Bitcoin Forum

Bitcointalk is rife with censorships (example: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=118154.0), and people who disagree with mods are being banned (example: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=120102.0 goat banned by mod who has a conflict of interest with GLBSE), the forum's ban on NSFW stuff (we're not children here). This thread isn't for discussion about those, but how an alternative bitcoin forum could be created that isn't censored and is free (in openness and liberty).

A few ways of doing it:
1) Upvotes and downvotes like Reddit, Quora, Stack Overflow.
2) Democratically elected moderators that can be removed if they abuse their power like what's happening now - similar to stack overflow.
3) People who are ignored by X% of the people have their posts automatically collapsed.

There obviously needs moderation or the forum would be full of spam advertising. Low quality spammy posts used to promote certain sites would also impact the discussion values, but how could moderation be handled in a fair and uncorrupt way?

FTFY

OP sounds like he's volunteering to set this up.  Thanks so much OP!

I've actually been thinking about this too.

Why not create a p2p decentralized forum and implement it into bitcoin itself?

The forum would work the same way that the bitcoin scheme works.

You have a public key (like a bitcoin address) and a private key (every public key has a corresponding private key to sign transactions with).

The public key would represent your "username", only the beholder of the private key would be able to post on the forum.

Every message in the forum made by the users must be encrypted/sign with their private key, and a corresponding public key is given with it.
This ensures that everyone posting a message, is who he truely claims he is.

Every user who made more then hundred posts gets the ability to rate other..
-> Each person has a "community rate" which is all the rates given by other people to the this person accumulated.
--> This could be used to filter out scammers and cheaters, people who harm others will get a lot of negative rates. Other who have done a lot of good things will get rewarded by a good rate, and get more trusted.

-> To counterfeit people abusing this system to harm others with a spam of negative rate we must add a minimum of 100 reached posts  and mayve to even make it harder the user should have atleast 10 good rates himself before getting the ability to rate others.

We could incorporate this into the blockchain. So not only transactions are stored in it, but also forum-messages.
-> We could take advantage of the network hashing power to relay messages.
-> Blocks only get produced every 10 minutes, so the posts get delayed.
--> Using a alt-coin that produces blocks fast can solve this though.

Private messaging can still be done.
Every user has a public and private key, now to enable private messaging we must generate another key-pair.
So we generate another key-pair and this time we give out the PRIVATE KEY TO EVERYONE.
This gives people the chance to encrypt their message with the given private key and it can only get decrypted by the public key which we keep.


Any input on this? :)

It's called Web of Trust. https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Web_of_Trust (https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Web_of_Trust)

Well we should have our own Freenet-like forum!

In my spare time I'm learning Java by rewriting the Freenet client's web interface (Fproxy). Once I'm done refactoring the existing code into something sane and readable I very well might start looking for ways to integrate new functionality involving Bitcoin.