Topic: Decentralize Bitcointalk - page 2. (Read 703 times)

Do you honestly believe that BTC is lighter compared to ECB SEPA payments (Target2 ledger)?

BTC has to broadcast the transaction to every node, while ECB uses a single centralized computer to process the transaction.

We don't use BTC because it's lighter or cheaper. Revolut offers SEPA instant payments for €0, while BTC is way more expensive and slower: https://mempool.space/

As mentioned before, it is a question that keeps being thought of but has not yet (to my knowledge) been definitely answered: Will we ever see it get off the ground? The amount of funds that were donated for the forum and probably still sit unused/unspent should have funded one of the best innovative forums but for reasons not explained it was never completed.

Ya at this point, its more less dead may as well just call it vaporware, I did notice the donate button is gone but its likely been gone for an epoch and I just noticed haha, and the green coin members

Well there is a hidden page rofl Tradefortress and a few others saved in there for memories sake the forum has self sustaining money so it could have executed the upgrade.
https://bitcointalk.org/donate.html

I disbelieve in this. As I said in my post, moderation in line with rules that are governed in a decentralized way will enable a clean, compliant and censorship-free forum. There is a difference between following rules and censoring the right to freedom of speech. If there was no difference, then we are censoring all discussion not related to the boards that are within this forum. I believe mixing censorship, spam prevention and rule compliance is not the way to look at things if decentralizing bitcointalk becomes a goal.


The method you're talking about reminds me of zeronet, an outdated solution. Bittorrent also dated and not a viable way to run a forum in a decentralized way. There are modern solutions out there in web3, and while using those technologies might not be in line with Bitcoin, one could argue that a centralized forum isn't either (if anything, it's worse than employing non-bitcoin technologies).


Votes or governance being sold is unfortunately, a part of life. If people care about the forum, they will not sell their voting power. If people were incentivized to keep their power, they will. There are solutions to prevent power being sold. In addition, if forum governance is value (which it inevitably would be since we're talking about bitcointalk here, the biggest bitcoin forum there is) then the appreciation of that value is an incentive in itself to keep governance power.

I don't think many would sell all of their governance power, especially since it represents the forum which Satoshi himself resided on.


I think you're analyzing too hard. At least in my view, beating the current centralized SMF forum and adding decentralized components that removes liability from administration, enables accessibility for all, creates decentralized governance, while delivering content efficiently, are some of the goals that would prove more viable than "complete decentralization that is even better than Bitcoin". We don't need to beat Bitcoin's decentralization to do better than the current structure, in fact it's probably best not to look at it this way for the sake of keeping the forum as usable as it currently is.

I think it doesn't scale well. Spammers will be unlimited, and even if there's a system in place to vote out spammers, new users will never get through if spammers create millions of new accounts per day. If you accept users on invite-only basis, new users have the same problem.

A truely decentralized forum won't have any centralized hosting. There could be nodes, but each user would keep their own copy, and broadcast it to other users like bittorrent.

Bitcoin tried, by basing voting power on CPU power. That didn't last very long. And even if there would be a magical protocol that gives one human one vote, votes would simply get sold.

After the IFD (Initial Forum Download), all each user needs to do is download all new posts. That's currently only 4 posts per minute. And each user (on average) will have to upload each post to another user (in a decentralized way, like bittorrent). That's actually the beauty of a decentralized system: bandwidth scales very well. If one person shares 1 GB on a server, each download consumes 1 GB bandwidth. But if he shares the same file through bittorrent, he doesn't have to spend much bandwidth anymore because every downloader starts uploading too.

Look, we are in an internet forum and don't know each other personally. Our texts represent who we are. Someone could be a very good person in real life, but due to some misunderstanding, the community may think he is a terrible person. So, we should be careful with our screen and think about what we writing. Someone might have a different point of view. But, they should not insult others until their opinion is very unpopular or harms others.

I was surprised how he reacted to OP's post even though there was nothing offensive in the OP. He just called out OP as Joker, and then he also reacted to your post when you said "Shame on you". If you cannot take criticism, you are unlikely to learn. I would suggest he should recognize that he is a human being and he might make some mistakes, too.

The code itself determines how efficient content is delivered. For a user, the lightness and efficiency of the code determines how fast a site loads. In terms of traffic handling on the provider side, this also comes down to code

Generally, decentralized applications are lighter in weight...how well they handle their traffic depends on how well they are coded. I believe bitcointalk could be recoded into a platform that is decentralized, that can handle large amounts of traffic and is governed in a decentralized way (described in next part of this post)

This is an opinion anyway....


I was talking more about if the forum were to be decentralized. I wouldn't call any democracy decentralized, since there'd be so many powerful entities aiming at manipulating apparent democratic systems for their interests.

Decentralization isn't a 1/0, there are scales as to how decentralized something is. However, BitcoinTalk has a high potential for decentralization, if done correctly. For example, if a governance token was released that airdropped 1 token based on a variety of factors, like trust, posts, merits, etc, then you'd have a system where yes, not everyone will be equal, however there will be a lot of people governing and contributing, therefore a good level of decentralization will be achieved.

Equal voting power is not good governance. Good governance is where those who earned (not bought) their say have the reflected value of their say to begin with. If they sell that say to someone else, that's the free market, though that should come after distributing power to those who earned it.

That's my opinion anyway, good governance is still something that to this day, no one has perfected.

I'm afraid you don't understand the fact that a forum has WAY MORE traffic compared to a decentralized payment system exchanging a few numbers here and there.

So no, it's not going to be more lightweight, quite the contrary!

The situation with the new forum became untenable (notably the endless waiting) therefore I unwatched the thread and gave up reading about expect for very rare forays in that thread. Looking back, it really is strange that with all the donations that were given and what the value of those donations is today the new forum was never completed.

I have not checked but I have noted other members to my knowledge have not mentioned the beta website, it is probably safe to presume it is at a standstill.

Two things to comment.

- Governments strive to censor all sort of speeches all the time, and they are elected by the majority most of the time. So no. Not only it is technically censorship, but it is almost a common phenomenon that happens to minorities.
- There has never been a truly decentralized protocol where each user can have equal voting power.

It is extremely ironic. I find it surprising (and not) that no one came to put him in line, especially since so many other members have been quick to do that to others in sometimes unnecessary circumstances in the past.

Nature will teach him the lessons that he needs to learn anyway. At least the true colors have been shown by that user


Does bitcointalk really need to be a museum?

Yes, it hosts artifacts of the first steps and the evolution of Bitcoin and its community...though is it really necessary for us to fall behind the bleeding edge just because innovation is lacking throughout administration and the community?

That would be a sad crack for this forum to slip in. Its history should motivate us, in my opinion anyway.


I believe that a decentralized forum wouldn't necessarily be determined by bandwidth or internet speed. A good solution should be more lightweight, if anything.


Decentralized means to not be controlled by a single party or group, as BitcoinTalk is.

There is a viable way to achieve decentralized hosting of the front end, back end and databases. The most efficient and viable way for the forum is what will take research, though it is possible with great minds doing the research and work required to achieve the goal.

An official goal will bring solutions. Attitudes like what we see vastly in this thread will not.


Rules govern what is allowed and what is not...if members agree to those rules and have a form of governance power over these rules through voting, then moderation should only be to enforce those rules that the majority of the community already agrees on, posts removed in line with that technically wouldn't be censorship, posts removed for other purposes would be.


It's also a little childish to tell an individual to take their idea and do go and do it themselves. BitcoinTalk and its administration have the resources, they did raise a lot of Bitcoin to build new forum software after all....

Censorship is not a huge problem now, though it could be later...if nations decide to take a leaf out of China's book and build a firewall around websites, that would be the next stage for censorship...if nations started regulating what communities people could join, prosecuted them based on what they say, forced tracking and reporting, or anything of the likes (all possible) then a centralized forum like BitcoinTalk would have to adapt (for better or for worse).

Decentralizing is taking liability away from administration and distributing it across very user. It's not an unreasonable idea.

Cough, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=167.0
One day maybe we will get new forum software

To quote a classic joke
When Epochtalk?

Cough

It's Ironic how he called out OP just because he wanted Decentralized Bitcointalk (which is not a bad idea) and then how he reacted just because you said shame on you. LOL. People always think from their side but do not try to think what if I were him? He can call someone Joker which he considers as his opinion, but when you say shame on you, it's not an opinion but it shows who you are. LOL.

You should stop replying to such a person who gets offended too much by such words and are unable to understand what could be their mistake. Some people always think they are right. They don't want to accept their mistakes and this is one of the reasons Ratimov fucked up himself.

I'm pretty sure you can still collect your pension(s) if you move to another country... If you become an "outlaw", that may change, of course.


This is true.

As I like to mention, at its base, the forum is now a historical museum for those who want to learn more about the beginnings of Bitcoin. It is also a repository for information on older altcoins. For example, this is the birthplace of Ethereum. Then on top of all that we have a huge layer of spam -- a positive byproduct of this is it has solidified Bitcointalk as an SEO powerhouse... years upon years of posts with specific terms frequently puts this site at the top of Google search results. Probably how it gets most of its non-user traffic.

I reckon we can have a decent decentralized forum protocol if FTTH (100 Mbps upload) becomes the baseline.

With ADSL (1 Mbps upload) it's not really possible... ADSL is fine for BTC, that's why Satoshi released it in 2009 (when ADSL was already becoming the norm).

This is a very apt question.
Very thoughtful indeed.
Let's assume that bitcoin is banned and declared dead all over the world. What do you think will happen to bitcointalk? Maybe, theymos will lose interest and hand over the admin to another person and that person might likely rename the domain and allow the forum to continue existing because of the people therein.
It could also be that, if bitcoin is banned, that will be the end of this forum.

Meanwhile, bitcoin cannot be banned but bitcointalk can. That is why theymos is being careful. Talking about decentralization of the forum. If this eventually happens, how will the moderation of the forum look like. Just thinking

Hey I am married and depend on 3 US fed gov pensions.

So moving to El Salvador to run a mirror image of this forum is not in the cards for me.

We would need a single person to do it.

I am not sure what country you would want the mirror backup to be in.

What would it cost in time and money to do.

Also a mirror image means two point of attack to hack.

So yeah it is not that practical.


Lastly bitcointalk was the startup forum for btc. It did a good job. It is no longer the influencer that it once was.

I think it's funny when they talk about forum decentralization. 
The point here is: what do you mean by decentralized? Without an administration? "Decentralized" hosting?

If it comes to hosting, whoever comes, there is still no minimally viable way to achieve this dream of decentralized hosting.

Start with the domain. Where can you get the decentralized .com or .org domain?
Are they going to say it’s the ENS service (.eth pseudodomains)!?

This continues to have a centralized service behind it. And in turn, it is not practical to access the forum this way. The forum was created to be a point of information about Bitcoin, accessible to the entire world. Not with the hurdles of additional configurations that people have to do.

And I'm not even going to talk about hosting... because in the end there always has to be someone behind the scenes managing the server.

People need to realize that it is pointless to have freedom of speech without moderation to some degree. Moderation != censorship. Freedom of speech endorses the controversial, but not the violating. You cannot fill the board with giant links to scam sites and expect to be protected. It is not hate speech to "censor" this kind of behavior, it is simply a necessary measure one must take to allow the speech of everyone else.

Go ahead and make your own decentralized forum, there is nothing preventing you to do that, and see how it goes for you.
You cant just expect that magical decentralization would fix all the problem in the world like censorship, it is childish to think like that.
I am not even sure most of the people would enjoy non-censored bitcointalk forum, and they wouldn't like to live in world without any censorship, it's just a pipe dream.