Topic: The Legal Fiction Perpetuated by BitcoinTalk - page 3. (Read 5252 times)

And that is the rub.  How does one "protect" the name Bitcoin where the name is not trademarked, the protocol is not centralized and the code is not closed-source?

I'm not arguing that the current blockchain is not the official blockchain of Bitcoin SHA256, but rather, that any fork of the Bitcoin blockchain can still be considered Bitcoin notwithstanding what any forum moderators may say otherwise.  

There is one official Bitcoin block chain. It should be a goal of the entire community to ensure that there is a definitive way to pay someone a Bitcoin. There is nothing wrong with protecting the *name* Bitcoin, and I think that's something Bitcoin supports should strive to do. If not, Bitcoin's chances as a currency will be harmed.

My recollection of the "bitcoin scrypt" issue was that it was initially banned out of a belief that it could case damage to bitcoin wallets. Once that was resolved, the ban remained because of the dilution of the bitcoin name. In my opinion, that's a perfectly legitimate reason for a ban.

It was more than 2 weeks after you first learned the developer updated the warning but didn't un-ban until being prodded by the community.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3356282
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3412020
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3412072


I'm not trying to pick on you Saltyspoon but I just want to set the record straight to prove my point that BitcoinTalk perpectuates a legal fiction that there is one official Bitcoin.  

That said, I also know it's easy for me to sit here and knit-pick someone who posts a lot more frequently than me and understand if you can't recall everything perfectly 100% of time so we can agree to disagree on that point.

I disagree with the statement in bold above.

Sept 11, 2013 - Banned  for the reasons you stated (and more).
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/scrypt-bitcoin-threads-not-allowed-292543

Sept 11, 2013 - Malware/overwriting wallet demonstrated to be false.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3133107

Sept 28, 2013 - You claim another reason for ban is confusion re name even if malware accusation was false.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3249904

Sept 28, 2013 - Malware/overwriting wallet again demonstrated to be false.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3250224

Oct 7, 2013 - You un-stickied Banning thread while stating ban was still in force
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3290330

Oct 11, 2013 - You re-iterate that the ban is about confusion re name
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3323441

Oct 12, 2013 - You state "To the people that are complaining, I highly advise rereading the OP where I specifically say it has to do with the coin's name."
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3323828

Oct 14, 2013 - You quote the coin developer as changing the warning
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3338566

Oct 25, 2013 - Ban lifted after lack of feedback from moderation staff
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3412072


So when you said that you banned it because of the wallet overwriting warning and lifted the ban as soon as you found out it was false, you are mistaken, on both accounts.

On the other hand, I completely agree with your remaining two paragraphs.  I was simply stating my opinion that it is a legal fiction here at BitcoinTalk that there is one official bitcoin.

My point is that it is a legal fiction here at BitcoinTalk that there is one official Bitcoin.


You forgot that theymos is reputed to have an alert key for Bitcoin SHA256 too.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Alerts

Well first off, it wasn't malware, the official spokesperson for the coin developer put out a warning, that since they didn't change the name of the coin at all, it was just called Bitcoin, both Scrypt Bitcoin and SHA Bitcoin would be saved to the same location, so if people didn't pay attention, their SHA Bitcoin wallets and saved data would be overwritten. That turned out to be false, which is when we lifted the ban on it. The moderation team still didn't like it, as they thought it was a cheap ploy at getting attention at the risk of harming Bitcoin itself, but it was allowed and not much has been heard of it since.

Honestly, I don't care what people think, they are making uninformed decisions. We are giving perfectly logical reasons, but the rationale of the community as a whole is to question authority. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but when people of the same mindset are in an authoritative position, its just redundant. If they think I'm intentionally trying to hurt my own investments, I guess they can think that, the truth is the truth, and really we have given pretty straightforward reasoning with no prior history leading anyone to reasonably believe otherwise. I don't know about Theymos' personal interests, but from the history of the Alt Coin section to this point, my best guess is that he doesn't care either way.

Lastly, I suppose even if there was a grudge against alt coins, and the Admins decided not to allow Alt Coins here, why would it matter? Its their site, Bitcointalk isn't publically owned as much as people like to think it is. While the Admins may be enforcing their own philosophies of free speech and as people like to so elequently call it, "libertarian policies", that doesn't guarentee that they have to, that is just their personal management style. If they decided to ban everyone with the letter T in their username, they could do so, at the risk of losing the people they do want here, but in principal, its their site. If removing giveaway threads from a specific subforum on a sole site is all it takes to significantly effect the value of an Alt Coin, my advice is not to invest in it.

Satoshi Nakamura, the original creator of the Bitcoin project, picked Gavin Andresen to be his successor by giving him the alert key recognized by most of the Bitcoin network (programmed into the original Bitcoin client by Satoshi himself), and said successor is currently leading said project. When the time comes Gavin will pick his own successor, or if something unfortunate happens then the people that he has chosen to recognize as "core developers" will find one. Which means that the current Bitcoin project as led by Gavin Andresen is the official and original Bitcoin project as started by Satoshi Nakamura and saying otherwise is really rather silly. What's your point? Mad that some altcoin you have won't make it to the moon?

First, thanks for the informed response as I cannot get into Satoshi's mind to learn his intent for using the MIT/X11 license.

That said, I read the thread and am confused when I reread your response (or think you may be confused).

Are you claiming that Satoshi chose the MIT/X11 License (over GPL) so people would not create alt-coins by rewriting the main Bitcoin client?  That's what your response in the context of my quote seems to imply.  I could find nothing of the sort in the Satoshi thread you quoted as he seemed to be discussing the creation of another Bitcoin client that would utilize the same Bitcoin blockchain and makes no mention of alternate blockchains.

Aside from Satoshi's intent re MIT/X11 license, do you believe that there does in fact exist only one (1) official Bitcoin?

*Sigh*

The admins here as far as I can tell don't care either way about Alt Coins and their existance. If they are however causing issues to the rest of the forum, that is when there is a problem. Alt Coins have lived peacefully in their section, secluded from the rest of the Bitcoin forum without any intervention or secret hate from the admins, besides perhaps for the occasional frustration when people are posting altcoin threads in the wrong places. Cklovias will attest to that, as well as some of Bitcointalk's more frustrated moderators.

The new "attack" against altcoins mostly has to do with that section, namely the Giveaway threads and their thousands of pages of spam contributing as a safe haven for paid advertising spammers to post (that is also an ongoing issue that effects everyone) as well as just providing a sheer amount of unwanted volume to the forums.

We have suggested incredibly reasonable alternatives, people are even allowed to post their giveaway info here, we just ask that they collect the hundreds of thousands of addresses elsewhere, be it twitter, their own forums, or whatever.

I'm a big supporter of Alt coins, and have been for years. The fact that I am actively supporting the changes mean either A) I've suddenly decided to hate Alt Coins or B) I see the problem giveaway threads create, and I think we are within reason to ask that people post them elsewhere. As I said a moment ago, its actually really being blown up out of proportion. We are trying to cut down on spam, and people keep looking for alterior motives such as why the admins are threatened by alt coins, when in reality as far as I know, Theymos has no public opinion of them, and John K. has a vested interest in some.

Had we targeted specific alt coins, I'd say that is unfair, but the fact of the matter is, we just don't want the posts. Create a giveaway thread asking new members to join your own forums, follow you on twitter, or facebook, or whatever, we don't really care. It should be a very slight inconvience on the community that wants Giveaways, a huge improvement for those that don't want them, and a HUGE improvement to those that don't want forum resources being wasted on hundreds of thousands of posts like this:

THX  1JXwGd1N8eP4WWMP6mLe6UNAycDhzqvhJo

The opposite is true, in fact. He released it under the MIT license so that people wouldn't feel the need to rewrite the main Bitcoin client:

This is a cross-post from yet another thread threatening to ban users or remove the Alt-coins forums altogether.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.4808581

This was posted here to get appropriate feedback.  I look forward to your comments, if any...



I'm afraid the admins at this forum are so protective of their Bitcoin SHA-256 wealth that they are oblivious to/ignoring the real-world implications of Bitcoin SHA-256's MIT/X11 Open Source License.

Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin SHA-256 under the MIT/X11 Open Source license for the specific purpose of allowing the creation of other versions of Bitcoin (aka Alt-coins).  Yet, the know-it-all forum admins here constantly threaten to ban users and remove discussion of alt-coins not deemed the one official "Bitcoin."

Here's a newsflash:  Bitcoin SHA-256 is not the official Bitcoin.   There is no official Bitcoin after Satoshi stopped working on the client (0.3.19) AND the blockchain forked.  Indeed, under the MIT/X11 Open Source License it is logically impossible for there to be ONE official Bitcoin after the original author's source-code was modified without the origin author and the blockchain forked after such modification.  At that point, Bitcoin SHA-256 technically became an alt-coin called Bitcoin also operating under the MIT/X11 license.  Bitcoin is a protocol.  Bitcoin SHA256 is a crypto-currency.  Re-read this if it doesn't make sense.

Stated differently, it's like creating a Linux forum when Linux came out, calling it a Linux forum, having people donate to the Linux forum, then limiting discussion to RedHat Linux because any other open-source distro is simply an Alt-OS and not the official Linux and is causing too much clutter.  Pretty self-serving and contradictory to the spirit of Open source.

It's your site and you can do what you like, but it is a grave threat to the whole Open-source ecosystem when certain actors have the power to deem one version of an open-source source-code as official and deem others to be unofficial so as to undermine those alternate versions of the open-source source-code.

Again, this is your site, but instead of ignoring the spirit of the MIT/X11 Open Source license, you should change your name from "Bitcoin Forum" to "An Alt-coin named Bitcoin Forum."

However, considering that this forum derives it power from continuing the legal fiction that Bitcoin SHA-256 is the only official Bitcoin I doubt we'll see a name or policy change.

If you disagree that the forum operators are going against the spirit (if not the letter) of the MIT/X11 Open Source License, I look forward to your response.