Yeah, I'd generally agree that people do not want to be doxed. The people that are doxed are generally those accused of scamming. Every scammer says they are innocent, those wrongfully accused can generally clear things up pretty easily.

Are lawsuits anything other than malicious? Should they still happen even though they are "attacking" someone? Its not a black and white question. There are certain cases I've seen where the people very obviously deserved to be doxed. Generally if you commit a crime, (Scamming is the major one here) people dox you. I'd say fair is fair.
Nope, there is a meta thread in meta named something along the lines of Staff Member information, or Staff Dox, and it has info about 3 or 4 staff members, including volunteered information. Again, that thread has Theymos' dox in it as well. Even though people can't find these threads, I've posted in them personally, so they weren't just threads I've seen in passing.


Tricky one, again that comes back to a plethora of other issues. I don't really have a solution for that one, all ideas that I can think of would be far worse than just how it is now.


Again, this is another issue, but Bitcoin in general is about financial freedoms. We don't feel the need to tell people what they can or can't spend their money on. If you want to put your house as collateral in a poker game with a pair of twos, maybe I personally would advise against it, but anyone is welcome to make whatever stupid payments for anything that they want. The ponzi section got its own section because "legit" dice/poker sites and such said that the ponzi listings were flooding the section and they couldn't get in any discussion over the flood of ponzi spam. Nothing more, nothing less.

I don't know anything about your ban, but I have personally seen two or three threads with Theymos dox in them on this site with no consequence to the OP or anyone else involved. I would expect that it was something else that you did. I don't have the info to know for certain, but that would be my first guess based on the info given.


Not that I necessarily disagree, but there isn't a screening process. Who should be in charge of fact checking to make sure the right person is doxed, and that the information is accurate? If you do post inaccurate info, I suppose you lose credibility? Thats something of a consequence.

This one would take a really really long time to explain. These are all things that have been greatly debated. I'll give you the short answers, but you would have to check hundreds of pages of discussion to have a complete scope of the debate. Buying/Selling accounts is something that staff can't enforce a rule against. If we do, people will just go off site and do it without our knowledge, and then people will be under the impression that it doesn't happen, so bought/sold accounts will be able to do more damage. Out in the open, everyone is aware to take proper precautions when dealing with someone. Staff are not responsible for scams or scam attempts. Do your own due diligence when trading. Ponzis aren't a "scam" if you know that you are investing in them. No one is being tricked into depositing money into LUCKYPONZI thinking its a cloudmining site. Do what you want with your money, let people do what they want with theirs. And spam is indeed our prime directive. A moderator's main job here is to help keep the board as clutter free as possible for thoughtful discussion.

Social Security numbers, Unrelease medical records, etc. It sticks out pretty well when someone posts something they shouldn't have access to. Your name, address, phone number, etc are the common bits of information that I see. If you can find the info in a phone book (if they still existed) with a google search, on social media, whatever. Its not private information. If information is illegally obtained, then its not acceptable.


The strange thing is, tons of people interact here on a daily basis and don't have their dox posted. There typically is a reason, or at least a percieved reason why people post each others dox. P.Gage is the only person I know of who has posted all of their own dox. I like to think most people here respect each others privacy until there is a reason not to. So when you say its contradictory that the Admins don't offer their information to everyone, that isn't applicable in the slightest. It would be more apt to say that if the Admins are accused of scamming and then delete their dox, that is a contradiction.

Again, concensus is not a nice feature or a fairy tale or anything like that. It is 100% required. There is literally no other way, the entire debate is a moot point. Bitcoin XT is trying to help, but it is breaking the entire system, though they are surely not the only ones to blame. There is no pressuring participants, and there is no changing the codebase unless it is nearly 100% accepted. Its a very important and specific design that removes humans from the equation. Bitcoin is no better than fiat if just a simple majority is required. If you can take uninformed or uninterested people and push changes with nothing but that, there is no point in mining, there is no trust in science and math, and we are back to relying on humans to regulate currency.

Metaphorically, this isn't like changing the block reward, block size, etc. Its like changing the system so that anyone can make changes by paying a room full of people to raise their hands. Look at the greater picture here, everyone is being baited into fighting over stupid features, and Bitcoin, BitcoinXT or whatever it ends up being is losing its credibility.


*Edit* sorry going off topic a bit, so how this all relates back to the topic. Bitcointalk as an organization has no allegiance to Bitcoin core, Bitcoin XT, or any set of developers. It has an obligation to preserve Bitcoin, which as I explained in jeopardy.

Bitcoin has been forked, what 4 or 5 times now?  Concensus is the way it is for a reason, its Bitcoin's most valuable security feature. It is by incredibly valuable design that you can't do what is being proposed here. If you think about security as far as hashing power and math goes, you have Bitcoin what it is right now. Win or lose, add BitcoinXT to the debate, and you now add other factors. Nodes, who you can bribe, etc. We are moving away from having to exploit a steadfast set of code, to being able to exploit people if you can't exploit the code. Bitcoin is supposed to be hard to change. If you support bigger blocks, or if you support smaller blocks, whatever, it doesn't matter. Don't support the idiots involved, support the Bitcoin code, and you will see how ridiculous everyone is acting, on both sides I might add. I'm not really a core support, nor an XT supporter. I think that XT has some broken features, and I think core needs to change a bit, but what I appose more than anything is how everyone is going about things, and the damage they are causing.

Dox stay up because it is typically meta data. If information about you can be found on social media/google, whatever, its not private. If someone has to steal your medical records from a hospital in order to release it, then that is not allowed, nor is posting someone else's social security number. As far as baseless accusations and such, it is up for individuals to determine what is baseless. If people want to post about their businesses here without needing Bitcointalk to fact check, verify their claims, etc, then they need to be willing to do that themselves when people ask. Bitcointalk is not affiliated with google in any way, ads are all done in house.

Theymos' dox are floating around somewhere in meta, rules don't apply differently to moderators/admins.

Again, thats not how it works. You don't have to convince anyone of anything. Bitcoin is a protocol that is based on consensus, not who can pander to the most people. Frankly, this is really a no win situation. Both XT and Core have problems, rather than solving those problems, they are just fighting a publicity battle, which is causing a bigger issue. If Bitcoin works the way that people are trying to make it work, the way you suggest, it is the greatest security risk Bitcoin has ever had, and "Bitcoin" can be safely called dead unless its fixed. Block size issues need to be fixed, a solution that doesn't require 15Mb upload/download speeds to broadcast larger sized blocks needs to exist, anonymity things need to be added, amongst other things. But those can all wait, as soon as all it requires is a majority to modify Bitcoin, anyone who can buy support for whatever cause they want can, be that block size increases, block reward increase/decreases, etc.

Again, the protocol requires consensus. This isn't a majority rule system, because majority rule systems are not stable nor secure. While Theymos has expressed that he isn't a fan of XT's proposed changes, I believe his greater concern is the same I addressed a moment ago. The straight definition however of an Alt Coin, is a Blockchain/Coin that is not Bitcoin. Bitcoin requires 99.9% concensus. Without that concensus its not Bitcoin, and therefor an alt coin.

*99.9% is just an aproximation, whatever the actual value is is aproximate 100% - statistical misrepresentations/margin of error etc, but its near 100%.

No, not true. Bitcoin is not a democracy. Bitcoin requires complete consensus, not a majority vote. If 90% of people split to XT, Bitcoin Core is still technically "Bitcoin". The only way Bitcoin XT becomes "Bitcoin" is in the same manner as all of the past forks. With concensus.

The logic behind calling XT an altcoin is the fact that it is not Bitcoin without nearly 100% consensus. 75% isn't enough, 100% of the miners isn't enough. It needs something like 99.9% of the miners and 99.9% of the industry before its considered Bitcoin. If you take Bitcoin's and fork it, you have an alt coin. So until XT completely assimilates and I mean completely as in 99.9% Bitcoin and all of its users, it is not Bitcoin.

That isn't to say that Bitcoin XT is banned here, it just doesn't belong in Bitcoin sections.

Yep, as some people have said before, Evil Points are accumulated when your IP (Usually through a proxy or tor) has been banned before. The idea behind it, is that individuals that want to remain anonymous are barely penalized. Its designed to be an amount that someone could obtain from faucets in a short amount of time. For that reason, its barely noticeable for individuals who want to have 1 or 2 accounts. It does however discourage people from making thousands of accounts. In short, it blocks spammers and is barely noticeable for individuals.

Mhmmm


Anyway, its up to personal preference, I very rarely leave behind the "this thread has been moved here" post, unless I feel people who go looking for it might miss it. I stand by my original statement.

If I'm not mistaken the bump button is already a planned feature. It will eliminate the need for people to actually spam the word "bump" reducing bump spam, and will also help prevent people from bypassing the 1 bump per day rule.

It was moved to the trashcan, I'm looking at it right now. If I had to take a guess, it would be due to the fact that its referal link spam.

Newbie jail causes a huge amount of issues. People complain about removing newbie jail, but it really didn't do much to prevent spam. The issue with spam doesn't come from genuine newbies, it comes from account farmers. If you are managing 100 accounts, a 3 hour wait means very little to you. If you are trying to learn about Bitcoin as a genuine newbie, a 3 hour wait can do enough to convince you its not worth looking into. If newbie jail was reimplemented this second, the forum would indeed get better, for 3 hours that is, then the waves of accounts hitting the boards would be the same as it was before. In addition, whitelisting is a huge drain on staff resources.

If you report one spammer, all of their accounts get banned.

Its not really about collecting revenue or punishing anonymity. How its set up, any user who wants to register an account via Tor is paying so little that they could collect it from faucets. The idea behind it is to prevent people from registering thousands of accounts and doing things they shouldn't.

Buying and selling trust is not against forum rules. There are very few things about the trust system that are explicitly against the rules, and none of which any staff besides Admins can touch. The reason for that being, its up to the people using the trust system to decide what is and isn't ok to do.

In this example, the forum users have decided that buying/selling trust isn't acceptable behavior, so it has become standard to give people trying negative feedback. I personally would recommend giving someone trying to buy/sell trust negative trust as well. And while moderators won't ban anyone for doing something like selling trust, I'd bet many would be willing to help. So if you do report the PM, it will at the very least verify that the pm you are claiming to have recieved is accurate.


*edit*


The beautiful thing about it all, is that all of the heavily debated topics such as account selling and signature ad campaigns also play a role in this. They give value to accounts that otherwise would be worthless. If someone's account can net them .1 BTC/month from a sig ad campaign, they are less likely to ruin their account for $10. The cost of scamming goes way up when accounts have value, and it becomes a risky endevor to try and scam. Sure a newbie account can scam a $5 starbucks card, but if you want to try and scam people out of something bigger, your trust must be valued greater than that item's value. So then the scammer can only attempt to scam say $500 for an account that might be worth $1000 based on all of its trust and rank. Why do that when you can sell the account? And the cycle continues. For the most part, scamming goes against self interest and nets the scammer a loss if you are trying to buy trust or accounts.

The only real successful scammers I've seen thus far are people who have operated legitimately for years, ran businesses, and were vetted. The trust system doesn't help about the long con in the slightest, so always be careful.

You could write an extremely well thought out evaluation of Bitcoin's economic trajectory and still have it be off topic if you post it in someone's sales thread. Methinks you are leaving out a lot of context.

Just don't trust anyone who creates self moderated threads if you wish? Or, only trust vetted companies that choose to use self moderation, or trust no one. Its really up to personal preference. What creating a self moderated thread says about an individual varies based on individual perception.

Being a moderator and being on default trust are two different things. The majority of members on default trust aren't moderators. Staff aren't necessarily trusted as far as trades go, they just need to be reliable with moderation policy.

Dont treat a staff member any different than any other member, we don't have any personal info about each other, and staff could just as easily scam as anyone else.

Ended up not listing on EBay. There was a no final value fee weekend that I missed. Things are still for sale until another one rolls along.

UI design hasn't yet begun. Thats just a placeholder so that the forum can be built/tested.