Bitcoin Forum

Hello noobs,

 According to Bitcointalk's donation page they've pulled in roughly ~620BTC from donations alone. On this same page it states that they recieve free hosting and the donations go to 'development of the forum'. I dont know about you guys but I dont see anything on this forum thats not on every other single forum that runs this software.. So if they're a non-profit I'd really like to see the paperwork on that because they have to account for all donations and report it to future donors. Also, If you've ever run an advertisement on Bitcointalk you know how expensive it is.

 I'm just wondering where all this money goes? If your costs are $0 .. and you've taken in atleast $1k in donations .. and there have been no improvements on the forum .. How is that a non profit?
 I think we should stop donating until we get these answers.. Is this forum really that great? 30% of it is flame wars and trolling. A wise man once said on IRC 'The forums are full of cancer and scammers'.

Cordially Yours,
James L (rg @ freenode)

there have been some posts about this before. it was something about this forum lacks features and stuff.
try use the search function.

I believe you are missing the point of my post. Next.

All donations are being saved for major forum software work (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50617.0). The only money ever drawn from savings was 25 BTC for hosting before the current hosting arrangements were made.


This also includes ad revenue. I send all forum revenue to the donation address.


The forum is not a registered non-profit organization, or any kind of "official" organization for that matter. You'll have to take the word of the administration that no one makes any profit off of the forum.

It is for development of new custom forum software. I can't recall the thread title but theymos detailed the specs for the job in a very long post.

Cool story bro. Personally, I think they should spend the money on getting all mods and staff some liquor for putting up with the ass-hattery that goes on here. I think I owe them all a beer for putting up with me and the rest of the off-topic/trollin' crew...PM me an address, gentlemen...

I agree. I would have donated 100BTC by now if Theymos would just use some existing forum software. This whole "make a new one from scratch" idea is asinine, as is not changing it to a new one and slowly making additions himself for free.

stopped reading there

Better that i don't ask why this forum isn't phpbb or vbulletin

Better that i don't ask why they want to make a new forum from 0 too...

Anyone can ask for donations, at least they don't beg with 1/3 of the screen like wikipedia.  Once the donations are piled up high enough, I imagine some new forum software will be built, but I can't see the software being better than the free BB soft out there like phpBB.

You want a new custom OS to run that forum on too? Perhaps a custom ARM CPU implementation to run the whole stack ?
Seriously. Why on earth reinvent the wheel?

Have to agree with the OP. Im fine with donations to cover actual costs, but as there dont seem to be any, this doesnt look too well.

They are working to get new forums...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50617.0

+1

Who the fuck is the we.  You are a noob.  You haven't donated shit.

This forum is indispensable IMHO.  I haven't found anything that come close for getting technical answers related to the client, protocol, mining, etc.

If you think otherwise then leave or don't donate.  Nobody is forcing you.  Just don't include this "we should STOP donating".  You have donated shit, your a noob, and have 4 posts.

+1

Why donate when you know the money will be wasted?

hope to see you ppl on some kind of p2p forum in 2012, we already have Osiris (http://www.osiris-sps.org/) around, great software btw and hope they opensource it

How do you know that? Have you donated, or are you just another worthless leech here bitching about something because you have nothing to do on new year's eve?

Oh yea. Happy new year by the way. We had ours 10 hours ago.

So I take it you don't know how to party then...

You must have missed the Christmas Special.

Unfortunately, yes, but I plan to watch it sometime. I gotta head out to the festivities soon; perhaps tomorrow when I am so hungover I wish I was dead...

Judging by the reviews, that's the best time to watch it!

Its the newbie forum, idiot.

I can't comment on that thread, but adding forum chat and a rating system similar to bitcoin-otc would make the trades that occur on this forum more secure and easier.

lol, you haven't changed a bit  :D  come on dude, spare some of those extra coins you buy Cheetos with, it's for a good cause and you keep up the good spirit

Oh, a white knight? Wow, nice insults

Wake up, they want to waste the money in a "custom forum"?

How the hell can they make a decent forum? Things like vbulletin or phpbb took YEARS and tons of investment to have a good forum, and here they want to compete with them with 1000 BTC? Either they are wizards or something is wrong.

I had some experience with "custom forum"... bugs everywhere, let alone security.

Also what is the point in wasting money to make something when you can spend much less and have something much much much better? Vbulletin or Phpbb or others...

+1

I had some experiences with custom forums

First one on EVE Online: they deploy it. Tons of bugs, missing things and epic security bugs. You could do html inject via sign (no i'm not joking). They remove it after some days and deploy it months later, and still we don't like it

Later on Eurogamer: that forum is a joke, random bugs on tons of things, deleting account system don't work, ignore button was released only months later (but, it was possible to have ppl in ignore despite that... and no way to remove them then...), bug with adding images and text or video and text. Sure, they fixed some bugs, but remember that it took them months to make the forum and probably a lot of THOUSANDS of $

I dunno what the ppl of this forum want to do with making a "custom forum", i dunno why they don't want to use vbulletin or phpbb or something else, but so far the initiative makes no sense at all.

Funny fact: i frequent some amateur vbulletin or phpbb forums for my online groups&games&co, they costed almost nothing and work perfectly and have all features.

Frankly I kind of like what they did over at somethingawful. Free base code, secure and functional extended top layer.

I am not white knighting it, I am just saying I think they should spend the money on whatever they want, and you should just do whatever you want.

More like


If they want money for new servers and buy vbulletin and/or setup a phpbb or vbulletin forum it's fine.

But the custom forum thing makes no sense.

Exactly. Its not like vbulletin is bug free, but the chance of some freelance dev coughing up a codebase that is both more secure and more feature rich, is...well, lets be generous and say extremely tiny. Its almost like saying windows or OS-X is buggy and insecure, lets put out a bounty for someone to write a better OS from screatch. Good luck with that.

The sensible approach is to take a proven and mature OSS platform and tweak it where needed, but keeping in mind that any non trivial tweak is very likely to introduce new security issues and bugs.

The job is to deliver software meeting the specifications. It seems most likely that this will be done by modifying software such as SMF or vBulletin. I'm not asking specifically for software built from scratch.

All im saying, guys, is dont claim to be a non profit when you're not a non profit.

Also you all assume I havent donated. Well have you ever considered that I did donate and didnt give my name or tell where it was from because im not some type of douche bag who donates to be listed on the donation page?

Flame away.

Where is there a non-profit claim made?

https://bitcointalk.org/donate.html

Matthew N. Wright,

 Do you IRC on Freenode in #bitcoin-otc? If so, what is your nickname?

Cordially Yours,
James "rg" Edward

I'm a recovering IRC addict of 15 years so I try not to venture on there. Hard enough getting to sleep with Skype on every device I have.

http://blockchain.info/address/4670d28b297da2751ae99bdc93a27ba1dace40f1

 ^-- Donation address. 620 BTC sent. To where? Good question James.....

Forum owner? answers?

Why do you care? If you are worried, don't donate. I am sure no one will take offense...or do you just have the overwhelming compulsion to be the world's bookkeeper?

I store the funds in my personal wallet, so the "sent" number is meaningless. I can calculate the accurate balance by subtracting all expenses (which I keep track of) from the total amount received at 17RTT...

Theymos,

Why?

Bitcoin makes it easy to maintain multiple balances.. I just .. I don't get it, I guess.

Only if you create a separate wallet. I admit it would have been good to use a separate wallet, but I didn't think of it at the time. It's too late now because the sends already exist.

You're one of the developers slash power users and you didn't think of it? Theymos, i like you personally but even you must know this stinks of shit.

If you'd like to squash this all right now... can you show us the data? the logs you're keeping to seperate funds and addresses?

Please prove me wrong.

P.S. cheers on a quick reply

More aptly. Why *don't* you care?

Here is some food for thought:
Enron misappropriates billions of dollars but I'm not a share holder.. Why do I care?

James "Rg"

I don't think so. Switching wallets is annoying. I'm absolutely obsessed with Bitcoins. Bitcoins and my newest Bitcoin projects are pretty much all I talk about with friends. I may not have too many posts here for how long I've been here, but I lurk here for hours on end, every day. I'm constantly sending and receiving Bitcoins. I would definately consider myself a Bitcoin power user (Not a developer, though,) but I still wouldn't think of making a new wallet for donations. Like I said, it's annoying.

Ryland,

 I suggest you read the documentation better as creating and managing multiple wallets is extremely simple.

I didn't say it wasn't simple. I said it was annoying. I'm american. The simplest of things are annoying to me. lol

There's only been one expense, so the file's not very big:

So the current balance is 1,149.41 (http://blockexplorer.com/q/getreceivedbyaddress/17RTTUAiiPqUTKtEggJPec8RxLMi2n9EZ9) - 25 = 1,124.41.

I still don't understand why there's 620 BTC in your personal wallet where as the other half remains in this other wallet? Why wouldn't you just move it all? This doesnt make any sense.

The forum donations are simply mixed in with my regular sends. I'm not moving anything.

Actually, many of the sends are sends to self, which I did to get the "received" amount correct.

I am curious. Please answer your question. I could give a flying fuck about enron misappropriating funds. I honestly know little to nothing about it, and can't imagine a situation where I would really care to learn. But I do want to know why you care.

I think we just found our forum douchebag of the year winner!!!

Answer the question, homie.

details should be published

They were. Read the thread.