Topic: Brainstorming various ideas for Reshaping the Indian Board (Read 338 times)

How did this information leak?   Did I mention them anywhere apart from github repo or to you personally? With the removal of Will Binns from bitcoin.org maintainers, the progress of the site and translations are moving at a snail pace. Hence, I don't think there would be any really ground breaking improvements in the nearby time frame. The github repo of whitepaper was removed recently and there are far less translations going on for the site while comparing the days when Will was active. I have personally hired some people known to me to work on the translations of the site in various Indian languages.

Regarding the whitepaper, Yes I am working with some pro language speakers and tutors for the Tamil version of the whitepaper but sadly it would take a few more months I guess since the work for them has risen to higher scales. This doesn't mean I am just concentrating on the Tamil version alone since neither I am good with Tamil nor with Hindi There is already a Hindi translation of the whitepaper done by Nischal Team, hence I am not going to work on it. Once the Tamil version is done and hosted, I am going to move onto Malayalam or Telugu probably and when I start that I would probably get in touch with you! Apart from this there are various exciting plans going on in the backend and I would be announcing them one by one and slowly over the months or years to come.

I would like to shed some light on this too. There are works going on for an excellent guide which would cover information related to current laws and complete regulations, while we are awaiting for the final WOM from the government regarding the regulations to finish writing the guide. Once we have finished it, a very familiar person in this subforum would be creating the topic and hopefully we need to ask Cyrus to pin them if the community agrees to it.

I have been trying to clean Regional Languages board from the beginning but it was literally a pain in the ass as the topics were overwhelming and huge to clear, hence I left them as they were originally available. BTW Thanks for reporting and cleaning the board   I recently reported a few from Off-Topic and main board, hopefully they would be removed once global mods comes over!

Renaming should be done for sure since the title of the sub-board is misleading and I hope we need to ask theymos/Cyrus for the same. We need to send a message and link this topic over there, until then let us wait for the responses from other members.

You very well know that India is comprised of 22 different languages and there is no other go other than using English as the only language in the main boards. To discuss through Hindi/other regional languages we do have a separate board for to serve the purpose.

Good thought on this. From the next raffle, I am thinking of placing a rule that X posts should have been made by the participant in X number of days in our local board. But before that, I would like to have opinions from other members regarding this. During the introduction of merit system back in 2018, BTCforJoe organized a similar contest : Joe's Signatureless Challenge: Win $25 + 4 Merits every week! where new members would be making helpful posts and Joe would be judging them and pay $25 from his pocket. We could probably organize a similar kind of contest to improve the community activity and I would be creating a topic to discuss this very soon to gain members opinions on this contest. BTW I have been recommending users to join our forum in various reputed Indian BTC telegram groups but haven't seen quite a huge interest for the same.

I think this is the only local forum where we use English instaed of Hindi.
If this is India forum, we should ask and encourage people to use hindi. They can still use English script if they can't type devnagri but language must be hindi.

Language is not a barrier for anyone who has basic education, some may not articulate according to the standards everyone expects but lets agree that mostly everyone understands and read basic English. I heard you are on a mission to translate the white paper to multiple languages and that is a great initiative.

It would be great if someone has the time to do a step by step guide on how to invest in BTCitcoin which includes a review about the exchanges and how to safe guard the coins and a small guide about wallets in multiple languages.

Regional Language board should be strictly for talking in multiple langues other than English rather than posting translated Alt coin topics, we have an Alt Coins (India) board and all the translated altcoin threads should be placed in that board irrespective of the regional language it is translated, most of my alt coin reports even though i ask to move to Alt Coins (India) board ends up in Regional Languages (India) which is not the reason that board is created.

Buyer/ Seller Reputations (India): All the scam accusation, reputation and investigation should go in their and not in the main board.

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Bitcoin Development and also for Translating Bitcoin Whitepaper, bitcoin.org and Bitcoin Core to various Indian Languages

For this we can use Regional Languages (India) board and first we should clean all the trash in that board and hopefully the global mod will look into the reports.

Edit: Regional Languages (India) board is clean now and lets not allow alts in that section from now on. Full credits to Cyrus for helping us out .

Okay this thread has been inactive for a while, but I have some thoughts on how the board can be revived, so I thought of posting here itself without starting a new thread about the same topic when it already exists. I've been scouring this local board in the last month in which I joined, and I think I might have some ideas that might be helpful.

1. Firstly, I completely agree with the others that a mod needs to be assigned to this local board. This needs to be someone who is a merit source ideally, as that would help with new users getting recognition and they will be rewarded for making actually constructive posts.

2. I see that @Heisenberg_Hunter organizes monthly raffles to incentivize activity within this board. Instead of this being a "lucky number raffle", you can try to incentivize constructive posting within this community (and maybe even in the global topics, but atleast X posts mandatory in the local board) somehow. It could be by posting useful news, writing constructive help posts for beginners and troubleshooting information, basically to stop shitposting and reduce people's dependence on bounties. You could reward the most "helpful user of the month"/"best new member" with a few merits for their best posts, and also a small amount of bitcoin. This would be for maybe Newbies - Members, and would take place bi-monthly, and the normal lucky raffles can take place in the alternate months. I think this would greatly improve post quality and activity here.

Basically, what I find that, as signature campaigns do not count local board posts, that just seems like a waste to most people, who think that this is a money making machine kind of a place. This mindset needs to be stopped, so that's why I think organizing bi-monthly contests like these will help and encourage new users.

Read my post above to have an idea of the current situation and past situation of bitcoin usage in India.

Legal status is required only when you need to transfer INR to BTC or vice versa. Other than that people wouldn't really have a hurdle in using bitcoin as a means of payment or trading with USDT in centralized exchanges like Binance. WazirX has joined with Binance for the INR trading pairs along with the inclusion of KYC procedures and I don't think this will be a favorable move towards the Indian cryptocurrency situations.

As of now, Indian scammers have left the forum and bitcoin as a whole and there are hardly any interest among the fellow citizens towards bitcoin or other alts. This shows that many right from 2016 are driven with fake ponzi agendas  promoted by ICO coins and pump and dump shitcoins. Most of the Indians are really in need of free money and they would blindly invest in any get rich quick schemes. Read my topic : Bitcoin Resources - Consolidate List (India Specific) v2.O about what you can do with your bitcoin and how well you can help the bitcoin community.

I guess the topic is necessary now due to the removal of restrictions related to Bitcoin by the Indian government.

One of the biggest hurdles for Indians to get to know about Bitcoin is the legal status of it in India. i think This should be clearly mentioned with proper proofs and hopefully pinned too.Because otherwise it opens up for a lot of confusion and speculation.
For example i was looking into the crpyto vs Rbi case(https://twitter.com/cryptokanoon/status/1220224113362366464 )happening right now (posted the same in press&news) which imo may favour a ruling towards crypto.

BTCumping for ideas! With recent regulation practices (Crypto-RBI case) and with the legality of cryptocurrency and bitcoin in general reaching a limelight here in India, I guess there would be a huge influx of good quality posters, spammers and scammers here in the Indian board in a few months.

In general, there seems to be diminishing interest in bitcoin and blockchain in general as far as India is concerned. It is also quite evident that majority of the Indian forum members were bounty hunting shitposters and when these ICOs failed miserably they left the forum as a result of major losses they have encountered. All is that we need to wait for another bull run where people would be concerned about bitcoin as a currency, technology and would deprive the idea of considering them as a get rich quick scheme or some sort of a trading mutual fund scheme.

Some of the major Indian telegram communities lost interest in pumping these useless ICOs and as a result many of them have lost lakhs of rupees in the process of trading scam ICOs. Scams were quite evidently used here for a longer time in the Indian community to fool the newbies and rob bitcoins from them.

Very true. Right from the beginning, majority of the forum members once they reach the higher ranks would shame the newbies and I have seen/experienced that in many instances.

Great post Heisenberg. I agree to the self-promotion bit. I think a moderator should be able to provide a nurturing space for initiatives without making it about self-promotion. He needs to be cool headed and should be able to see through his own biases and conflicts of interest. He shouldn't be very concerned about the "riches" part of it, which unfortuantely, is something that cannot be said for too many people. I think this is pretty normal too and not really exclusive of the Indian crowd. You won't find many exclusive philathrophists in the forum in general too despite the virtue signalling and shaming of newbies. There is definitely the clash of work ethics and frankly, we suck at it in the eastern hemisphere. (Professional Indians being our saving grace..lol)

Thanks for endorsing me and I think you are the best guy for the job right now if @Theymos ever turns his Sauron eye to this. I am happy to be the conscience keeper if you guys need me.. I am more interested to get a bit more connected in real life when the chance comes. Lets see after that.

A few months ago, I articulated my opinion here - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/suggestions-to-improve-the-india-forum-5188136.

I like the idea of 'Bitcoin Development' board.

More recently, government of India have started taking lots of interest in Blockchain Technology. There are over 50 startups reported to been aided by government which are indulged in blockchain-related solutions. Government maybe against cryptocurrencies but it certainly want to succour blockchain related businesses. But I hardly see discussions regarding these on forum. So it is essential that we have child board completely dedicated to posts regarding what we have achieved in the field of cryptocurrencies & blockchain so far as well as potential upcoming projects specifically for Indian market.

I thought of posting such developments here but again the problem is that Main Board is quite unfit for such posts and 'Press & News' child-board is usually for updates and not for serious discussions.

I would love to see Indian blockchain startups to register and post their project on BitcoinTalk (kinda we used to see few years back like Zebpay) and will try to persuade few of them myself. Will even try to host QA on their behalf here if other members show some interest. But again the problem is that Indian Section is quite disorganized. We need a proper child-boards before we can start something new in our sub-board.


Honestly speaking, I have never seen myself as a moderator of the Indian section. But if it's good for the Indian board then I may take up this duty if other members agree. However, on the other note, whosoever becomes moderator (if someone becomes moderator), it is expected from him/her to contribute something out-of-box to make section more organized and popular than just moderating threads.

For someone to stay here and contribute for a longer time, they should basically understand the real purpose of bitcoin and must be really used to the forum practices. There are various topics being created by many of them all over the internet to make newbies understand about the true purpose of bitcoin. But as far as Indian community is concerned, we need someone from our local board to create a topic highlighting all the issues being faced by a fellow citizen while using fiat money and how bitcoin might solve the problem if they were used mainstream. Though we are using English as our primary language, the topic should have a native Indian English accent and must be created by a native Indian, who is well aware of the problems we are facing here. Quoting from B&H topic wouldn't be helpful I guess.

There was once a MS dedicated for our local board. Since they were inactive, I have applied for the same and was made a source of merits. But even after that, I have never been seeing any really interesting discussions taking place over here. Well, using English as a primary language could be seen as another problem and people would be posting such topics in main boards instead of our local board?  As far as Indonesian, Russian, French boards are concerned people are discussing about the prices, development, speculations, forum issues in their native language but since we have a wide variety of languages we cannot create topics something similar to that.

Newbies here aren't really aware of the purpose of these local boards but the purpose of the same have been mentioned in the Unofficial rules topics created by S_D or should we create a separate topic dedicated to describe Indian Child Boards?

It's not about creation of separate local boards, but rather the Regional Languages board should be made active by posting interesting topics there.

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The need for a moderator is required only when the community is too large and the global mods doesn't have time to moderate the local board. Neither of them are happening right now.

There isn't enough activity here in our local board and people are sticking towards global boards.


From my point of view, I still don't see a suitable candidate for the position of moderator. A moderator shouldn't impose power on the people or showoff their power to moderate the community. Whereas they should act like a fellow poster, should promote interaction and should be able to have strong grasp on the workings of the forum. As far as I have seen through most of the so called veteran's post they do seem to be the first case of holding a power for themselves and trying to oppress others by arguing what they say is always right.

As far as this forum is concerned it is highly a decentralized one with freedom of speech being considered as a foremost option. If someone in the name of moderator trying to minimize this then they don't seem to be a suitable candidate for that position. I have been browsing through some of the very older posts on this local board and majority of the Legendary-Hero members were trying to create a seniority kind of attitude over here and there were only 3-4 of them having the qualities of being a fellow knowledgeable poster and at the same time for being a moderator. None of those have expressed interest in being a moderator but were always better in thoughts than the so called veterans. Some of them are

1. Muhammed Zakir - If someone from 2014-2017 era lurking here still in the forum, they should be knowing about them. One of the most knowledgeable posters hailing from India and has always been really very helpful for other posters.

2. krishnapramod - Really helpful in exposing spammers, plagiarists and had a strong knowledge on the usage of forum.

3. amishmanish - We don't need to describe about this guys's contribution to the forum. But lately they have been highly inactive and I am not really sure will they be able to actively participate in this forum.

4. eaLiTy - Top reporter, silent reader and been present here for a quite long time from 2016

5. webtricks - Recently I have an eye on this user and they seem to be emerging as net positive on the forum and Indian board on the whole.

The first 3 were highly inactive and doesn't seem to be returning as active users anytime soon. While the latter 2 would be suitable candidates but it's completely based on reporter history, trustworthiness and their view on how neutral they are.

One who is self-promoting themselves for MOD role shouldn't always be given a priority and I have always seen the kind of self-promotion from so called veterans. And more importantly if someone tries to impose power in the name of moderator they don't fit for the role.

Lack of moderation in our board made this place into chaos,global mod can handle the reports but still we need someone who understand the ideas and replies of our local board members so it must be an Indian to get better place to discuss.Theymos still not convinced to appoint anyone as replacement for Benson even more veterans were proposed their interest for being one.

Definitely agrees with the regional child boards to get more clear view of threads because dumping all the regional languages under one section made it as impossible to read.

Both threads are none of the use for us, nor any newbie. "Easy way to understand Bitcoin" must be an informative & detailed thread; not a link to third party. As you discussed about language barrier, it would still be a problem; you can't get translated the thread into all available language of course.
I would prefer a thread quoted from Beginners & Help board since we are using English here as the main language.
Have you reported already? I guess mod will take necessary steps certainly if you did.

I am not certain if we do have Merit Sources from our local community; but I can ascertain that we have enough member to merit quality posts- we are doing that at the moment. Moreover, if we are out of merits, LoyceV thread can get some as well.
Why don't you apply for Merit Source, Heisenberg_Hunter? Or did you? Sorry, I never have seen any of the application from you; at least I can't remember.

I agree that the board can be better presented with renaming.

Having a lot of regional language is a big problem; you must not create different language sub-forum in Indian local; even if you do- the same will happen what it is now; for instance- Indian local with no mod. There will be no one who will be able to moderate all the regional languages of India. On top that, there are not enough of activities which requires different sub forum. I would prefer as it is now.

The main problem is not having a mod for our local I guess. I don't know why theymos isn't considering a mod for this board. There are a few qualified member who can moderate the board. It would certainly increase the activity here as well. I guess we have a petition thread as well. Have someone tried contacting theymos? I guess theymos would agree with us if we could present the need of a mod for a healthy discussion & better forum.

For quite a long time (may be over a year) we have been discussing various problems which are being faced in the Indian board after the prolonged inactivity of Benson right from the middle of 2017. Benson was a great moderator who had a major role in shaping the Indian bitcoin community in general. But after the legalization practices undertaken by our government, many of the forum members were not really used to the idea of contributing or posting in Indian section of the forum.

Apart from that, a majority of old timers has left the forum as a result of ongoing spam in 2017-2018. They felt like the forum was diluted with very low level of posts being posted here. To mitigate these problems and to bring back the board as to how it was back in 2013, we the remaining Indian forum members should take certain steps in minimizing these situations.

Please read this topic completely before arriving at any conclusions or making any posts. It might be a little lengthy, but most of us should have a complete read. Another important note is that, we must be reshaping the board well before another bull run to face the major horde of spammers who would flock here to spam or to destroy the board completely. These ideas, topics, games, evoking interest among other Indian members are for the sole purpose of engaging the community for quality discussions and also in preparing this board well before spammers flocking up here in huge numbers.

Here are some of the ideas which I have been thinking for some time and could help in initiating this discussion :

1. Pinned Topics

The foremost problem which we were facing is the unnecessary inclusion of pinned topics in the main Indian board. The topics didn't serve the purpose and were least helpful to any of the newbies here. To prevent the unnecessary spam, we have cumulatively and repeatedly reported the topics and hence the previous topics were unpinned from main board. Some of the topics which still doesn’t serve the purpose and are present here just to pollute the board

• An Easy way to understand Bitcoin – The topic was pinned back during the early days of the forum and they are no way helpful to newbies or seasoned members. We could report them and unpin them and instead have a kind of topic which will educate the newbies on bitcoin. I would like any of them to take the initiative and start a topic by explaining bitcoin in a very easier way.
• Welcome to Indians – The topic similar to 'Easy way to understand Bitcoin' wasn’t really helpful and has been used as a frog pond to spam with redundant posts like “Thank You”, “Pleased to be here” etc. Instead, I have thought of creating a topic (under construction) which doesn’t ruin the essence of “Welcome to Indians” topic but would be more of a decent explanatory. I would like to hear community opinions on what can we include on this topic as it could become one of the most important topics if our country got to know about bitcointalk on a larger scale.

2. Merit Sources

There was a long term concern on we don’t have any merit sources and people thought like, even after contributing we won’t be able to rank up and those finally came to an end. If you create good quality topics and posts, you would be receiving a certain amount of merits and if they are really good others who have enough smerits could help by meriting them as well. So people shouldn’t worry about ranking up or gaining merits as far as Indian board is concerned provided they post good content.
Try to contribute more, bring up quality discussions and I assure you that even Indian members could rank up to higher ranks.  Newbies at heart, try to contribute utmost and you will receive some decent amount of merits only from the Indian board.

3. Renaming and Creation of certain Child Boards

For quite some time, I have been unhappy about the minimal and confused usage of Child Boards here in the Indian local board. For example if someone comes up with a Scam Accusation on a particular Indian website or to solve their doubts regarding the reputation of an Indian website they don’t really have a board to post their queries apart from the main board. The Child Board Buyer/ Seller Reputations (India) seems to be useful only for posting the reputation of a trader or a particular person in detail and doesn’t seem to be useful for discussing about the reputation of an Indian company or something similar. Hence I would like to propose a solution for the situation by renaming the board to Scams / Reputations (India) instead of Buyer/ Seller Reputations (India).

We could consider another example for the above situation, where a particular forum member is asking about that if freebitco.in is legit or a scam? Does that really need to be present in the main board?

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I have been disheartened about the involvement of Indians in bitcoin or how badly bitcoin is being preached to the general public. We have some of the better programmers out in our country but none had been involved in the development of bitcoin or generally to the contribution of bitcoin. Everyone have been trying to trade and weed-out profits and trying to shed bitcoin in a bad light.

To counter this and to increase the adoption, I suggest for the creation of a separate Child Board dedicated to learning about the Bitcoin Development and also for Translating Bitcoin Whitepaper, bitcoin.org and Bitcoin Core to various Indian Languages. What are the communities thoughts on this idea? If there is a board for the same being created can we name them “Bitcoin : Development and Translation (India)”?

4. Languages being used in the Indian board

Well this section seems to be one of the controversial in terms of our country is concerned. According to the Articles 344(1) and 351 of the Indian Constitution we have over 22 major languages but all of us present here doesn’t really know all these 22 major languages and we abide by the fact that English is the common language which connects the Indian netizens and thereby we have been using them for quite a long time.

How can we overcome this barrier of teaching bitcoin to the non-English speaking or in the sense bad English speakers we have in our country and who could sign up here in future? Is Regional Languages board enough for them to learn all by their own? Should Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu be restricted only to the Regional Languages board? Is bitcoin.org and Bitcoin Core is sufficient to be present in English?

P. S To prepare the board for bull run and to create a healthy community in future, I would like everyone reading this topic to chime in and give your thoughts on these ideas and suggestions. If you have any additional interesting ideas, please post them here and we can discuss regarding the same.

Self-moderated to prevent newbie spam.