Bitcoin Forum

The altcoin sub forum no matter how much moderation will continue to decline as this forum and cryptocurrency gets more popular and receives more exposure. The current problem with that sub forum is the fact that an overwhelming amount of projects posted there are scams or low quality cash grabs at best. It has a reputation for these reasons and most genuine projects will be branded with the same brush. Unfortunately a pay wall would be unlikely to solve this problem due to the fact that these companies and individuals releasing  these garbage projects are willing to invest a small amount of money in the grand scheme of things because they will make hundreds of thousands in return.

Also introducing a paywall which requires every project to pay to list their project will probably be labelled as a cash grab and not very well received and the pros probably don't out way the cons because of these developers willing to pay the money because they'll earn over twice the amount easily.

So my proposal is to introduce premium altcoin sub forums. Just like the "Altcoin Discussion" is a dedicated sub forum we could introduce this for altcoins. For an example "ETH" could be a sub forum however the criteria for being allowed these sections should be that they've been vetted by dedicated members of the public and been verified as a worthwhile/interesting project as well as being a paid listing (per month). To be clear this doesn't mean "approved"  We should only allow a maximum of 5 sub forums at a time and have these on a monthly rent basis. I have no idea how much this should cost however I believe it should be within the thousands per month to allow that money to be paid to moderators/dedicated people to review the project and moderate that sub forum.

 Benefits to the forum:
- Vetted projects to assure quality
- Dedicated moderators = Less spam
- More exposure to quality altcoins
- Save time browsing the millions of projects launched every day

Benefits to the developers/owners:
- More exposure
- Dedicated moderators
- Have their project reviewed and be able to showcase that to others that they're project is of high standard

If that's actually true, it's incredible to me--are we still in the world of creating a garbage project, drawing in suckers, and cashing in for that much money?  Sounds easier than a gold rush, IMO. 

Yeah, the altcoin section has been a mess for years.  I've always thought there should be subsections for at least the major altcoins, and I think I voiced that some time ago.  Just not sure how enthusiastic Theymos is about doing anything to or for the altcoin section.  I've long thought that it only exists to appease those bitcoiners who wanted a section for non-bitcoin cryptos. 

I commend you enthusiasm to clean up the altcoin section, which it desperately needs, but I don't think this is the way to do it.

Sure, a paywall of several thousand dollars a month would weed out many (but not all) of the shitcoins. The issue is for the real coins, who is going to pay that fee? Take a coin like Monero for example, which like bitcoin, has many people developing different aspects of it, no centralized authority and certainly no centralized pool of coins or money to draw from. Who is going to pay the fee for their own board? The developers? Crowdfunding donations?

I would worry that the only coins which would pay this fee are the biggest and "best" of the scam coins, which have enough of a pre-mine or ICO to afford it.

What he said.
A quote from me about this from a over a year ago:


-Dave

Also from what I posted over a year ago:



With BTC going over $10K again, it's going to be a shit storm of epic proportions as everyone tries to cash in again.

Anybody want to get in on the ground floor of BitcoinDave?

-Dave

It has at least one disadvantages, because some of best altcoins left the forum months or years ago. Vitalik, for example, left the forum years ago. I know OP suggested such funds will be collected from ETH community (for example) to fight for one to five sub-boards, but I doubt that community will be ready to do something like this. It looks unrealistic. The mechanisim looks like what the forum has with banner adverstisement auctions, that use funds from their own teams/ owners, not from community.
Furthermore, it is easy to search for specific projects to find good topics related to them. Shitty topics, created originally for spam, will tails off fastly, that is one of good indicators to judge topic quality. Another indicator is the general post quality of OPs. I think that people can easily to do it with all current available tools.

It will be very hard to deal with scammers whether you take payment or not.
The best action is to educate the masses and they can automatically understand these scam on their own.

Crowdfunding could be a way of doing it or we could consider offering certain coins free slots if they meet certain criteria like Monero. Again they would have to be reviewed by whoever is given the responsibility. Its true that scam coins will probably be able to afford and justify paying the fee and many other legitimate coins won't have the money but its certainty going to be a deterrent and by putting a review process in it too I think it would weed out most.

Not all the garbage projects are raking it that sort of money but the ones with a good marketing approach are. I know that a few of the projects have generated a significant profit and then just exited like the hundreds of projects before them.  Yes I know the argument against the altcoin sub forum is that its not about Bitcoin and this is primarily a Bitcoin forum so not much attention is giving to the sub forum. We have 2 mods covering that whole area which is probably more active than the whole of the rest of the forum.

This is the same issue with why scams aren't moderated - it would take an inordinate amount of time to investigate every altcoin as to whether or not it was a scam. No process is going to be 100%, and you run in to the issue of real coins being denied arguably their best platform, or scam coins being approved. The "best" scams are ones which aren't immediately obvious, and survive long enough to lure in the maximum amount of people. These people will then flood the forum, blaming us for approving a scam that they lost money on.

Completely agree with your points regarding the altcoin boards (and most boards for that matter) needing a dedicated sub board moderator.

Although your points are valid and I would agree that this would be a time consuming endeavor many people are already doing this for free. ICOethics has been reviewing several different altcoins and exposing them for example. However a deposit would be made and then the review would take place. So a moderator or whoever is put in charge of doing it would be getting paid and therefore justify the time taken to review.

You've made a point about the "better" scams being harder to detect. Although an in depth evaluation on the project will likely reveal any hidden intentions in the majority plus I think anyone paying a substantial amount to get their project evaluated with a no return on deposit if anything seems fishy is not something most scam projects would be interested in doing because of the risk involved where as legitimate projects wouldn't even have to worry about that.

I take your point regarding the payments from the altcoins being used to fund the team responsible for reviewing them. But there is a difference between ICOethics busting scam which they come across and tacitly saying that projects aren't scams by approving them for their own sub board.

I'm not trying to be deliberately obstructive here, I just don't think the forum vetting projects is the right way to go. Coins like BCH and BSV could easily pay any fee from their centralized owners, and don't have any of the usual flags of being scams like a fake team, Ponzi structure, etc., and so would likely get their own board, despite being total trash.

This to me would be the biggest concern about this, and the fact that users will assume that these projects have been officially reviewed, and approved by the forum which would definitely cause a few headaches. I think this has been discussed in the past, and I think the logistics of it could be a concern. Generally, I think its a good idea to showcase proper projects that are worthy of that extra exposure, but then again looking at how profitable the altcoin market is from a developers perspective we would likely have several projects wanted these positions, and reviewing them would be both time consuming, and likely a waste of time for a lot of the trash projects that would undoubtedly apply for the spot regardless whether they're paying a premium for it or not.

Generally though, this is a decent suggestion, and with a bit of fine tuning we could get something to work. Although, I'm currently braced for the onslaught of new users heading over to the altcoin section due to Bitcoins recent price surge.

I proposed Security Deposits for bounty threads a few months ago but it didn't really catch on. The concerns were similar like in this thread that doing that would give members a false sense that the project is somehow vetted and secured by the forum itself.

I am for any kind of improvement that would distinguish good and reliable projects from scams.

Quoting my own thread here as a reference.

This is an interesting concept so if I'm understanding correctly they would be paying into an escrow as a security deposit and lets say something did go wrong would that then be distributed out to those that have been affected by the coin? The logistics of that sound like a nightmare but in theory a good idea. Having a large substantial amount in a security deposit which will then be used to reimburse those could be a good idea. I think this would only be relevant if the project scammed and not because it failed though as even good projects fail to realize their potential.

Dude,

No one is going to pay for an altcoin sub-forum on btctalk,

1.  BTC Maximalist call every coin not bitcoin a shitcoin,
    why would anyone pay for that slander

2.  Many Altcoins have Slack or Telegram or other forums,
    so they just relocate all communications to their other forums and dump btctalk.

It is also a place where you can easily moderate or redact anything you don't like.

It is hardly comparable with an open forum with objective mods. Projects using only these are a big red flag imho.

In fact if anyone gets scammed by these, nobody will ever know it, so they can do it without risking anything too.

You aren't the first person to come up with a such an idea:


The problems which would arise are mentioned by others:

1. A dedicated board could lend extra legitimacy to a scam before its inevitable exit-scam.

Solution: only allow old/serious established projects to have their own boards? E.g. ETH, XMR, ZEC, but...

2. ... would there actually be enough demand from non-scammy projects? Many have moved onto other venues: Telegram, Slack, Discord, their own forums, facebook groups, etc. Traditional discussion forums still retain their advantages, but a lot of people prefer more responsive mediums of communication.

You do realized that most alts topics had to become self moderated because of the asshats that constantly insulted and derailed the topic on btctalk.
Having some moron berate an altcoin that many in a community have worked hard on and spend considerable portion of their own fiat trying to maintain, is unwelcome to say the least.
Example:


Which is why many altcoin communities did the following.

You don't see self righteous trolls like Lauda anywhere but on btctalk.  :P

i don't think this is a good idea not because of the way you are suggesting it be implemented but because of the bias it creates. even if you find the most perfect method to only select the handful of good projects. bitcointalk should never create any kind of bias for any project. instead people should learn to do their own research and if they can't do that they shouldn't even enter the altcoin market.

I tend to agree with this. A payment method favors coins which have a centralized entity who will make the payment, which is the exact opposite of what constitutes a good cryptocurrency. Picking based on marketcap doesn't work either with coins like BCH and BSV being completely manipulated to be worth far more than they are, and coins like USDT printing new ones out of thin air, and so all having artificially inflated marketcaps.

On other boards, a sub-board generally gets created if a lot of posts on that board are about the same topic - take the most recent creation of the hardware wallets board, for example. Again, I don't see how this would work on the altcoin boards, as projects would just flood/spam from an army of sockpuppets until they hit the threshold for their board.

I think the vast majority would probably be ok with a sub-board for Ethereum, but beyond that it would be completely up in the air.

Not a bad idea, but as Khaos77 pointed out why would the specific altcoin community need a dedicated subforum if they have already proved their trust? Why would they pay for a dedicated sub forum if they have enough discussion places other than this forum? Ethereum has stack exchange to discuss most of their issues and doubts, Dash has their own forum 'dashtalk', monero has forum.getmonero and many similar coins have their own forums and discussion places apart form telegram.

The coins which might be interested in such activities or creation of a own sub-forum in bitcointalk would be the new alts which has been created with the intention to scam newbie investors. With the prolonged 2018 bear market and the 2019 bull market, most of the coins which were proven to be much better and somewhat trustworthy ran away by selling coins in exchange. So, what would have happened if they were proven trustworthy by moderators in the initial stages and certainly ran away in the later half of 2019 with the recent surges in the bitcoin prices.

Also for most of the time theymos has said that he has ruled out the idea for receiving payments to announce a project or to receive payments from people for wearing a signature. Apart form that, I am really amazed how mprep controlled the whole spam world (Altcoin Discussion and its sub-boards) before Welsh became a moderator.  :o

So the actual issue to be addressed is the quality of the moderation on the forum. Anything else is just hiding a problem.

Or just stop the altcoin section all together.

Yes, that is the logic behind it.

Yes, if a project failed to accomplish their goals and raise the needed funds they would receive their security deposit back as long as they have refunded all their investors. If the investments don't get returned the deposit would be kept in the escrow and used to at least partially reimburse the affected parties.

Sounds like a nightmare to implement, you are right, but I still think it is not a bad idea.

Removing the altcoin section altogether makes more sense than trying to make people pay for it, when no one will.

But this also removes a large portion of the btctalk membership which is only here for the altcoin sections.
Less active membership , lower views count on ads , less money made by the btctalk forum in general,
so unless the forum wants to cut their ad revenue , not a profitable idea.
But one that many Bitcoin Maximalist are in favor of.
 
FYI:
There is always the possibility that one of the alts design , does surpass btc at a future date.
Not all of us feel btc is a deity to worship that can never fail.

FYI2:
Some people have little use for altcoins, but ignoring the fact they give a useful purpose to siphoning off a large percentage of bitcoin supply in the trading pairs, add up all of the satoshi verses all of the altcoins, now if all of those alts disappear, you have an immediate available supply increase that with no other utility, could cause a decrease in btc overall price. Increasing BTC supply faster than demand always caused a price drop.   :)

Maximizing ad revenue is not what Bitcointalk was made for.
It's not exactly a profit-driven site, otherwise it would look a lot worse than it currently is... which is still not that great if we're being honest.

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Maybe it's analogous to the ponzi situation, where a board was created in order to redirect spam that would contaminate useful sections (which are at this point not-so-useful either)

If it was not a Profit driven site, then their would be No ADs.   ;)
Also those copper memberships would be free.

Quoted from another forum I'm a member of


Ad revenue is not for profit, but rather a need

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Plus, the ads are fairly restrictive and rare.

For a higher profit, theymos could have made it a lot more flexible for advertisers. Or disabled the "Hide ads" button?

This is somewhat similar to what I've suggested in the past. I wouldn't be against charging all coins to list here as I think alt coins should contribute something to the forum financially as the vast majority of staff time is probably wasted on cleaning up after them, but if theymos felt this was too restrictive then maybe we could still allow alts to have a thread here but also they could pay a fee to get their own sub board/dedicated url. The fee could be a one off or a yearly fee (or both). Maybe the coins could also assign their own mods to the boards which would free up staff time. I think this is something a lot of coins would go for and it would certainly be cheaper than hosting their own boards.


Some of these shitcoins have made millions and they promoted them by sig and bounty spam. We literally give them free advertising and they destroy the board in the process. It's win-win for them because they pay people in tokens they've created and once their campaign is done they either sale off into the sunset or create another shitcoin for some bullshit half-assed idea and rinse and repeat.


Those sorts can stick with having a thread, or if someone wanted to get their own sub they can cough up for it or try crowd fund it.


I disagree. I think if we had the option a lot of coins would pay for a dedicated board as there are several benefits to it. As I've said before, if the only way to list them here was to pay a fee and they got their own board it would also eradicate the paid spam bumping as it would be useless to do.


Would it? If we got rid of signature campaigns and the only way you could adverse here was via ad slots imaging how much spam would disappear over night. I don't think we need to litter the forum with ad slots but that's essentially what we have right now anyway, only it's done in a destructive way.

I was referring to the kind of website with banner ads all-over. Say goodbye to the border of your page.

Think "faucet site" kind of ads... save for pop-ups, because those are horrible.

And besides, I did allude to the current state of the forum in regards to spam.

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Removing signatures will at-least keep spam confined to the Altcoin section with the various social media report bumps. :)

I wouldn't want that and that would never happen anyway but the sig spam is arguably just as bad and all that money just goes into the pockets of those paying the people to make it in the first place who don't care what mess they cause as long as it gets them free promo. What I've suggested before was a banner ad at the top something like this:

https://i.imgur.com/jIbHl22.jpg

That way advertisers can target their market ie a gambling site would advertise in the gambling board and so on. You could also have more paid memberships like Copper/Silver/Gold/Platinum etc but theymos doesn't seem to be interested in either more ads or any more memberships so it's unlikely to happen. In fact, I'd say there's more chance of sig campaigns being banned outright than more ad slots. Theymos has even considered getting rid of them, which I don't think we should do. More paid Memberships wouldn't hurt either and at least it would essentially kill the account farming/hacking market in the process.
 

I'm surprised it isn't already dead. How do users expect to purchase accounts when the emails can be reset within 14 days?

The hassle, I assume, should outweigh the benefits. Maybe just ignorance?

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As long as something can be gained with less input than the anticipated outcome (i.e. low-GDP countries house residents that have a lower average value of time) you'll have account farmers trying to accumulate high-ranking accounts.

Paid memberships might lower the amount of farmers somewhat but I don't think it'll be highly significant.

I'd love to see before and after statistics of forum activity a month after disabling signatures ;) Would give a nice picture how much activity is 'organic' and how much is mostly signature-driven.

This is considered the home of cryptocurrency when it comes to discussion. Sure we have reddit and they have their little telegram groups but any serious project would be getting their hands everywhere. Lets not forget that the majority of this forum doesn't use Telegram and the other places Khaos77 listed. I have never used any other site to discuss cryptocurrency other than this forum. This forum has millions of users and a lot of people are paying huge amounts to advertise here on the forum. By purchasing a slot to get more exposure they are going to get just that. Its an investment as well as a benefit to the community who don't want to sift through all the shit in the altcoin sub forum.

Where do you think people first heard of these? Not to forget that anyone with an interest in wider cryptocurrency and not just one coin will likely be on this forum building up a reputation and participating in conversations.

At the moment, the only coin I accept in payment is Bitcoin. I'd like to expand this, but I haven't done the required homework yet. For example, I suspect that I should be accepting Litecoin. I'm not sure where to open good discussions about alts here on Bitcoin talk. I've also picked up some Basic Attention Token, Steem, and Bit Blocks, and I would like to hear opinions about the future of these coins. Perhaps it would be useful to have child boards for the more established coins, and they could be moderated to remove low value negative posts.

Etherium, Ripple and other blockchain structures seem to be evolving and expanding, and we need to be discussing those in some detail. The new FaceBux is also indicative of future trends, and if Bitcoin Talk is going to stay as a significant platform in the new crypto world, it will need to build communities of enthusiasts for these new ventures.

Well, there are already good users discussing about the future of this coins as we consider those alts as strong altcoins as what you have stated like the litecoin for example. And if child board will be created for this then surely spammers will not have any restriction then it will probably destroy the board. However, it could be prevented like the removal of signatures so it will be less attractive for the spammers to post irrelevant replies in every threads to be brought up for discussions.

I am supporting this notion as I am also holding good altcoins like BCH, XRP and ETH to which I think will have also a better future in cryptocurrency.

Remember that altcoin discussion is fine in the Serious discussion section, and would likely provide less activity than the altcoin section, but likely better quality. There are a few hundred threads in the altcoin discussion about these topics already that could be found with the search function if you're interested in sifting through them.

It certainly would be interesting to see what happens. I wouldn't be at all surprised if we lost at least 50% of traffic within a week or so and it continuing to gradually decline as people come round to the fact that they can't earn via posting here anymore. A lot of people would quickly lose interest and even fairly active/well known members would probably start to spend less and less time here. I think there will still be a lot of traffic for other alt coin bounties though as this forum is still probably the best way to promote themselves but without signature ads the effectiveness of this would be greatly reduced so maybe even they would look for alternatives. This wouldn't be ideal if crapcoins suddenly took over discussion.


This is comparing apples to oranges. It's like saying why would anyone use Facebook when they've got Telegram and whatsapp. Private messaging services have their place but so do forums or other forms of web presence and private messaging apps really aren't great for public debate.