their financial issues
People being required to demonstrate the ability of not having financial issues before voicing opinions sounds like a very good thing to me.
Seriously? So you think that people with financial issue due to their class, situation etc shouldn't have an opinion?
My suggestion was a mere 0.1 BTC. My point was, they should prove they can do the legwork of acquiring BTC and understanding how to use it before being able to post on the forum. It would prevent some of the same old newbie posts from being reposted over and over again. It also helps, in a small way, to prevent sockpuppets. People could more easily connect the dots between sockpuppet accounts, unless the sockpuppeteer works hard to make sure the two addresses never interact.
But it also depends on what you want the forum to be. Should it be a place of higher-level discussion with less "noise"? That's what I heard it was supposed to be. Locking out people who are just finding out about Bitcoin is a good way to do that. They can go research elsewhere and discuss elsewhere until they have a greater understanding of Bitcoin, enough to keep down the noise and keep up the number of relevant and interesting conversations relative to noise posts. If the new forum is supposed to be friendly to all, then it'll just turn into the same cesspool we have here (IMO).
Here's another rather radical idea: Bitcoin addresses as usernames.
In order to "sign up" for the forum, you must have a legitimate Bitcoin address with a balance greater than 0.1 BTC. You use this address to digitally sign a message verifying that you own the address. In order to trade on the forum, your Bitcoin address must have a balance greater than, say, 2 BTC. Usernames are simply full Bitcoin addresses (or firstbits, if you want to shorten them up a bit).
This would virtually eliminate forum spam, removing one major headache from administration. It would make sockpuppeting more expensive (would have to put 0.1 BTC "on hold" for every sockpuppet you wanted to create) and more difficult to conceal (any accidental link between Bitcoin addresses could be proven by anyone, not just the forum administration looking at IP addresses). It would also force people brand new to Bitcoin to actually acquire some before joining in on any discussions, bringing up the quality of the discussions that do take place. But it wouldn't actually cost the forum users anything.
So to participate at the peak, it could have cost $520?
Numbers could be adjusted to whatever is deemed appropriate, of course. The balance required for participation that I suggested was only 0.1 BTC too - I was just suggesting a higher balance required to participate in trading, as it lends a bit more trust to that person if they have to hold that much of a balance in limbo, so to speak. And it doesn't actually cost anything - you just have to prove ownership of that much.
What if someone wants to find out more about Bitcoin or is looking for investment but has no Bitcoin themselves?
So for them, no matter how small the amount of Bitcoin, they would need to have a bank account (not everyone does), they would then need to transfer fees to an exchange, then buy some Bitcoin.
Sounds like quite a barrier to entry.
The minimum balance required to participate could be reduced then. Heck, make it 0.00005430 BTC, and tell them to get it from a faucet. Anyone can still participate for free, but they must at least prove that they know the basics of how to use Bitcoin. This wouldn't prevent sockpuppets at all, but it would at least prevent people who have no idea about Bitcoin from generating extra noise on the forum.
EDIT: But if the idea is to promote higher-level discussions of Bitcoin, is such a barrier to entry a bad thing?
