Bitcoin Forum

I used to be involved with IRC a very long time ago for many years and even ran a hosting company that offered primarily BNC & IRCd accounts. It did well for a while but I ended up shutting it down because business slowed and I really thought IRC would be dying off with the popularity of forums, online chats, facebook, etc.  By the time I said goodbye to IRC, it was pretty much just a lot of botnets, illegal operations & script kiddies. However, I have frequently seen people posting conversations from IRC here and posting screenshots of IRC chats.

So, I guess my question is:  Do the 'real' conversations amongst bitcoin enthusiasts happen on IRC and this forum is just a mouthpiece or PR forum for the "mainstream bitcoin users".  If so, what network does everyone use - or should I assume freenode?

yes

Thanks for at least reading the subject.  ;D

I want to sell a BNC service for BTC. You register on a site, send Bitcoin to the address give, then you get a BNC account on my server. It should be possible with minimal coding, but I don't know how to interact with znc (http://wiki.znc.in/ZNC) to make the accounts.

irc ... it's twitter with no server.
same security -nothing- ... same usage -blablabla for nothing and XDCC request-

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/IRC_channels

One of the reasons I am asking this question is because I am half tempted to relaunch my old company and accept BTC as the primary payment option. But it really wasn't very profitable for me towards the end of the companies existence and was a decent amount of work keeping it going.  

EDIT: to expand on this further, my implementation would likely involve setting up bnc accounts locally on my own server and using shell scripts to setup the bnc accounts, which is primarily what I did when setting up prior accounts. I  had it down to a one-line command I would enter in for a new account on the shell and it would setup the account and even assign a unique vanity host  :o    .... Shouldn't be hard to create a front-end web interface for this that would do what you are saying

who cares, i can go onto IRC without paying, and without even needing to download a IRC program..

those that need IRC for developer and other useful stuff dont care about these gimmicky things that people try to sell them

I guess the #bitcoin channel on freenode is just some sort of "default" place for people to come by if they're bored, have some specific question or just want to talk about bitcoin. They join and see what's currently going on. Also, if something 'important' happens, it's a place people will most likely talk about it.

I like to lurk in #bitcoin-assets on freenode.

IRC is alive and well, I don't think it will ever go away. It depends on which server you hang out on tho; Even today, IRC has unique features which other systems just don't have.  There are plenty of conversations anywhere, whether it is on forums, irc or otherwise. I think there is a bitcoin channel on each irc server nowadays, but I'm not sure. freenode is the official server for the bitcoin channel.



Very true, developers do not care about it - and irc chat provides a good way to communicate for them. But mailing lists are easier if you have a busy schedule

Think no one can doubt the gold days of IRC are long past, but I know some communities still active, including bitcoin one.

But still nothing compared to the old gold days.

The people who use IRC now tend to be the people who want to self-host that kind of thing. Also Freenode now has a web client, so my guess is that it would be difficult for a paid service to differentiate itself well. You'd need to have a lot of value-add features beyond simply running am IRC bouncer.

I've only used ZNC, not BNC, but I presume BNC also has channel buffer replay support. In addition to automatically repaying channel buffers when a client connects, you could store them and make them accessible on a convenient and searchable web interface.

Another feature you could add is proxy OTR. For people who connect with a client that lacks OTR support, you could make the bouncer negotiate the OTR for them and relay the result. This isn't a thing a user should do if they can do the OTR on their side, but it's an improvement over not using OTR at all, which is what they'd do without that service.

I still use IRC for multiple things including BTC, reprap, hackerspaces, arduino. Most channels I use are on freenode. As far as BNC servers go most people including myself are just using a raspberry pi setup. Its cheap, uses little power and pretty reliable.

IRC sucks a big dick full of scammers and fascist mods.
 

I used IRC all the time, but have stopped for the last 3-4 years since new and IMO better chat protocols have been released.

That is what I felt like towards the end of my IRC days. Most of the knowledgable people I knew back then all left IRC once all of the networks we typically used started getting overrun with xdcc bots and a lot of the networks started getting into policing & politics on the management side, which just didn't make it fun anymore. Nonetheless, I met a lot of interesting people on IRC back then.

I assume this raspberry pi setup is located somewhere else… or why run a BNC in your own house?  The main reason people I knew used BNC's were to protect themselves and fully hide the IP/location they are connecting from, primarily to protect against script kiddies & dos/ddos attacks. I realize most networks now probably mask IP's, but there are still plenty of people (IRCops, admins, shell providers) that could see them.


That makes sense, I could see the self-hosting option working for people. There were plenty of people back then that self hosted IRCd servers as well but mainly for private networks, anyone who wanted a public network typically went to a shell provider to be fully protected from denial of service attacks and to ensure their networks/servers had the highest uptime, availability, and bandwidth.

Back then it wasn't as easy to have high-powered linux machines sitting in your house to be able to support the amount of memory & processing power needed to run an IRCd process hosting 1000's of users….. not to mention the bandwidth - a lot of people still had dial-up or extremely capped upstreams at home. (until we all figured out how to get around the caps)  :o    but obviously not too much bandwidth involved with self-hosting BNCs

We ultimately started using psyBNC for our BNC accounts to get a better feature set. The basic BNC client, without developer support, didn't grow with the times!  

I do like the idea of having a web-searchable interface for the channel logs but not very familiar with OTR, which I am assuming is off-the-record messaging?   -- I will have to do some more research on that one.

IRC? wooww. Haven't heard from it since...well seven years ago

I can only speak for myself, but I was never a big fan of IRC. TO be honest I never saw the advantage of those chat-rooms?

Chat rooms where fun when we had still 1200 baud modems but today? I really don't see the point of it.

IRC?!

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UeyN-r_lEz4/UQAgvgoF_qI/AAAAAAAAG3c/uQltVx0jBwE/s1600/ogre-nerds.gif

I personally don't have much of a reason to use IRC as I don't need to conduct business via IRC, which is really the only reason one would need to use IRC as opposed to discussing via forums, as IRC allows for much more fluid conversations.

Nope it is right next to my desk. The reason I personally use it is for PM's. When someone PM's me even, if I am afk I will still see the message when I login. Another benefit is it logs 200 lines of chat from every channel you are in so you can do a bit of catchup and jump right in on the conversation. IRC is not for everyone but I enjoy it for my hobbies.