Copper membership provides newbies with the ability to bypass some of the new member restrictions and post images.

EDIT:

This recent quote from Theymos makes some of the statistics quoted in this article incorrect.

Quote from: theymos on September 18, 2018, 10:50:15 PM

The member search page only returns a maximum number of results. Currently there are 3145 copper members. Maybe I'll compile stats over time later. For now, you could search the Bitcoin block chain for transactions of the copper-member amount.

-END EDIT-

If you register with a IP that has units of Evil any payment towards unblocking the IP go towards a Copper membership.

Below the following quotes by Theymos explaining Copper membership and Units of Evil is a lits of all the current Copper members.

Currently a single unit of evil costs about 300 Satoshis.[/b][/size]

The notice you see if you sign up and are proxy banned:

Information about obtaining copper membership:

How to get copper membership: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=credit;promote

Quote from: theymos on November 10, 2017, 09:23:30 PM

By popular demand, newbies can now pay to have some of their restrictions lifted. If you pay the fee, you become a Copper Member, and you can post images. That's the main point of this: allowing newbies to post images. Additionally (and these might change depending on how things go), Copper Members currently have these bonuses:

- Some of the same permissions as Member-rank members, such as reduced signature styling restrictions. (But none of the PM-related restrictions are currently lifted, such as the style limit or per-hour PM limit.)
- Your "you must wait ____ seconds between ___" counter is reduced by 75%. So if you're naturally of Newbie rank, you only have to wait 360-75% = 90 seconds.

If you paid an "evil IP" registration fee, then whatever you paid (in BTC terms) is subtracted from the upgrade fee. If you paid a registration fee a long time ago, you might even get a free Copper Membership due to the increase in BTC price. Just visit the link at the bottom of this post to check whether you have it already.

I am aware that for most people the benefits of this membership are pretty lame. This membership is only intended to fill a specific niche; if you don't need it, don't buy it. It is not intended to be the lower-cost Donator/VIP alternative which I've talked about before as a possibility.

I wrote the system so that I can easily add additional paid memberships in the future, but I might not ever do so. Not sure.

You can buy it here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=credit;promote

The ban map:

The IP location map:

Quote from: theymos on October 21, 2015, 07:40:32 AM

When someone is banned, their IP and some of their neighboring IPs receive evil points. The thought occurred to me recently that you could create a map of the Internet according to evil points, and I couldn't resist doing this right away. The result is pretty cool-looking IMO. It also seems to show that the evil score system is working as expected: the vast majority of the Internet is not being forced to pay, and in the isolated sections where a registration fee is required, prohibitively-large fees are very rare.

Here's the image (zoom in):
https://bitcointalk.org/banmap201510.png

Each pixel is a /24 address block (ie. each pixel represents 256 IP addresses). The colors are:
█ Zero or nearly zero evil
█ A small amount of evil
█ More
█ More
█ At this point you actually have to pay if you register an account in this block
█ More
█ More
█ More
█ Pretty high
█ A ton of evil, more than anyone is likely to pay

This is per block, so a single IP address could have an evil score requiring payment while its block still shows up as black here. A colored pixel indicates the evil score of a typical IP in that block.

Addresses are laid out in the standard way. So you can for example cross-reference with these maps: https://ant.isi.edu/address/

A /24 should almost never uniquely identify someone, but to be safe I randomly added, removed, and modified some of this data for plausible deniability.

Quote from: theymos on July 27, 2014, 04:08:57 AM

When you register, the IP that you used when you submitted the registration form is used to calculate your evilness. The more frequently this IP or its neighbors were banned, the more evil is associated with your account. The amount of evil associated with an IP decays slowly over time, but the amount of evil associated with an account does not. You must pay or be manually whitelisted to enable posting on one of these "banned" accounts.

Here are some stats:

Evil	% new users
0	53
0-1	35
1-10	4.4
10-20	0.80
20-50	2.2
50-100	1.3
100+	2.9

Currently each unit of evil requires a payment of 4023 satoshi. You only need to pay something if you have 1 or more, though.

Comments, corrections and additions welcomed.