Quote from: Eyedol-X on August 02, 2017, 12:51:01 PM

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The Bitcoin Forum is a website meant to host free discussion of Bitcoin and related topics. It is operated mainly as a service to the community, and the vast majority of income after expenses is either saved for future expenses or reinvested into the forum or the community. The forum was started in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, the original creator of Bitcoin. It is now managed by theymos, BadBear, Cyrus, and a dedicated team of moderators. Forum finances are managed by theymos.

If you donate 10 BTC, you can get a special "Donator" title and a green "who's online" color. If you donate 50 BTC, you get VIP status and the ability to create a custom title for yourself. Both Donators and VIPs also get access to an exclusive forum section. You must contact theymos prior to donating if you want to take advantage of this offer: you will be given a unique donation address. See this forum topic for more details.

Thank you for your interest in donating to the Bitcoin Forum!

Quote from: theymos on August 19, 2011, 08:29:22 AM

If you donate 10 BTC (which pays for about a month of hosting), you get donator status:

If you donate 50 BTC, you get VIP status, which allows you to set a custom title:

This is not (yet) automatic: you need to PM me before donating. See the new donation page for more details.

This is part of an effort to make the forum self-sustaining. If donations alone are not enough, a few auctioned-off text ads will probably be added.

I came here today looking for what is involved in donating and what perks, if any, exist.

I must say the vision of donating 10/50BTC when it was created refers to 10 BTC paying for 1 month of hosting for the site. That amount seems almost unbelievable today unless this forums monthly costs are much bigger than I could have imagined.

1 BTC floating around $2700 USD right now and this translates to $27,000 USD for Donator and $135,000 for VIP.

I understand that it should be respected for the people that donated these amounts back in their day and even Claymore semi-recently earning Donator status for his 10 BTC Donation but IMO these ranks and price points should be retired for something more palatable and reasonable.

As others have suggested, I will also suggest, perhaps it's time to create a new donator structure that is based off of the fiat dollar amount at the time of the donation so the "NEW" VIP could be something reasonable?

I would also go further to suggest that maybe there are different tiers of donation titles or something as has been done on other message boards. I know this is isn't something that can not be done overnight and it takes a lot of thought/work to implement.

Thanks for the consideration.

For the record, I already have asked theymos about changing the amount to achieve Donator and VIP status. His explanation was quite brief: changing it into something smaller than what it is could be grounds for services and people to abuse the system to scam. Of course, many malicious user would take advantage of a couple hundred bucks to potentially scam thousands because people will trust them due to their status.

Even VIP and Donators can scam or fuck the hell out of your bitcoins. See TradeFortress and the now defunct betcoin.tm. The latter I have experienced being tossed from one to another rep for just 1.5 bitcoins.