Topic: Is this forum getting worse and worse? - page 2. (Read 2170 times)

I believe many people have spoken well concerning the way forward of this forum,  I know there will be massive improvement as usual soon because the administrator board are fully ready to do their duty to make sure nothing make the forum users feel they are not working to keep the forum progressing. Since there is an issues that make them to banned mixers from the forum, and if they have lift the banned, and they are ready to follow the forum rules, they should give them the second chance into the forum, because I was told there was a lot of signature campaign and bounty signature campaigns from the mixers from this forum, which is the reason many users are here today to be part of the progress of this forum, this is my little suggestion.

There is always reason to talk and discuss.

New technologies shows up every few months, even in the bitcoin protocol, like silent payments.
New wallets appear with different approaches to old tech, like aqua.

Also, New services appears, old ones scam exit.. New legislations comes in.

New bugs in old wallets...

 There is always something to discuss and questions to answers.

Quite frankly I might not be in a place to make my little contribution concerning the forum losing its relevance or the possibility of losing valuable members with technical know-how abilities. However, I can state for a fact that the platform still has its relevance to a very large extent because for the few weeks have been here, I have learned the fundamental concepts of crypto ecosystems and I have been able to apply certain information gotten here to more practical activities. I believe if one scouts well enough and also knows what he or she is here for, the information given out by certain individuals who are genuinely still active will serve its purpose.

I can agree as well on this for some reasons like the mixers ban and scarcity of signature campaigns in filling up the space created from the banned mixers on the forum, many were already leaving while some are no more active as before, fine and good if the signature opportunity is banned along the mixers for instance, people will still be active on the forum but the number of increase we should have achieved may not come to pass because there will definitely be a drop, all these are part of what increases the activeness and activities of so many members on the forum, though it has nothing to do with the sole purpose of bitcoin discussion which is why the forum was created, but a means to increase the forum participation and activeness of members from the opportunities they were served with.

Yes, it is a sad condition, but it also depends on what goals they had when registering their account on this forum.
Someone who is interested in learning will expand their knowledge by reading from basic to technical, but I'm sure there are not many users who are truly sincere like that because I think most of the current generation come solely because they want to make money from signature campaig.

There is no problem, though your concern is thoughtful, the forum continues to be active, except that it's not always on BTC core discussions. This can only mean there are no Bitcoin trending/hot discussions to discuss which is not the fault of the forum and its users.

When Ordinals was trending, no one forced it, it was well discussed, and the same goes for the ETF and the former ones before them. Tell me, which one is trending like them now? There would naturally be more topics to discuss when Bitcoin and Bitcointalk were still new than now when almost all important discussions have already been discussed. Things will naturally spice up when important developments happen around Bitcoin, like the ETF of last year.

You just need to ask where these new people will come from. They mainly come from social networks. If someone uses social networks, they know that there is clip thinking there. Quickly log in, quickly read the information that will stay in the brain for no more than 15 seconds, and that's it, enough.
People have stopped reading large texts. You are talking about recurring topics, but even there, does everyone read from beginning to end? If everyone could conduct constructive conversations, reading from beginning to end,  there would be no need to create similar topics.
It is precisely because of this that people have become illiterate, do not know how to read correctly, do not read books, or, as it was earlier on the Internet, large articles or blogs; they are not interested in the content of the forum.
We often direct newcomers to read this or that publication, but if their brain forgets after 15 seconds while reading a large topic, what was at the beginning, then what can you talk about or ask?

I know, that's why I said there are still some left, but the newer generation of this forum can barely pass a quality test and that's sad.


Loss of good quality user activity = Loss of overall quality.


I never disagreed with that, all I said is that this problem existed even in the past, but the quality didn't drop much because those who were coming to the forum were interested more in the industry and its advantages than the monetary benefits which is why the quality were intact, but that has changed drastically over time, hence, a drop in quality.


I wouldn't put it that way, it might hurt their feelings because they are good at solving problems because they have a lot of technical knowledge and not because they have answered repetitive questions. 


I have already answered this twice, once in my post above, and once in this post again.

Like seriously? I don't agree with that. Virtually almost every post that is been created has already been discussed sometime ago on the forum. The only difference possibly could be just little things however the base context of the problem or discussion has a very high likelihood of being very similar to an old post. Ever asked yourself why people in the technical board are quite good at solving issues?
It's simply because they've come across these problems over and over again.

Seems like you are contradicting yourself. What possibly could cause lack of interest ? Isn't repetitive posts part of it. Older members here are looking for newer things to discuss and not regular reoccurring posts.

Quality users will always exist, but their numbers will probably decrease over time. We can't always maintain interest for some reason, that's why you will always see people just coming and going. I'm also not sure you will still post and be interested in discussions when you have become a multi millionaire because of bitcoin, you must get bored to maintain that interest all the time.

I believe that there are still many users who really care about the quality of their posts, it can be found everywhere around this forum. Discussions are also still interesting when you're used to having knowledgeable users discussing with you, so the forum hasn't lost any of its quality, but it's probably lost a lot of user activity.

Were problems such as these non-existent in the past? No, we had repetitive threads and topics even in the past, we used to have a way higher amount of spam in a lot of different sections of the forum in the past, and we used to have account farmers, bounty hunters, a lot of scams, and a bunch of other problems, but that didn't make the quality of the forum drop. The good quality people always used to overshadow the bad things around here.

The problem lies in a lack of interest. We used to have more active and quality members in the forum, particularly during or around when the Merit system was introduced. In those times, if older users used to become inactive, new quality members used to take over, and that isn't happening at present. Most people these days aren't particularly interested in the forum itself and the knowledge that can be gained from here, and to be honest, for this reason, the forum isn't as informative as it used to be, but, even if it does have something left in it, new users aren't interested in that. All they know or think about is how they can earn money from here and I don't blame them because the world is becoming that way, a person tends to look for monetary gains in almost everything they do.

So the problem is not in repetitive and boring threads or topics, they can be handled, but only if more members are interested in quality discussions and informative stuff that this forum used to have in chunks before but is losing over time.

Let's be frank though, it kinda seems like general post quality on the forum is actually dropping. Will I blame the mixer ban? No . I believe to an extent that mixers too brought more traffic. however the fact remains although we have lost a majority of important members here due to inactivity or other factors, what  can we say ? Are there really any more discussions made here on the forum anymore that hasn't been made in the past?

Yeah we'll say that things are quite dynamic however the fact remains ,the only totally new topics on this forum are simply just a few occurrences that haven't happened sometime ago on the forum. Older members here often find topics here quite boring based on the fact that they have literally seen these topics over and over again.

You can even tell when you see new technical problems pop up older members are more inclined to engage in them .

It was always the case. If you are a software engineer, then you will handle Bitcoin easier, than if you are not. I can clearly see that in case of test networks, where by CPU mining I can get around 10% of all mined blocks, which is insane, if you note, that all of my blocks have the minimal difficulty, and there are many ASICs around. And it is even more surprising, when I can achieve similar results on both testnet3 and testnet4.

One of many possible outcomes, is to move those transactions into test networks. I can happily confirm a lot of Ordinals on testnet3 or testnet4, if it will decrease the load on the mainnet, and will allow regular payments to be processed faster.

This problem can be also fixed, but I am trying to postpone that kind of code, for as long, as I can. Fixing UTXO flood should happen after batching regular payments, not before them. Ordinals should fall into the trap of their current design, get themselves locked in their present flaws, and then, crushing that market will be easier, because then they will face the same problems as Bitcoin Core developers: you cannot change things, if they are grandfathered in.

The same is true for mainnet, but many people didn't realize it yet. And it is good to keep Ordinals' users in their blissful ignorance, for as long as possible, to then wake them up with a cold shower. If you want to know more, then read about "assume UTXO", and note, that Ordinals are completely unprepared for those kinds of things.

1. It will be hard to kill testnet3. In the best case, it will be slowly dying altcoin. But I guess, that network will be maintained for a while, even if it will no longer be supported by Bitcoin Core, and even if existing seed nodes will be disabled. Some users will just not upgrade, and their local list of peers will be sufficient to keep it running, even without hard-coded seeders. And as usual, they will use addnode to connect to nodes, maintained by centralized exchanges. There were altcoins, which stopped working, and trading was not affected. This situation may also repeat there.
2. Getting the same outcome on testnet4 will take a lot of time. If you want to test things after many halvings, then testnet3 is your only choice, there is no alternative, because testnet4 started from 50 tBTC. Also, because testnet4 will have no blockstorms, then doing some tricks will be easier than on testnet3. Another thing is the new rule of 600 seconds, which will help CPU miners to mine more blocks than before, because it will push the time forward, and lower the network difficulty. I can also see that now, because I can mine more testnet4 blocks than testnet3 blocks, with the same CPU power.

Not that long, as you may think. They annoyed a lot of people. They abused the network to the point, where some big mining pools started censoring them. And they created way more UTXOs, than they should, so they forced some developers to deploy their code way faster, than they planned. They basically forced people to start spinning up new "utreexo nodes" to avoid being sued. And if they will abuse the chain further than today, then you will see block explorers, showing proofs, instead of sharing full transaction data, when their operators will start receiving letters from courts.

Thanks for bumping with a nice reply. Appreciated.

Open source means "take your time doing it". More of a bless than a curse, hopefully. Wishful thinking.

What's your problem, exactly? A Bitcoin transaction is information. It has always been possible to use it as a cloud storage. There's nothing to be "fixed". Due to the way the network is designed, even if you softfork and disable this "malicious" use, then Ordinals can appear again, in just another shape. For example, in UTXO.

And I'd absolutely disagree with the testnet analogy. A testnet blockchain is not an immune piece of data, which is guaranteed to be stored indefinitely. We already notice people migrating from testnet3 to testnet4. It's crystal clear that the best selling point of Ordinals is that they're stored on Bitcoin, which will probably operate for a very long time.

Pretty much the same, as it was.

Then ignore them. There are many interesting things to explore. I don't know, play chess, read some old topics, try to create your own topic, whatever. Don't expect a new great posts, coming at regular intervals. Sometimes, there is no interesting post for a month, and then suddenly something, which could be worth 50 merits. It is unpredictable, and it is normal. It always was.

Also note, that some things are still "in progress". It is Open Source: things are published, when they are ready. So, don't expect a topic about DLEQ proofs between secp224k1 and secp256k1, because of the same x-value in half of the generator, because it is not yet ready. Many interesting things are baked under the hood: testnet4, weak blocks, scanners for Silent Payments, OP_CAT, and so on. They arrive, when they arrive. The only way to push them faster, is to join some group, working on some proposal, and support it with your code, your test cases, your translations, your new bitcointalk topic about it, etc.

And it will be in the future as well. You know why? Because it is that kind of spam attack, which was still not yet fixed. There is no clear winner yet. So, people will talk about it, until someone will kill Ordinals, or until Bitcoin will officially become some kind of P2P cloud storage (but then, it will be worth as much as testnets are, because the only purpose of testnet is to push transaction data publicly).

So, I expect people will discuss about Ordinals forever, unless the network rules will be fixed, or unless people will be encouraged to try something else. Or: maybe some spammers will eventually run out of coins, and then regular payments will take their place.

That's why some people just stick to some boards, where there is no speculation (or the topic is moved somewhere else, if it is mentioned). I heard about things like Wall Observer, but I never read it. And you also have the same choice: just ignore topics you don't like, and produce more topics you want to read about, and everything will be fine.

1. Some of them are still there, hidden behind different accounts.
2. There are also some new valuable members, who woke up recently, after falling asleep in 2020.

Human emotions, as usual. Things are not getting better or worse, the only shifting thing is your way of looking at them.

I have to agree. There's no way a newbie can tell the progress of the forum if his stay is just a couple of days or months. Either way, he might actually not a real newbie.

However in my own point of view, this forum is quite different already from it was before but it's not actually full of negative criticism as I'm still seeing it as good and productive forum the way it was originally designed. Maybe we just have different opinions when it comes to this and I have to respect others if they don't see the forum the way I did see it.

This is also my stance on this and I have been saying same. The early users of this forum didn't actually dish out quality posts as they have been described. Rather they gave natural and uninfluenced posts.
Nowadays people allow the signature they promote influence what they post;
Some signature participants are encouraged to post in the Ann threads of the project they are promoting. They'll definitely not go their to be negative but positive and loyal to their employers.
The early posters could make a post how they performed CPFP in bitcoin and that will be considered as high quality post. But make same today, it will not be regarded as a high quality post.
It is normal that the initial excitement of a new technology drop at some points, there's nothing strange about it.

Getting worse is probably an exaggeration. The forum may be a lot different today than it was before but all I can see is that there are still positive developments that continue to build in the forum, despite of the fact that some reputable members have already leave the forum due to some personal reasons.

Bitcointalk forum has never got worse or has eventually turned into superb. It just serves its own purpose right, to consistently educate all members and create a harmonious discussion that bind us more to be more attached with the forum members and the forum itself.

Maybe I'd say I came after the mixer ban or I haven't been this knowledgeable in the forum before the mixer was banned. I don't have an ideal of the significant changes in the forum all these while otherwise I've always commend the state of discussions with the intellectual users in the forum.

Don't get me wrong please, you could be right but having the view on my own perspective as a forum member who haven't been here for long experiences now, I've reputable honours to those who have effectively been contributing to the welfare of the forum in providing solutions and expanding the obligations of bitcoin discussion at large.
Hopefully there must had been exited of much intellectual forum members as a course of the mixer ban and while I've also been in the forum for a quite time now, I understand that there had been shilling posts and similar topic of discussions revolving around he forum which makes it feel like there's no creativity as the discussions goes on.

Hard? I wouldn't take it that far. As far as I'm concerned, you are able to detach from here whenever you want just like you would any other website.


You could say the same about the Altcoins board, Economics, Trading discussion and Bitcoin discussion, though. Pretty much everywhere you look is plagued with spammers bar the technical boards, this board, and the marketplace.