How bitcointalk.org earns money

[philanthropist67]

Can someone highlight how this forum earns money to pay for its services like paying for the hosting services etc.?

Secondly this forum is created by satoshi but he is no more active. So who actually is the true administrator of this forum?

[1715158246]

1715158246

[jackg]

The forum makes money mostly from advertising at the moment. You'll see on every thread, below the first post, there's a space give to an advertising spot or a special spot (that's normally a quote or a link) - you can click the advertise here link near the disclaimer at the bottom of the ads to find out more information on them.

The forum also makes some money out of charging evil fees for banned ip addresses (such as ones created over tor) and has donator ranks that can be paid for (as well as a copper membership rank too).

Theymos is the main administrator over the forum also now, Satoshi left the forum to them and cobra (afaik) - and cobra recently resigned their control of the forum to Theymos. We've had two admins while I've noticed them here, the first was badbear and the second was cyrus.

[tranthidung]

Can someone highlight how this forum earns money to pay for its services like paying for the hosting services etc.?

The forum asked for donation years ago and the fund is big with price of Bitcoin now. Theymos said as a head admin that the forum does not need more donation when the community discussed that the required BTC to get VIP or donator badge should be reduced. theymos emphasizes that it is a Bitcoin forum so donation will be in Bitcoin.

• Theymos should reconsider amount for "Donator" and "VIP" status.

I am holding too much money for the forum. This is contrary to the forum's otherwise decentralized structure. I'd like to get some extremely trustworthy people to hold smaller chunks of the forum's money (maybe 250-500 BTC per person).

- More money is better than less money. I'm not going to turn down donations when people want to donate. (Though when asked, I often recommend that people not donate.) I'm not going to stop selling ads even though the forum probably has "enough" money. It's not bad for the forum to have extra money. It will be used on something useful at some point. If you don't like this, don't donate.
- More than half of the forum's money is from ads, not donations.
- During the school year, I am a full time student. I barely have time to administrate the forum.
- When I do have time, there are many interesting/important/fun things that compete for my attention. I don't spend all day working on the forum. I've certainly not been working full-time for 12 months on vaporware forum software...

Hidden links to donation and advertisement.

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Hidden pages/ features

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Usecase descriptions

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Forum donation

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Donate

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Info on forum donators (donators - 10 BTC, VIP - 50 BTC). Honorable cases are not included

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Ads

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adinfo

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Get information on current ad slots (9 main slots and 1 factoid slot)

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adstats

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lists ~exact impression counts for ads

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Secondly this forum is created by satoshi but he is no more active. So who actually is the true administrator of this forum?

Forum history

• 2009 - 2011
  
  • satoshi created the forum and was a head admin
• 2011 to 2012
  
  • sirius was a head amin
• 2012
  
  • theymos took over the head admin position and he is the head admin of the forum so far, together with Cyrus.
  • I don't know since when Cyrus became the second head admin of the forum. I only remembered he was promoted from a global moderator.
• Domain name
  
  • Cobra & theymos have access to the domain name
  • Since April 2020, only theymos has access to it.

It's surprising how well-documented history can become totally forgotten... Satoshi created the forum on Nov 22, 2009, and was head administrator until almost 2011. Then Sirius was head administrator until 2012, which is when I took over.

Cobra also owns the bitcointalk.org domain name. I consider the forum to be basically owned by or at least dedicated to the Bitcoin community, though; I don't call anyone an owner of the forum.

That wiki article is kind of terrible...

There was a period where both Sirius and I were active administrators. For convenience, I reckon Jan 1, 2012 as when I became head administrator, though it was actually a gradual transition starting before and ending after that.

The story of how I became head admin is actually pretty boring. Moderators were needed, so I was made a global moderator. Then admins were needed, so I was made an admin. Then over time the other admins slowly lost interest and resigned until I was the only one left. I guess most of the people who were around here to see this have more-or-less left the community now. That's a bit sad.

It's not entirely clear, but for simplicity I usually say that I became head admin at the beginning of 2011, a little over a year after the forum was created.

The forum was originally located at bitcoin.org/smf, then forum.bitcoin.org (hence the redirect), and finally bitcointalk.org. Fun fact: The name "bitcointalk" was invented by Jeff Garzik, and he's the one who bought the domain.

Domain access

Bitcointalk.org:
 - Cobra has ultimate control over the domain name. I have access to the domain name settings.
 - I run the server. Cobra has no access to the database or server.
 - The BTC is held by myself and the treasurers. Cobra has no access.

Satoshi created both bitcoin.org and this forum, which was originally at bitcoin.org/smf. Later, the forum got its own domain name, but due to this history, bitcoin.org and bitcointalk.org have traditionally been linked, and for quite some time Cøbra and I have together managed the domain names. However, Cøbra has never had much involvement in bitcointalk.org's operation, and I haven't involved myself in bitcoin.org for a couple of years, so the linkage between the two no longer really made made any sense. Therefore, we decided to separate the domains: I no longer have any access to the bitcoin.org domain name, and Cøbra no longer has any access to the bitcointalk.org domain name. The two sites should be viewed as totally separate, which in practice they have been for years.

There will be no changes whatsoever on bitcointalk.org due to this, and I'd assume that the same will be true of bitcoin.org. The bitcoin.org open-source project has been advancing steadily, and I hope and expect that it will continue to do so thanks to the efforts of its contributors.

Thanks to Cøbra for handling much of bitcointalk.org's domain-name-related work in the past.

[NeuroticFish]

I think that most is covered. I would add that the forum didn't spend all the money received in the past, hence it's holding bitcoin. And with the rise of bitcoin price, the forum actually have enough money to cover the expenses.

Because we are able to operate comfortably using advertising and fee revenue along with our BTC reserves, we no longer collect donations. If you want to help the forum, please make good posts, report rule-breaking posts, and invite friends. If you want to donate BTC, donate it to a charity, or maybe even to your fellow forum members.

Actually the entire donation page is an interesting read.

[coinism]

The forum makes money mostly from advertising at the moment. You'll see on every thread, below the first post, there's a space give to an advertising spot or a special spot (that's normally a quote or a link) - you can click the advertise here link near the disclaimer at the bottom of the ads to find out more information on them.

The forum also makes some money out of charging evil fees for banned ip addresses (such as ones created over tor) and has donator ranks that can be paid for (as well as a copper membership rank too).

Theymos is the main administrator over the forum also now, Satoshi left the forum to them and cobra (afaik) - and cobra recently resigned their control of the forum to Theymos. We've had two admins while I've noticed them here, the first was badbear and the second was cyrus.

Can we extract from this that Theymos is close to satoshi since he took over charge from satoshi. He is previously in contact with satoshi for sure.

[Little Mouse]

Can we extract from this that Theymos is close to satoshi since he took over charge from satoshi. He is previously in contact with satoshi for sure.

Theymos was active in the forum back in the day and from the oldest too I think. It's not like he joined the forum and made an admin. Forum was created in 2009 while theymos become an admin in 2012. That doesn’t ensure anything like you are expecting.

The story of how I became head admin is actually pretty boring. Moderators were needed, so I was made a global moderator. Then admins were needed, so I was made an admin. Then over time the other admins slowly lost interest and resigned until I was the only one left. I guess most of the people who were around here to see this have more-or-less left the community now. That's a bit sad.

It's not entirely clear, but for simplicity I usually say that I became head admin at the beginning of 2011, a little over a year after the forum was created.

The forum was originally located at bitcoin.org/smf, then forum.bitcoin.org (hence the redirect), and finally bitcointalk.org. Fun fact: The name "bitcointalk" was invented by Jeff Garzik, and he's the one who bought the domain.

[jackg]

Can we extract from this that Theymos is close to satoshi since he took over charge from satoshi. He is previously in contact with satoshi for sure.

We can probably speculate that people actually interested in the technology and who seemed quite friendly got on quite well, indeed a lot of people here still do and can.

I'd say Theymos, satoshi and a few others probably got along quite well (or at least didn't hate each other) and it doesn't take long for people to feel comfortable around people and to know what they're about (the same is true for discomfort and hostility - which is harder for people to bother to ignore online).

We don't know for sure how things might have been handled at the start too. Satoshi handed the forum's domain over to two people and things were given to other teams too - like I don't think Theymos or cobra had too much power over the git repo and there are two main bitcoin sites you can use to download what claim to be the official bitcoin client - the main one being bitcoincore.org and I'm not sure who controls that.

It's also very hard to delete stuff online, perhaps satoshi thought they'd just start up a rival forum if Theymos went rogue and provide proof they are satoshi.

[nakamura12]

Theymos was active in the forum back in the day and from the oldest too I think. It's not like he joined the forum and made an admin. Forum was created in 2009 while theymos become an admin in 2012. That doesn’t ensure anything like you are expecting.

Well, there is a part that Theymos joined the forum and few years later become an admin. It is the same in my experience before where the forum I joined is running as it is then later on the forum admin needed a moderator/staff. I applied and got the position as moderator to help manage the forum and delete posts. It was a forum for cryptocurrency but as of now, it seems it can be accessed but cannot log in.

[Pmalek]

Can we extract from this that Theymos is close to satoshi since he took over charge from satoshi. He is previously in contact with satoshi for sure.

You have to understand that the Bitcoin/Bitcointalk community was different in those days. Bitcoin still didn't find it's real use case and people were in it for the technology and the advantages a decentralized currency gave them. Theymos gradually progressed up the forum ranks to where he is now. He knew how to run the forum, had an interest in bitcoin, and did the things other users lost the interest for (as he stated in one of his quoted posts).     

[Jawadu]

Can someone highlight how this forum earns money to pay for its services like paying for the hosting services etc.?

It's obvious they pay a lot of money to host this forum because it has many members and new content every single day! The good thing is that I see ads under topics, and if I start my own topic an ad will appear when the topic get at least one reply. Maybe they also get money from copper accounts because I see a lot of copper accounts in the bounty section.

Secondly this forum is created by satoshi but he is no more active. So who actually is the true administrator of this forum?

I only know Theymos as the head admin, but he appointed moderators to help him because it is a tough job to manage the whole BTT forum yourself. That's why you'll see different moderators manage some categories (subforums).

[GeorgeJohn]

Can someone highlight how this forum earns money to pay for its services like paying for the hosting services etc.?

i don't know quite well how forum generate the funds used to run the community of bitcointalk, but i assumed that they probably get some certain revenue's through equivalent methods a signature campaigns generate income they use to pay their participants, which i can directly say, is through advertisement but I'm not really sure, because from the looks of things the community is curious about bitcoin development technology.

Secondly this forum is created by satoshi but he is no more active. So who actually is the true administrator of this forum?

from the look of things since i joined the community earlier june 2020, it's theymos i know vividly that controls the forum, other people obtain instruction from theymos, so therefore its a general administrator... Even you as a person it quite well that you know, you just want to seek the opinion of people, which, from perspective is encouraging, because is obvious that if you are not informed you are totally deformed of information.

[decodx]

I think that most is covered. I would add that the forum didn't spend all the money received in the past, hence it's holding bitcoin. And with the rise of bitcoin price, the forum actually have enough money to cover the expenses.

Because we are able to operate comfortably using advertising and fee revenue along with our BTC reserves, we no longer collect donations. If you want to help the forum, please make good posts, report rule-breaking posts, and invite friends. If you want to donate BTC, donate it to a charity, or maybe even to your fellow forum members.

Actually the entire donation page is an interesting read.

Is there any public record somewhere showing how much BTC bitcointalk.org (theymos) holds at the moment?

I saw some old thread and post from theymos:

There's currently about 1250 BTC(+BCH) in reserve.
<...>

Is there any updated information?

[NeuroticFish]

Is there any updated information?

The last info is in this topic. In this moment it shows that it was last edited this year.
Also it's consistent with the old known addresses. You'll see that 750 didn't move and 500 have moved to multisig.

BTC750 in https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/19XTo6BHpPHSkW5cm183VrgEYpGjVJmQEt
BTC500 in https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1Eog8UqRFLufC71rBLt2nYgfUDskgxAyVF

Also it's expected that those old funds will remain untouched, since the ad revenues may cover everything good.