Topic: Can we restrict user registerations somehow? (Read 868 times)

This is true, I was aware of the possible effect.
But ANNs are bringing most of the bounty hunters who just don't care about bitcoin, won't ever post in the bitcoin section, so from bitcoin point of view, it's not quality traffic.
From the traffic point of view, I know that every user counts. (even bots, who are e.g. half of the traffic of the ANNs traffic I guess, but I don't have proof of course, it's just an educated guess )

I'm also against of scaring off genuine devs but I have no idea how we can make a difference. I think that genuine devs are the ones who won't be able to get merits on the short run when they start their altcoin topic, because spammers scammers (who work together and sharing merit among themselves) seems more legit from the merit point of view than a genuine dev who has no connections with the forum to get merit quickly. I know that a genuine dev can also hire the bots to be able to stand out from the mass of shitcoins but that would cost heavy ETH for him and half of the bot farmers are also scammers, they won't just do anything but run away with the money...

So if you have a look at the ANN threads, from the point of view of a newbie (who came here to make some money with joining the bounty campaigns),  what is the chance that they can select a legit ANN topic with a genuine dev? Really low... Even what is the chance that they will ever found that legit ANN topic, when all the scammy ANNs are bumped all the time and legit ANNs won't have a chance to get to the first page? Users are used to select from the first page (like in a google search) so chances are really low for genuine devs to get noticed at all.
So I think at the moment this is what scares off genuine devs, so if we make some restrictions, maybe (maybe) the legit ANNs would become more noticeable, so I'm not 100% sure that restrictions equals the loss of the quality traffic.
But this is just my opinion, I'm happy to discuss, I hope somehow sometime we'll be able to work out a solution for the current situation, it's badly needed...

SMS verification is a very bad idea, it will stop only potential good people, bot and abusers will likely use virtual online SMS generators to bypass the problem...

If this happened even today, i would also leave the forum. It would be totally demoralizing for newbies looking to rank up. This kind of attitude towards new members must stop. With this kind of restrictions, this forum will just loose it it no time and new users will just migrate to other forums with "softer" rules.
You don't want to see to a lengendary Bitcointalk forum loose it's number one spot to a new rival forum

More reason for genuine new users to go to other forums. what will stop the genuine devs from going to other forums to post their projects due to the stringent measures on bitcointalk?
Am pretty certain that the altcoin section brings in almost half of the users in here, so imagine there are little or no more ANNS of projects in the Altcoin boards due to your strict rules but instead there are quite a number of them in other crypto forums... i guess you know what will happen next.

You may not see it short term, but long term, it has an effect.

I have to agree that not all might really want to use sms. Tho, there are already few members here who were giving out personal informations and sms verification might not ve a problem for them.

Therefore, 2fa and sms is both good as long as you have choices since also not all wants to do the 2fa cause i think we already have it in here yet not everyone is using this feature

Or, we should make different merit requirements for creating a topic in various threads, e.g. if you want to open a topic in the Beginners's section (or in the OFF topic), you don't have to have any merits, but if you want to open an [ANN] thread, you should have at least 5 merits etc.
I know that it will scare away geniue coin devs and those who want to advertise a really working new altcoin, but that's only 1 out of 1000 or even less...
Also, because we're a bitcoin forum, let's make it easier to open a topic in the Bitcoin Discussion thread (less merit requirement and more merit to open in the alt section).

For the amount of money that these spammers earn they wouldn't even blink at getting a throw away sim. SMS verification doesn't solve the problem but it does affect genuine users. I know there's no point in discussing this as theymos would be against the idea anyway. But any restrictions which severely limit normal users should be avoided. This is why I think the shadow ban is the best idea out of all of them. It doesn't affect normal users and only those that break the rules. It solves almost all the problems. Yes they will find out eventually but if it slows down the process of the spamming then I'm all for it.

As I've said before things like this will just scare genuine users off whilst the ones who are determined to earn here will just jump through whatever hoops you throw at them (and theymos would never implement this anyway). If I signed up to this forum and it required sms verification I would seriously think twice about proceeding and just leave... or I could just buy a throwaway sim for £1, and that's what those who come here to abuse the forum will also do and that's also why it's essentially futile.

SMS verification in my opinion doesn't belong in a Bitcoin forum. Yes it would stop most malicious users but a lot of people here wouldn't like giving out personal information. SMS verification could be optional for 2fa.

Newbies are really limited accounts, they can't really do much... And form each 100 new users registered 1 should be a good element, so, for that one it worth to have the registration system just like the way we have it right now.

But if in future it becomes a problem, we can change the registration just like the steemit one and ask users to verify their account with a phone sms.

It has been suggested multiple times, although I'm not sure if it has received an official response from theymos or not. I imagine this will be implemented when the automatic account recovery is introduced to the forum.

I don't know whether putting restrictions on accounts which haven't included an address is a good idea though. Not everyone on this forum will have made an address, and might be simply researching into Bitcoin, and asking a few questions. We shouldn't be punishing legitimate users.

I do not know if it has been suggested in the past, but instead of having email account confirmation, every new user should be able to register a Bitcoin address and send a signature with a unique code received at the time of registration. This address would become a way to recover the account as well.

If he did not do this, the new account would look like "on probation" and would be even more limited than the newbie account. It can be more easily nuke by moderators and not just administrators.

I have thought about this and still fail to see where this is implied in your post..
You even predict an outcome of such action to be where everything is peaches and cream, and Satoshi even comes back, lol.

When the unabashed communist stands with "If we just took all the money from the rich and gave it to the poor the world would be a better place", even though I know that will never happen, I will always stand against these ideas because that is what it takes to ensure it does not happen, action.


Is it the real solution? Is it what you advocate for or not?
Or are you just making a mockery out of all those who are whining because the only "real solution" is complete catastrophe?

I wouldn't consider it free
It's not supposed to be fair. If you are quicker, faster, and smarter you should get more. "Fair" is just feelings.




The only thing that can be abused is rules. The more rules you have the more avenues for abuse their are. The most "fair" is no rules and survival of the fittest, may the best man succeed. This is why freedom and free markets work so well..





The more rules you make the more rules you have to make and the end is complete authoritarianism.

Everything will be just peachy.

Wouldn't it just be obsolete with no signatures forumwide?


Didn't the first pizza transaction happen here?
Where would bitcoin be at all without the economy this forum has hosted since the very beginning?


I like address integration ideas but I don't see how this would solve any of the problems of this topic.
BTC addresses are about the easiest thing to create anonymously in existence. A millionfold easier than anonymously making an account here and with no realistic limit.

I guess you took my comment wrong. I don't suggest anything, just pointing out the the main problems and the real solution to what everyone is wining about.
It is completely clear none of those suggestions (as you call them) will be ever implemented, so no worries.
The whole idea if there are free money on the table, there's always someone trying get more (all) so it's no way to have fair shares for everyone.

You seriously suggest removing these sections of the forum?
If you think the forum would be better off completely without them then why don't you just put them on ignore? You should also remove your signature and ignore signatures.

Delete the marketplace too. No buying and selling anything allowed! No trades or transactions.


Change the name to nothingtalk.org ?
Just castrate the forum so it becomes docile.

Oh, I'm sure he would just adore your ideas.

What about bitcointalk itself? Theymos and the moderators? Do they not count?

So I log in from my hotel wifi or mcdonalds and all of a sudden I'm banned until I pay an evil fee?
Every account that has ever logged in on an IP that collected evil just gets wiped out, and the next time any IP gains more evil all accounts that have used that IP get wiped out again.


How exactly does this effect you? Are they your competition?
They are just a bunch of fake twitter accounts spamming scams to other fake twitter accounts providing very little to no value to the company hiring them. So they are the ones loosing by paying them for garbage.
If they don't want to wise up to who they hire then let them fail. Why should we protect them?

IMO ETH token ICOs are one of the worst things that ever happened to cryptocurrency because they tarnish the image of crypto as a whole. They make crypto look like shit.
99% of them are get rich quick schemes at best and I don't much mind them getting a taste of their own medicine.
Just ignore the bounties board and whack em if they try to spam this forum outside of it.


In closing I guess I would just like to say that I value the ideals of Bitcoin and Bitcointalk more than I value the absence of scammers and spammers. Dealing with them is a small price to pay.
If Satoshi's priority was to stop scammers at all costs he wouldn't have made the BTC blockchain immutable, would have made transactions reversible, and would not have been concerned about anonymity. Satoshi's white paper has a section (10) just for privacy.
The only reason I am in Bitcoin is because I believe in freedom.

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety, Benjamin Franklin.

This isn't Twitbook. By coming to this forum you are venturing deeper into the internet.

Yes, the retroactive point is the only thing can be good with the evil IP, but I don't think it will be possible to do it since we have millions of accounts with thousands of bots and alts and we have a huge amounts of data, over the time the file.txt will be huge and we will have space problem.

In the end, I'm against the restriction of registrations, it makes no sense because I still believe if we have a 0.1% of new good users it will be always a gain for the community, but I hope to see something against this massive abuse of alts and bots.

As always some people here on the forum are using over 200 accounts in the same bounty and this is disturbing my mental state  .

I understood. Then there is only one thing-to tighten the rules for obtaining the rank of Jr.Member to 10 merits. This will reduce spam, but will not solve the problem of one-day accounts for spam and fraud.

Restricting user registrations is a slap in the face for anyone willing to join this forum for good reasons. When crypto currencies become mainstream this forum will be one of the main sources of information and closing it for those who want to participate is not the right thing to do.

This is because they were made to do so to remain legal. It was not for the benefit of their users or the community. We've seen in the past many exchanges being compromised and only coins and certain sensitive information being compromised. But now if an exchange is compromised or the government has a back door into them they have all the information that they'll ever need and it could be catastrophic. Remember this forum has been hacked on a few occasions too. Are you sure you would want your personal information to be stored on the server? Theymos hasn't got the need or the budget (probably has the budget) to create a security system worthy of protecting sensitive data. Plus theymos would then have to abide by some laws because hes storing personal data.

This would only work if we elected users that have good report accuracy and reported regular but at that point we might as well add them to the staff members anyway.

Nope. Would be colossally abused. Anyone with 5-15 accounts (or however many you require to remove posts) could just silence anyone they want. With bots this would be easy to do and they could bot your posts to get them removed as soon as they appear.


We're not an exchange. We're a forum, and theymos has said he would never implement KYC and nor should he.

To speed up the cleaning of the forum from spam, you can do so if the post has several reports to the moderator (5-15), it is automatically sent to the trash. Here is an important one for the automatic removal of a post should be counted only reports of users with more than 300-500 reported positions with an accuracy of 90-100%.

 We can't beat forum spam because we want to use anonymity. 

 I think that the complete restriction of registration is not correct, but to introduce the simplest KYC procedure for new users (old users may not pass, as already registered) is a great step to reduce fraud on the forum. Or as written above to bind your account to your mobile number.

After all, many exchanges began to use the KYC procedure, and before it was not needed.

Such thoughts. I apologize for my English, dear forum users.