That's true as well, but those sorts of sites (and the odd exchange as well) seem to be the only websites that can afford to spend thousands of dollars advertising on their website or service. If the forum wanted to show ads from interesting bitcoin startups with a lack of cash, they could consider opening a few more ad slots for auction, as that would drive down the price per slot, making it more affordable for startups. However, that's a completely different topic from this, so I'll just stop it there to prevent this thread from getting derailed.

I'm not sure that Og handles ICO escrows (his thread doesn't mention anything about it + I haven't seen him do it before), and if he doesn't, I know that SebastianJu is a trusted escrow provider who provides ICO escrow services for no fees.

I believe the person you're referring to is Spotswood (link to his website). It looks like he's active on the forums and still building GPU miner frames, so if you're interested in purchasing ones it'd probably be worthwhile to send him a PM.

I've found that using MyTrezor with a Trezor can sometimes slow things to a complete crawl, so I don't think it's any fault of the device itself. Whenever I've had issues with my Trezor being slow with MyTrezor, I switched to using Electrum with the Trezor and it was responsive again, so I suspect that most of these slow Trezor issues lie within the MyTrezor web app.

It looks like it breaks for me with a screen width of 1158px or less. Also, the rules for forum ads state that "Ads must appear 3 or fewer lines tall in my browser (Firefox, 900px wide)". I'm not sure how that ad got through screening, because it looks to me as the ad is more than three lines tall.

It means you won't be able to connect to the VPS using the Remote Desktop program that comes built in with Windows. Instead, you'll have to use Remote Utility Access to connect to the server.

Alternatively, you could look for a banned Senior member account. It would be totally worthless, you probably wouldn't receive negative trust for farming/spamming/scamming/etc, but it would allow you to test out your signatures. I don't think that would be considered ban evasion (since you weren't the person who received the ban), but it might be worthwhile to double check that with a staff member if you're interested in proceeding with that idea.

Not true. When theymos runs auctions for ad spaces on the website, he also includes data as to how many impressions previous ads have seen. Removing signature campaigns would decrease the impressions that ads see, and in turn, the amount of money brought in from ads for the forum.

I agree with you on the possibility of banning account sales. I think that would do good around here to cut down on the number of signature spammers there are going around posting absolute trash and cluttering up topics. The problem with banning account sales is that you're banning the sale of Bitcointalk accounts on this forum. There's nothing stopping these dealings from going on elsewhere, and accounts still changing hands.

I don't agree with you on banning signature campaigns. Although there are lots of users simply spamming for satoshis, there are plenty of users who actively contribute valuable content to the website and who wear paid signatures too. It makes sense to me - if you're already going to be posting on this website, why not get paid a little bit for doing what you're already doing?

It seems that hacked accounts have higher priority than lost accounts (ex. lost passwords) which makes sense, because there's the possibility that the account may be used for scamming. I remember it being mentioned a couple weeks ago here in the Meta section by a user who had his account both hacked, and then later forgot the password to the account after it was recovered. He said that his account was recovered much faster when it was hacked compared to when he lost the password to it.

That would be a very poor financial move for the forum. Signature campaigns increase traffic to the website, and in turn, the number of impressions that are seen by ads. Removing campaigns would result in a drop in traffic as well as a drop in ad revenue for the forum.

I'd still consider it open source even if you aren't able to contribute to the official repo. If one wants to contribute but isn't permitted to update the main Epochtalk repository, they can just make a fork of Epochtalk and make their changes in their own repo. Open source just means that all the code is openly available to anyone who wishes to view it, it doesn't require that you're permitted to contribute to the official project though.

Correction: Epochtalk is already open source. Here's a link to the project on Github.

This thread isn't talking about VPN's, it's discussing VPS' (virtual private servers).

OP, I don't think you'll find a Windows Server VPS for $1 a month (it looks like most places charge ~ $5 USD per month for a Windows VPS), but if $1 a month is your budget you can get a half-decent Linux VPS for $11 annually.

You shouldn't need to open port 8333 unless you want that device to be a full node, so I'd close that port again and increase your router's security level to prevent any network intrusions. Are you running the latest version of Bitcoin Core? If I remember right, some of the old versions of Bitcoin Core can't sync with the network anymore. That could be what's causing your issue, especially when you mention that you've rarely used that computer for a couple of years now. Plus, the newer versions of Bitcoin Core sync much faster than the older versions, and offer pruning as well (reducing the storage requirements for running Bitcoin Core).

I realize this thread is pretty old, but it's still relevant so I'll give my two cents.

If you're looking for a cheap VPS, I'd recommend following the LowEndBox blog. They seem to be a reliable source for posting cheap and low-end VPS'. For example, AlphaRacks currently has a deal on their 768MB/single core VPS for $11 USD a year, and they accept Bitcoin. Link to the LowEndBox article about it.

As long as your cold storage system has up-to-date balances on your addresses you should be able to still broadcast transactions generated by older versions of Electrum without issue. If it doesn't have up-to-date balances, it may not work. For example, if an address has a zero balance, but your cold storage system says the address still has a 0.01 BTC balance, that transaction won't broadcast because it's invalid (trying to spend funds that are no longer there).

As unamis76 mentioned, your first step should be to disconnect that device from your network, as well as any other connections to other devices. Instead of cleaning the infected computer I'd recommend backing up important data using a Bootable OS (Ubuntu, for example) , then completely wiping the drives in the machine, and finally reinstalling the operating system. That should ensure the machine is no longer infected (as long as the virus doesn't lie within the motherboard's BIOS).

I haven't been able to test out the image to verify if it's "clean" or not, but OP, if you're serious about distributing these images you could consider starting bitcoin-d automatically on boot with a cron command or with init.d.

I think a better alternative to distributing images would be distributing a .sh file that automatically installs bitcoin-d, and updates/upgrades the OS in the process as well. It's easier to verify that a .sh file is clean than it is with an entire disk image.

From what I can see, the reference link posted along with his trust rating doesn't prove anything. I'm not sure what the entire backstory to him leaving the negative trust rating is, but I wouldn't worry too much about the rating. It isn't a rating from a member on the default trust list, so it has no real effect on your account.

That isn't completely true. There are quite a few escrow providers who are already highly trusted and offer free escrow services (SebastianJu, for example). Of course it's appreciated to tip an escrow provider but lots of the escrow providers around here escrow deals for free to prevent scams. If it takes them 30 minutes to prevent someone from being scammed a few hundred bucks, they're happy with that.