Bitcoin Forum

Two days ago, I wrote this in response to theymos ending the 7-day ban on many users:
I received a PM asking to create this thread anyway, and my post in the locked thread will soon be forgotten, so here it is :D

A better description may be to allow on-forum altcoin giveaways if the giveaway is not meant to promote the altcoin itself (which is probably what lead to spam in the past), but instead promotes for instance a website (this could be a casino, a mixer, or an exchange) that uses the altcoin . The coin itself shouldn't be the main reason for the giveaway, but it should be worth enough to have an actual cost for the company that runs the giveaway. So no tokens make up out of thin air (like the Bounty board).

Background of this request: this now deleted thread (http://loyce.club/archive/posts/5406/54064391.html) offered 8000 TRX as a prize, currently worth $92 (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tron/). I don't think a promotion like that hurts the forum, so I'd like those to be allowed.

Doesn't this include moderators making decisions about which altcoins are shitty and which are not ? It would make it more like altcoins are moderated which is avoided here from the start.

Agree with you Loyce, we’ve all seen the mess that can happen when people advertise airdrops & true shitcoins in the Altcoin Sub but I don’t think posters or indeed the actual casino or sportsbook should be punished for posting in or creating an altcoin giveaway, especially when the casino or sportsbook accepts the altcoin.

I’m a bitcoin maximalist, I own a good stash of bitcoin & have very little interest in alts, however we have to allow alts room to grow. Hey, most alt profits end up being pumped back into bitcoin any way so I 100% agree with you, Loyce.

Certain giveaways should be allowed, it’s quite obvious which threads are designed to spam the hell out of this place & which threads are genuinely created with good intentions, the casinos or sports-books growth & their punters interests at heart.

The TRX giveaway saw Bitcasino.io Support (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2087138 ) banned for 30 days, I think their ban should also be lifted.

A bit. But even the shitty ones can have value, so it will come down to whether or not they can be exchanged for Bitcoin. The next problem will be coins that are only traded on shitty exchanges. I'm glad I don't have to think of all the details, all I do is make a suggestion :P

Instead of complicating things with exchange rates, definition of what is considered established, etc, why couldn't the entity running the giveaway just convert it to Bitcoin? This is a Bitcoin forum.

Imagine the outcry and rivers of red trust if someone were to run e.g. a BSV giveaway. I mean it's established isn't it...

I'm for it, even though I'm really not interested in 99.9999% of existing alts right now. How do we decide which alts are considered "established" or not though? I assume probably alts that are in the top 20/50/100 on Coinmarketcap? If not, it's going to be hella difficult as certain alts being established/legitimate or not is quite subjective. Probably the last thing we like to see is mods and users battling it out arguing if x coin/token is considered a scam or not LOL.

It's a common sense that the altcoin giveaway rule was meant to prevent all those shitloads of useless coins when forum was flooding by them but since the situations has changed I will agree here with some others that the rules needs a change if possible.

Besides, if this giveaway things were not confusing then we would not see much talk about it. I was one of the user who was banned recently too even after knowing the rule but really could not identify the nature in the topic.

Technically it does but I think we want here a common ground where we will see it preserve the forum interest of not to get spammed and also legit promotions from established companies/projects.

Edit:
Yes, some of these guys get the tickets but this is not solving the issue we have here. If we consider the recent ban issue applied to some of us and still there are some who are under the same rules and possibly still in ban status means one thing which is the rule is not very clear. There are still some campaigns (not complaining against them coz I do not see any problem there) which has hundreds of users responded but from their OP it looks like they did not clearly mentioned if the giveaway will be in BTC or any other altcoin. If the rules need to be applied to them then we will see a mess ban where more than few hundreds of users will be banned and I do not think this will look good for all of us.

Not sure but may be it's not possible all the times? Who knows.

---

I think hilariousandco said somewhere that in this kind of situation trashing the thread will be a good thing instead of banning everyone who joined and to make it more flexible in my opinion whoever will be the topic creator will get a PM from the mod about the post that this kind of giveaway is not allowed so their post got trashed and if they post the same topic again only then they (the topic creator) will get x days ban. This my personal opinion by the way.

Allowing one altcoin giveaway to be discussed here and denying another doesn’t seem to fit with free speech.

If it's not possible to convert to Bitcoin then such a horrible shitcoin wouldn't fit the OP's criteria either.

And - correct me if I'm wrong - it's not the actual giveaways that are forbidden, it's the "I want to join this giveaway, here's my address" type of posts. In other words, if someone wants to run an altcoin giveaway outside of the forum and even link it here - that should be fine. As long as they don't incentivize low-effort posting/bumping.

Yes you have a point but we can not expect all the users will have greater handling power than the mods. What I mean by that is: not everyone will know that we will have to convert the coins to bitcoin and promote. So, still we will see topics where we will find it ultimately falls in the criteria of altcoin giveaway.


Here we are talking about spamming issue which still we can see if the payment method is bitcoin. Example: games and rounds and other prediction type threads like what will be the bitcoin price in x time etc. Most of them are very low effort posts, aren't they?

No, you are not wrong in the context.

Yes, but it's a special board for that kind of thing and this being a Bitcoin forum (and lacking a better way of doing it) I can understand why such exceptions exist.

I don't really see why allow it for altcoins unless Bitcointalk actually needs to promote certain altcoins for whatever reason. What would that reason be?

I did not mean any problem there so period here of course, means we are on the same page.

What bothers me is the rule of banning and if you got me earlier then it's not very friendly rule which is obviously confusing or we would not see so many users got trapped in it including a lot of us who are well aware of the rules and respect it by heart. Do you think some of the users really care much about those altcoin if they had this in mind in the next morning they will see they are banned? The answer is of course NO.

I will repeat what I said below regarding the concern here:

The devil is in the details.  So now we're going to ask mods to decide which altcoins are shit, based on which exchanges they trade on, and whether those exchanges are shit.  I'm not saying the mods don't have the capacity to determine these things, but they're determinations might differ from mine, and vice versa.  Leaving so much up to the determination of the moderators is very likely to cause problems.

Currently there's very little stopping a casino or an exchange from creating a thread with a promotion saying "Go to our website, enter "bitcointalk.org" as a promo code, and receive 1 billion shitcoins that we now accept."  As far as I know that would not be against the rules, and no spam will result from it.

No, thank you.

My reading of the explanation as to why participants were unbanned early are as follows:
*On forum games are allowed in the Games & Rounds sub, but on forum games involving altcoins would be wrongly posted, and would be disallowed forum wide.
*The thread was incorrectly posted in games and rounds
*It is an understandable that some participants made a mistake in thinking participating in the giveaway was allowed
*A lot of long-standing, active forum members were caught up in the mess, which is a negative consequence under normal circumstances, but this negative consequence is made worse by the fact that most of the world will be spending an increased amount of time on the internet in the coming weeks. 

This is a bitcoin-related forum, and its primary focus should remain to be bitcoin. I am okay with an altcoin sub where the development of altcoins can be discussed, and with an altcoin marketplace. The reason being that it is always good to have multiple perspectives, and things can be learned from the development of altcoins, and from altcoin economies.

Well, that's a different story. I think this forum is horribly unfriendly to its users. Even rules that will get you banned on the spot (permanently or temporarily) are not easy to find or understand. IMO that's what needs to be fixed instead of wasting energy on creating standards for allowing altcoin giveaways. I'd pin the rules next to the Bitcoin Core download but officially theymos doesn't believe in written rules but he writes strict anti-altcoin rules and violators get banned... go figure.

I think theymos is handling this forum better than anyone could in the space. I have seen him to make some decisions in unbanning some users by not going very strict. There are exceptions and he always allowed room in it. My effort here is to see the next guy not to get banned because he was not very much aware about the rule or thought that it's not against the rule to make a post in thread X.

Isn't this mean that the rule was not very clear in their mind? It's not that they always do not understand the rules.

I think there was some confusion.

I believe a simple solution would be for a mod to create a sticky in the games and rounds sub that says threads about altcoins do not belong in games and rounds, and that altcoin giveaways are not allowed.

This does not harm (sticky in the board) but how about the companies who have altcoin besides bitcoin in their platform. We do not suggest them to go to an altcoin forum or we ask them to go to altcoin marketplace? We need to embrace crypto projects, don't we?

The games and rounds sub is for on forum games, spreadsheet-based and giveaways (and the discussion thereof). Examples would include giving a prize for correctly guessing a number, being the nth person to post (with n being unknown), playing tic-tack-toe, and similar.

The game or giveaway should be bitcoin-related, and if it is not giving away a bitcoin-related prize, it should not be in games in rounds. If a platform accepts some altcoins on its platform, that is okay, but I don't think the thread should be promoting this fact.

This is a bad idea. There is no empirical guideline on established altcoins. What you likely consider established are very likely technological scams, e.g. EOS, IOTA.

Speaking from a market cap - security perspective, it is as much of a scam like anything else. I like Dogecoin, but this is a fact. The answer is no.

Correct, a established scam just like the previous 3 mentioned.

I think that's an issue of fairness more so than free speech, but whatever.  There are always going to be problems when you allow some people to do something and ban others from doing the same thing, and in general it's not good to run things that way.

I'd say the rule might need a looking at, at the very least.  On the one hand, I would expect senior members to know the rule about giveaways being banned and the consequences for breaking it, but on the other I don't see what the big deal is--and if it were my call I probably wouldn't punish the members who participate in them and instead would ban the promoters.  I sort of felt bad for those members whose names I recognized when they got temp-banned, as this is a lousy time to not be able to post on bitcointalk.  As I also said, though, those members ought to have known better.

Don't fix if it ain't broken !
One could make an altcoin giveaway thread without getting banned:

• Announce it here and ask users to post username on telegram, website ,etc
• Ask users to send PM for participation
• Use the Private giveaway feature (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5226333) (I guess it should work for altcoins too, not sure tho)

Don't think there is any need for more features or rule bending for this.
As long as there is no "Post username and address in this thread" I doubt anyone would have a problem with the thread, regardless how shitty the shitcoin is.
So what if we are talking about ETH, LTC, DODGE, XRP, BCH or some new fresh out of the oven, premined, closed source, inflationary, AI developed shitcoin ? Do you miss that much "[USERNAME] [SHT COIN ADDRESS]...." kind of post ?

I understand some got banned because of a giveaway, but where are you going with this ? Make mods pick between coins ... why ?? Didn't see anyone complain before this 7 day ban that got cut short.

Not any crypto project, you are supposed to shill for bitcoin here, in real life, everywhere. Learn to use "it's shitcoin, stick to bitcoin" in regular speech like any other bitcoiner do ;)

---

@LoyceV what do you mean by established shitcoins? Top 10 CMC:

2) ethereum - shitcoin for smart scams
3) XRP - bank shitcoin
4) Tether -  ???
5) Bitcoin Cash - Roger said it is trash  ;D
6) Bitcoin scam vision - faketoshi's scam
7) Litecoin - copy
8 ) EOS - centralized garbage
9) BNB - (insert any other exchange I want to make monez) shitcoin
10) tezos - another smart contract shitcoin

Money with kill switch  ;D
Much wow, such coin. Meme coin. Only doge giveaway should be allowed here.

Not sure how long it took you to come up with all these interpretation but you nailed them :-D

I think I am one of those bitcoiners too although I have some "shitcoin for smart scams" and the only reason to buy them was the massive price decline against BTC. I am still waiting for the price to spike at least 100% so that I can double my bitcoin.

Heeey, I have read this topic, opened CMC and wrote everything straight out of my head. It probably took me 3 minutes or so. I don't know, me and my friends are having lots of discussions in RL about crypto and they all end with me saying "stick to bitcoin monkeys". Lets just say that I read more than I post...
See? It's all about bitcoin.

You deserve more merit and you got it :-P
And you are lucky to have friends around you in RL who are also bitcoin lovers. My mates sucks LOL

No question :-D

Honestly, I don't like most shitcoins and the fact that Tron was used as a coin there made me step away from that giveaway - but on the other hand I don't see a valid reason to ban altcoin giveaways. Finally, rules are there to serve the community and not to ban dozens of good users, so I like the idea to have a discussion how to prevent such cases in the future like the one we had recently.

Possible solutions:

1. Altcoin giveaways offered by services (mixers, casinos etc.) posted in Games and Rounds
2. Altcoin giveaways offered by altcoin devs posted in Altcoins Marketplace / Bounties
3. Requirement: at least Member Rank / Copper Member to launch giveaways (to have something at stake if they are abusing it for fake-giveaways (announcing and not paying; solely for creating buzz) or outright scam coins.

Personally, I wouldn't make a difference, if it's a new coin or an established one; I think it's somehow also a good thing for the forum to be considered as important by (legit) altcoin developers, like Monero (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.0) and Dogecoin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=361813.0) did. I like it to keep Bitcointalk as an important part in the crypto ecosystem and (at best) every altcoin should at least announce his new coin here and maintain their thread for a while. The more they get involved here, the better for Bitcointalk as a whole.
And regarding the spam: yes, there will always be spam, to prevent it as good as possible => 3. Requirement: at least Member Rank / Copper Member to launch giveaways

The answer for it should be NO, to avoid any kind of attacks to the admin and the forum.

Altcoins, themselves, are very volatile, more volatile than Bitcoin. Their intrinsic values are difficult to identify and it is always a sort of challenge for investors. Allowing altcoin giveways here will cause many potential risks on the forum (its reputation, drama, more workloads on the staffs and admins).

Compare some established altcoins with their today values to their values at all time high circa late of 2017 and early of 2018. Most of them have still been lost around 90% from their all time high values. Many generations of investors call them as scam, no matter how established they are. Established altcoin, itself, is another controverasy stuff.

---

There were many bounties or campaigns in the past, shadily run beyond the forum (from Discord, Telegram, etc.) and require participants to make posts in their ANN threads. It is a pain in the ass to find them. The forum should better restrict them all at the start to keep the forum as clean as possible. Any resources (time, human) should be used more efficiently and prevention is better than cure.

it has to be allowed/banned for all, this is not something they can be picky about or they will end up pissing a lot of users off. lets say i like an altcoin that doesn't make the "list" or the opposite, maybe i hate an altcoin which i know is a shitcoin but makes the "list" to get the "stamp of approval". in both cases i would be furious for the bad decision.

which is why i say if you are to change the rules, change it for all altcoins equally. maybe create a new board for "giveaways" and don't let them put any incentives such as "bump our topic" to receive the giveaway. the board could have same rules similar to some other boards without showing signatures or counting posts.

This is a bitcoin forum we say yet altcoins are the major reason the forum is still very active and been considered one of the most relevant forum when you speak about cryptocurrency. Sure Satoshi made the forum all about bitcoin but I'm positive (anywhere he's) would be happy with the way the forum has grown out of been just a bitcoin discussion forum to accommodating other discussion like altcoins, politics etc. For we to achieve global adoption, bitcoin would need help, it can't do it alone.

Just imagine as a enthusiast that spend must of his online time on the forum and we didn't have the privilege to discuss or get updates on the recent Corona virus outbreak on the forum just because it was strictly a bitcoin discussion forum 👎. Things have changed and it's quite time some of the forum rules get reviewed. Some months back, the forum support Grin as a new payment option in the forum (which was a welcome development from my angle), let's stop the whole hate on altcoins for some second and think about their positive contributions to the industry so far. Atleast we have altcoins that are worth to be given the tagged "established" which aren't scam related per se. Lets work with those, ethereum is a perfect example.

I give you full marks for bringing this reference. No one had this in mind to use as a good reference so far in this topic. Thank you.

I think an on the record /public apology by the likes of mprep etc is warranted.

Although I am in favour of alt coin giveaways, many many coins over the years have struggled to gain traction simply because they couldn't give coins away as part of their promotion.

i disagree based on what i have seen so far. any coin that has ever struggled to gain any traction has been because they had nothing interesting or innovative to offer.
keep in mind that the long term survival and adoption growth should be the factor that you look at not the short term hype that is caused by these types of giveaways/promotions.

I reckon the core alts such as ETH, TRX and LTC should be fine, and not the ones piggybacking off their blockchains.

I'm probably biased to just a handful of coins that seemed to have potential. In saying that I haven't lent my support to a coin for many years now and certainly no premanufactured tokens which goes against the grain of mining solo or collectively.

ETH is a shitcoin, TRX is a scam. What the hell are you on about? Just because you are bagholding or buying into the lies of the Asian scammers[1], that does not make any of those projects less fraudulent.

Exactly. Mr. Switzerland's knowledge on these matters has always been rather minor, he knows it and I know it from our past. Time to lock this and move on.

---

[1] Before stupid people call racism, look who is behind TRX.

I ain't holding any of them, just Bitcoin.

Left the altcoin game a long time ago :D

Great. Then take this as a lesson (without an actual explanation) and do not suggest these things anymore so we can avoid other people from getting scammed!

It would be good to see that. Some days ago we have seen the massive temporary ban for that reason. However there may arguement arise too that which is established altcoin and which is not. For example, some gambling site has their own token/coin and gambler cam use that to play there. Would that be considered as established altcoin?

There are maybe a maximum of 5 coins out of several thousand coins that you could consider anything worthwhile. The answer is no. Stop promoting scams and condoning people getting scammed by fraudulent market-cap nonsense.

The problem is to say which altcoins are good coins.

Most of them are just altcoins but IMHO if the intention of the user is, in the end, convert the coins in bitcoin the giveaway has a purpose.

Maybe for whatever reason, rich companies can giveaway a ton of altcoins but cannot giveaway bitcoins (fee conversions, etc) and if someone of us normal users gets 50$ (value converted in fiat) can't see how it is bad for the community.

I agree this is a BTC forum and almost all altcoin are scams and maybe on those giveaways, a rule can be "XXX coin or same value converted in bitcoin".

There's too many bias when we're talking about altcoin. For example, some consider ETH is shitcoin which allow various shit tokens exist, but few people like ETH due to it's smart contract and allow few things such as gambling, DEX and games.

If altcoin giveaway were to be allowed, IMO there are few restriction or treatment must be made to prevent total chaos such as :
1. Signature is completely disabled
2. Only Jr. Member or above allowed to post
3. Shows warning, just like thread on "Investor-based games" board. Modified example from "Investor-based games" board :

I don't see why certain changes to altcoin giveaways couldn't be made or why that would hurt the forum. The easiest way to do it is to allow only Top 10/20 coins according to CMC. That would prevent questioning admin decisions as to why a certain coin was allowed or not allowed. Only those being used, stored and traded the most are allowed - others aren't.

Grin was also not something Satoshi brought and it has become a payment method on his forum. Good, why wouldn't it. We will soon see Taproot and Schnorr Signature upgrades but Satoshi didn't envision that either.

I like Bitcoin better but if someone prefers to use ETH that is his right, I don't care. If that someone wants to give away a $50 ETH it doesn't hurt me in any way. Heck if he gave it to me I would exchange it for BTC so there you go, ETH finally has a use case.  ;D

I think we are too small of a community and interest group to be holding each other back.       

So...
This whole giveaway idea should usually help new coins/tokens.
Let's assume I develop a new coin (a.k.a clone some other coin and change parameters: total supply, block time and ticker)
I just created [CHL]Coin and now would like to make a giveaway or airdrop. Logic would dictate that I would be giving out CHL coin. That is my product. Not ETH, LTC etc.
Since it is a new coin it definitely is not on any exchanges (even if roadmap says "in progress to list"). Anyone who does a giveaway wants to promote, make potential users familiar, have some use it and have some hodl it.
The idea to allow just a few alts will help only services or layer 2 business ideas. Exchanges, casinos, mixers etc. Not really fair to the coin cloning devs :(

The point is: if I make cookies I will host a contest and winner gets cookies, not croissants.

Still not sure what got into you guys ... if you want to diversify your portfolios do some fb bounties! It's honest work :)
As I said before: as long as there are no wallet address posts anyone can go crazy with giveaways.
Want to see ETH in games and rounds ? Go to vitaliktalk.org (domain available btw) !

If somebody is too stupid to properly asses which is actually a genuine coin and which is a scam, then you should care. If you do not, then there is a fundamental morality flaw (or a "I do not care as long as I can binge on Netflix flaw"). ::)

And what and who exactly does this help? The coin spammers to steal more money from people? Have we learned nothing from when the first bullshit altcoins were created?

ICO's steal money. Giveaways offers worthless and potentially still worthless coins.
Don't know about you but never felt poorer after receiving an airdrop. But that's just me I guess :)

Giveaways lead to word of the mouth spreading (free marketing) leading to gullible people buying the coin whenever it can be bought leading to financial losses.

---

Ultimately I also draw on this questioning: Do we not have enough problems here? Are not enough people getting fooled by coins? Are not enough people losing money? Do we really need more?  :-\

Me or you caring or not caring will not change the fact that ETH is a Top 5 (if not a Top 3) coin in terms of market cap and trading volume, would you agree with me on that? If that volume is fake or not, is not for me to say. But that is what the numbers say. The crypto community is certainly using it.

As for morality, be sure that I know how to distinguish right from wrong, and I know which group I belong to.
 
That is exactly what it is not supposed to do. It's not a new bounty idea to help the newest "revolutionary, world-changing ICO". The topic of discussion is whether or not to allow giveaways for "established" altcoins.  

For the record I also think altcoin giveaways should remain where they are: somewhere else !


As long as you invest you should also take the risks involved and there are plenty, that's for sure.
Just wanted to emphasize there is a difference between ICO and giveaway, one is stealing the other is advertising for the stealing platform :))


My point was it would not make sense for new projects to offer giveaways in other "established crypto". It would make sense only for services. And why change things around here just for their sake ?
Scams are not moderated but at least spam is. And these giveaways tend to create lots of it.


I know... The last airdrop I joined made me furious as f**k. Make an account here, share this link on fb, share this on twitter, write here, add your details there... Never felt so angry and embarrassed for a few bucks (if I'm lucky). Not joining another anytime soon...

Even if you received the airdrops, the chances to trade them for ETH or some similar alts are pretty slim since their trading volumes and/ or the prices are pretty low.

Once, many years back I joined some airdrop called PIXEL. Completed the tasks and was awarded the tokens worth like $4. Eventually I found out I had to send them to a decentralized exchange (since there weren't other exchanges supporting it) which meant forking out another few bucks to cover the costs, not to mention the trading fees later on.

I was like fuck this shit, I'm out.

The market cap is irrelevant. Market cap is a numbers game by few big individuals or couple groups of such individuals. Entirely irrelevant. If I can protect a single person from being scammed by ETH, then it is my duty to do so. Anything else is morally wrong and one is apathetic or worse, morally evil.

Utopian wishful thinking gets us nowhere in practice.

---

I'm conflicted on this one.  I'm naturally drawn to the pragmatism of the "live and let live" attitude some have expressed, but I also have a weird kind of respect for Lauda's decidedly puritanical stance.  

Looking at it solely from an impartial, practical sense, I can only ever see it creating a constantly moving set of goalposts if, once we've even established what the criteria is, we try to judge whether an "established" altcoin remains so over time.  Crypto moves pretty fast.  I remember a period when Namecoin and Peercoin were considered part of the furniture, traded for BTC on just about every exchange you could sign up for, but now they're just largely forgotten trinkets for bagholders.  What might be viewed as established today may not stay that way tomorrow, so it's just going to cause arguments later down the line when someone has to make the arbitrary decision that <x> coin is not allowed to be included in on-forum giveaways anymore, but rising-star <y> coin suddenly is.

Thank you.

As you said, it is not practical either and opens a can of worms. I think this may also lead to many more problems. What happens when somebody buys some coin because the forum staff declared it as established (this being the sole reason for their purchase), but it ends up being a disastrous scam of sorts? Who is to blame?  It is just simple and easier not to do this.

I don't see what this has to do with free speech. You can still discuss any shitcoin elsewhere, you just can't give them away. Just like it is now for that matter.

That is indeed my understanding. Viewing this from a different angle I don't even know why low-effort posting for a Bitcoins giveaway is allowed.

I had this in mind too, when I posted my suggestion. I get where the instant temporary ban is coming from, namely ending spam. But many other rules can be broken without an instant ban. Spamming referral links for instance will only get your post deleted, and I don't believe joining a giveaway deserves a bigger punishment.

Correct. But why would they do that, if they barely get any publicity that way? For the same reason Bitcointalk allows millions of "proof of authentication" posts: the spammers promote the thread, and again, I find this worse than joining a giveaway with real value.

It's like we're all grounded.

Correct, the fact that that many well-known users thought posting there wouldn't be a problem made me doubt the current rules.

Several of those I've never used. But if someone were to offer a $100 giveaway, I wouldn't mind checking how to convert it to Bitcoin.

I couldn't disagree more. Don't blame the messanger, mprep is just fair to all, without special treatment for established users.

The problem is bigger that that... Let's assume that mods pick the cream of the crop shitcoins and giveaways with those coins are fair game. That means somehow they are acknowledging that coin. They are proposing it, trust it, even advertise it.
Nobody wants to do that... especially theymos.
Seems to be the same case as ICO adversiting on the forum... a no go!
Which coin are you confortable to recomend?  Bitcoin!
Think a bit about this before having any more doubts :)

it is because you were lucky and/or you received the "airdrop" in a wallet you already had or in a third party wallet like exchanges. there are a lot of people who did get poorer after receiving such "airdrops", example: bitcoin gold giveaway. a lot of users lost their bitcoins after downloading a malicious wallet from the official bitcoin gold website that infected their computer and stole their private keys...

Here's my solution. Allow everything, but create a special subsection for Altcoin promotional giveaways and here's where the forum benefits. Require every giveaway thread to donate 1 million sats to the forum.

The spam is limited to that board. The forum gets some money. It's win-win.

Theymos said the forum doesn't need money (it owns ~1250 Bitcoin).
Even at the peak of ICO spam, when almost every ICO turned into a scam, they could create their Bounty threads with thousands of zombies posting virtually unrestricted. If they didn't have to pay the forum for doing so, I don't think a giveaway should have to pay either.

People lose money to scammers, win-win indeed. ::) It is time to stop embracing innocent and naive individuals being financially harmed (and in extreme cases ruined) because of own petty greed.

If we did things the wrong way in the past, this means that we should continue doing it the wrong way just because we did it like that previously? I do not follow this logic. The stance towards ICOs was terribly wrong, and everyone knows it. It led to the following: A handful of scammers getting rich, a handful of intelligent scammers getting rich, a fair number of people profiting from the pumping in these scams, and an enormous amount of people being financially harmed. Good stance indeed. :-\

So do Bitcoin giveaways. Those temp bans that were recently issued were given to members who participated during the weeks that altcoins were given out. But when Bitcoin was given away there were no bans. If the spam those types of post create is the problem, then it is all the same.

If I have to post my casino username to get Bitcoin, it's the same type of no-value post as if I have to do the same to get Litecoin.
I understand very well that the bans were not issued for the spam part, but for taking part in an altcoin giveaway. I am just making a point.

Users lose Bitcoin every day downloading fake Electrum wallets. The same security measures we undergo when downloading and verifying Electrum should be done with other software as well and if in doubt, don't use it.

Bitcoin Gold is not something I would vote for or allow either and I doubt it would find its way on the list.    

  

True ! That is why nobody here (luckily) will allow altcoin giveaways, ICO advertising and so on ... because even currently ok crypto can fail in awful ways and why should anyone here be (sort of) held responsible for that ?


In bitcoin we trust. In the others not so much. Would you bet your parent's house on any altcoin from coinmarketcap ? I wouldn't...

So "allow on-forum altcoin giveaways for established altcoins" ... no thank you !

Even cryptotalk (yobit forum) pays users in btc, not some weird new crypto from their investbox or ETH or their own coin(s) for that matter. That sure says something :)))

I think a good way to solve this issue with maximal positive effect is to either establish some kind of protocol that must be followed, or perhaps some kind of script to automate things. This would enable giveaways while also keeping it from shitting up the forum with useless posts.

I wonder where the lapse in logic happened where we are both banning altcoins due to spam and scams and where we have already created a board exclusively for scams (investor-based games).

Not that the forum really cares about scams... but best watch out if you post twice in a row!

That's exactly what I'm doing!  Club members can receive a monthly giveaway of promising alt coins.  :)


 :-\

I support this and I don't see why it shouldn't be allowed if an altcoin is listed in many major exchanges.
I see members afraid about scamcoins... since when the forum is monitoring scams? Flags are here to do the job and warn people.

I don't like this idea to be perfectly honest.
I'd much rather see giveaways take place in third party platforms in order to avoid overloading the forum with simple and mindless address posts.

A third party website could verify bitcointalk account level by scraping an alphanumerical code the user was requested to put in his profile once.
The giveaway itself IMO would surely be worth a thread in bitcointalk, but NOT for promotion or to be facilitated in the forum. Just to have actual discussion on issues, assistance etc.
Address posting is just needless bumps and unfair to bounty managers that have build platforms and tracking methods keeping the forum spam-free.

If 'established' altcoins wanted to promote a giveaway, I maybe the forum should make a concession and allow them to buy ads. Hell, if it's just giveaways, why not allow every coin to buy an ad? The mere fact that it costs something to buy it will probably deter the worst ones.

Another topic (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5412899.0) reminded me to bump this thread.

Then remove your old bump. ;D

Like I said in the other thread, you aren't allowed to offer an altcoin giveaway. Just wrap it differently. Bounties are allowed. Create a bounty thread. To participate in the bounty, I have to follow you on Twitter and make a re-tweet saying "LTC to the moon". After that, I write the usual authentification post or bounty report in your thread (because that's allowed), and I get the bounty. No rules were broken in the process. 

It might have already been said, but there is inherently going to be a bias problem in determining which coins are established.

For example, I think everybody can agree that Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Ethereum are both established. But what about e.g. Solana which has market cap #3?

What about something like Bcash? [this will probably bring a strong no but then it's going to tarnish this forum's purpose as a "free-speech crypto discussion place"].

You are allowed to have bounties with unlisted scam tokens that will never amount to anything and no one cares. We call that scams not being moderated and staff not meddling in other people's business. But if you give away a coin that is listed and is trading (no matter what people might think of it), you get yourself banned because that apparently makes sense. You either have freedom of choice or you don't. If you allow people to get scammed on Bitcointalk and allow me to create and distribute the Pmalek token through bounties, why prevent me from giving people ETH or LTC or X? Freedom of choice is also allowing me to make my own mistakes and receive any altcoin I want to. Freedom of choice entails teaching me not to accept that altcoin and explaining the reasons why. 

The incentivized posting rule doesn't make sense.
This crap can be found in tens of thousands of posts in thousands of pages in the bounties sub. Same thing with the reports for social media bounties. But that's ok.



BTC giveaways where you only post your bitcoin address don't generate spam. ETH giveaways where you post an ETH address generates spam and is incentivized posting because of science apparently. 

What old bump?  ;D

That sounds like it's going to be allowed. Nope, it's not allowed (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5412899.msg60918930#msg60918930). But you can ask for 50 pushups + proof (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5412899.msg60919017#msg60919017) :D

It's #9 on CMC (https://coinmarketcap.com/), and I've never used it. But I can find ways to exchange it into Bitcoin without KYC, so I'd say that's okay.

Let me put it this way: if someone wants to give me BCH, I'm not saying no. I even offer a Forkcoin service for getting rid of it!

Tens of thousands? That's cute:

I think this point is one reason why exceptions will not be made to the rule referenced in the OP.

To somewhat piggyback on your point, establishing exceptions may make some view that the forum sees a particular (group of) altcoins as more legitimate (less of a scam), than others. Even if there would be no legal basis to this, there may be a moral/ethical basis, regardless of any disclosures made.

If there was a "neutral" criteria, there would be the potential for some to claim that the criteria is designed to include/exclude certain altcoins. Any neutral criteria would also likely require the reliance on third parties to make judgments, which leads to its own set of issues.