Topic: Converting Bitcointalk to a decentralized Forum (Non-technical explanation) (Read 516 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

Then build it A quick Google search shows you're not the first.
But I already see a problem: I'd have to install software, which I don't often do (for security reasons). To take your Telegram example: I only use it in a VM. Bitcointalk (or any other forum for that matter) doesn't require me to install anything.

Some would say "build it first let's see".
My reply: how am I sure you will believe when it's built. You may consider it magic or voodoo because it is too advanced for you.

Thanks LoyceV

I can think of so many reasons why this won't work... Where to start:
Messaging clients nowadays use centralized servers, and users only download data that's relevant for them. Downloading all posts from a forum will easily fill tens of gigabytes, and it grows continuously.
Satoshi isn't around, so giving Satoshi access to any data won't work.
Gmail is a bad example: any POP3 email client used to have all emails available offline. But they all relied on a centralized server. By now, being online isn't a problem, but sharing your IP-address with all other forum users (just like when you use Torrents) is not a good practice.

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Theymos has posted some good ideas about a decentralized forum. I remember the idea of ignoring users based on a system similar to the current Trust list. Without central moderation, everyone will have to choose for themselves who's ignore list to follow.

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As much as I like the idea, there's a reason I haven't seen any real decentralized forum. The cons don't outweigh the pros.

I think part of the issues here is lack of understanding of my post and suggestions. I wish I could share this with optimists or people who would not believe my simple ideas are impossible to implement. I actually prefer to solve problems alone than involving people unless I could control what they say. It's hard to find people like me.
Incase you are not aware, I contributed to Gmail current method of categorizing received messages/mails, but when I initially contributed to the idea on Google Plus, I'm not sure anyone supported it until I saw it implemented later on Gmail. We are currently enjoying it.


Anyway, anyone can recommend to us how we can easily download our data from Bitcointalk. That is the major reason I want a decentralized forum - to be able to control my data or have copies of my posts/comments saved in my devices so that I can search through them whenever I want, even if the forum nolonger exist. I found an interesting tool yesterday called "DocFetcher". It's a bit like Google Search  for your local data. It should enable me search for posts/writeup I saved in my laptop. It would be nice using that for all of my valuable posts on the internet saved in my devices.
I want something that could serve me well whenever I start moving more often as a nomad, without the internet.

As far as I'm aware most websites which appear to be decentralised, are only somewhat decentralised. pseudo-decentralised might be the word for it. As in, they allow contributions from the community, and largely there's no central figure, but ultimately someone controls it, and if they wanted could indeed intervene even if it hasn't as of yet.

Although, I'm not even aware of many websites that are decentralised. One could argue that the projects on Github are, and therefore Github is, but that's not entirely accurate either. Although, I agree, and it might even change my mind if I could be shown some websites which have actually successfully implemented it. Although, from my thoughts on it, it either can't be entirely or it'll be detrimental rather than beneficial. 

@Ucy can you please give me a few examples of decentralized websites you know of or even use? Not necessarily offline ones, those are a bonus!

There's still archive sites that make periodic backups of public information from the forum, there's also some forum members that scrape and store parts of the website themselves.

I don't know if decentralised forums are yet a thing. Stacker news has been mentioned here before but they're a while from being decentralised and probably won't fully be unless they enforce their login via lightning network instead of allowing users to use other credentials like an email address.

It's possible to make the forum decentralised but we're also waiting on things to be done with the new forum software which Theymos seems against doing after it's been made (I'm fairly Indifferent to its use especially if it isn't cross compatible).

Exactly In the current span there is still lot of spam and daily hundred of reports are submitted so in the absence of it what would happen and would you call it a forum? It would be filled with spam posters if we think of going decentralised and it's not at all good idea with complete delegation of powers.

But yes we still enjoy the freedom of posting and share ideas with each other like the open discussion forum but why you want more freedom? As a member I feel free to write and see any board and mods are doing their job unless you make any mistake you don't need to worry but @OP idea doesn't seems to please me as well because we have seen that part which he is ignoring but see this is still freedom that you can share your opinions in the meta about what changes you want or forum related discussion but this doesn't imply all will get accepted.

Despite of the good suggestions about the forum upgrades. Let's don't forget that there is still epochtalk ^{(new forum software)} and its been how many years since it was started.
Now talking about a new forum software ^{(mentioned in this thread)}, i don't think another to be developed software and another set of budget will be considered.

Anywhere that a system doesn't take care of itself or doesn't need any intervention is where decentralisation makes somewhat sense, bar a few exceptions. A place like a forum which is subject to tens of thousands of spam posts every week, probably isn't the best place to have a popularity contest for moderators or ones that have simply been here the longest. That's not how you get a system that keeps itself in check.

Decentralisation is brilliant, but only when correctly implemented into something that actually works better decentralised. For a currency that makes absolutely perfect sense. Potentially for holding certain records via the blockchain, that aren't data sensitive it makes perfect sense, but a forum it doesn't, and the moderator selection issue is only part of the problem. Very likely, users would've stopped using the forum before this issue even became apparent.

So far the forums have been great and there's no need for changes that can look like wild social media.
This is indeed a Bitcoin forum and as we all know that Bitcoin is a decentralized currency, it is not necessary for this forum to be decentralized. It means I agree with you that not everything should be changed to decentralization.

The last change proposed by our friend @PowerGlove has been approved looks pretty good, namely the placement of (OP) in each username to indicate the person who created the topic.

So, what you're suggesting is some sort of end to end encryption sort of how Whatsapp does it? I'm not sure if I'm missing something, but how would that work on a public forum?

I personally don't get the obsession with changing everything to decentralisation, since it isn't something that needs to be implemented into everything, in fact I tend to believe in certain situations, decentralisation is a horrible idea.

Also, the forum doesn't need to be decentralised, and quite frankly at least from how I envision it would be absolutely horrible, and no one would use it. There's a reason why there's no true decentralised forum out there, since it would just become unusable, and way too much effort to implement in the first place without any real upsides to it.

You cannot be more wrong.
A forum that doesn't allow administration and censorship is the recipe for disaster. Although the forum, as it is now, allows freedom of speech, it still prohibits spam, plagiarism and spreading malware. Probably more too. And hundreds of posts (at least) are removed daily because of this.
On the other hand, a forum like you propose will be the ultimate garbage collector.

So my proposal is, like I tell those who want to create a better Bitcoin too: be my guest, make your own and see how many will embrace your idea. Then you will see if the idea was good or not.

Telegram that you used as an example is not decentralized, it is completely centralized. If this forum works like telegram, it does not mean it is still safe as long you have to still send posts online. PMs and anything you want to send on this forum with data, you have to go online. This forum do not nead any app for now, what matters most that members are demanding for is the new forum software, maybe it is going to come with apps or not.

I think Gmail business account should be able to do that, but you have to pay for it like subscription. You want people to also pay before they can be able to make use of the offline version? It is not an easy work, it will cost than you think.

I am perfectly fine with how this forum is.

I have been considering discussing this for a while now but didn't see any strong need for it. I think it needs to be considered now for several reasons. Some of which are, to make the forum hard to take down, to have post of members preserved even if the forum database is destroyed/corrupted from a single point etc. Incase of the latter, the forum copies can replicate and continue to exist possibly with another domain name (if necessary). The right domain name which should be accepted as the real forum domain name could be choosen via consensus involving most/all forum participants


So, I'm suggesting the development of a forum that works offline with members forum data saved in their devices, more like how Telegram or similar messagers do it. Such offline forum would enable members create posts, change forum settings and have them synced later with whoever is having the full forum data. Forum members can hold any amount of forum data the wish, whether it's the full/whole data or parts of it, such as their posts, threads they are posted in and their (members) forum settings. In regards to holding the full forum's data, I think it should be done in such a way that forum data that should not be seen or accessed by the holders is thoroughly encrypted, only the owners of the data can decrypt and access them. This would mean no one will be able to access or change Satoshi forum data (not even theymos or other high ranking admins) except Satoshi, who will be the only one with the decryption keys for his forum data... All other members including theymos will have their own decryption keys too.

The forum can exist in one or two forms/versions: the offline and online forms. I remember Gmail existing in similar manner (offline/online Gmail) with the offline one use for composing, sending email (and for other uses) offline, which later synced probably with the online version, with the latest state of the owner's account updated. For example, if an owner sends mail with the online version, the offline gmail will be updated to the latest "sent message" when the owner connects it to the internet... and vise-versa . Unfortunately, this Gmail method is still centralized, as users can only have copies of their own data rather than the whole Gmail data encrypted and saved in holders devices. With my method, any Bitcointalk members should be able to hold the full forum data in very secured manner.. It should be impossible for the holders to access people private data more like the Bitcoin system and Blockchain. This would also make forum moderation decentralized, open, community-based, transparent etc. With this method, members can rank up automatically to become moderators, moderators ranked up to become higher mods. Higher ranks will automatically get higher moderators access. And moderators should be ranked based on merit. I have developed and discussed a merit-based ranking system that's fraud-proof/fool-proof ... it can only rank up reputable moderators/members. Incase you are interested, let me know and I will share it here.

I guess the "Gmail offline" is available for both PC and Android devices assuming it's still in use. The forum offline version could exist in similar manner mostly for the sake of flexibility. You could either download the forum on your laptop/pc or on your android (or other mobile operating systems) devices.




You may move this post to the  right section if this is not the right place to post it.

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Last edited:  10:38am GMT, Nov 7 2022
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