Bitcoin Forum

What is the feasibility of storing the entire forum on some decentralized file system. Ideally it would be bitcoin itself through something like ordinals. But alot of people probably would object to that as a waste of blockspace so what other ways could it be done less expensively.

1) how much disc space does the bitcointalk forum hold in total?
2) how much does it grow per month?
3) how often would you update the forum threads and what software would you use to do it?

We can't expect the forum to stay online forever but there are some nice threads with a ton of information in them and that should be saved somehow for future bitcoiners. I know that some people will have a seriously bad reaction to suggesting the entire forum be stored on bitcoin itself but doesn't it make sense that that's where it belongs? Bitcointalk is the de facto forum for bitcoin everything.

I think that the Internet Archive is doing just fine in terms of being used as a way to save important parts or contents on the Internet, there's probably someone out there that's already doing what you're trying to propose and I think that it would be a really awesome thing if there really is someone doing it and not just some threads on the forum but the whole forum itself and when it happens, it will feel like you're exploring the forum itself when you check out on the preserved forum in the future that this forum is really going to go away.

I think using Bitcoin itself might not be the most efficient or feasible solution due to potential objections and block space concerns, there are other decentralized file systems or distributed storage solutions could be a promising avenue that could be explored.

What are your thoughts on using platforms like IPFS or Filecoin for this purpose? They offer decentralized storage without the associated block space concerns of directly using Bitcoin.

If you use something like BitTorrent or IPFS protocol, it's feasible although limited by who wants to act as "seeder" or "server". IMO Bitcoin blockchain probably should be used to store BitTorrent or IPFS link.


I think @LoyceV and @TryNinja might able to answer these question, since they own copy of this forum.

You can use Wayback Machine (https://wayback-api.archive.org/).

There are times their scrapers fail to scrap forum posts but it does not occur too often.

You can archive it by yourself or someone else can do it.

There are some websites which archive historic threads, posts of Bitcoin forum, for instance.

• Satoshi Nakamoto Institute archives forum posts of Satoshi Nakamoto. (https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/)

That's not a decentralized system but just a free digital library. We are talking about the distant future here, what makes you think that the forum wouldn't be online but that library would be? The solution shouldn't involve a website that requires its domain or hosting to be paid and updated every year or so because in that case, it could go offline sometime in the future just like how this forum can as OP said.

So, the storage should be decentralized and it should be working without needing any maintenance or something.

This forum does not update the domain and hosting every year. The last update is in 2019 and the expiration date is 2029 and theymos bought it for 10 years.

https://who.is/whois/bitcointalk.org

Decentralized or centralized forum, the domain must be bought by someone publicly or anonymously. You can buy it for 10 years, 50 years or 100 years if you have money for payment.

I know, I was actually referring to the Internet Archive, the library, because for normal websites or services, their operators or creators buy yearly plans usually because they wouldn't want to pay money in advance since they might have to stop the website or service before that period.

The fact that theymos has paid for the hosting for 10 years in advance makes this forum more unique, and I knew this already.

using filecoin is not free though. and it only offers temporary storage. if you were using it directly, from what i understood is it's only free to retrieve data for the original uploader. everyone else has to pay for retrieval.

there are services built on top of filecoin but they cost a subscription fee aka similar to web hosting so you stop paying your site goes away. using ipfs directly would have the same issues. no one is going to "pin" all your terabytes of data for free.

so i don't think these 2 technologies would be affective.


paying for hosting and domain name registration for 10 years are two different things. One of them you can verify. One of them is not public record so I'm not sure how you think you know that.  :o hosting means paying for the storage space not just the domain name.

How reliable is the Internet Archive really with us trusting it to store all this valuable information? There are times that certain pages simply fail to load in my experience.

I really don't know how much all the Bitcointalk data will cost when using all these decentralized file storage systems so no opinion on that; and I don't know the risks/downsides of IPFS either besides the fact that it's far more tried and tested.

But what's the idea? Is there a backup/copy of the forum, in case it stops working? This is already being done by some users.

Or is it putting the website up and running in a decentralized system?
This would, based on current technology, be very complicated. This required each user to store hundreds of GB of information to visit the site and consult. And even if there was the possibility of visiting the website without downloading files, the speed would be low. I'm not saying low speed when browsing, but rather when updating.

In the end, someone needed to pay for an online server, to serve as a connection point to all parts of the site, spread among the various peers.

I understand the concern, but the site administration has several plans to ensure continuity in the project. Of course we don't know the future, and a lot can happen. But, for now, as long as another operating model is not possible, this model is assured.

Two admins and three global moderators who can be promoted to admins if necessary, in human & moderation resources, the forum has enough to do its continuation.

For other risk factors like forum seize by government, by banning mixers proactively, I see theymos and even Cyrus already saw that risk and eliminate it by that 'big decision' which surely does not satisfy all forum members but for forum future, eliminate that big risk is good.

For other risk factors which are insignificant or non-existing now, we will know more in future and more things will be done in forum administration and moderation to adapt to future changes and challenges.

I hear AI trend use tons of data. So i think we can expect few volunteer to "pin" this forum thread/post for some time.


At very least, they can spare their storage to store this forum (since it's mostly about text) when they store at least 10PB of data[1].

[1] https://blog.archive.org/2012/10/26/10000000000000000-bytes-archived/ (https://blog.archive.org/2012/10/26/10000000000000000-bytes-archived/)

It's though but, I thought about asking; how about the illustrative diagram/pictures and memes on important threads? I mean.... I know these pictures have already reduced quality - maybe about 100P of vertical resolution which consumes barely 250kb from the 10PB presumably...
* Is that going to be part of the storage problems we'll ever have in the future if we ever adopt a decentralized storage pattern?
* Since the transmission and regular update process will be way too slow, according to this quote, how do we regulate that to not go against our caches?

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That has only made me realize how much work it takes altogether to be at the top ^{[it's lonely at the top]}

i don't think it's reliable at all. Not unless you are using their paid services. For example:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/bitcointalk.org

for this forum, they can go DAYS without even doing a single snapshot. and then in a single day they might do 2 or 3 snapshots. doesn't make any sense.
what you'll notice if you take a look at the snapshots of this forum is when you start clicking on individual threads, many of them don't even seem to be archived so it's worthless.

you are right. i think the internet archive is almost worthless. but they do have a service called Archive It https://archive-it.org/

Archive-It Basic Pricing
• $500 yearly for 128 GB data archived
• $800 yearly for 256 GB data archived

you pay alot to store a little. seems to be the name of that game...



it would cost more than any centralized web hosting service most likely.  

using ipfs for a website as dynamic as a forum seems like it could be problematic. ipfs is really best for storing files that don't change. if we think of trying to store each forum thread in it's own file, that file would need to be "updated" possibly hundreds of times. not ideal.

which users exactly? and how dedicated are they to doing it? what happens if they stop doing it? i heard that loyce is doing it. but i think that's a pretty big burden to put on one person's shoulders. apparently loyce archives the blockchain too. he must be really busy. what happens if he gets burned out? what happens if all of them get burned out?

that would be the end game.

that way things could have real world consequences. merit could actually be not just some imaginary thing but actual bitcoin. and things like AI spam could be stopped by requiring new users to make a small deposit of bitcoin and if they started abusing the forum then their deposit could be siezed for different infractions.

it's not about not trusting the current administration but recognizing they are only human and humans can only last so long. if you want something to last you have to make it decentralized, just like bitcoin...

Yes, he is the forum administrator. And he has already reported several times that there are several alternative plans, if you find something with him.

Therefore, let's believe that everything is as planned, so that the forum always remains active.

Even with images, i'm sure it won't be problem for Internet Archive in terms of storage size.


Aside from what @larry_vw_1955 said, i expect many link to image no longer valid or can't be obtained without blocked by the image provider for requesting too many images.


I simply don't know.

You're probably talking about the Wayback Machine, accessible in the Internet Archive. If that's so, you'll have to index pages of the internet first on the Internet Archive before you could even access them at a later time, and I do not need to tell you how little the amount of people in here who would go so far as to index pages of the forum just so they can check it at a later time, especially with third-party notifications being a thing in this forum already.

So yeah, the idea's good don't get me wrong, it's just boring and cumbersome, plus the Wayback Machine's facing some of their own shit too as of late, just watch SomeOrdinaryGamers' vid about the Internet Archive facing shut down and shit.

Using bitcointalk forum with ordinals is a terrible idea and I would never do that, especially not on main chain.
One potential option would be to somehow use bitcointalk on IPFS, but that would make it slower and and I don't know if everything would work correctly.

I would say that having backups of the forum as torrents is going to be a easier solution and a long-term one. There are some torrent sites that always release the backup of their torrents library and such thing can be done with this forum as well. But doing something like that is going to be costly if it isn't supported by the community who may seed those torrents for the peers, and leechers.

There are some cloud based seeding sites like Seedbox but those can cost a lot of money on monthly basis. Someone with his own dedicated internet and computer can seed those torrents and if that someone is joined by a team of 10 then it's possible to backup the forum on monthly basis and have it's backup copy available to everyone for long term.

"EThe Bitcointalk Times 18/06/2024 Larry brings the forum into the chain". Here you go, that's the genesis message for if it is ever archived in the blockchain.  :P

Jokes asides, it takes a lot of money to store it in the blockchain. I just copied and pasted every post above mine, and compressed it. It's 5.6 kilobytes. With 10 sat/vb at low priority, it'll cost 56000 sat just for this single thread (until this 21th post).

It isn't worth the money.

maybe bitcoin could have a sidechain that stored the forum. and people could get rewarded with bitcoin when they stored significant parts of it. like mining the forum.  :o instead of proof of work it would be proof of storing the forum.



But how big can torrents be allowed to be? Because this forum has to be terabytes in size by this point, after being online for over 13 years. I would guess terabytes but I really am not sure. But lets assume it is terabytes. I don't think too many people would seed something that big. Unless they were getting paid hence my sidechain idea above.

Lets say 100 new threads are posted to the forum everyday and each thread is 5 kilobytes. Then that is 500kb per day. that works out to about 182GB per year. Over 10 years, that's almost 2 TB. it is probably even more than that, in reality though...

So who rewards those who store forum data on the sidechain?


I recall the theoretical limit is around few exabytes, although in practice it's limited by your device. And don't forget you can save lots of storage/bandwidth by compression, https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/a/49216 (https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/a/49216).

so if the bitcointalk forum was running on a sidechain, people could be required to use a native token to pay to post. the native token would have been bought using bitcoin.



yes data compression could be useful but it does have costs. the cost is in terms of compressing and then everyone that wants to read it has to decompress it. so it uses energy.

A way how this could be achieved:

- Sidechain has a native token and a Bitcoin bridge (see this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5496743.new#new) for some existing mechanisms), let's call the pegged token "bridgeBTC". Mining could be managed via proof-of-work/merged mining, or alternatively a PoS system.
- Forum storage takes place on-chain (like on Steem). Both full nodes (which store the forum) and those who store new parts of the forum (which weren't stored before) via new data transactions get a status similar to "masternodes" in other altcoins.*  Transaction fees however will be probably relatively low.
- The standard client proposes, for each bridgeBTC and native sidechain token transaction, to pay a small part to those "masternodes" creating the transactions that store the forum. This fee is however voluntary and can be canceled.

This is still a quite "fun" solution I don't think will ever materialize. But maybe somebody can even make profit with a semi-centralized "BitcoinTalkCoin". :P

You could store all subforums separately, then it will be much smaller already. And you could create yearly/monthly snapshots with only the new topics. In general I'm quite fond of the torrent/IPFS idea. It will also show which subforum is really the most popular, and which ones would see almost no interest in storing or even downloading it.

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* To know which sections are legitimately "newly stored" could be a quite difficult challenge. It maybe is impossible - at least without the forum operators themselves acting like a sort of "oracle" confirming the new threads are legit. Or there could be PoS voting (a kind of DAO) which new parts are "accepted".

The way the site's content is stored can be a problem. But the even bigger problem is making the site functional for anyone. All information must be accessible within seconds, for anyone who enters the site. No need for downloads or other extra programs to access.

Furthermore, all information must be 100% online, and it is not possible for someone who has certain content on their PC to go offline, meaning there is no longer access to the information.

This is not simply a question of storage, but of the entire functioning of the forum.

I'm sure it's possible to build such system, but how many people willing to pay for that? https://stacker.news/ (https://stacker.news/) has somewhat similar system, but with limited success.


That's true, you can't get everything. But at least you just need to decompress it once.

Accessibility will be a problem too. Devs could probably code a decentralized forum software using the p2p stuff which the torrent networks use but I am not sure if it will he possible to attach a domain name to that software. So people will have to run a program to access the forum and that means no google seo. Which means nobody will be accessing the forum via google, means the advertisers won’t be happy about it… meaning > no sig camps

Decentralization is not the solution to every problem it seems.

I believe the OP meant the "decentralized storage" as a backup solution, not as an actual proposal to move Bitcointalk entirely to a decentralized platform.

But even if this was the case, there were already models for on-chain stored "forums" or "social media" that worked. I had discussed that here on the Meta subforum in this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5481514.msg64087445#msg64087445). In my case I have had a bit of experiences with Steem(it) (https://steemit.com), and it worked reasonably well. Of course it has centralization problems but these are not directly related to the fact that it's stored on a blockchain.

In the case Bitcointalk is moved to a Steemit-like platform completely, viewing content and also posting could be provided by independent websites which access the blockchain with a full node. The software needed is a combination of a block explorer (to view the content) and an online wallet (to post yourself). Every forum user would need to create at least one account/address/key pair for the blockchain to post, but that can be hidden (so in fact all what you have to do is to "register" on one of the "node websites"). As Steemit showed, there were basically no differences in reaction time and availability to a centralized forum. The node websites could run ads and sponsor the transaction fees for posting, like it occurred on Steemit basically (although there the model was a bit more complex).

In reality, this concept would be more on-topic here than it was in the other thread I linked above, so I guess the concept could be elaborated deeper here in this thread.

I don't know if it works that well... The times I tried to access it, I felt very slow and sometimes I couldn't even access it.
But, there always ends up being some centralization point. Someone has to pay for the domain, a server that connects/processes all the nodes, and in this case, even cloudflare.

I'm not saying it's impossible, just that at the moment it's still not very viable for a site as large as the BitcoinTalk.

I think you missed the point in my opinion and I don't think that it's all about moving Bitcointalk forum rather it's all about having a backup or copy of the bitcointalk forum if you ask me and store it in another site where you can access it anytime you want by using the search function in the platform if a person wants to check a certain information. If I understand or get the point and that I am not wrong then it should be similar to bitcointalk forum or maybe not except there is no post feature means we cannot post in the site and we can only add new information (if there's a feature to manually add something) if there are new posts/information posted on bitcointalk forum or automatically added on the site/platform which I can say that it is archive site/platform that looks like bitcointalk forum or not or maybe the same as what TryNinja have created https://ninjastic.space/topic/5499856.0

But copies of the forum already exist! He gave the example of the TryNinja website, and even LoyceV does the same.

And I think anyone can do the same. I remember seeing that someone had a mirror forum, where it was visually the same but you couldn't post.

Yes, it may have Terabytes in size but it can be easily compressed to very small size because text is highly compressible and that's a positive point. Even the images of the forum can be compressed in batch if someone makes a batch converter for it.

I believe the forum is mostly based on text based posts/threads and those can be highly compressed by anyone who may then upload the torrent by seeding it and then others who want it to be online can also download it and start seeding it.

Strange, I had used it for some weeks, writing also a couple of posts there (and then lost interest), and never had any problems regarding performance. This was in 2016 or 2017 though, maybe they scaled down the infrastructure, at least on the steemit.com server.

There could be several server operators competing here. They could add their own advertisements for example, or finance the server and domain via the mining/minting process. It's likely that one server would become the most popular one (due to duplicate content issues on Google, for example) but as long as other possibilities exist, the risks related to centralization are minimal, because if the operator misbehaves there's another option around the corner.

And for those who want to access directly the content on the chain without wanting to access via a "centralized" domain, there is no technical hurdle to simply write a client where also a content browser / posting interface is included.

But I sorta agree - this is something for the far future, considering not even Epochtalk is ready after 10 years or so ... But I personally think positively about that option :)

Regarding the backup copies that already exist (TryNinja etc.), I think the problem is that while these copies are stored only by a few people, there's still a relatively high risk they get lost, or corrupted, or whatever. So in general the OP's idea is not bad, I think.

If this ever comes near reality, I would strongly oppose to store the images on-chain or in the main torrent. That could attract the wrong people. Images can still be included via external servers like talkimg, or via external image torrents.

that's not a very user friendly webiste.

only thing i see on Loyce.club is various links to statistics about the forum but not the actual forum. loyce seems all about statistics. but those are some crazy statistics. people who are members on this forum, loyce is going to have so much data on them that he can pin down exactly where they live at some point!
if you thought bitcoin wasn't anonymous then thank's to loyce's various statistics he can tell you anything about anyone. scary world we live in!

that's the one thing i haven't seen. a backup read only copy of the forum.

yes as a backup from which the original forum could be reconstructed if the main site ever went missing in action.


the should be trying to move bitcointalk to a steemit-like platform so that continuity is transparent and it has some degree of decentraliztion. i guess though some people go by the "if it aint broke then don't fix it" methodology. but that can end up being challenged if something happens like a site gets hacked and usernames/logins get compromised.

i dont think there's much more to discuss at the moment about this topic since i think another thread also touched on this issue. but centralized forums are not ideal. even something like reddit, they are centralized. they will need to move to blockchain eventually or be overtaken.

I might be nit-picking here, but I think TryNinja's site is more accessible than LoyceV's site. Obviously loyce.club is essentially an HTML warehouse with historical information, so it is not really a fair comparison.

I would *love* to make a search engine for the forum though. It has always been one of my pet peeves and I think it would be much more useful than what is essentially a decentralized backup of the forum, given that Google and the built-in search are terrible at finding posts in large topics.

A post archive isn't the same as a working forum. Let's say Bitcointalk is gone tomorrow. I have backups of most of the posts, but it's the unedited version. Millions of posts that have been deleted are still in my archive. I know who posted it, but I can't link the forum identity to a real person. So even if I (or someone else) would use the post data to create a new forum on a new domain with all usernames copied, it's going to be impossible to give the real account owner access to their own posts. Some may be able to sign a message, but that's going to be a lot of work and will only reach a small part of the users. And since the forum is gone, most users won't even know there's an effort to create a new domain name for the forum.
If Bitcointalk.org disappears, I expect it to just be the end of this forum.

My posts archive (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5167469.0) is just that: an archive. I have no intention to make a working forum, that's not the point of archiving posts.

I love the BS accusations! I couldn't care less about where you live, and only archive public data. If you post your location, someone can indeed know. My site loyce.club doesn't block Tor users, so by all means, if you visit it, use Tor.
You can bet there are others archiving every post on Bitcointalk too, without publicly sharing the data. There's no point to worry about it: anything you post on the internet should be considered public knowledge forever. If you don't want that, don't post it!

TryNinja is much better at presenting the data than I am. All I did was create and publish a static archive before anyone else did, and it's been online for 5 years. I gave TryNinja a copy of my archived old posts, so you can search them there.

You mean like Ninjastic Search (https://ninjastic.space/search)? If you want to build another search engine, I'd be more than happy to get you a downloadable archive with 60-ish million posts (in separate files) :)

Hive Network/Blog[1] would be better example than Steemit due to past hostile takeover[2].


You're right, although i was simply hoping you or @TryNinja would answer size of your backup or database which contain all forum thread and post.

[1] https://hive.blog/ (https://hive.blog/)
[2] https://cryptoslate.com/big-exchanges-conduct-a-hostile-takeover-of-steem-blockchain-following-tron-acquisition/ (https://cryptoslate.com/big-exchanges-conduct-a-hostile-takeover-of-steem-blockchain-following-tron-acquisition/)

My archive (https://loyce.club/archive/) directory fills 163 GB and has 15,271,678 HTML files. This would be much more efficient to store in a database, I expect TryNinja to have lower numbers.

That last quote on the news website hit really hard:


In reality there are only a few people holding the coin (any coin - even Bitcoin) who actually care about consensus, community, voting, governance, etc.

The rest of them are "number go up" people who do not care better and would rather these exchanges have all that bargaining power in return for the privilege of storing their money on a centralized (yet "convenient") point of failure.

I would go on but I don't want to take the discussion off-topic.

In that case the size of torrent can be pretty small and anyone can easily seed it and others can download it and become its seeders. I believe the one who may create such torrent should take responsibility to create more torrent based backups on weekly or monthly basis so each new post/thread of the forum can be updated and the downloaders can get updated data easily.

It would be even better if the images can be uploaded on external servers because that way the downloads can easily browse the forum's posts/threads and may click on that external links. TalkImg as we all know is a great option for the purpose and I believe Joker_josue will allow such type of uploading of images on his site.

If something like Nostr.com can exist for decentralized social media network, and it keep growing despite everything, than I am sure that we could have something similar to work as decentralized forum.
Question is how many people are interested in using forums these days.

True, but there are a lot more bitcoiners who care about real value and decentralized, than there are altcoiners who are doing the same thing.
And big difference is that bitcoin was no premined, there was no pre-sale of coins, and there is no hidden team and owner behind. 

Creating a good search system is very complex and difficult to do. It took Google years to get to the point where we know it today. Of course, a search system could be created in a database, but it would require a lot of work to make everything really better.




I didn't understand your idea. Can you explain better?

The idea is simple, someone who may download hosted images from imgur and other image hosts and then upload those images to TalkIMG and may link those images to the posts/threads of the backup torrent.

Let's say if someone who's going to create a torrent backup of the forum then he/she has to either avoid images or add images to the torrent file which will make the size of the download huge but if that person somehow develops a program where all those images could be uploaded to TalkImg and then either get embedded to the posts/threads they belong to or they may be added to the posts/threads as clickable links.

I know it's easy to say something like that but doing it is going to be a tough job but on our forum there are some members who are good programmers and they have in depth knowledge of web scaping. And those skills are highly needed to turn that idea into reality.

I think I am more interested in having a secured backup of the present forum incase anything happens to the present, than having a decentralized bitcointalk.

Nothing unusual to be able to do. All the system needs to do is load all the images onto the host, and then just list the link.

But in reality, this doesn't even need to be done, as the forum does not host any images, just their links. So, practically this would not be necessary.

the problem with that is there is no secured backup of the present forum if you just rely on a couple people to do this backup. what happens if they go offline for some reason. then they're not doing backups anymore. how long until people realize that and someone else takes their place. i wouldn't say bitcointalk needs to be decentralized but its data needs to be maybe. but as we have seen, that's easier said than done and we might be stuck with the centralized pay per month plan. i have lost interest in this because it seems like it is a very high cost factor for any type of decentralized storage unless it is the users who are paying for it somehow.

Actually....... Google was very good at the beginning, so the search part they had covered. The point where they are today is based on earning money, and no longer on providing the best possible search results for the user.
Ninjastic Search works fine for searching, but only if you type the exact right keywords. That's what Google excelled at: showing me what I want to see, even if I don't know exactly what it is. If I place my right hand incorrectly and type "botcpom", Google knows I mean "bitcoin". But that would go far beyond the scope of a forum search engine.

To get back on-topic: a fully decentralized forum would also mean a fully decentralized search system. That's great for privacy, nobody else will know what you're looking for.

From imgur alone I downloaded 801,550 pictures and 146 GB (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5453227.0). But there's a bigger problem: a decentralized forum should be immutable. If someone can edit the image links in all posts, you can't be sure what else they've edited.

This would have been some of the best means by which the most values of the Bitcoin or crypto industry would have been achieved with the forum. Given the fact that, there wouldn’t be any threat of getting it offline based on certain allegations that might arise from certain disjointed associations and the need to prove what, like we had in the mixer case. We wouldn’t have been threatened by that and probably wouldn’t have the decision we had on mixers but, how possible would it be.
Bitcoin is decentralized but the forum is centralized and there are known parties to its hosting and governing which make any of the possibilities to these not so feasible.

I can envision a system where 10-minute batches of posts are "mined" in a new PoW chain that stores the forum database. Of course it would have to come with a "premine" of all the old posts. There are certain sections of the forum that I would omit entirely, including (but not limited to):

- Marketplace
- Politics & Society
- Off-topic
- Archival
- Marketplace (Altcoins)

Cutting out these sections - along with all images - would reduce the initial database size by at least half, I'm guessing. Would be a fun project; if I had all the time in the world I'd probably try to launch it.

For a scalable decentralized forum, I'd expect the user to be able to choose which sections they want to keep. So as long as there's at least one person uploading Off-topic, it will exist. By the time nobody has a copy left, it's clearly not important enough to keep anymore.

There are plenty of archived posts already with waybackmachine, everything is saved by Ninjastic and I am sure that theymos is making regular backups of everything.
You can also archive anything you want.

Hence they removed ''Don't be evil'' moto  :P
Some people say that g00gle also removed a bunch of history and they altered facts many times.

Maybe, but I think this search would be much slower and not that precise in real life.

I don't see any good reason why anyone would do this when there are free alternatives like IPFS.

But the forum does not store images. That is why this aspect does not even arise in this matter.
The issue will be navigation time and content updating. Making a post and it only being available 10 minutes later for everyone, I don't think is ideal.

You're completely right about that: Google Search was a much better product 20 years ago... I don't know what has gone wrong with that product team, but they've taken something that used to be eerily good at what it did, and somehow turned it into a completely useless POS.

(I mean, sure, the web was smaller and nicer back then, so search in general was a more tractable problem, but even so, Google really did have something special about their ethos and engineering philosophy back in the day; these days, not so much: they wandered from the path and basically never found their way back onto it... I never choose Google for anything anymore, now I just use their stuff when I'm effectively forced to.)

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On-topic: No offense, but this thread reads like a bunch of first-year nursing students talking about how to do a triple bypass. ;D

Figuring out the sequence of 4D chess moves that would eventually map the forum's database onto some kind of custom rendezvous-hashing-type distributed storage layer, while keeping everything running basically as-is (leading up to, during, and after the migration), is not beyond the realm of possibility, but it's pretty much at the tippy top of the complexity totem pole in terms of things that could be done to Bitcointalk. Show me the programmer that estimates they could pull off a task like that, and 999 times out of 1000, I'll show you someone that doesn't really understand the problem.

This is a bit similar to the "sidechain" idea I proposed here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5499856.msg64229229#msg64229229).

I think there's the same challenge to solve than in my proposal: The "miners" would have to be rewarded in some way to incentive them to store the correct contents. But how can you be sure that they store the correct content, and not some randomly generated fake posts which would take them probably less time than to scrap the forum?

Perhaps this could be solved in the same way like Optimistic Rollups work. The rewards to the "forum miners" are locked for some time, let's say a week or two. If there is somebody who discovers that the contents added by a "miner" don't exist or differ from the forum contents, they can post a proof. The reward is then slashed and the miner perhaps even penalized in another way (slashing a security deposit, for example), and the fake content is pruned, and an additional "miner" gets the opportunity to store the missing 10-minute window.

Of course this raises additional challenges: there may be miners trying to attack the forum and store the randomly generated fake posts there instead of the "real" posts, to be able to get the reward. Perhaps as an option of last resort a DAO vote (for example via PoS) could he held if there's some doubt about the correct forum content. Just to ensure there's not the slightest incentive to try such attacks.


I think the "Steemit solution" should work without problems, but it would take a lot of preparation time of course. And in general I think it's legit to discuss such ideas, even if some ideas sound impractical. Even theymos has mentioned eventually that he'd prefer a decentralized option for Bitcointalk for the far future.

Yup, it's worth discussing. My nurses-talking-about-heart-surgery comment wasn't a dig (seriously, I know this stuff is fun to discuss). But... holy shit is this a tough problem. Basically the first sign that you (the proverbial you, not you specifically, of course) wouldn't even be able to make an impression (let alone a serious dent) is if you catch yourself thinking of the solution in terms of existing building blocks. I know that sounds harsh, but, from a programming point of view, if something like a completely from-scratch distributed storage layer is an amount of complexity/work that you'd prefer to avoid (by trying to take advantage of something that looks suitable and has already been built), then you've already demonstrated that (in all likelihood) you don't have the software engineering chops to handle the rest of the complexity involved. I mean, maybe I set the bar unnecessarily high in my previous post, by imagining it as an in-place upgrade with nothing lost along the way (feature-wise, UI-wise, every last bit of the database comprehensively preserved, etc.), but if you relax those constraints and simply say: "Can you make a decentralized forum similar to Bitcointalk that might one day be able to serve as its replacement?", then I'd estimate that to be a much easier lift.

(But, I've been programming since I was an ankle-biter, and all my years doing it have left me with a pretty depressing view: I think programming, as a profession, is in decline, and most of the legends have already left the building, so to speak. So, even in the watered-down version of this problem, I'd still expect most every attempt to end in failure. If not outright failure, then the slow, eventual failure that comes after you basically force a win by hiding the fact that you're dealing with more complexity than you know how to tame.)

Maybe it would be possible to assign forum contents to be "mined" in a block to a hash, and if the contents don't match the hash, the block is invalid. Of course, posts can be updated, and are continually edited or removed, so there'd have to be a very scientific, precise way in which the hash is calculated. And whichever miner calculates the correct hash first receives the block reward.


Because there's no motivation/incentive for anyone to continually archive the forum, forever. We are currently reliant on the goodwill of TryNinja and LoyceV to properly archive forum posts.


I don't doubt it  :D

the steem blockchain has blocks just like bitcoin's blockchain does. and the "transactions" in a block can be different types of activities like replies to postings, postings themselves, upvotes, etc. the steem blockchain apparently records them all!

if we only had the source code to the steem blockchain. oh that's right we do. since it's on github. now all we would need to do is write a "bitcointalk" layer on top of it ala "steemit". steemit is a very complex codebase. but all it is is one huge forum. do we know how to write forums? ::)

the steem blockchain stores all the postings, replies, forum activities that happen on steemit. the only thing it doesn't do is store images. people can put images into their postings though. but those get stored on ipfs. apparently.


that's why you have to turn it into a blockchain. one where there are incentives for being involved. steem has validators. i assume they run full nodes. so all 21 of them are storing the entire steem blockchain. i'm sure loyce would do that.  ;D

Just like I can no longer use it to find plagiarism. It doesn't show any matches nowadays.

"Less precise" is a feature for searching, and that's what Ninjastic can't do: it only shows exact matches. A good search system shows you what you're looking for.

Priorities must have changed. The founders own 140 billion dollars (each), and the priorities are share holders. Just like their advertising shifted from useful text ads to completely overdoing it everywhere.

Money changes people, and companies. They would probably not be as big as they are now if they would have remained a friendly company.

I see where this is going: the Mother of all Patches that decentralizes the forum!

I can show^* you the programmer (and team), but it comes with a corporate price tag. And that's the problem: it's expensive to create, and can't really be monetized.

^* Not literally though, because of privacy.

That's probably why it doesn't exist yet. And you're only looking at it from a technical perspective. To be useful, it needs moderation to tackle spam.

I'll quote this post here:

This was (and is) my incentive:
I can't make any promises on the "forever" part. Well, actually I can: I will most definitely not do this forever :P But I can promise not to abandon it willingly without trying to find someone who takes over if when it comes to that.

Incentives need to be paid by someone.

I don't have blocks, but I have sha 256 hashes (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5167469.msg56771597#msg56771597): anyone can archive them to prove editing later on. Read the posts around the linked one for the discussion on data integrity.

as far as i can tell, you're not going to get something closer to that wishlist than something like steemit. so it's already a solved problem. steemit is a huge forum. it's only weakness is the main interface is a website but that doesn't mean someone couldn't code a software application that could run locally off of the steem blockchain.

steemit already has "subforums" and things.

but i'm not really interested in pursuing this discussion further since in my opinion it's already a solved problem. no need in beating a dead horse...

just for reference, steemit announced on bitcointalk when it first opened up back in 2016 so it shouldn't be any secret: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1466593.0

and what did the announcement say?

Welcome to Steemit, decentralized and incentivized social media.

Steemit is a new social media platform built on the Steem blockchain where the community rewards individuals for their posts, comments and votes, co-founded by Ned Scott, CEO, and Daniel Larimer, CTO of Steemit and founder of Bitshares.

Underneath the hood of Steemit.com there is a tradeable cryptocurrency token, called Steem, and it's performing well on the US-based exchange, bittrex.com, and blockchain-based exchange openledger.info. With Steemit.com, posts, comments and votes are immutable.  Attribution is a given. Accreditation is not taken for granted. And community appreciation is an actual reward.