It does seem you are posting your own words and not just reports. You seem to be here exclusively for the altcoins and Masternodes. Maybe share a bit more and show that your intentions are more than simply trading and earning money out here.

If you can, try and get engaged with what bitcoin is really about and see if it is worth your time. Engage in the discussion and see if you want to be one of the better members out here.

There is nothing new in saying that decentralization is hard. It is known for decades now and has been a topic of discussion a million times here. You somehow want to blame Satoshi for being the mastermind of an evil plan (that i feel has cost you some money at the ATH). The direct and simpler way of looking at it is to realize that the quest for a peer-to-peer electronic cash system is older than bitcoin. All previous implementations needed a central authority. Bitcoin solved the problem of trust without relying on a central party through its PoW consensus mechanism. That in itself is the culmination of years of work in cryptography and electronic cash systems.

The quest for peer-to-peer electronic cash is not just a technical one but also a socio-economic one. The adoption of bitcoin weakens the control banks and governments have over those who choose to use it. For a long time now, these technical achievements and socio-economic ideals have drowned in the spam posting.


Lightning Network already works, though it is not for everyone yet. bitcoin as a technology is here and has been tested robustly. The debate over mining centralization, privacy features continues as healthily as ever. LN will arrive too and then it will be ready for mass adoption. Whether people wish to use it or not will be up to them. Saying that it is an "intentional scam" is just one of those crazy-pot conspiracy theories. Frustrated, naysaying rants like this one are just one of the defining phenomena of a prolonged bear market.

That is some damn fine advice. I wish people could care less about the money (although it is important) and more about learning here at the forum. For the promise of trust-free money and blockchain to come true, we still need a lot of collective brainpower.  My pleasure to help you along to the member status if i did..

This should be in the works. Either that or increasing the requirement. These shitposters think whining will get them sympathy votes. We saw this same thing happening when the merit system was introduced. They like to argue on this much-abused, typical left-liberal plank of "But we are all equal, aren't we".  The answer is "No! We are not all equal on this forum."

If the whiners could have paused for a second and removed the greed of accruing free money/ tokens, they would have realized what a great place the forum actually is. They would have noticed that people with deep knowledge of Mathematics, Computer Science, Cryptography and with novel and radical opinions on the role money ought to play in society spent their time here. If they were here for anything else other than copy-pasting reports or increasing post-count, they would have learnt to act better.

I joined here after reading about one of the signature campaigns. I spent my share of time being blinded by the promises of quick buck and posting those "reports." Seeing responses on the ANN threads i used to visit as a new member, I started asking questions about post quality and spam problems. I started reading the debate and discussions at r/bitcoin, nakamotoinstitute.org, bitcoin.org and the other old stuff. I got involved and took my position on bitcoin's importance for the world and society. I now wish to go deeper into the technical aspects and dedicate a portion of my time to learn.

I share my experience so some of you too can realize  that learning about the technology and the ideas behind it is a much better prospect in the long term than simply spamming the forum for crumbs. This will surely not make any difference to those with bot armies but it should to people who are actually looking to be part of the future. Those who would learn from this latest change will be better-off in the long run. Those who are just going to raise this immature hue and cry about the place being unfair, not being EQUAL enough or trying to be some sort of left-leaning revolutionary here will get what they deserve in time.

You have been really engaged with the ICO scene with good feedback. ICOs and these ANN threads are a reality now and the sole purpose for a lot of new users. I have a feeling that you are an old, more experienced user and if you would share more, the newcomers would benefit from it.

Looking forward to better engaging posts from you. Merited an old post of yours.

A lot of newbies post content from articles elsewhere and may copy-paste a lot of material in the process. Instead, share your own understanding on the issue in your own words. Then provide a link to the original article from where your thought train started.

If copy-pasted content is detected, you WILL get banned, no matter how you rationalize it. Do not look for the easy way out as it will mean a lot of heartburn later, if you get caught.

I looked at all of your posts before the Rule change. Barring one post about automatically adding LinkedIn contacts (which is also dubious as far as linkedin policy is concerned), you have sadly made no useful posts. All of them are simply reports. This gives the impression that you are here just for farming bounties.

I'd recommend you spend some time at the forum engaging in fruitful conversation. I am sure you will get that 1 merit in a jiffy. I'll be glad to check in later too.

Totally your judgement man. Not questioning that. I am just pointing out that it is unfair to hundreds of those posters who get lost in the din because someone like toheed2x spams 1000 reports in the time a serious poster would actually manage to post much less. If the post histories are taken as a reference, then at least the deserving ones get a better chance. Those who just "woke up because of rules change" should have to wait a little longer.

I would just prefer that the "good guys" get more of a chance than the "not a good guys".. So shared my opinion with you.

It is good that you are trying to analyze this. Unbiased analysis is a necessity to unravel truth. If you did check the link, did you notice that the Description of WALLETS in OP's banned post is a word-to-word, direct copy-paste??

You may find the ban too much because this may seem not much of an offense to you. That is your personal judgement which maybe unique to ones socio-cultural norms. When it comes to the way "plagiarism" is defined, such a blatant and obvious copying of the "real content" without even a mention of a source is a pretty big offense.
It is easy for anybody to write a few words and then copy paste parts of a huge article making it look like "original content" when it is not. Classic plagiarism well detected by Loyce and deservedly banned. It is necessary to take care of clever con-artists with a ban hammer as early as possible. You will hence, not find any leniency in these matters.

Ohh and they don't HIDE. They actually don't have the time to waste because it is a lot of work trying to explain the same things over and over again.

You are right. I have seen bot-like posts a lot of times now. Copied posts appear at the rear ends of hundreds of long pages. I am sure there is a thread to point out these accounts. I have been a little rusty so don't know for sure if this is being looked into actively or not.

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Merits hurriedly brandished off are the worst. It is actually lot of work to give merit only to those who deserve it. Going through post histories is important to make sure these aren't just the bunch who get a "change of heart" post any new rule implementation. I think those users who have been trying to get involved but were getting ignored because of the huge spam should be the first ones to get merit.

An example of the mistakes that i am talking about. Not questioning Philipma's judgement but I think this was a hurried one. The kind that should not happen.

I think you made a mistake there philipma. This is the exact kind of account for whom the step was meant to. This guy has over a 1000 posts that are only "Reports" while the other are one-liners.
He has had zero merits until you hastily awarded him 2 merits for this one-liner post. To all the new merit sources, This step will only be truly successful if you take the pain to at least read/browse/glance at the post history of the guys whom you decide to merit.

Spending it the way Philipma just did would only lessen the effectiveness of this courageous and desperately needed step from Theymos. Lets make sure it is put to the best use.

Go through the post histories to see whether the people you are meriting have actually made the effort. Not like this toheed2x account which is probably just someone's farming alt. Defeats the whole purpose, causes a lot of heartburn for people who have actually made the effort and have felt ignored because of the spam.

Sorry but I think you did not get my point. I quoted in my reply part of the post where Satoshi tells what his motivations are. Just to be sure, I'll quote the sentence again.


Money that is free from third-party control. Is that not a good enough motivation according to you? For me and for those who actually care about the underlying ideals, this is a settled issue. Trying to implicate otherwise through rhetoric is just repetition of the same old, tiring agenda.

Like someone pointed out, Satoshi's initial motivations are pretty clear from the whitepaper and his initial posts. If in doubt, read the posts curated at this link.

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These days it is the norm, and one of the failings of internet, that anybody can shit on anybody. This is irrespective of the level of competence and effort gone into the first person's work. So of course, your criticism, though invalid, has its own place.

Satoshi or the small group of initial miners were not part of some conspiracy to create a pump and dump "scheme". They were simply electronic cash evangelists and privacy enthusiasts who wanted a method to transact value. bitcoin enabled that. Thing is that it caught on faster than anybody expected. Beginning in 2017, a lot of beginners who have no interest / time to understand and explore the underlying technology have joined in.

This has lead to the market being overcome by manipulators, traders and whales. This is not because of some intrinsic property of bitcoin but because of basic human greed. Calling it a pyramid or a pump and dump is little more than another "opinion". It may seem like that to a lot of people and anybody who agrees with this "opinion" is better off getting out NOW.

Apart from block-size and block-time changes, your other proposition (from another thread) is a radical change to PoW algorithm. I am not someone who understands the game-theory, the graph theory and associated higher mathematics to judge on decentralization aspects of a mining algorithm. After much reading and thought, I came to an understanding that PoW works. The history of its development shows that various such ideas of "Proof-of-X" were tried but failed to pass the trustlessness criterion. This made me decide that bitcoin is my best bet. I am sure that the whales invested in this are also aiming for stability and not radical experimentation.

If the obstacle is not technical but political then you need to generate enough information to help people make a decision as to why a change in algorithm or block times can be feasible. This needs code, testing and evidence. Hence, a testnet. It will be far more easier to convince people that way. Or maybe if you could point us to a peer-reviewed discussion on these topics.

As i admitted above, there are technical aspects I don't understand yet. What I do understand is that Bitcoin's PoW works and has been working through the past decade. What i know is that a whole hardware manufacturing industry supports it with increasing hashpower and that hashpower is what keeps it valuable. I understand that mining has a centralization aspect but I also know that the entities involved will be wary of risking a self-goal by targeting the very thing that keeps them rich. As a believer in bitcoin's ideals, I hope and cheer for news that mining hardware may soon see entry of other major players leading to some resolution of the issue that you wish to address.

Changing the mining algorithm so as to wreck uncertainty on the miners worldwide would be a bad-disruptive thing to do, not the good-disruptive. How disruptive changing network specifications would be, like you propose here, should be demonstrable on a test net..

A lot of people including Greg Maxwell have pointed out that any technical discussion here at BCT has lost significance because of the way it quickly gets personal/ political. Here's what you said in your post:
In my opinion, accusing someone of spreading FUD as part of their 'strategy' is not technical criticism. (which you should focus on and which no doubt will be welcomed). You cannot hope to call them FUDDers, Dogma-ridden and expect them not to think that you have an ulterior agenda..There have been too many of those out here..¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Many people don't view it as extreme conservatism. Its accepting that you don't know what you don't know. There are enough examples of lower blocktimes, bigger block-sizes and there is nothing to suggest that they won't ever face bottlenecks. There is the Github way to do it and it says it well.
With that, I'll bow out of this discussion and leave you to point us to information on why what you say should work. Maybe some of that material you have been promising for a while. It will be good learning for us.

You don't have to fall to the levels of slandering to make your point.

On one hand, your ideas on "winner takes all" vs "shared effort" sound reasonable while on the other hand, you seem to be a big fan of the conspiracy theories. Why can't you understand that this is basically a difference of ideology-driven vs business-driven thinking??
More than enough people have suggested you above to focus on the merits of your argument rather than trying to make unnecessary accusations on core devs. There have been enough people and their alts doing that on the forum. Why'd you want the system to be a running experiment for your ideas? You should probably see that this can be done a lot less belligerently and a lot more collaboratively.

Why don't you implement a testnet for your ideas. People will notice. If you have put up code results at IRC or some other place with suitable peers, a link would be welcome.

The above argument for scaling illustrates the basic difference in the approach for Big blocks vs Small Blocks. Big blockers seem to view bitcoin's demand growth as the basic motive. They want to ensure that any foreseeable demand is immediately filled by a step -wise increase of blocksize, even though it'd need a hardfork and even though there'll be a lot of unknowns.

This seems to ignore the basic ideal of keeping bitcoin within reach. Nobody should be able to takeover bitcoin sheerly by the amount of resources they can put into it. @ali mentioned in one of his opening argument about the small miner with a 200K investment versus the big data center with upwards of a million dollars in investment.

There is surely a point of exit for the enthusiast between this 200K and 1 Million, where he'll no longer be able to afford running a mining node. Apart from the hardware cost, access to crazy fast internet that will be needed for, say, a 32 MB blocksize syncing, further shrinks the set of people who can contribute meaningful hashing power.  For bitcoin to remain in the domain of the enthusiast and to remain usable for everyone, block size is probably the only thing that is under this community's control. Once that increases without an upper bound, it'd still function but the number of people who can still afford it will drastically reduce.

Maybe it is time we had a proper study on this. Is it possible to check the details of who is connected to a pool and respective hashpowers of such connections? We have some 9500 nodes live as of now. How many of them are mining nodes and what percentage of them are at the enthusiast level?

amishmanish
My address: VQxabS3MVWsFiecU6tvhRBCCSGNiWFihfk

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