Bitcoin Forum

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2024/05/16/1sHq3.png
Edit: replaced original link with talkimg one
source: ninjastic.space

I was compiling the forum activity stats for my own amusement and thought I may just as well share them here (as couldn't find any similar topic).

What strikes me the most here is the enormous levels of activity in 2017 and most of all, 2018. This cannot be a coincidence and there's got to be a reason behind it. I reckon the simplest explanation would be the 2017 rally to almost $20k region (in December 2017) sparking massive interest in BTC and by extent - this forum. But it doesn't really add up, as for most of 2018 the price was free falling and the enthusiasm couldn't be too high. Also, we didn't see any significant increase with the 2021 pump.

Any theories?

Bitcoin's all-time high at that time happened around 17th December 2017, Ethereum would achieve it's all-time high in that bull run in early 2018. I think it was January. It sparked off a massive altcoin rally and ICOs, bounties, airdrops, spamming, account farming and scam were the thing of the time

Airdrops and bounties were so profitable to bounty hunters at that time, and it's probably a period where there was a very high account registration rate ever. It took a lot of time in 2018 for so many to realize that the bear market had set in after the rally.


The spamming went on for a long time, and it led to the introduction of the merit system later on in 2018

What you see afterward are a result of ;

- Death of ICO hype,
- Less profitability of bounties and Airdrops,
- The long crypto winter from 2018 to 2020,
- Less account farming and spamming due to the introduction of the merit system,
- much improved moderation where one-liners that were a thing back then will get deleted in no time etc

Heh, I completely forgot about that. You're probably spot on here.
Those were the golden times when you could just quickly put together a lousy website, create a token, and then use it to pay desperate 3rd worlders to hype it up, creating value at zero cost.

almost 90% of bitcointalk users are inactive on forums in 2022, will they ever be active again?
or they completely quit the forum.

maybe people who are active on the forum in 2018 are just following along with what's trending, they just want to know what's interesting in this forum, and after they get bored, then slowly stop again from the forum.
Don't take it seriously, I'm just assuming.

Bitcoin_Arena pretty much summed it up. 2018 was the year when Bitcoin peaked both in price movements and in interest. If you check Google search statistics for Bitcoin you probably see similar pattern. Many people met Bitcoin at that time and started researching it. New ICO's are always introduced here. Most of the messages sent back then were also unnecessary spam posts. Even after 5 years, we clean them when they are reported.

Even if the Bitcoin price rises to new ATH's, the forum won't be that active again. Most of the attention has shifted to other platforms on social media. Bitcointalk will no longer be the platform where cryptocurrencies are discussed most actively, but it will remain a boutique venue.

Most likely not. Also the spammers' incentives to post anything sh*t and rank up is now out of their league. You got to earn merits now (after 2018) and that is pretty demotivating to them :P
But hey, there is strength in loyalty not numbers, we still got many informative ppl on here.

But the most technical questions are/will be still asked only on bitcointalk forum (mostly in development & technical discussion section and bitcoin technical support board). I dont find ppl discussing on some of those topics (posted in those boards) in other social medias such as tg or twitter. So, bitcointalk is still the hub for tech geeks ;)

It depends on how you define active

What does @OP show here is total number of posts, but there are also users login and exploring this forum but didn't create any post because they don't have to. Sometime I search about old thread and check of few old accounts, actually they're login for few times only but their last post mostly on 2017/2018.

Although total posts are greatly decreased after 2018, but I'm just curious does it's really good for the forum? a lot traffic will boost the site rank, but it's full of low value post, it's really annoying for many users. But if the total post is small but it do have a higher quality, Bitcointalk wouldn't developed/improved a lot.

forums have tried to fight back against the hard times when forums were full of spammers. But I'm sure the Merit system that was implemented was quite successful in reducing the old spam accounts, only increasing activity to be able to rank up. however things don't work anymore, and that leaves quite a few accounts in 2017 inactive.
I'm sure now everything looks better, even if not with a large number of posts, forums with useful and quality posts will look better.

It all started from 2017 ICO season and then when BTC and ALT started to deny the market after early 2018 then everything started to slow. ICO investors lost their money and the teams were becoming millionaires. Crypto for individuals at it's worse time I think was in between 2017 - 2018. But overall the publicity and media coverage increased as a result many people heard about it. From 2019 to until now it seems things are stable. Even last ATH did not make any major impact 

This metric (true or not) doesn't really say anything. Number of accounts doesn't represent number of actual users. In the "pre-merit" era, account farming was a big thing. And it's quite normal that a lot of people would just quickly create an account only for one-time use purpose and never come back, this is not unique to bitcointalk.


That's also a normal cycle, very few people would have consistent level of activity throughout their lives. People join, leave, come back again etc. Normal thing.


Not really, iirc the level of spam was becoming unbearable. That's what you get when when you provide incentive to posting (bounty campaigns etc) without any quality expectations. It was not uncommon to see i.e. someone just copying someone else's reply from the middle of the thread and posting as their own. Many such cases.

As mentioned above, ICO dying natural death helped the most, I would imagine implementing the merit system played a good part, but it was introduced at the beginning of 2018 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2818350.0) so if it had any effect, it was delayed in time.

There is nothing unusual about big spike of activity we had back in 2017 and 2018, most of the people heard about Bitcoin at that time and simple search would lead them to bitcointalk forum.
This was all connected with big increase of Bitcoin price, creation of many new shitcoins and ICO projects, everyone was mining the ''new bitcoin'' with GPU's and hoping to start early earning various tokens.
I remember days new projects started to pop up all the time, and we couldn't manage to report all the scams that played mostly on greed of people.
It's perfectly normal that this house of cards was going to collapse at some point and activity to get back in normal.   

If there is something strange, it is the number of activities in the year 2021. If we compare what happened in the year 2014, 2017 and 2018, we will notice that the price increased at the same pace in the year 2021. However, we did not witness an increase in the number of activities, and the reason for that is either the lack of paid campaigns in the forum or because of The influence of the merit system made creating armies of new accounts a waste of time.

This data will not give us a complete picture except with more data such as the number of notifications, blocked accounts, bitcoin price, paid campaigns.

In 2018, people still had hope for a quick recovery in the cryptocurrency market. 

Many people have purchased various alternative cryptocurrencies at a high price and expected the recovery of the value of these assets.  Some users continued to invest in cryptocurrencies, hoping that the prices of bitcoins and other crypto assets have already reached their minimum. 

Also in the second half, some ICOs continued to bring profit to their participants.  For example, at the EOS ICO, the price of the token exceeded $20 for 1 EOS. 

Also, users from Russia could use the forum without a VPN in 2018 (when Roskomnadzor blocked access to the Bitcointalk website)...

I think the main reason we had so many posts in 2017-2018, other than the aforementioned spam, was the explosion of ICOs and other tokens on the market.

This attracted many new people to this market, and the forum was the ideal place to attract crypto users.

Unfortunately this generated a lot of spam, and many logged in just to post ICOs that later turned out to be scams.

Amazing, it's just amazing how popular this forum become during 2017 and 2018 but as sad to see how it lost popularity soon.
I think that 2021 year was taken by Elon Musk's tweets and by Twitter because of that and probably it was taken by Youtube content creators and Reddit & Telegram/Discord channels.

To be honest, I become more interested in cryptocurrencies since 2020 and around that time discovered that this is the forum where satoshi demonstrated his coin.
This forum can become active but not in a way it currently operates because it's a different time today.

What if bitcointalk becomes XDA-developers like website? It's a news website and a community at the same time.
Call me crazy, but User Interface plays a huge role in websites' success. This forum looks kinda very old for 2023. When new user comes here from Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and sees the old UI of bitcointalk, I genuinely believe most of the times it will make him to go away.

We're still trying to recover from the sheer amount of spam that 2017, and 18 brought. Seriously, I've removed thousands of posts from that time period, and it's still a drop in the ocean. I've removed pages upon pages of crap that was generated due to the hype of ICOs, and generally the overall feel during that period. The forums become a little more strict, and structured since then, and ultimately the hype has died down since most of those projects all failed.

However, it's really had some lasting effects on the forum, which even today we're still cleaning up. I'm determined to get to the bottom of it though. Definitely, showing signs of catching up, even if it's only the start. To be fair, most of the users spamming during this period have already been banned, but their posts still remain so it's just doing a little of the after cleaning.

How have you been doing this cleaning?
Search for old topics; see page by page; are you looking for topics/posts from these users who were banned?

Maybe I could try to help...

Basically page by page, the ol' fashion way. Several users have done this in the past, and reported quite a hefty amount of posts. So, it's not something revolutionary. It's more for de cluttering the section, and allowing users to actually take a look at older threads without being bombarded by the typical spam. I've used some tools though, I've got a userscript which highlights certain words, and I've got a ton other userscripts for various things. I've sometimes found spam through other third party sites which have search functions.

The typical stuff. I utilize the user notes userscript that was posted to note down findings, and I review that periodically. I've only really started streamlining, and getting a cohesive way of moderating though, it's take a few years. However, it seems to be working fairly well recently.

There has been users who have mentioned their process, and methods before. Since, I can remove a lot of the crap I find, my process will be a little different. Reporting definitely takes a lot longer, but if you want to use a third party tool, you can always try the script developed by suchmoon.

If you do want to help though, just report. If there's current spam that you stumble across that should be the priority since it has the most exposure or if the threads are being bumped often. Any active thread, is generally a higher priority.

And what kind of information do you normally look for to classify this spam?

It's just that, I think the forum will only be more attractive again, when it becomes cleaner from a lot of "noise".

It's everywhere that the merits system removed a great number of spammers from the forum. And I'm asking if people were spamming the forum to rank up or make money through bounties? Because I don't understand how they all disappeared right after the initiation of the merit system. I think the ban on spam accounts drastically reduced such people from using the forum. Moreover, they can farm accounts and merit their alt accounts to support their activities if they were concerned about merits, since accounts with many posts were rewarded with appropriate merits, according to their rank. Looking at the drop in posts after 2018 I'd say that coupled with the above listed ico and bounty hunters, I noticed that some threads in the service sections were abused and bumped multiple times a day without any punishment or sanctions. The spam bursters helped alot in keeping the forum neat and reducing the numerous spam posts, which amounted to over 15m posts in 2018.

Yeah, I can imagine that easily over a half of that 15.6 million posts in 2018 was pure garbage made just for the sake of "bounty campaigns". That's what you get when you combine ability to run ICO campaigns at virtually zero costs (paid in self issued tokens of no value) and hundreds of thousands of people from poor countries chasing "easy money".
The real damage was all the valuable members that had left and never came back as the forum was unbearable at times.

My personal theory is that the average person who discovered Bitcoin during the famous 2017 bullrun became excited and decided to participate here on the forum, later when the price started to go downhill that same people started to panic and vent around here.

Those who did not find this forum during the bull run eventually did during the price dump, searching for an explanation, consolation and even advice from the most veteran holders, who were here around that time too.

The most recent bullrun did not catch as much attention as that back in 2017, since there are more place on internet to discuss about Bitcoin, added to the fact people were also trying to speculate with other assets like Gold, Gamestop stocks, Nokia stocks, silver, etc.

Bitcoin was not the "novelty" it was in the eyes of the new investor years ago. Probably, some of them bought at the top and are still sore to this day, which may not let them to enter the Bitcoin market again.

Two helpful topics for you

• Forum's 2020-year-end report (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5277279.msg56046745#msg56046745)
• Time Series on monthly statistics of forum (new users, new topics, new posts) (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5071903.0)

The chart for forum daily impression count reveals a lot about forum activities with and without spam endemic as consequence of 2017 bull run and ICO wave, then impacts from merit system and enhanced merit system to reduce spam.

If you want to see more details, look at box plots.

Bitcoin Arena provided an excellent response. Without that explicit explanation, I would have assumed that most of the users who came here from 2017 to early 2018 were inspired by bitcoin after it reached its ATH.

Following that incident, they created a discussion section where they kept talking about how the bull run must have happened, whether relevant or irrelevant discussion, they kept interacting with each other, which must have resulted in those one liner posters. All thanks to the implementation of the merit system, which has significantly reduced the number of spammers.

I hopped onto this forum in 2018, I think that was just such an iconic year for crypto because so many people were curious and literally everyone and their mother couldn’t believe something like Bitcoin could run up to 20k in such a short time frame. I believe this left a rippling effect for basically all of 2018 all the way to the end of the bear market where it leveled out at around 3,500 per coin and started going back up from there. Great bar graph you got here! Thanks for sharing.