Topic: The effect the mixer ban has had on the forum. - page 3. (Read 4424 times)

What happens when theymos is gone (for any reason), that is a good question.
I hope he already prepared some plan to make sure forum survives in his absence, in similar way like Bitcoin survived Satoshi's absence.

Main problem with Steem was tokens they used to reward members for writing posts and comments, and I think this project later forked into separate project with different token.
Only way for forum to work in decentralized way long term is if there are no tokens involved, and you should not have to pay to make posts.

I agree with this.
It's possible, and I could even imagine clients or bitcoin wallets that have something like integrated chats or forum extensions, maybe as sidechain or second layer.

I assume Administrator Cyrus also has server access. I have no idea if there's a backup plan for the domain name. Short-term, this will probably be okay (the chance of Admin dying this year is no more than 1%). If the inevitable happens, there may be time to get a new domain name.
For loyce.club, if I would disappear, the domain is still active for a while. Hosting will keep going until something fails or someone pulls the plug. After that it's gone, and a domain squatter will claim the domain.

For what it's worth: .onion sites aren't decentralized either. They all rely on a server with an owner, even when it's hidden.

It looked like a pyramid scheme when I checked it years ago, designed to make the first "contributers" money, and needing more people to join. I just looked at it, and it's still showing how many dollars each article raised.

I'd expect a truely decentralized forum to work without website. Just a program you run, maybe like Tor browser, with a local database (or blockchain) containing all posts ever created. If most of the users use "light clients", I wouldn't call it truely decentralized.

I am, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

The closest thing I saw to a decentralized forum that worked was Steem(it). It ran quite well (it still exists) and had good SEO for some time. The crucial part making that possible was obviously that there was a web front-end run by the founders, but the content was stored in a decentralized manner. So there were a couple of alternative web front-ends.

(OK, it is not really a forum, more a kind of blog platform. But a forum and a Steemit-style platform is esentially the same thing, only with different CSS style )

Let's say such a kind of forum is implemented, and one server is taken down. The community could still post on other servers in friendlier jurisdictions, or directly to the blockchain. The web server operators could also decide if they moderate some kind of content, for example illegal stuff. In theory each web frontend operator could have its own moderation (that happened on Steemit if I remember well).

Steem(it) had of course the problem that it had centralization problems because the governance token was highly concentrated on the founders. And of course the monetization system had several flaws.
But actually such a system could be designed with varied grades of (de)centralization. I also personally think that the on-chain storage was not really well done; in the way they did it it could not really scale as others already wrote. I'd better store only the hashes of the posts on-chain and share the complete content via a torrent-style system. This would also make it possible to make illegal stuff really disappear, frontend operators could be compliant with the "right to forget" for example.

But I think Steem(it) showed the principle of offering a decentralized publishing platform with web front-ends can work.

I think also Nostr has a lot of potential. It solves the "server-dependency" problem of earlier decentralized social networks and could be combined with a blockchain approach in theory.

So in general I'm not so pessimistic about the "decentralized forum" idea.

For free? Nothing is free here. This forums runs in an expensive server.
Also, This forum is very profitable, a lot of people is making a lot of money here.

In other forums as well. Quora, reddit,  etc even pay their top contributors to post.

Everytime I'm reminded of this, I'm always thankful to the people and organizations that are running those servers for free or at a really low charge just so we can establish a server that's outside of what the common Internet users go to. Regarding decentralizing a forum, what's the big deal of not becoming one because the centralized one seems to me a more appealing thing because that means there's more people that can easily access and participate to the discussion and most of the time, these types of decentralized forum's got something to hide.

What if something happen to Theymos today or anytime. Bitcointalk gone? I can not remember the role Cyrus have. Do we have a setup which allow someone else to take control of the domain and the database in case anything happen to Theymos [Not just legal things but things related to health]?

@Theymos

That's probably why there's not a single decentralized forum yet. And without centralized server, everyone will need to keep the entire database of all posts. It won't run in a browser, so no advertising for SEO either. Search engines don't visit decentralized forums.
Theymos wrote about the possibility of a decentralized moderation system, kinda like the current Trust system. So if you trust me, you won't see posts I've deleted. But if someone creates a billion spam accounts, that's still going to be a problem.
I expect to be stuck with a centralized forum for a very long time.

I'll just pass on one quote here, I'm not sure who the author is
"Democracy is a great system that allows everyone to feel like their opinion matters. Until you expect something to change"


Paying with some worthless token is still payment, isn't it?

It's not impossible to make something like this, as someone already created decentralized twitter alternative called Nostr.
If Nostr is possible than forum should be even easier to create, but I am not sure how this would be moderated in real life and if people would even transition to new forum.

Not everyone needs to run a node for this, and with pruned nodes it's even easier.

Nothing can survive without any changes and improvements, including bitcointalk forum.

Let's say someone come up with a decentralized forum software where no authority can touch. That's pretty much what darkweb is. Every type of filth will leak from a place like that. Let's face it, decentralization is not always the perfect solution. It is because we are trying to solve the wrong problem. The problem isn't the forum software we use. We are the problem. By "we" I mean everybody. It is because we can't stand to live in a perfect world.

Just like how the Architect described it in the movie, the Matrix.

He created a world with imperfections and only then his simulation worked to some degree. Every other perfect world simulation has failed instantly. We can't be happy if everybody's happy. We are feeding on other people's misery. That's also the reason why capitalism prevailed.

In a world where everybody's driving a lambo, what's the point of driving a lambo?

Pay to post!?!?! LoL

Could you imagine the dropoff in traffic if people weren’t paid to post here? Even as it is, most people who created things here left as a result of poor management and that’s when it’s free and advertisers are lining up to pay you to participate here. Not to mention Bitcoin couldn’t facilitate a pay to post operation anyway in its current state.

I don't think decentralized forums can work now. There isn't anyone working well.

Seo is important for traffic, which is important for money and sustainability of the forum.

Bitcointalk seo is very good, and there is very good content here. I found  many times posts of this forum appear in my Google searches.

And reddit is a very good forum with many good information. Not the best for crypto , but there are many other subjects there.

This forum is not decentralized, neither democratic. It is owned by a person, and we are all forced to either use it under their terms, or not use it at all. Bitcoin is truly decentralized, and therefore not democratic. You don't vote for changes in the Bitcoin protocol under the accepted sense of that term.

A truly decentralized system can't be democratic, because democracy requires a government, which by definition makes the system centralized.

So Bitcointalk defines the voting rules. This means it isn't truly decentralized. Theymos can pop a few Legendary accounts and use those to increase his votes.

• Bisq doesn't use the Bitcoin network to do everything, only the trades are settled on-chain. If you use the blockchain to create a decentralized forum, you'll be forced to keep at least the forum posts on-chain, which means it cannot scale.
• BRC20 tokens are worthless trash, and the fools who buy them spend millions of dollars. To give you an analogy, think of forum user who would have to pay thousands of dollars to take part in discussions.

It is a challenge but it can be done if we as a community can work on it. Why are you concerned about SEO? This is where I surrender as the SEO part is so much destroyed as Reddit stands out when typing anything related to understanding Bitcoin or its issues. What you said is another excuse as the community is still progressing with mouth recommendations or due to the reason that the forum does not provide good informative post anymore.

Where is the technology to do that (decentralized forum)?

Will you make a blockchain forum? Would you pay a transaction fee to post?  

Would you run a node for free?

Who is going to create a fucking front end with capable SEO to compete with bitcointalk, for free?

---

We have hundreds, thousands of forums in the internet. This is among the best of them. I don't think there is much to change here.

The community!


Is the forum decentralized? No, it is not! Is Bitcoin truly decentralized? Do define democracy by the way as this forum is not.



Only existing known legendary users and Hero users will be allowed to vote. We will know who will be the one but on some of those local boards it will create a canvassing opportunity for those who stand in the election they can lure their voters with anything but the voters will be from the higher ranks.

Then you will say many high-ranking members are on those big local boards. Of course, but the member standing in the election will nominate only those who are known globally and are reputed.




That is your point of view and if you think I am parroting then how the hell Bisq was created and why there are BRC20 tokens spamming the network. It is better to encourage a suggestion at your timeline rather trolling.

If you think it's easy, then a generous donation from theymos is waiting for you:

You're kidding, right? Democracy is centralized.

Who's "we"?  

What prevents someone from creating alt accounts and voting for themselves? Will you impose KYC to prevent that? If so, then what will prevent buying and selling KYC votes from the Internet? (The answer to the last one is obviously "nothing"). And even if you have a solution to both, to whom will trust the KYC data? We obviously can't publish all that data, because then there would be no privacy, which is devastating for democracy.

Our best course for censorship-resistant communication is Tor, but that wouldn't be a decentralized forum. It'd just be more difficult to shut down.

I don't think people think twice before parroting this. Explain me your thought on this. Step by step, how would it work? I want you to realize yourself how dumb idea this is.

Creating a decentralized forum is not so tough all we need to do is to copy democracy voting. As democracy we can choose a members from active local boards through voting.
Only one member is allowed to represent and the local board members will vote for their leader.

The selected members should be odd in numbers and they will then decide what happens as a policy and other things for the forum.

Forum software, there are plenty of intellectual minds who can make this forum hard for the government to track. If the forum was created for Bitcoin then why not use the network to run a forum software?

This is my suggestion which I am sure will have flaws or might have been discussed earlier.

How to you find someone who's trusted, anonymous and capable?

We saw that authorities (very high chance) visited this forum, registered here and made a warning post. Theymos also said that this forum will be in danger if he allows mixer promotions on this forum. He is also based in the USA. I think that if we want to keep this forum and theymos safe, we shouldn't ask him to ignore the warning, allow mixer signature campaigns anyway and change his home because some people here want to earn $200 per week.

If theymos ignores warning and allows mixer promotions, this forum will be closed sooner rather than later and he will be in a huge trouble. If he doesn't ignore the warning, this forum and him will be safe. We have two choices but sadly majority of people prefer to earn $200 per week for a limited time and don't give a shit what will happen to this forum and theymos.
I am not against privacy, no, but in this case we have to be realistic and do whatever is the best solution for this forum and for the forum owners. I think that theymos's decision was optimal and done for good, not for bad.