Topic: Converting Bitcointalk to a decentralized Forum (Non-technical explanation) (Read 466 times)

The default isn't configured on protocol/system level, but rather on software used to interact with the decentralized forum. But it means developer of the software have some influence to make certain moderator become popular.


That's true. It's proven by the fact most full node operator use Bitcoin Core.

But i expect older post on bounty section cannot be obtained easily. It could be because node which store it currently offline or the software unable to found out which node has the data.


If all software by default use same moderation configuration, i expect it'll be less messy.

Have you seen the bloodthirsty animals that plague the forum? Ever hear the mantra, "Jaywalkers deserve death," echoed by much of the anti-zebra coalition?

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Unlike the analog universe, where you can simply choose to exit a conversation with a dedicated idiot or shill, would you not have to choose between sorting through enormous bloat (without fees) or extreme new/unknown-user segregation? A concession for newbies is multiplied by several magnitudes for malicious spammers. The value-based filters will target both bloat and unrecognized users: if you want to see or merit new-user activity, you will need to tackle an ungodly amount of spam, effectively becoming a voluntary moderator (but only for what sections you deem important).

It's an interesting premise but isn't the capacity of spam too high?

Even if you took the current moderators, and used them to sort of define a moderation standard, you'd still be introducing centralisation there, since users would have to opt in on who they trust to moderate, the majority would pick who's the most popular out of them, retrospective to their actual moderation work.

Basically, for it to work you'd need a ton of statistics, a transparent way of showing what was moderated, and why, and then you can't bring in the current moderators as moderators for the decentralised forum, since that's introducing centralisation to a decentralised system, even if you get to choose who to follow for moderation.

Also, I think selecting multiple moderators to follow, and then seeing or not seeing content based on that would be confusing for everyone. Most new users struggle with the layout, and functionality of Simple Machines forums since they aren't used to it, let alone a system which would be confusing even for the most senior of users of that system.

Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see a limited trial (albeit I wouldn't want to participate, just watch) run just for the carnage as I previously stated, but realistically I don't think it would work very well. I guess for a community that talks about how much they love cars, it works better. However, Bitcointalk in particular is quite a large, and complex set of users, that basically attracts people from all walks of life. That in itself adds complexity.

Even better: if nobody thinks the posts are worth keeping, it gets forgotten. That means the decentralized software should be able to handle parts of the data being offline, but also be able to handle it in case it comes back online (years) later.
Kinda like a pruned node

Who decides the default moderators in a decentralized system?

That's probably why it never really took off. If the users of this forum would switch to a decentralized forum, I thought to include most of the current Moderators as Moderators. I would assume most of the Moderators would include the users who made good Reports, and it would be pretty good from there.

The alt accounts won't have a say in this, just like non-DT users are quite meaningless to the Trust system now.

Maybe. Or a user could choose not to follow the moderation coming from abusers and still see the posts.

Now that I think about it: if different users all see different posts in a thread because they have different moderation-
settings, the thread can become messy. I'm also unsure how new users would have to decide who's moderation to follow.
Someone should build it to answer all those questions

Which you'd basically have a voting system for users to vote on users that should be banned, which sounds absolutely brilliant in practice. However, when it comes to reality, it'll be a shower of shit (for a lack of a better term). Considering how many disagreements users generally have on a forum, mix that in when there's financial gain to be made, you'd have a disaster in the making. You'd not only have disagreements which would result in feuds in terms of moderation, but also you'd have users looking to censor certain users to benefit from it financially. I hate that we always seem to talk about signature campaigns, but they're usually the best example.

For example, if you had someone that is in a high paying campaign, they could be subject to report abuse by using alt accounts. At least, with a centralised figure you have some sort of quality control. That also eliminates alt accounts abusing the moderation system.

Basically, for moderation to work on a decentralised forum with as big of a community as we have, it would have to be implemented absolutely perfectly, and even then most users don't want to contribute to moderation, and just want to browse, and discuss, which is absolutely fine. However, when it comes to relying on the community to moderate it'll likely be misused more than it's used for legitimate reasons.

It's like the saying; "absolute power corrupts absolutely" - John Dalberg-Acton, now that isn't always the case for everyone. However, when everyone has access to power, which could be artificially increased via alt accounts, you'll have a problem on your hands which wouldn't be easy to rectify.

It would be interesting to see it implemented just to see what sort of carnage pursue, but in terms of usability in the long term, it probably wouldn't work. At least, for a community of this size, and diversity. Then obviously, you mix in the financial side of things which always tends to cloud users judgement in the first place.

On a side note; I'd like to see shadow bans be introduced to the forum anyway. There's some situations where I think it could be beneficial. Specifically new users, but then that does increase the workload on moderators as posts would need to be reviewed in a pretty quick time scale in my opinion for it not to become too detrimental to new users.

Allow me to quote theymos here:
The more I read about it, the more I want to see it in action

The point of being decentralized is of course that theymos doesn't have to do it I can imagine using the Torrent protocol to share all posts, and using Bitcoin blocks as timestamps. But don't ask me how to build it

See theymos's posts above: every user can moderate everything from their own perspective, and every user can choose who's moderation they accept.

They'll basically be shadow banned from the perspective of other users.

I like that fact that OP sat down and reasoned all these out to share with the forum. I also appreciate the fact that some of his ideas are applicable, even if it will be bogus to implement. But what I don't actually is the compelling reasons to run a decentralized forum. If this was necessary, Satoshi would have implemented it before now.

If securing the forum database is the problem, there are many other ways to do that.


I will like to understand your theory of the merit system that will replace the human conscience with machine codes. I highly doubt there's a chance of a better merit system than what we have now.

If your concern is archives (in case someone shuts the forum down), you can use various places to read posts, such as loyce.club, ninjastic.space, web.archive.org, archive.ph etc. A decentralized forum doesn't make much sense. To have freedom of speech we need human moderation; I know no way a computer can be programmed to do that.

A truly decentralized forum cannot exist, because there is no way to punish those who'll infringe other people's freedom of speech. There could be bots everywhere. Hell, even in centralized platforms there are.

Now, given that the name of this site is bitcointalk.org, do you really think that Theymos will move the entire forum on to the blockchain of some shitcoin? There is no dApps support on pure Bitcoin mainnet.

Decentralization is a human right, but when applied unnecessarily such as in places like this, it becomes dumb.

It's still tiny compared to the blockchain, so I would store it. In fact, I have a copy of all posts already.

That would work too: let the bounty spammers keep their own database.

There's not a whole lot of incentive to do so, and you're right except I think it'll just be a select few which would host the servers, which is centralised to a point anyway. I guess you could argue that 4/5 users hosting the servers is better than one central figure, but Bitcoin works because there's a common interest in hosting nodes, and it's beneficial to a currency they use.

Most users aren't concerned about the integrity of the forum, at least because they don't think it's being maliciously altered in the first place. So, the motivation or incentive is much lower.

I imagine we would have a few people trying to remove the altcoin section completely. It's something that has been talked about for years, and we know from very senior users stating publicly they actively boycott the section. So, if we had a decentralised way of doing it, it might actually be pushed out if the 4/5 people who would be interested in hosting the data agree to remove it. 

The altcoin section definitely does carry a stigma here, which to a point I get, but ultimately the forum wouldn't be as successful as it has been without it. The bounty section is definitely problematic though.

I expect something similar to how Bitcoin is used: some people let Bitcoin Core download the full blockchain, but the majority uses light wallets that rely on a centralized server. Or multiple centralized servers, such as Electrum is using.
When a decentralized forum gets too big, we'll end up with centralized servers again.

I agree with you, people wanting to decentralize everything are either ignorant or just a dreamers who don't know how things work in real life.
Decentralized Bitcointalk would be terribly slow and unusable, but I would like to see certain parts of forum using decentralizations, maybe for some kind of voting, or things related with Ban/Unban.
This is not easy to implement, and I am almost certain this could not be implemented correctly in current bitcointalk forum software.

It's not impossible to make it, maybe based on something similar like Tor, but everyone would probably have to download everything, and I am not sure many people would do that.
I know some decentralized forum attempts, but they never were 100% decentralized and they never got more attention or popularity.

I see that you have given up your Bitcoin price control magic for now, but you have not given up on the idea that you are special to the point that the whole world revolves around you. It's really hard to find people like you, luckily most of them are in places where the internet is not available, but it's not such a big problem if they have a direct connection with the almighty creator

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Then use your magic and do something wonderful for the whole world, because everything you've written since the first day on the forum is a bunch of nonsense and I'm honestly surprised that anyone gives you any importance.

You don't have to do this.

Archive is used mainly when people want to save initial post for evidence of scam, scam accusation or to avoid that post deletion by moderator or topic author in self-moderated topics.

Editing time can be seen in your post too and this information is public for every reader.

I would like to see that voodoo magic. Heck, if you can create a truly decentralized working forum-like platform, I bet you could even make a few bucks from it. But something tells me that you won't be able to do that. Why? Because you are obviously not an engineer and cannot code. And because the blockchain is not a magic wand that makes everything possible.

And, like Rizzrack said, I actually doubt you really understand what you are talking about and I think you may have some misconceptions about what decentralized applications are. For starters, they are not the same thing as having local copies of online data.

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Ahh, good old KISS principle! 

Quiet, Welsh Wench! thermos and his dogs won't stop this coup! Off with their heads!

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I would recommend the "save page" feature found in many browsers. There's also a convenient print button in many threads.

I don't see much gov pressurres to ban bitcointalk, although some countries like turkey and russia started the trend.
First thing that comes to mind would be a namecoin .bit version.
Did not see any live implementations but something similar to what https://zeronet.io/ was trying to do.

When epochtalk would be working perheps some community members can make use of it's API and make a namecoin clone that some may want to use.

It is a masive undertaking and as the title of the thread suggest this is a non-technical discussion, so just ideas from the top of our heads.


Either I don't understand your propposal, or you did not explain properly or you seem to be talking about things that you don't really understand how they work under the hood... no offense, just MHO.


So you mean a grep command for Windows  try Select-String