Topic: Huge donations to bitcointalk (Read 868 times)

I'm not surprise with the amount of donation receive by the forum, it's big but they deserve it as this forum creates a good community that has a lot of leaders in the crypto space and good influencers  as well. If you based it on USD, it would change from time to time as bitcoin's price is volatile, but regardless of course, the amount of donation is huge for us but this is a huge forum, maintaining the site with millions of members is very expensive.

Theymos on the other hand does not need to inform us where the money is coming because he owns the forum and we are no stockholders or investors, but he still showed some transparency based on the post shared above.

If you were, then we have one mystery solved hahahaha

Why worry about donations that you're not contributing to, we should be happy there's enough reserve to take care of the forum expense for years to come even when the forum decide to shutdown every other revenue source like ad slots. The bitcoin community is known for its generosity and that's what we should be advocating for. Donating to the forum shouldn't be a course for debating as the forum has done enough for millions of people.

Maybe we should even have a dedicated day for donating to the forum, a day you can donate as little as you have and we just celebrate the forum for all the knowledge and opportunity it has provided for the community.

It is money donated to the forum and the people handing it over do it for the benefit of the forum. The needy can set up their own donation addresses somewhere.

You can read about it on the donation page here - https://bitcointalk.org/donate.html

"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 original thread about it is here - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/get-donator-status-by-donating-10-btc-38071

As you can see when it began a donation of 10 BTC was enough to pay for one month of site hosting.

Wait a minute what is the donation use for I guess it should be given to the needdy instead. That's a whole lot of money to be presided. We should get up some answers to this question: Do admin(s) use it instead of donating?

So 1.7 million, but the address has spent 9000 plus coins


To me the dec 4 2017  deposit is of interest.

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/7e26ca9197f46bbc8a7c9adf922cb6bdadf967a585e8ac5809583bcd6fb16b6b

I think I remember what those 12 coins were.

Looking at the wallet from Nov 24 to dec 31 of 2017 is fun



https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/17RTTUAiiPqUTKtEggJPec8RxLMi2n9EZ9?page=54


pages 54 to 51

Never heard theymos has a Girlfriend, what's more with offsprings 😂

✌️😁 I do hope i won't be penalize with this 😂😂😂

I guess most were stored before the whole skyrocket thingy. With that amount of supply, theymos' offsprings and future offsprings' could enjoy his inheritance

Never know about that, good thing this thread existed.
I almost drooled on that sum of money, I really didn't know we have that much in this Forum.
Man, I really don't know how long does Bitcoins already taken (in terms of acknowledgement/achievement, etc) maybe words aren't enough to describe the Journey of BTC

When we talk about donation, it is not a force payment. You donate because you are willing to share an amount to others. The forum also needs donation to the people specially that there are many users here who have been successful because of the forum. We gain money in this site as well as the knowledge coming from the brilliant people. So, I think giving a donation to that address is enough to pay all the things that crypto made to them.

It is really huge amount and I think older accounts donated it back when the price of bitcoin was really low.

I would be utterly fucking devastated but it also depends on how much I had and I assume no one donated if they were going to miss that amount.

We can assume many are long gone and likely long sold so it's just another tx that haunts them.

Probably, but there's a silver lining; those transactions made back then when bitcoins were just figures in a wallet was the foundation for its growth as a currency, similar to the 10,000BTC pizzas; which quickened bitcoins' use as a payment option.

And they are not really financially driven, cause during the early days of the forum, they moderated voluntarily and put in effort to grow the community without any renumeration. This is the case when new forums are starting up, but the fact not all actually take off to become popular means there's no guarantee also.

Same here. I've tried to get off google/chrome as much as humanly possible. If you haven't tried the Brave browser I'd highly recommend it. I switched to that recently and still use DuckDuck as the search engine.  Google is hands down the best browser / search engine, so sometimes using it is a necessary evil though of course.


OP- the mods do a ton here. The amount of work many of them do here is insane (esp global mods like Hilarious). They deserve every satoshi.

Pretty irrelavant but I'm curious if donators ever regret the amount they donated like for example, someone donated 100 btc at few dollars per BTC in 2011 but now it's worth a million!!!

I remember theymos was dreaming about: We should build a seastead. Probably, the mean idea behind seastead was that governments don't sell parts on the sea unlikely lands. Idk if he still dreams about that, more likely, yes and he may wait for futher rise of bitcoin's price. I think if bitcoin really reaches 100k or something like this, theymos will truly think about this and forum funds may be used for that?

I was suspended for 3 days over the bolded, but I was not informed by any mod or staff that nuked it (no one could figure out why either when I created a thread using my alt), until days later when I noticed my thread posted under Micro Earnings (which had been running for months without any hiccups) disappeared without a trace.

Basically if that counts as a refspam, now I know but they have to give the source (offending URL) behind the suspension. I've never refspammed prior to the incident and it somewhat caught me by surprise.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/forum-funds-155000

The total number seems to be closer to $16 million dollars at current USD/BTC exchange rate. So way more than enough than any online discussion forum could ever need.

Theymos mentioned before he didn't want to do sponsored/prioritised or stickied posts, hence why I suggested the sub board ads as a compromise.


Yes.


I dunno. This forum is pretty liberal when it comes to staff and normally people get away with more than they should, but I guess some people feel censored whenever they have any post removed even it if was against the rules. I've seen people hysterically cry over having a ref link removed or even claim having their thread moved to the correct sub board is 'censorship'.

Yes, that's pretty viable. Another way is to also feature sponsored/ prioritized posts or stickies to boost their presence.

By the way, theymos solely determines the advertisers (from the bidding), right?



I think what he meant that it's style of censorship; mods deleting at their own discretion.

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. 

What if the donators get tired and do not donate anymore, how would the moderators be able to be paid?

I guess you OP you though of the donation is only for the mods and upper devs, you just can't believe the huge amount it received not thinking about the expenses they need to manage the forum.  Besides that is where mods are getting paid, they have job and it's not easy to maintain the forum's quality and credibility so why not donate some? @theymos is presenting the website's expenses every year, you might just want to look for those. Thanks to those people who have donated  you guys are pretty awesome and supportive.

What? Do you have the slightest idea about what you are talking about? Donation to BitcoinTalk is used for Bitcoin development? How about you stop shit posting for your signature payment?

Your point is logical but not fully described.Bitcointalk forum donation isn't for only this forum moderators.
This is all for the development of Bitcoin.

The 'forum software project' is payment for development of a new forum.


No mod is paid a wage per se (except for maybe Cyrus and co with his Cryptios company but I don't know the terms of that deal). It all depends on how much 'work' you do, but it's capped at a certain amount. If you do nothing you'll get nothing. If you do a little you'll get a little. Last month almost 1btc was paid out between 26 mods ($9157). Three of those received nothing. 8 of those received less than $100 or just a little bit more.

You're completely underestimating how difficult it is to run a successful forum or website in general; and remember that we're even talking about the #1 Bitcoin and cryptocurrency forum that's ranked at website #24,833 globally[1].

What's your point in the first place? That Theymos doesn't deserve what he got for all the hard work that he's done for the community?

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[1] https://www.similarweb.com/website/bitcointalk.org/

Well, I guess it's for the new development software of the forum, Epochtalk, not smf.

Now you did.

Look at the quoted post of theymos above for the expenses paid to mods.

If some of the post and thread are getting deleted, some user's are getting ban or nuke that is Moderator's doings. They have a lot of job here and they are keeping the forum clean as possible, LOL. The forum software is the forum itself, so we are enjoying using this forum smoothly, There's no such thing as free on running a website/forum. 

According to this list, there are 36 officials admin staff and mods. Let's say their average wage is a grand a month, and that will cost 36K for a month and 432K for a year. They are human and need money to run and make this place civilized. They have full rights that don't need to be questioned, IMO.

I think a lot has been spent on the development of new forum software (epochtalk).

Mods deserve to be paid too. It's not easy running a forum like bitcointalk. Imagine the number of reports they have to handle everyday. I'm not sure if payment to mods come from forum donations though. What I know is that it comes from forum ad revenue.

Edit: adding reference

Forum software?? Mods?? Why should both get paid? Isn't smf free? I haven't heard any other mod to get paid.

Bull markets can make some people feel superb happy with profits they get and big donations can be made consequently.

If you read the Stats on active & merit status of Donators & VIPs after 10 years you will know the latest VIP members (from 50 BTC donation is Claymore) and it happened during the bullish market in 2017. I believe Claymore earned lots of income from miners, especially from Ethereum miners and he love the forum too, then he donated 50 BTC.

I don't know if there is a more recent update on the information, but it has been publicly made available here:


Check-out the donations readings over the last few years.

You can't run a site like this on a $20 VPS.

One thing we can confirm is that the address is the donation address of the forum.

https://bitcointalk.org/donate.html

However, we can't determine or tell where that donation is coming or for what purpose, only the admin can tell as they are the ones who are in control of that wallet, but I would not bother to ask because donations are mostly anonymous, unless you want to belong in the list which I think are coming from early stage donors.

just look at the btc figure from the wallet address so you'll not be confuse.

btc receive : 9839.23238496 BTC while the final balance is only 156.05024514 BTC.... that's only 1.5% of the total btc received in that address.

How many expensises does a super web hosting needs for 10 years? Half bitcoin?

What kind of question is that? Of course, it's a donation address, anyone with good hearts can donate, it's not that anyone is asked to donate mandatorily.
 
As a forum and a website, obviously, donations were/will be used for the hosting, domain and other website expenses. Idk if the payments of mods came from there as well.

This is the donation address of the forum: 17RTTUAiiPqUTKtEggJPec8RxLMi2n9EZ9

It right now has 1,7M$. If you check the recent transactions, there are people that send huge amounts. How is that happening?? Do admin(s) use it instead of donating?