Topic: Huge donations to bitcointalk - page 2. (Read 861 times)

The forum has - if I recall correctly - over a million dollars in reserve. Besides, the donations don't pay mods; it's from ad revenue.


The staff payments are just encouragement to stay around and keep working. Without some form of compensation most mods would probably fizzle away eventually, or the work they do would take a backseat. I've moderated a few boards before and I've never been paid on those ones, and mods get tired eventually or just disappear. It's often a thankless task and you're more likely to make more enemies than friends but getting paid is a good reason to stay around and do a good job.


I'm not sure what the current situation with the forum development  is. There was a team I believe that was hired but I don't know whether they're still involved or to what capacity.


We could add different/new donator ranks. Many of us have suggested things like Silver and Gold Memberships. Personally I think they would be very popular/lucrative and would also curb account sales as people would just buy the membership instead of risking it buying an account which is already a shady market.


You don't need to use google ads. Theymos doesn't seem keen on adding additional revenue sources anyway, but you could just add more banners here if you wanted more income from adverts. As I suggested before, having one at the top of sub boards would be lucrative and companies can target what areas they want to advertise in ie a gambling company would advertise in a gambling board.


I'm not sure what that means.

The moderation system here is becoming like stackoverflow.

Another thing is that Google only allows certified licensed gambling websites to advertise their businesses. So lack of competition and more repetition of ads.

That was the total value of the current Balance.
We don't know if the Balance was:
1. Total Current Donations
2. The Remaining Donations From The Past
3. A Figure with Mix Digits from Forum Advertising

And Looking back on 2017&2018 where theymos did bring as a small breakdown of expenses, I think $1.7M is not that really big especially if they have tons of expenses just to bring a healthy forum.

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The reason why we see some Mods getting their Signatures rented. 👆👆👆

$1.7 million is huge money indeed, but don't forget that most of big donations (50 or 100 BTC) were made long time ago when Bitcoin wasn't $11k. And I may be wrong, but I think that Bitcointalk have much more BTC in reserves. And big donations still happens, but in BTC it's that huge as it was almost decade ago. And I really don't know why people are still donating big money, when it was said multiple times that forum don't need donations to survive.

If you look to forum from business perspective, you're right. There is many ways how Bitcointalk can be monetised better. But I think Google ads is one of last things together with KYC which could be added to forum.
First reason why is privacy. I won't go into details because it's obvious.
Another thing is that you can't control content of advertisement. There is so many reports about scams and phishing websites advertised on Google. Probably it wouldn't be good to see such ads on Bitcointalk.
And finally, Bitcointalk isn't commercial business website which needs to maximize profits. Currently Bitcointalk have enough income to continue operations, pay to staff and for development of new software. There is no reason to look for extra income now.
Bitcointalk is one of rare websites which don't have million  ads and you don't need ad blocker hera and I really appreciate that.

Personally, despite the frequent requests to reduce the donation amount required for a rank I've always respected the fact that it hasn't happened, and the stance has been relatively firm.
I'm one of these people who have started to boycott some big companies including Google as I find the way they handle things, and specifically the privacy concerns to be too much to justify using their probably superior services to their competitors.  

Start using Google Ads and scammers will use it to advertise phishing websites pretending to be Ledger and Trezor. Search "Ledger" on Google and sometimes you will get a scam website asking for your seed. We don't need Newbies coming here, saying that they got scammed by an ad they saw on the forum (also, ponzis).

Google sucks. At least theymos knows what he is doing when he accepts someone's banner in the ad rounds.

*~$100 (BTC didn't got below $2 since theymos started accepting donations in return for Donator and VIP titles).


Bitcointalk.org is primarily a discussion forum, not a business ran to maximize income. There are many reasons against having Google ads, such as: privacy, preferring to have more control over which ads are shown on the page, and not wanting to censor more content than necessary just to please Google (to be compliant with their gambling policies, among others).

I tired to open this blockchair link to see the transactions and see what i got  



Anyways, there are many generous people around the world who can donate to anyone whom they like. You and me have no rights to ask "How this is happening"

Sometime i feel that forum is missing a lot of funds by not using google ads. With the sort of traffic, this forum generates, google ads could generate a lot of revenue for the forum, but then it will not remain as clean (ads free) as it is now.

True, the size of the donation is relative to the price, you cannot compare the 50btc donation when the price is at $100 and 1btc donation as for the price now. Don't just mind the amount if someone donates, instead thank him/her for the donation, no need to calculate how much is it in $$$ and I guess theymos isn't waiting for the price to spend those bitcoins, he spends it no matter how much the price is.

Let us not forget this forum is actively looking forward to give you best experience.

I mean we have seen people coming in meta thread and asking for XYZ changes on the forum. It could be anything from layout to adding buttons or may adding more security etc. Each time admins have listened to the improvements that were deemed necessary.

I am pretty sure that costs something. Also the number of mods are also increasing and surely they get paid little amounts as well. I can tell this from very old thread here, Are the mods getting paid from this forum?

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That new forum is a fortune and I believe there is only one developer?

Well, you have from servers to website hosting to maintain for handling huge traffics.

And then there are mods that have to be compensated in order to work. If you're a security guard, no way you'd guard Google's headquarters for free, right? Same concept in most major forums

Thanks for bringing it up. Well, I think mods deserve to get paid for their hard work. And I don't care how much money spent from this forum donations. Honestly, I tried to mine a few satoshis in 2010, but I didn't have much interest in bitcoin and cryptocurrency until I found the ethereum presale wallet in this forum. And I think all of the admins and staff have done a super great job and the money is not enough to pay their sacrifices and efforts. Bitcointalk is one of the largest tech community and family in the world, and you guys are rock!

Mind boggling that it took 20 posts for this to be mentioned.

These days if you're happy to donate 50 BTC to become an official donator then more power to you but you're likely to be in a microscopic minority. Once upon a time that was 50 bucks and less which is when many of the donations would've been made. The origins of this forum came together before Bitcoin itself even had a price.

We have to pay for the psychiatrist's sessions if we want to keep doing the job .


If the forum has no more money, or if Theymos decides to stop paying mods, some will leave, others will stay. In what proportion ? I don't know.

You may be forgetting that the bigger donations (as amount of Bitcoin) were made when Bitcoin was small, most probably under 200$.
Many of the spent Bitcoin may be also at low prices. This means that if you calculate everything at today's price of Bitcoin you'll be awfully wrong.

Also, as TryNinja said, quite some of the later income should be from advertising and maybe copper membership too.

The forum doesn't live out of donations.

theymos does ad rounds almost bi-weekly (last one) for the ads you sometimes see under the threads. In the last one, he got 0.63 BTC (for ~12+ days).

And he probably has some spare amount saved.

Good clarification, I have always thought why mods don't participate in signature campaigns, despite their eligible higher rank, mods are doing greater job on the forum keeping it clean and spam free. @theymos knew all reasons for it, everything in place, and therefore, donation is not mandatory but voluntarily at OP.