applies when the administration changes the email address, not when you change it yourself. It's for recovering hacked accounts and similar. Most people don't need to care about it.

As an extra protection against any possible social engineering attacks, whenever^* the administration changes an account's email address from its current value, the following process occurs:
 - The change is queued.
 - It is listed in seclog.php.
 - The old email receives a warning.
 - After 7 days, the change goes through and another seclog.php entry is added.

The account stays locked throughout all of this.

Hopefully it will be essentially unheard of, but if an account is going to be incorrectly transferred, everyone who knows about the incorrect change should noisily post all of the evidence they have so that we can at least put the change on hold and re-review the evidence.

^{* Admins can act outside of procedure and bypass the queue if necessary, but hardly ever will.}

May's deal looks totally dead, but May herself seems relatively secure. It looks like nobody wants to take the blame when everything comes crashing down. I don't like her politics at all, and her deal was basically EU vassalage, but I kind of feel bad for May...

I think that no deal is likely to be reached, and they're going to cancel brexit at the last minute, either via a referendum or even unilaterally in parliament. Any future referendum will have a pro-EU result. Brexit's cancellation will absolutely infuriate the substantial minority of people who are still strongly pro-brexit. IMO the brexit people celebrated too soon, and haven't been doing enough to lock things up. Moreover, the whole UK political system has long been hopelessly screwed up, even moreso than the US, so it's difficult to expect any positive results in anything.

A no-deal brexit would probably be the best long-term result, especially if they can also bring themselves to significantly loosen their regulations vs the EU. The "A+ plan" would be very net-good for the UK long-term, for example, but it seems impossible; IMO the people of the UK would sooner accept May's vassalage deal with the EU than reduce their regulations so much. In any case, a hard brexit will probably cause a several-year-long economic depression in the UK as the economy adapts -- will the people freak out during this and demand returning to the EU (under extremely unfavorable terms)?

What are your predictions? If you're in the UK, how are things looking there?

This kind of algorithmic accident based on over-trusting the zeitgeist has existed pretty much since Google was first created. Remember "french military victories" being suggested to "french military defeats"? If you look for them, you'll find them.

But has anyone else noticed that Google Search has gotten really bad over the last few years? Oftentimes I search for something kind of obvious, half of the results on the front page are from the same site that I'm not interested in, and the things I'm looking for are either unfindable or many pages deep. I'd like to use DuckDuckGo, but it's really bad, only working (sometimes) for the most simple queries.

Then you can attack a competitor's topic by bumping it in the middle of the night, etc.

They've existed on Freenet since before Bitcoin existed, and they function pretty well. (Usenet is arguably also a very old form of decentralized forum.) The problem is that:
 - People are too lazy to install software to use a forum.
 - People don't want to be responsible for their own moderation. There are effective ways to do it which aren't manipulable and don't require wading through endless spam, but it's still work which every user must do for themselves. 99.9% of people simply won't do it. (Freenet's FMS inspired bitcointalk.org's trust system. Imagine the forum's trust system, but for moderation instead of trust, and no DefaultTrust.)

So there is essentially no demand. If you built it on the "new hotness" ipfs (which is Freenet but much worse... and I'm not a fan of Freenet's design), then maybe you'd get a bit of attention for a while, but it'd eventually fade.

No, because mistakes are occasionally made. chimk was framed that one time, for example.

I won't do pay-to-bump or similar because it removes any sense of fairness or community participation, and basically just makes a page of most-money-wins paid advertisements. (Paying a fixed fee to create a topic there is possible, though not high on my list, since that'd at least be fair.)

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I'm currently still leaning toward some per-topic metric based on merit, though probably not exactly what I originally stated. Limiting who can bump would be easier to implement, but the roughness/immediacy of it makes it more easy-to-manipulate IMO.

I only changed the message on autobans. ("Autoban" = lingo indicating a type of ban. They're usually not actually automatic.)

In most cases, the person's last PMs will be one or more "deleted post" PMs containing the messages that got them banned. If not, then the reason for their ban is more complicated, and certainly couldn't be automatically determined. Having moderators put a reason for every autoban is a waste of mods' time. Autobans are for obvious cases when appeals should only very rarely be accepted, which is why the appeal topics in Meta can be immediately rejected 99% of the time.

I have no respect for anyone who would even think of plagiarizing in the way that these people do. They don't belong here. Additional warnings will probably have nearly zero effect, and if it has any effect at all, it'll just turn fairly-easy-to-identify plagiarists into more ambiguous shitposters.

Do you mean total merit across all posts in the topic, or just for the OP?