Awarded.

Was it an actual draft that was saved in your drafts (forum meta) section? Or was it just a draft you were working on locally that wasn't able to be saved to the meta? Either option is pretty messed up, but if it's the former, then there could be much more vulnerabilities and bugs from this cloudflare integration than we see on the surface.

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I have added the following rule regarding alt accounts to the top post:


But for full disclosure, please note that @nullius will not be partaking in Round 4, but his alt @Meretrix will be. @Meretrix is not eligible to win the first place prize in Round 4.

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Thank you, very much! Although I would love the idea of an ongoing sponsor for this, I really don't mind putting up some cash money for this. I don't want to obligate any individual or business into having to commit to this on a weekly basis. If anyone wants to donate towards the cause, they are more than welcome to at any time, but I will be making a conscious effort not to put much focus on the sponsorship aspect of this challenge, as this should be a great opportunity for members to want to make a better forum experience, not a thread to showcase sponsors Does that make sense?

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You're quite welcome, and like I said in your critique, you really caught me by surprise this week. @nullius literally only beat you by 0.06 points. When @nullius first joined this challenge, I (semi)joked that nobody would ever be able to beat him. Little did I know that just a few short weeks later, the race would have been so close. Great job, again! I have merited this post (HODL) and this post (2FA).

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Please follow the updated instructions for submitting your application

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Unfortunately, because we now have at least one hater on this challenge, I don't want to give them any reason to believe that this challenge is anything else than what it is intended for. Having alts simultaneously enter the challenge would not be fair to other participants (I was specifically thinking of @nullius and his alt when this rule was first being considered).

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Nah, I think that if a participant wants to promote it, they can, but it shouldn't be a requirement.

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Wow, this would be great! You can send it to the escrow address in the top post. Thank you so much for your donation!

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Finally, good news, everyone:

We officially have 25 registered participants for Round 4, which means that there will be a cash prize of $5 for 3rd place!

Good luck, everyone! Registrations close at 9:00PM (GMT -6), so make sure to submit your application! The link to the application form: https://goo.gl/forms/5ZFbI8HmeDkeoqU53

Thanks Joe for an honest opinion.  My basic motive to join this contest is to get the feedback only. I never thought of winning any position amidst nullius, Toughit (though he did not posted), Blue  Tyrant and flipflop.

Looks like you got little surprised by bitmover, but I am following him from the start of the round 3 and knew at once , that one more good contestant is in the competition.

@bitmover
I read your some of your post by using Google Translate and I found one scammer copy-pasting you also.
https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/3164920.msg32734677#msg32734677

Congratulations to all the winners and @all : Cheers and Keep the spirits up.

I'm excited to hear that we have enough participants to qualify for a 3rd place prize. It is amusing to me that nullius has entered with a fictional character persona, and I believe nullius to be creating an entire fictional universe out of alt accounts. If they are not, then they should be, as the forum would be more entertaining if that were the case. That being said, it is also very interesting to me the new rules pertaining to alternate accounts. I think it is interesting that nullius is guaranteed to not win 1st place (unless there are undisclosed alts), and that someone else has a good shot at the increased prize pool this week.

Have you experienced any problems with the google forms or automating enrollment entirely? You mentioned that someone barely beat another user by .06 points or something like that, and I'm wondering if I missed something in terms of how posts are being graded and scored.

Yay..I'm late again.
Merited: https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/3133667.msg33122304#msg33122304

Congrats, Blue Tyrant

Hey Joe, I'll provide again Merits, two merits for 3rd place on round -4 

The application period for Round 4 has ended.

All applications submitted from this point forward will be added to Round 5.

We have received 3 applications after the cutoff time of 9:00PM (GMT -6), so those applicants have been placed in Round 5. Those users are Lorin, marcelo01, and max2607.

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Thank you very much for donating towards this challenge! Low fees won't be a problem; there will always be enough Bitcoin in the escrow to secure the current round. Including yours, we have had a couple donations this week, but before they were received, I funded the escrow address with another $30.

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That would be @Meretrix.

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You've turned out to be quite an awesome merit sponsor I hope to see you around again in this challenge between signature campaign rounds! Thanks again, Geraldo!

Although the.nym.zone’s official position is perforce that there may exist some benign uses for undisclosed alts, running multiple entries in the same contest against its explicit rules would be abusive and outright fraudulent.  Not only would such a thing be wrong in principle:  In practice, it would also destroy our reputation.  As disembodied ghosts in the.nym.zone, reputation is all we have!

Adding some teeth to the theory, nullius is friendly with folks in Reputation who could be expected to red-tag both of us to hell if we were caught abusing alt accounts.  I don’t think he is someone who could try to fly under the radar.

Thus when he created me, after he first bought me some shiny Copper jewellery, the second thing nullius did was to establish bidirectional linkage between our accounts using neutral trust feedback.  You can see the sent and received feedback on my trust summary page; n.b. that trust feedback can’t be backdated.  When in doubt, check trust pages.

I must emphasize, too, that using undisclosed alts in close proximity to each other would almost certainly lead to being caught sooner or later with some form of forensic authorship identification.

For a real-life example of forensic authorship identification on this forum, see how tspacepilot outed Quickseller’s fraudulent self-escrow scheme.  Warning:  That post is long and technical.  Yet I doubt that such a sophisticated analysis would be necessary to catch multiple contest entries by the man famous for the “nullius post”.  Our writing style is distinctive!

The language patterns used for such identification are subconscious, and almost impossible to reliably modify through conscious intentions.  Though my style may sometimes be modified to take on a feminine lilt in the manner of scripting dialogue for a storybook, the underlying statistical patterns would not be significantly changed.  We’ve read academic papers on the topic.  Mr. “nym.zone” would make a joke of his street cred as a privacy expert, if he were to suppose that he could reliably fool such an analysis without botching his words in some horrid way.

Whereas in a writing contest, we must necessarily make more than short, terse posts; and we cannot use intentionally mangled language, as anonymous parties oft do to avoid identification in high-threat scenarios:⁰


Yes, we could write like that.  In dark corners of the Internet, how do you know we don’t?  You would never find that!  But of course, we would not likely win a writing contest by such means.

The greater lesson:  Authors can almost never be truly anonymous.  The smaller lesson, here apropos:  For many reasons, neither nullius nor any other sane person would try to cheat in a writing contest using multiple identities.

❤️ The Meretrix

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0. We state no opinion about TSB here.  The above quote is simply an apt example of intentionally mangled writing by person(s) of indisputably high intelligence for OPSEC reasons, based on the threat model necessary when openly perpetrating the extremely illegal act of leaking classified exploits from USG intelligence agency blackhats.  They leaked the exploit which unknown person(s) then used to create WannaCry.  It is wise for them to not only change their writing style, but to mangle their words beyond recognition.

Hi Joe,

I updated my application. I didn't see that you needed the Google Spreadsheet form until now. I'm not sure if that rule changed happened before/after the deadline had passed... Am I still in this round?

Thanks for the kind words! And yes, the same conditions apply to mine as well as LoyceV's donation.

I don't mean to put you on the spot by any means, but are the criteria something you are willing to make public, or at the very least share with me in confidence? I'm very interested in hearing what these are. I'm not sure if you are open to negotiation on these criteria in the hopes to improve them; not that there is anything wrong with them, but there is always room for improvement. I was unaware that you had official criteria, and I feel like they may assist me in meriting posts, or figuring out which deserve it.