Topic: Pattaya - page 6. (Read 34043 times)

Bruce doesn't care really. This is evidenced by the multitudes of advice given by the community and by people who actually have a background and experience, to which Bruce consistently turns them away or labels them as "haters" or "13 year olds". Whatever line of thinking Bruce is on is the only line of thinking that matters to him and he won't change from that. Even if his sponsors rose up, he'd just insist that there are many more sponsors out there that would advertise with him (and give him a big thumbs up for making stupid decisions) and continue on his merry way.

Organizing the conference in Pattaya will be at least convenient for  one Bitcoiner.

That might be a good idea.
But after the way Bruce has been acting I would be surprised if a lot of those sponsors would want to remain in association with him.

And if intends to keep making that show of his and if he keeps calling it "The Bitcoin Show", instead of something that sounds less like an official Bitcoin thing, like "Bruce Wagner's Bitcoin Show", I will be sending some email to those sponsors expressing my disapproval.

Thanks for your words wolftaur.


While it would good, and perhaps necessary, to have a spokesman to move things along I think we need to remember the cyberpunk/cypherpunk ethic Bitcoin is based on.

It shouldn't be about celebrities or some centralized organization to hold our hands and look out for us. It is about empowering the individual to do for hirself.
It is about us - we the people - being able to take control of our own money and live our own lives. Living freely and in voluntary association to do and act as we feel appropriate for our own life situations.

We may need the training wheels of some well spoken salesman to get us started but eventually we should want to get out from under the thumb of Big Brother. 

Excuse the mixed metaphors...   but is this not what we want to move towards, while trying to not to scare those who find the prospect of such freedom scary?

Too busy doing what exactly? He rarely does the Bitcoin show anymore - if at all - and his TV "network" is a disjointed mess of broken promises, unrealistic goals, poor judgement & leadership and over-hyped pipe dreams.

<----  +42 this is the way to go.

What really goes down in Pattaya:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoneogHmZOI

No, it's not ego. Just like the million other times someone tried to give Bruce honest and helpful and advice and he rejected it all out of hand because it wasn't optimistic enough for him.

When people accuse him of only wanting to go to Pattaya to screw boys and then someone posts his enthusiastic review of a place in Pattaya where you can go screw boys, he's pretty much ceded the benefit of doubt on that issue. At the very least, it creates enough doubt that if he's got some big awesome legitimate reason for his Pattaya fever, it would probably be best (even if just for his own image) to share that reason with the community. Instead, he throws a tantrum, starts his own forum and then deletes it 3 hours later?

I don't know. I look at this thread and I don't see "98% trolls", I see a lot of people with some very heated concerns and pointed observations, and I see Bruce hiking up his pants and taking a crap on those people just like he does with anyone who's the least bit negative about anything. Apparently Bruce is the only person who's allowed to show any kind of emotion or have any kind of honest opinion about anything, and if you disagree, you couldn't possibly really think that and must be screwing with him. It's such a childish and myopic worldview, and when you combine that with the tantrums and the taking-my-ball-and-going-home act, it makes it especially galling to watch him repeatedly accuse everyone else of being a child.

Feel free to voice your concerns, and please be more specific about what those concerns are and who you include in "the people". As to "any other place" I can only assume you're unable to reflect upon the fact that we're discussing but one of the many places conferences are planned to be held.

Wow, even more defending of holding a bitcoin meeting in a shady place, while it could just as easy be held in any other place without a bad reputation. The people who so badly want this meeting to be in Pattaya have other motives than just bitcoin to do so. I can't help but wonder what they are...

No, but it's a matter of opinion that Pattaya's unrelated industries would rub off on conferences held there. If you want to claim it does, I suggest you take any one industry or company that has held an event in a Pattaya conference center and show how that has negatively impacted their reputation.

If you cannot do that, your opinion is not based in fact. It is really that simple.

As I've posted earlier:


Not to mention Las Vegas. Omg. How could anyone ever think of placing an event like CES there - especially with the Adult Entertainment Expo just next door?

Now. If Pattaya was the ONLY place Bruce suggested there should be a Bitcoin conference, I would probably agree slightly more. Seeing the absolute onslaught of trolls attacking first Amsterdam (really) and then Pattaya as if that's more important than how great all the other locations are is basically proof this is more about trolling and personal attacks on Bruce than anything else.

I find that quite lame.

While the above might be a valid reflection for some who are based in US culture, as a European I see no reason whatsoever to include such opinions in what and where I would ever hold or travel to a conference.


Reading through your posts on this forum, and how very little facts you seem to base them on, I see no reason for anyone to listen to your opinion on what the "public mass" think or does not think about anything.

As far as I can see, there's a lot of "I think" and "My opinion" in this thread - from the naysayers. The only facts being posted do not support their world views.

Like it or not, I think you are right.
So what can we do? We know Bruce wont listen to the community. But I think he will listen to the sponsors. So I say tell the tradehills, mtgoxes, memorydealers that Pattaya is a bad choice, I think they will listen and can eventually convince Bruce to move to a different city.

I can understand that. We have a similar problem on another place I hang out online -- people will frequently bypass ignore settings and administrative cease-contact orders by just making new accounts with a new anonymous e-mail address. At one point some truly pathetic moron who clearly had nothing better to do had amassed more than three hundred logins, all used at least four times a week. I was one of the tech staff the administrators suckered into spending three weeks going through system logs to help them find all those accounts to ban them. :/

It's not a matter of opinion that Pattaya has a poor reputation. Everyone in this country KNOWS it as a center for the sex industry and other illegal activities. If you don't know that then you plainly have no idea what you're talking about. The question is whether Bitcoins need to be making headlines holding a conference there. I'd vote no.

I'm always willing to try my best to give someone a fair and honest chance, so I will try that tomorrow. Though in all honesty... I do have to say, it does tend to get me on edge that the first post I made on this thread, I was trying quite hard to be direct and honest, I wasn't trying to insult someone, I stated (and honestly, I think I stated it in a pretty unprovocative way) what my concern was...

And the first thing I see from Bruce answering it is "This thread, like most of the threads in this forum, has become overrun by 98% 13-year-old children who are making a concerted trolling attack on the Bitcoin Forums." I don't think I misunderstood that at all, I don't actually see how I can construe that as referring to the members of another forum. "It is very sad that it is destroying the Bitcoin Community's central point of communication.    Oh for the "old days" when adults discussed topics relevant to bitcoin... with other adults... here in these forums."

That is not a misunderstanding. He referred to the posters on this thread. Repeatedly and directly. Along with the posters on this forum in general. Directly. (Also, I have no idea how the conclusion he's referring to members of another forum can be drawn there at all.)

So, yes, tomorrow I will try contacting him more directly and trying to tell him exactly what it is that I, personally, find troubling about the proposed location. But, no, I am not jumping to conclusions, or misunderstanding, about the fact that there were things said in this thread that I think were obviously not intended to troll, and Bruce just jumped on the tired old "poor me" definition of

troll, n. Person who dares to not agree with me in public.

If you've guessed that I find the application of the T-word for that use to be offensive, you've guessed correctly. I suppose it's entirely possible he's misinterpreted some, or lumped the behavior of some trolls in with everyone, but to be honest, in either case then he's jumping to conclusions just as much as you seem to be accusing me of.

I was referring to much of the commentary in this thread itself, not saying "most of the community." Local reference, not global.

Some of the posts in this thread had specifically stated concern about Pattaya's reputation being associated with Bitcoin if a conference is held there. And honestly, even if that's the minority view...

Minority viewpoints are equally entitled to recognition and consideration. If one in 100 people worry about whether hosting a Bitcoin conference in a place that has a reputation for child prostitution and other things that make many average people squeamish, hell, if one in a thousand worry about that...

No, I am not trolling. I mean, seriously. I became a grown man multiple decades ago and my mother still warns me that I'd better be careful on the internet because "that's how people get raped." Considering that my mother isn't even close to the only person I know with that kind of paranoia, yes, I do wonder how I could explain Bitcoin to some of the people I know if we see "Currency conference marred by child sex scandal" or anything like that in even a minor newspaper or online news aggregator.

I live in a very conservative area -- one which happens to have a pretty large number of financial businesses. I worked in that industry for a few years. If Bitcoin started becoming practical I actually still have many connections in this area and could probably get several businesses to seriously consider accepting Bitcoins. Except for one problem: When I say "conservative area", I mean very. I'm the only gay person in my entire neighborhood. I'm the only person on this block who does not have three or more children. A few minutes ago I sent a PM to someone wanting to pay for some printing work, with bitcoins. I can probably actually arrange that with a local printer, the guy was a former client of my last employer, and personally owes me some huge favors right now.

The guy is also the director of his local church.

So, what it boils down to right now? I'm aware of a specific business I have a very good chance of getting to accept Bitcoins, which is what poster after poster after poster is claiming we need, businesses accepting Bitcoins, merchants letting us spend them.

I even know of a heavy user in this forum who wanted that service for Bitcoin enough to publicly ask about it.

And I know how conservative and religious and church-affiliated the business is. As a result, I have good reason to believe that if I could get him to take bitcoins, he would drop Bitcoin like a hot chunk of uranium if he thought his neighbors and religious clients thought the currency was used for child prostitution. And while were at it, let's be blunt, lots of these people aren't exactly great about getting their facts right before they pour out the "OH GOD YOU PERVERT" stuff, so the fact that "conference held in area where this has happened in the past" is not the same as "conference was about using this money for THAT" is pretty irrelevant...

There's still not a single tangible fact to back up those worries posted in this thread. I can only assume a lot of people aren't used to having to base their opinions on facts.

Anyone can claim anything. It's how you support your claims that makes a difference. Trolls cannot usually back up their claims.

That right there is the whole problem.

The self-appointed voice of Bitcoin is a child who gets pissed as soon as someone doesn't agree with him and proceeds to insult everyone arbitrarily. Thirteen year olds, I believe it was, that we have all now been labeled as.

He isn't losing faith in the forum, he's just unwilling to show up now that it's gotten enough users that there are multiple voices that don't agree with him.

The excuse about him being "too busy" to ignore the largest collection of users I am aware of for the project he's supposedly busy with is pretty asinine too. I mean, seriously...

If the top-ranking executive officer of Goldman-Sachs said "Oh, I'm too busy to look at any of today's economic news, I haven't read a stock report in two years, and I don't even know if they still trade silver or coal" they'd lose a hell of a lot of customers and prestige, I would think.

And frankly, the "he's busy" response is a crock of shit anyway. He had the time to insult everyone posting in this thread... along with saying very little about the fact some people were uncomfortable. He tried to, well, dispel the myths -- and completely ignored the obvious fact that most of us are more worried about public perception. Unless he thinks his post here is being printed in newspapers around the country, his entire post was about insulting us, and then trying to claim we were wrong -- about the wrong thing.

I think I just asked him. On this forum.
I fail to see how all of us emailing him would help him being less busy?


Please feel free to help Bruce with the immense stress of being so busy he cannot post publicly anymore and share his response with us.


Maybe his ego does, but for the rest I've not seem him do anything that would really require a team working for him.

He's already declared that he's not posting here any more and the new forum he set up earlier today only lasted a few hours.  Unless he makes an OnlyOneTV episode about the whole Pattaya controversy, I doubt he's going to be doing any explaining.