I've just received an email alert from a web hosting forum that I haven't visited for over 3 years. It claims to have been made in a thread to which I had subscribed. I tend not to subscribe to threads, as I am often a fairly prolific poster, but maybe this one slipped through the net. However, it did raise an interesting thought.

Bitcoin Talk has many valuable members who have drifted away from the forum, and I believe that the forum would be richer if they were encouraged to return. Would it be possible to use subscribed thread alerts ( where possible ) to pique their interest, and possibly return to contributing to the forum?

Quotes clutter the thread, so before quoting, make sure that the quotation is really required, For example, it is rarely necessary to quote a post when replying immediately after it. It is also unlikely that a full quotation of the OP is needed. If addressing a post to a particular member, then consider using @membername rather than a quotation. Alternatively, use a snip sequence such as >..< ( meow )  ~ (tilde), -snip- ../ (partial snip). Nested quotes are never a good idea, and neither is the reposting of an image, and doing either ( or both ) can mean that your post is ignored by the reader.

If you do need to use a quotation, then select the point to which you are replying, and snip the rest. Failure to use the quotation feature responsibly indicates disrespect of your readers, and gives the impression that you have limited communication abilities, in my opinion.

I agree that creating a decentralised ledger would be a useless complication. I was thinking of a centralised ledger with its own currency, and this could be used by local and overseas visitors to purchase products and amenities. Perhaps that is too far into the future to consider at the moment though. Blockchain seems to have became an extremely general term, and my thinking was that a chain without the cryptography, but with public access and analysis would serve the purpose. Maybe I shouldn't refer to that as a blockchain.

I would like to point out that this trust would be in the South West of England, and is unlikely to be of interest to many members here. Also, it is just an idea at the moment, so I am not asking for any payments or contributions. However, I would be grateful for comments on the possible viability of the project, and any advice on setting up a blockchain for security tokens to register benefits for members and contributors.

The idea is to purchase woodland with running water, and use it for the benefit of the wildlife and preservation of the trees and other vegetation. I will establish a small museum of vintage agricultural and horticultural equipment, and provide a cleared area for members to park camper vans when visiting the site.

Is it a sensible idea to create a blockchain to register transferable membership rights?  If you were managing such a project, would you add any other options to the blockchain? Were the project to become successful, then there is a possibility that other woodland sites could be added in the future.

I have registered the domain name WildBrambles.com for this project - do you think this is a suitable name?

We all live in wonderland, we wonder when the anglosphere elite will lose control, and we can return to national sovereignty, and control of our assets. The control of interest rates by this banking elite is one of the ways that they transfer wealth away from nations and their population. Inflation is a tool of the wealthy to preserve and increase their wealth. When I was in Oxford, you had a choice of 3 bedroom houses for less than a thousand pounds. Good luck if you want to buy a house there now for less than £100,000.

Thank you for your interest. I have sent some time reflecting on the project, and have discussed it with a number of people.

As I have mentioned, the main aim of the project is to help the unbanked and those living in countries with severely disadvantaged currencies, and Venezuela was one of the countries I tried to support. Many of the people in these countries do not have English as a first language, and this can make it difficult for them to evaluate and to take advantages of the major crypto currencies such as Bitcoin. I would like to open the forum to possible members outside the Bitcoin Talk community, but this increases the risk of spammer applications, and these can consume quite a lot of unproductive time.

I would be grateful for any advice and/or comments about this.

Don't reinstall your OS - switch to Linux. Mint is fairly close to Windows if you are not familiar with Linux.
Windows 10 includes Cortana, which cannot be removed. This is a keyboard logger ( amongst other things ), and stores all of your info and communications in the Microsoft cloud.

The elite are always trying to redistribute assets into their portfolios. Privatisation of national assets is one way that they do this. Now that they have come to realise that Bitcoin is a store of wealth, and may be better than gold or silver, then they will attempt to soak up as much as they can, and they will use all of their established tricks and machinations to do this. The obvious result of this is that there will be a substantial increase in value over a period of time. The big advantage of Bitcoin is that it allows small investors to take advantage of this wealth preservation opportunity. It is possible to purchase a few pounds ( Sterling ) of Bitcoin, and this is not a possibility for gold investors.

It might be worth considering the storage and insurance of crypto in ration to gold. This company offers a service for gold investors. You will see that it requires the owner to deposit his gold in their vaults.
https://www.bullionrock.com/bullion-guide/storage-and-insurance
Similar services are being created at the moment for funds that have over $1,000,000 in Bitcoin, but they require the owner to leave the coins in the insurer's wallet. This will reduce the use of Bitcoin for daily transaction, and transfers the real ownership of the coins away from the investor.

You are missing my point. The quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere does not have a significant impact on the greenhouse effect. Water vapour is the most significant factor, and you just have to look at the cloud cover in most countries to see this.  However, water vapour is not included in many of the climate reports, and certainly not in the reports publicised by those who seek the switch to electric cars to gain more control over private transport.

Perhaps the move to facilitate Bitcoin transactions over software controlled radio will help the spread of crypto in Africa.

Carbon dioxide is the life breath of trees and other green vegetation. At the moment we have a carbon dioxide famine, and this is leading to desertification. It is ironic that the "green" activists are attempting to deprive the world of oxygen producing plants. Water vapour is the major cause of the greenhouse effect, and this is removed from all the reports, and this distorts the results. When a plant is deprived of carbon dioxide, it "gasps for breath" and opens its pores. This leads to the evaporation of water, and a transfer from the ground into the atmosphere. It is easy to understand how this leads to desertification.

I have received a few requests to revive The Fit to Talk English project, and I still have a great deal of affection for the project. I apologise for having neglected it, but it did seem to go through a quiet period. I would like to revive the English practice forum, and I would be grateful if anyone who has an interest in this, or can offer a small degree of support could discuss this in this thread.

I did start some Spanish language related projects, but the members involved in those seem to have left Bitcoin Talk, and I have allowed the domain names to drop. However this should not have an adverse effect on the basic purpose for which the forum was created. I am interested in adding some audio features to the site as well, and this would allow Bitcoin Talk members to practice spoken English as well as text communications.

Hopefully we can keep the pound low, and take advantage of it to boost manufacturing and agriculture.

There are some interesting developments at the moment. The Anglosphere has been kept safe for many years mainly  as a result of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance ( United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States ). Theresa May's deal would have taken us out of that, and made us subservient to the EU intelligence agency that they are creating. They want our satellite technology amongst other things, and this is to try to repair the failed Galileo system that was partly funded by us. In return, they have said that we will not be able to access the data. I understand that we have plans to use our expertise to develop our own system.

In fact the EU seems to be trying to distance itself from the Anglosphere, and they have never really accepted English as an EU language. I suspect that the Five Eyes alliance will develop into a trading partnership, although I have not seen anyone else suggest this.

I am English - that is not the same as British or European.

Some of you aren't picking up the point. We don't all have time to read all the posts in a thread, and thus we have to skip read. If we have to hunt for a reply because of the bad use of quoting, or we cannot gain a quick appreciation of a post, then we just skip the post. Too many of these distractions mean that we may exit the thread, and never revisit it. I have put members who frequently produce distracting posts on ignore. This may not longer be important as I have reduced my merit awarding due to time pressures. The point that I was trying to make is that a single emboldened word turns a single image phrase into a sequence of 3 images. This may not be significant for people who don't have English as a first language, but for those of us who have to scan text quickly, it is an annoyance.

Printed articles in the quality newspapers are displayed in columns, and one reason for this is to allow for fast scanning of the text. If you watch the eyes of most readers, they will move from left to right as they read the article. However, the eyes of a news analyst will have virtually no sideways movement, but they just scan scan down the column. This is because they are able to extract the content of a complete line from a single image. You will also notice that newspapers tend to use left and right justification, and to avoid splitting words over two lines - this is another aid to fast reading.

In this age of information overload, it is worth trying to speed up the processes of information gathering. For example, I have helped a couple of people who felt they had to repeat the words silently as they red them. You can recognise this if you watch their lips as they are reading.  Helping them to skip this spoken stage increases their reading speed quite dramatically.

When making post, don't write them for yourself, but construct them for your target audience. That way you will get the maximum exposure for your message. One of the problems with sig spammers is that they aren't interested in their audience, they just want to get a word string into a thread to meet their quota. Make sure that your posts rise about the polluting effluent of the sig spammers.

First off - it happened over 20 years ago, so why drag it up now, it obviously wasn't important at the time? Secondly, I'd rather have red blooded politicians in charge, instead of the deceitful dish rags we seem to get most of the time.

I shudder to think of the number of female legs that I have squeezed in my life, and nobody seems to care about that. So what do you think? The English squeeze legs, and the Americans grab "pussy" ( allegedly ), should we care about either?

I've given up on politics and economics. I keep getting posts deleted, and one gets tired of the same mass media stuff being trotted out, and I'm mainly interested in the supra-national activities of the elite. I did dip into speculation, but my level of knowledge is fairly low, and I'm really confined to speculative trading of the wicks on Coin Base, and there isn't really much you can say about that, you just have to do it. I do want to create a tokenised security for an investment club, and also to fund a woodland conservation project, but I haven't got much further that talking about them over coffee.

Once I can sort out my van, I'll start to discuss Bitcoin for digital nomads, but right now I'm trying to claim compensation for £5,000 worth of goods that were removed from one of my garages as a result of an admin error. So far they have admitted liability, and offered £600, so there is a long way to go.

Re: the OP. Being a merit source is becoming a bit of a thankless task, and I did send you a PM about this. I didn't look at the posts in question, but the amounts seem to be fairly small, and the awards may well fit in with the request by Theymos to encourage new members with merit awards.

I'm in that position, and I'm finding it harder to fast scan threads with all the formatting, and petty bitching that is going on.

I've selected this sentence as an example of a good construction.

When one is learning to read, then one looks at individual letters, and those are built into a word. Then one moved on the next string of letters.  Pretty soon, one starts to recognise strings of letters as words, and the word is no longer a string of letters, but an easily recognised image. If one spends a lot of time reading, then certain word combinations become recognisable as a phrase image, and this speeds up the reading process considerably. When I look at the quoted sentence, I see two images  - "But Hey" and "does it matter". The comma makes this even simpler. Text such as "does it matter" is recognised as 3 images, and therefore slows down to reading process, whilst it adds nothing to the message impact.

On scanning a thread, a post presents a single image for my evaluation. If it a wall of text, or has other characteristics that are likely to slow down the reading, then the probability is that I will skip over it. Of course there are exceptions. I realise that I could be missing the chance to read an interesting opinion,but I have found that as a general rule, formatted posts contain lower value content ( in my opinion).  Let me provide an analogy. If you are selling karate and kung fu equipment, then you don't paint your shop pink, and fill the window with Barbie dolls. You may have the best equipment at the lowest prices, but most material artists are likely to walk past your shop and go elsewhere. I appreciate that such a window could be attractive to a specialist market, but as a general rule photographs of Ip Man, Bruce Lee, or nunchaku, butterfly knives, or a wooden man will attract a wider audience.

Always remember that if you post isn't read, then it has failed in its purpose.