Topic: Get Donator status by donating 10 BTC (Read 138661 times)

Thanks for the link. Still, the idea of extra paid ranks is a couple years older than that, not sure if it's a thing that's likely to be introduced.


Can't wait for the new drama about the MS/DT 'cabal' acquiring more powers...

 Absolutely and aside the charity funding. Theymos is know for been a responsible person and I believe the fund donated will be use for something meaningful probably something that the crypto community will somehow benefit from it despite the fact that theymos once confirmed the forum don't need the money cause Bitcoin network still need some better solution before the total 21 million coin are mine.

There is definitely merit to what you described as a way to benefit a charity. A public vote would bring a lot of users together to gain some form of consensus but on a personal level I have always been highly skeptical when it comes to giving my own money to others to donate so I am not sure if an idea such as this would gain momentum, it depends on how forum members feel about it and the voting process involved.

Several users started threads asking for funds to donate to people in need, I respect their intentions but I would never donate to them simply because I have a policy that I never give my donations to others to give. Quite simply when I have the means I like to donate directly from my hand to the donor or hand over my money to highly trusted friends or family and then follow up with the recipient to ensure they received the funds... a very old habit.

If the end result or aim is to donate to charity and that is after there are enough funds secure to keep the forum operating for years to come (therefore surplus funds) then maybe your idea would be a good way of giving back to people who need help. It would be interesting to see how much this forum could generate every year for charity. I suppose many newbies would be happy in the knowledge their Copper Membership funds would be donated to charity rather than be added to a pot that already seems to be looking financially healthy.

Yeah but it could come back too

Okay maybe we don't have to monetize it? Maybe the ranks could be allotted to specific people like: DT members, Merit sources ya know? Since the forum administration plays a big role in both deciding DT1 members and merit sources, these members surely deserve a rank for themselves. For everything they have done. I mean imagine how cool it would be if DT members have like a police siren as their badge or something. 

Or like GLOWING SIGNATURE? pew pew pew

Yeah like hilarious said, what else can the community do other than just suggest :/




Yeah I remember reading about it too, but damn I really hoped we would go somewhere from there.



While I understand why an attack using images could be made, there could also be security measures taken against accordingly. Also, see you get it, something could be done.

Well I envisioned it as being like the current Copper Membership where you pay to the forum and the rank is automatically credited to you, and then every month or quarter or whatever the forum donates it to charity. You could have a public vote on where the money goes or something. I suppose you could also personally donate it to a charity of your choosing but that would require manual verification by staff somehow to make sure people don't cheat it. Signing a message from the address you just used would work but staff will still have to verify that unless you could automate the verification somehow.

Those millions of USD$ held by the forum pot when BTC was less than $10,000 would mean phenomenal amounts of USD$ now. That would cover the forum expenses for a long time to come. Without doubt there are expenses involved to run the forum and you provided lots of information here I was not aware of before, I am fairly sure lots of others never knew either such as the payments received by moderators. Thank you for elaborating.

When you mention about giving to charity you do mean directly right, or do you mean to donate it to the forum and allow the moderators/admin to forward the donation? I am trying to work out where the higher title you refer to comes in to play here.

I believe theymos has mentioned what happens to it somewhere, but broadly speaking it likely just goes into the forum 'pot' to pay for forum expenses like servers and mods etc. However, the forum had millions in reserves years back when the value was sub 10k so I have no idea how much the forum holds now so the forum probably doesn't need the money like theymos has mentioned, but like I said before any money donated could be given to charity and it's a win win as there are multiple benefits to letting people buy a title that comes with the benefits of a higher account. There is a thread somewhere with all the forum treasurers and how much they hold so most of the money is public and a while back theymos did post a list of expenses but I think that was a couple of years ago. The new forum software is still in development but I have no idea what stage it's in, who's doing it or how much it costs. Around 10k per month total is paid to staff. I don't know the exact algorithm used to calculate payments but basically a very active Global mod can get around $1500 a month and a very active patroller or local board mod can get around $500. If you do nothing you'll get nothing. If you do a little you'll get a little.

Thank you for the feedback hilariousetc, I broadly agree with you. If somebody wants to part with some of their BTC holdings they can always find a good cause to donate to.

If anybody does make any donation no matter how unlikely of 10 BTC, do you know what will happen to those funds?

The new forum never was released, maybe work is still on-going but has it ever been made public how much forum staff get paid? Even with those expenses including web hosting fees was there any indication ever given about how much BTC are in the kitty and what plans are in place to use them either in the short or long term?

I don't think it was anything to do with animated avatars specifically, but uploading any avatar, though looking at this post below by theymos it seems it wasn't the reason for the hack anyway:


Unless that's a different hack.


Well, why do people donate to things like crowdfunding? Often there's rewards and benefits and people are suggesting donating will come with the benefits of higher ranks like Senior and Hero etc. Theymos has said in the past that the forum doesn't need any more money, but even if the forum doesn't need the money it could be given to charity or something.

Why would anybody feel the need to donate to this forum? I am happy for those that want to donate but right now 1 BTC = $56,000 so no matter how many BTC somebody has what would be their logic for donating to this forum or any other forum? What would they achieve and what would the forum treasurers do with those funds? There was a time when donations were asked for and donations maybe were needed but when I look at benefits of donating versus not donating - there is not much reason for anybody to donate.



https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bitcoins-2021-rally-is-minting-thousands-of-crypto-diamond-hands-millionaires-11614200303

There are many websites out there showing how many USD$ millionaires Bitcoin has created but no website can actually show how many BTC have been lost. There is no way to calculate the number of dead wallets even though many of them hold lots of BTC and have been dormant for years, they could belong to investors just waiting.

I am not so sure about the figures you stated about 740,000 BTC being distributed between 98% of remaining Bitcoin users. These are all based on estimates that can be refuted by alternative estimates.

wasnt one reason animated gifs in avatars were remove was because of the cosby hack? or was that something else.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcointalkorg-hacked-by-somethingawful-pics-42549

edit: im sure i messed the quotes up; my apologies

No. I stopped making suggestions because little seems to be done and I didn't want to annoy theymos with constant requests. There are plenty of threads both public and private with a lot of good suggestions so it's just up to whether theymos implements them or not.


I created the Community generated suggestions to improve the forum (+ eventual voting on them) thread a while back: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/community-generated-suggestions-to-improve-the-forum-eventual-voting-on-them-4893744

And theymos did post in there somewhere with his opinions on them. Think they were separated into three categories like yes, no, maybe so you can see where he stands on certain things.



I don't think images would be a big deal and could be one of the benefits of the highest donator tier. I think they were originally removed along with gifs for being too flashy/distracting or something, but signature designs have evolved over the years and many of them can be pretty flashy so I don't think there would be much difference between images and bbcodes really. I think people found a loophole on the avatars as well as some of them are animated.

Ability to add animated avatars and even images (regardless of size) in signatures was removed so not sure how that would pass.


I think the right time to monetize the forum in this way has passed.


Similar ideas were raised by many people, and afaik theymos commented publicly (~somewhere~) about this and didn't seem particularly enthused.


https://bitcointalk.org/donate.html
The market has spoken:

I'd love to see that happen, definitely not on this board though. And that's pretty much a Catch-22.

I was on slush's pool sometimes the luck worked out nicely in earnings, sometimes not.   Never had the sense or really ability to retain all the bitcoin we got, alot of it is costs not profits really.

Unless things changed radically just recently, don't think we've altered substantially what's been true for years but Bitcoin is the most widely and evenly distributed of all the major blockchains, probably all of them.   Imagine if Satoshi never gave up his share, thats the story for alot of them.     So you might be correct but its still the best in that regard and afaik the trend is towards greater distribution so long as actual user population and wallet usage continues to rise.
   The only disruption I see to that is the main market noise interference and influx of FIAT newly made, QE in itself is heavily top biased beneficial to central banking, government fiscal expenditure and treasury bond holders so it figures that weighting continues to wherever its effecting an asset price change.  I presume BTC has changed price partly because of the giant amounts of QE in the last year which means we have likely also absorbed some of that bias

Agreed 100%. I can't find the reference I read recently, but an analysis was done and it found that 95% of all bitcoins are controlled by the top 2% of the account holders/users.

Meaning:

18.5 Million Coins Currently Mined - (20% lost BTC forever/lost wallets/dead wallets) = 14.8 Million BTC Likely Left in Circulation * 0.95% = 14.06 Million BTC are held by the top 2% of bitcoin users/holders.

Leaving only BTC740,000 distributed amongst the other 98% of ALL Bitcoin users/holders.

Hard to fathom quite frankly... but it makes sense.

When I started mining BTC in 2014, we started with 26 Antminer S3 units and were making roughly BTC0.50 a day on Slush's Pool in BTC earnings.

But, that was when BTC bounced from $600-$90-$1000 for quite a long time on a bumpy trading pattern, but very cheap. So BTC0.50 / day when it was valued at $200 wasn't a big thing... but we were in it for the marathon.

Cheers!

Strato
 

Footing the current price of the market the 10BTC is not even a million dollars and speaking of some Bitcoin millionaire lurking around the forum or once make a contribution in the forum at some point, I believe there are some Bitcoin millionaires among the wall observer poster cause they seems to be serious investors.

Maybe yes, the novelty means something, but come on half if not most of them are no longer active. Its just beating over a dead horse at this point. Also, the benefits of these memberships could be upgraded to numerous things discussed before. For example:
-   Animated signatures.
-   Access to new and private chatrooms and/or boards.

I remember you telling in the past you brought it up to theymos in the staff board, any luck yet?     And I quite vividly remember discussing the potential benefits that these new ranks could include, that too years ago. Oh well. We can only keep discussing about it.


At this point I don’t see a reason for purchasing these ranks other than the membership being a novelty.

But a novelty at this cost, is it worth considering that it is almost worthless realistically?

Just one problem with that article, it confuses Bitcoin addresses with "accounts". So people with more than 1 address with over 1m USD value are being counted too many times, eg. Satoshi is being assumed to be approximately 25,000 people.

I do agree with your basic point that Bitcoin has made many people millionaires but it's likely to be somewhere far higher tan 5 and far lower than 93,000 (so far).

They are talking about millions worth of BTC in USD not millions of bitcoins.  There are quite a bit more than 5 out there.  According to this article there are more than 93 thousand out there holding more than a million dollars worth of BTC.  It wouldn't be surprising if many of these folks were members here at one point and maybe there's even a few lurking around or participating here and there.