Topic: Setting up a public Bitcoin Foundation forum mirror - page 2. (Read 5869 times)

It cost only $25 USD to join for a yearly membership. A drop in the bucket for most.

Yeah I think I understand where you are coming from. But surely a criminal would just use a mixing service straight away?

Also I am confused because you stated on the private forum that mixing services such as Blockchain.info should *refuse* redlisted coins. To me this harms fungibility.

And of course P2P mixing services are unlikely to care about redlists.

TLDR; Criminals will use mixing services so what is the benefit of this proposal?

If it's not that big a deal why not have it be released by the foundation itself.  In the spirit of transparency and all.

It would only impact people that chose to use it. That voluntary nature is very important and my previous writings on this topic (which are on bitcointalk by the way) describe some crypto protocols that can be used to achieve this.

Even if the people you're trading with all did choose to use it, there's no implication of guilt to having marked coins - there can't be, because it's so easy to send coins back to yourself a few times and then it's impossible to know how many people the coins passed through. All it can be is a clue for an investigation. So if you chose not to use it, and lots of other people decided differently, the worst case scenario is that one day some detective turns up and says "We'd like to chat to you about where you got these coins from, because we're looking for an extortionist and we think you might have information that can help". And maybe you can help or maybe you can't.

This obviously can happen to you even without Bitcoin, like if you witnessed a mugging in the street.

So, you're basically suggesting redblacklisting?

The mining pools should start a foundation. Using the same filtering software, do not include any whitelisted address transactions in the block.  Good look to everyone in the USA getting confirmations.

Correct me if I am wrong, but proposals such as Redlisting would not require any changes to the Bitcoin code but could have a significant impact on Bitcoin users.

I think the bigger question is what the point is? You realise that changes to the Bitcoin software are already all done out in the open, right?

If you actually get an account and go take a look around, you'll probably lose interest in this project, because it would suddenly seem kind of a waste of time.

The Foundation forums don't get that much traffic and don't have much of interest in them. Bitcointalk has 10000x more threads. What's more, no decisions are taken there and no software development does either.

But by all means, go buy an annual membership and take a look.

I doubt many people will care about the TOS.

To prevent any such watermarking of pages by the forum operators, simply buy a couple of accounts.

No need to provide an exact mirror, just republish the content of the forum posts.  You can easily check if they are watermarking the content (subtle differences in character spacing/punctuation) by cross checking across multiple accounts.

A Python script would do ~ couple of hours work max.

They can just add this as a violation of their TOS, see which account is scraping, and ban your account quickly. There are a variety of techniques to determine which account is scarping that ignore user agent and number of page request but reply on fingerprinting your user account.  Using a custom honey pot post, picture, hidden ascii character,  in which each account will be severed a unique one, you can determine which user is rehosting the content. There are way to defeat this but I won't go into it.

Or, in other words, not much more than 2 USD a month.
But hey, yeah, we definitely need to invite Edward Snowden over to leak our secrets

It's 0.06 BTC per year or 0.6 BTC for a lifetime individual membership (they update the prices occasionally to account for the BTC/USD price changes), and 2.4, 6.1, 12.2, 61.1 or 244.5 BTC for silver, gold or platinum industry memberships.





About a year ago the individual memberships were priced at 2.5 BTC (annual) / 25 BTC (lifetime)

Yes it does unfortunately, the cost is pegged to Bitcoin and will not change with the USD exchange rate according to the website. It has been 25BTC since the Foundation launched.

To put into perspective, it is 50BTC to get VIP status on BitcoinTalk.

I'm pretty sure it does not cost 25 BTC to get forum access. That's about $11,000 at current exchange rates.

 

See https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/leaked-private-bitcoin-foundation-discussions-on-blacklisting-more-zip-dump-334520

I am happy to mirror everything. Do NOT contribute any more money to the Bitcoin foundation.

Recently, a thread posted on the Bitcoin foundation forum that was 'leaked' by a member gained much popularity (Mike's comments on redlisting). Due to this, it has now become clear that we, as a community, need to be able to view all of the threads posted on the Bitcoin Foundation forum, which is closed to paying members only.

My plan is to set up a Bitcoin Foundation mirror. I would create a script that scrapes all new posts and threads on the Bitcoin Foundation forum at a regular interval, allowing us to view them but not reply or post new threads. It will use the useragent and browser fingerprint of a common web browser and would scrape at a random interval to hide the fact that it is scraping content.

I offer to set up such a website available as a clearnet website and also as a Tor hidden service in order to prevent any interference by the Bitcoin Foundation should they not approve of such a website. The website would be available to everyone free of charge with no registration required, no ads and no IP logging.

I will personally cover all costs of running the website. If in future this becomes difficult to do I will ask for donations to pay for this, and possibly add advertising similar to what BitcoinTalk currently has. I will not be running this website for a profit.

The only problem is that in order to do this I would need a Bitcoin Foundation forum account.

I do not have an account and they cost 25BTC, so if anyone likes my idea and is willing to donate their account please get in touch, you can send me a PM or preferrably use my GPG key below.