If you used "bx seed" you probably already lost your bitcoins, but if you did and you still have them. MOVE THEM NOW.  It turns out that in late 2016 it was changed from using the OS provided secure entropy to using 32-bits of timestamp fed into an insecure generator.  If you used it prior to the introduction of the vulnerability I would still recommend moving any coins you have left.

Do not update and continue to use it.  The author insists the insecure behavior was intentional and expressed disinterest in changing it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37054862

https://twitter.com/_electronicCash/status/1675834992956506112

According to coindesk a newly unsealed DHS investigation report (which I can't find) alleges that Charlie Shrem and Roger Ver laundered money for the hackers of MTgox (run by Bitcoin Foundation founder Mark Karpeles).

I found the coindesk article after seeing the indictment mention a 2012 "new york based bitcoin broker" and figuring out someone else probably made that connection and googling for the hackers name and Shrem.  If it's true we now have:

* Peter Vessenes   --  Stole $5 million dollars from MTGox by accepting deposits and not remitting funds, then tried to shake the insolvency down for billions alleging ludicrous contract breaches

* Roger Ver -- According to the DHS laundered money for the mtgox thieves

* Charlie Shrem -- According to the DHS laundered money for the mtgox thieves


There were only six founding members!

Of course, there were red flags for anyone sensitive to them-- it's a big part of why many in the early community kept cautiously distant with the Bitcoin Foundation.  But those kinds of subtly are lost to history, because at the time they were more suspicions than allegations.

https://twitter.com/itswillmack/status/1594667376020267010

He's demanding they stop using the word Bitcoin to refer to Bitcoin and that they pay him billions of dollars in damages. (The particulars of claim is the interesting document)

https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoin-sv-hardfork-significant-security-risks/

As many are aware, the infamous faketoshi scammer Craig Wright has been on a campaign to use harassment, intimidation, barratry, and fraud to attempt to steal some 1.1M coins that belong to Satoshi and others.

In furtherance of this scheme his company just published code for directing the seizure of third party coins in the BSV blockchain. BSV is a scammy bitcoin knockoff that is proprietary software controlled exclusive by Wright and his agents. Users of BSV are only permitted to run the software he approves so they're able to foist their coin stealing code onto their users which would be impossible for legitimate cryptocurrencies.

Because of this I believe any user of the BSV altcoin is in serious risk of exposure to network consensus instability or outright having their assets frozen or stolen out from under them.

This would be of no direct relevance to Bitcoin users except some Bitcoin exchanges support BSV and so far whenever an exchange has gone insolvent they've pooled assets from all users in the bankruptcy. This means that if an exchange becomes insolvent due to Wright stealing or freezing BSV out from under it users Bitcoin balances may be used to make BSV customers whole.

While it's never a good idea to leave Bitcoins you aren't actively trading on exchange I'd strongly recommend getting your funds off the following exchanges ASAP (non-exhaustive list):

• Robinhood
• Bitfinex
• Bittrex
• Hitbtc
• Huobi Global
• Kucoin
• Bithumb
• Gate.io
• Poloniex
• CoinW
• Indoex
• OKX
• CoinDCX
• Pionex
• Upbit
• Bibox
• Bkex
• Yobit
• Deepcoin
• Mexo Exchange
• Wazirx
• CoinEx

This shouldn't be news to these exchanges as it's been known for some time that this was coming: https://twitter.com/Arthur_van_Pelt/status/1577647343595315201

Of course, since the BSV ecosystem has been engaging in non-stop harassment of Bitcoiners including multibillion dollar lawsuits against Bitcoin developers and non-BSV supporting exchanges it's probably prudent to not to business with exchanges still supporting this ecosystem to begin with, if you care about the value of your Bitcoins'. If an exchange will support this scam just to make a bit of extra money-- what else might they do?

Would people be supportive of creating a sub-forum for investigating/exposing Craig Wright and his BSV scam for the protection of Bitcoin and Bitcoiners?

Most of the people doing this work have been coordinating on twitter and reddit,  but BSV scammers have been flooding the platforms with false reports and have successfully knocked out more than a couple account thanks to idiotic and/or artificially-idiotic (AI) report processing. There is also a real risk that the scammers simply buy off the platforms (e.g. in the case of reddit) or their staff (e.g. in the case of twitter) to achieve their end. 

Moving a community around can be really hard but it doesn't necessarily need to happen:  If it's clear to the attackers that at most all their attack will do is switch the URL people are collaborating at then they may just give up on the attack.

I'd say we could post in some existing subforum but part of maintaining a community around a subject that is protracted as one involving a decade long scam and a dozen court cases (each of which has months between each event) ... involves a bunch of lulz and shitposting,  traffic that is basically only interesting to people working on the subject, mocking the latest forgeries, etc.  While the big events in faketoshi land are of general interest to most forum members most of the day to day traffic is only interesting to faketoshi debunkers and people following the ongoing train wreak(s).

If it's not obvious to you why this is important to Bitcoin, here is some background:

As anyone not living under a rock probably knows by now:  The most infamous faktoshi, conman par-excellence Craig Wright, has been creating a rather substantial nuisance of himself by piling lawsuit after lawsuit against Bitcoin community members, journalists, developers, and former developers.  For example, he's sued me and a dozen other bitcoin developers and former devlopers demanding ~6 billion dollars in damages, and has a second lawsuit filed naming us that we haven't even seen yes.  His court case in norway with hodlnaut has been in the news lately.

Over time his necessity has evolved from a simple (although high value) tax rebate scam to an advanced fee fraud (nigerian prince) to what is, hopefully, its final form: an impersonation scam with a target of a >$20 billion dollar payoff:   Their plan is to steal a mountain of early bitcoins by fraudulently claiming to have owned them and lost the keys, then demanding bitcoin developers write and bitcoin users deploy a cryptographic back door to reassign those coins to them.  I say "their" because the real scam here is that likely Wright has convinced wealthy funders that together they're partners in a scheme which is going to rob the world/Satoshi but really Wright knows it won't work and his goal is just to scam the funders.

It's *very* common for cons to take the structure of the conman convincing a mark that they're really going to rob a third party, when in fact the third party is in on it, or doesn't even exist and it's the mark getting robbed.  The story however, helps keep the mark from getting good advice, explains the con's sketchy behavior, and answers varrious microeconomic questions the mark would already have ("Why are you sharing this windfall with me? -- because I need your help to pull off the con.")

Anyone with a reasonable Bitcoin background knows that Bitcoin doesn't really work that way-- if developers (or whomever) were trusted to not steal coins bitcoin could have just skipped the whole ledger thing and had them run servers like paypal.  Unfortunately, even if Wright was only able to convince his true mark that they have just a small -- say 1% -- chance of success then it would make economic sense to spend tens or hundreds of millions on the effort and that's exactly what is happening.

To put it in non-Bitcoin terms:  Mr. Bumblecharm has convinced Duke creepycal that with Bumblecharm's long history of obvious forgeries they'll be able to convince the world that Mr. Bumblecharm is true heir to the royal throne, and should property be awarded control of the empire along with its vast estates and accounts which he'll share with creepycal in exchange for funding the enterprise.  To accomplish this they're harassing, intimidating, and litigating against any visible person that disagrees in public or otherwise stands in their way.  Duke creepycal likely believed the story in the past (in the earlier nigerian prince phase) but likely doesn't believe it now (though it doesn't much matter if he does or doesn't-- he's in it for the payoff).

If this really were about royalty the public would laugh it off the stage, but since it's about something new and technical people's eyes glaze over and their reason goes out the window.  Large parts of the media is complicit because "maybe" makes a better story and a reduced lawsuit risk than "this is an obvious joke as was proved years ago"-- so even as wright get caught over and over again with utterly indisputable forgeries they're able to keep carrying to the public that this his claim is merely 'disputed by some'.  This translates into courts and professional services (like PR agencies, and lawfirms) having at enough plausible deniability that they're willing to participate in the con in exchange for payment.

His highly funded lawsuits have already cost people millions of dollars defending them and if carried to trial are expected to cost ten to tens of millions of dollars more, and there is little to limit him filing more of them.  Stopping him requires casting a light on his actions so clear and stark that no one can ignore the facts -- we need to get to a state where his lawsuits are laughed out of court and where prosecutors feel pressured to take action against an obvious fraud.

Some Bitcoiner's I've encountered say things like "I see why this is personally tragic for the people being targeted, but I don't see why this matters to Bitcoin: He can't get people to run a backdoor and devs can go anon".  But I think both this is anoverly narrow perspective.

It's true that no one can force people to adopt some hardfork like Wright wants-- but it's only because the community speaks out against it that people will know to not run it and avoid being bamboozled into it.  Bitcoin's non-cryptographic security comes from its users defending their own interests. There is no authority charged with protecting Bitcoin: it's in the hands of each and every user and owner of Bitcoins.  And as the say-- 'The price of freedom is eternal vigilance'.  So it's not a proper response to someone pointing out an attack to say "don't bother doing something, bitcoin is strong against attacks" when we're taking about strength that exists specifically because people will do something.

The specific pressure against developers may create a bias toward developers that are more reckless or even ones that have bad motivations (why worry that you're going to get sued by Wright if your real goal was to get your own backdoor in).   Anonymity is an additive tool some may use, but unless your involvement is to toss a patch or a post over a wall and quickly disappear it's basically impossible to stay strongly anonymous against a competent and concerted attacker: every word you say risks leaking things about you.  Satoshi is anonymous, sure, but he left in 2011 before anyone was really paying attention to bitcoin.  Anyone who participates anonymously should be assuming their identity will be exposed eventually that, at best, it's an additional security measure. Anyone who thinks anonymity is a serious fix has not given a lot of thought on what it takes to be strongly anonymous.

While Bitcoin can handle losing any particular developers but developers are a resource bitcoin uses to fight other attacks, and so it's easier for Bitcoin to be wounded or disrupted in the future if competent developers are chased out.  So while wright's attack probably can't kill bitcoin on its own, it's not inconceivable that it could weaken it enough that some future attack does much more harm.  And sure, while kill bitcoin completely is a pretty unrealistic idea-- a bitcoin that was barely used by anyone, outlawed many places, and/or unreliable would be much less valuable and useful to the world.  It might not be "totally dead" but that would still be a sorry outcome.  I worry a lot that an attack of this approach evades Bitcoin's immune response.  I think if a state were to do what Wright is doing there would be a very strong reaction-- but if the attack is disguised as a joke many people go 'meh'.

Wright's attacks are also against individual bitcoin advocates, journalists, and Bitcoin companies-- not just developers.  Even if you ignore the direct harm, they divert tremendous amounts of resources that could otherwise be spent improving bitcoin or hardening it against other attacks.  So I think that although Mr. Wright himself is an obvious joke, the harm he's causing and can cause the ecosystem is a serious concern.

So given that I think this is a subject worth at least a little attention from every serious Bitcoin-- and it's certainly worth making sure people that have picked up the mantle here have a place they can discuss their efforts without being silenced by Wright and his conspirators.

We could obviously setup a separate forum but there is a lot of work that goes into maintaining something like that which is already done by Bitcointalk.

Cheers

Earlier thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5311388.0

Craig Wright is increasing the intensity of his campaign of harassment.

He recently filed a lawsuit against several former and current Bitcoin developers, including myself. In that case he is attempting to steal 111k BTC which clearly doesn't belong to him-- he claims he was "hacked" but that he has erased his computers to be sure there was no malware, not only does the hack appear fake but the coins were never his to begin with. He is demanding developers distribute effectively backdoored copies of Bitcoin node software -- of course, that wouldn't work even if they developers tried because people wouldn't run them. Failing a recovery via backdoor, he is demanding over $6 billion USD in damages.

He also filed a copyright lawsuit against Cobra for bitcoin.org hosting the Bitcoin whitepaper.  Satoshi himself put the whitepaper on Bitcoin.org back at Bitcoin's beginning.  Unfortunately,  Cobra found it to be procedurally impossible to obtain representation and present a formal defense while preserving his pseudonymity.

Cobra's identity is irrelevant to the case-- the case depends purely on Wright's obviously false copyright claims and the fact that even if his claims were legitimate his complaint would be blocked by the fact that the author put the file there himself and took no action for over a decade.  But Wright intends to use Cobra's identity to harm him, so Wright is using the case as a pretext to obtain that identity.  This is an indication of what Wright would do to Satoshi if Satoshi were around.

There is an ongoing litigation in COPA v. Wright (IL-2021-00019) over the same subject matter-- the copyright of the Bitcoin Whitepaper-- where another party Wright threatened has filed a lawsuit seeking a declaratory judgement as to the falsehood of Wright's claims.  Because Cobra was unable to obtain representation while protecting his privacy, Cobra threw himself on the mercy of the court presenting four pages for argument and hoping for a stay of his default judgement pending the result of this actively litigated case.

The court was unwilling or procedurally unable to provide that mercy. The court issued a default judgement in Wright's favor, ordering cobra to remove access to the whitepaper for people in the UK and post a message claiming that the site had violated Wright's copyright.  Given that Cobra is, apparently, not subject to UK jurisdiction the court will presumably have a difficult time enforcing its ruling.

Satoshi Nakamoto authored the Bitcoin Whitepaper with the intention that it be shared widely, and Craig Wright’s takedown notices and litigation are fraudulent, but since he is a litigious jerk who has bankrupted people with his fraudulent legal claims in court, it is sometimes a wise strategic choice to avoid provoking him into suing, which is expensive and disruptive to a defendant even when they ultimately win, or a wise choice to keep him from obtaining your identity.

But you might be in a good position to host this paper that Craig Wright so desperately wants taken down and kept under his exclusive control.  If you are, you probably also would like to host a mirror of some Bitcoin Node source code-- since Wright will come after that next and node software is more important than the whitepaper.  E.g. https://bitcoincore.org/bin/bitcoin-core-0.21.1/bitcoin-0.21.1.tar.gz  or https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd/releases/download/v0.22.0-beta/btcd-source-v0.22.0-beta.tar.gz  or whatever other node software you like.  Wright has also been claiming that some people hosting the white paper are in support of him and his Bitcoin scam-version clone, hosting the code for a node implementation will deny him that excuse.

After hosting it-- You might want to give notice to his attorneys, just to let them know.  Below is an example notice you can send to his attorneys (make sure to fill out the two [ADDRESS] blocks).

Warning: sending this makes you considerably more likely to become the target of a lawsuit by Craig Wright. You should think about whether you are prepared to be in that position before sending this letter.

(This is absolutely, positively, not legal advice, and you are strongly encouraged to consult with your own attorney, especially if you are in the UK.)

To: Simon Cohen <Simon.Cohen@ontier.co.uk>
Cc: Paul Ferguson <paul.ferguson@ontier.co.uk>

Mr. Cohen,

I have recently become aware that the firm of Ontier LLP has been sending notices on behalf of Craig S. Wright to parties hosting “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” (the “Bitcoin Whitepaper”), alleging that Mr. Wright is the rightful copyright holder of the Bitcoin Whitepaper and that further distribution is an infringement of Wright’s exclusive rights.

I believe this to be a fraudulent misrepresentation of both the authorship of the paper and of its licensing status for many reasons, including but not limited to the following subset of points:

    • The Bitcoin Whitepaper was released, along with the initial public version of the software, under the MIT license. This license is a perpetual grant to the general public of the right to “use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies” of the software and associated documentation files (including the Bitcoin Whitepaper) and may not be revoked or rescinded, even by the true author.
    
    • The Bitcoin Whitepaper was authored by a person or entity writing under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, and any exclusive rights under copyright are held by that person or entity (or their assignees). There is no evidence that Wright is that person; in fact, despite challenges in courts of law and mass media journalism, Wright has been either unable to provide proof, unwilling to produce proof, or produced documentary support in the form of forgeries. Any reasonable observer would conclude from this that Wright is unable to claim this connection through legitimate means, and is not Satoshi Nakamoto.

    • Wright has attempted to defraud the courts for his own personal advantage on previous occasions. For one example, he perjured himself in an earlier legal proceeding, which was exposed by the true owners of $200M+ in bitcoins he claimed to own producing unforgeable digital signatures stating that Wright was a fraud. In more recent actions Wright admits to not having a large amount of Bitcoin but instead attempts to force Bitcoin developers to effectively steal Bitcoin for him, were his claims true he would have no need for these supposedly lost coins.  His claims cannot simply be taken at face value, even when made through counsel.

It is therefore my good faith belief that I have valid license to distribute copies of the Bitcoin Whitepaper and that Wright’s claims do not have any bearing on that right. Upon that belief, I am hosting a copy at [ADDRESS] along with the code for a Bitcoin node implementation at [CODE ADDRESS].

I am providing notice to your firm so that any credible claims to the contrary may be addressed in a timely fashion to avoid running out the clock on equitable defenses.

Best,
[NAME]

I've noticed a large number of my old posts are no longer discoverable via google, maybe on the order of half that I search for (really informally).

Here is an example:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1427885.msg14601127#msg14601127

You should be able to find it by googling for substrings:

Example.

Yet you can't.  In fact, AFAICT, no substring will make google return anything on the first page of that thread.

If you google the thread title you get the second page of the thread and only the second page of the thread.

Duck-duck-go, however, returns it just fine.

I find it pretty demoralizing to have my posts vanish from search indexes, especially because last year Reddit changed so that negative-voted posts don't get search indexed and as a result thousands of posts of mine in rbtc effectively vanished from the internet.

We Are All Satoshi

Except for Craig S. Wright.

Craig Wright definitely is not, but he would really like everyone to believe he is.

Satoshi Nakamoto authored the Bitcoin Whitepaper with the intention that it be shared widely, and Craig Wright’s takedown notices are fraudulent, but since he is a litigious jerk who has bankrupted people with his fraudulent legal claims in court, it is sometimes a wise strategic choice to avoid provoking him into suing, which is expensive and disruptive to a defendant even when they ultimately win.

But you might be in a good position to host this paper that Craig Wright so desperately wants taken down and kept under his exclusive control. And you might want to give notice to his attorneys, just to let them know.  Below is an example notice you can send to his attornies.

Warning: sending this makes you considerably more likely to become the target of a lawsuit by Craig Wright. You should think about whether you are prepared to be in that position before sending this letter.

(This is absolutely, positively, not legal advice, and you are strongly encouraged to consult with your own attorney.)

To: Simon Cohen <Simon.Cohen@ontier.co.uk>
Cc: Paul Ferguson <paul.ferguson@ontier.co.uk>

Mr. Cohen,

I have recently become aware that the firm of Ontier LLP has been sending notices on behalf of Craig S. Wright to parties hosting “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” (the “Bitcoin Whitepaper”), alleging that Mr. Wright is the rightful copyright holder of the Bitcoin Whitepaper and that further distribution is an infringement of Wright’s exclusive rights.

I believe this to be a fraudulent misrepresentation of both the authorship of the paper and of its licensing status for many reasons, including but not limited to the following:

    • The Bitcoin Whitepaper was released into the public domain upon its initial publication by Satoshi Nakamoto on the Cypherpunks mailing list. All participants to the Cypherpunks list, including Satoshi Nakamoto, agreed to the Cypherpunks anti-License (CPL) for their list contributions, which states "The intent of the Cypherpunks anti-License (CPL) is to inform users that they are free to use and redistribute the indicated work or any derived or modified work in any manner they choose. Works distributed under the CPL are in the Public Domain. [...] The distributors will not use or participate as far as they are able to government legal systems to attempt to enforce requests restricting the use, modifications, or redistribution of the work for perpetuity."  

    • The Bitcoin Whitepaper was additionally released, along with the initial public version of the software, under the MIT license. This license is a perpetual grant to the general public of the right to “use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies” of the software and associated documentation files (including the Bitcoin Whitepaper) and may not be revoked or rescinded, even by the true author.
    
    • The Bitcoin Whitepaper was authored by a person or entity writing under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, and any exclusive rights under copyright are held by that person or entity (or their assignees). There is no evidence that Wright is that person; in fact, despite challenges in courts of law and mass media journalism, Wright has been either unable to provide proof, unwilling to produce proof, or produced documentary support in the form of forgeries. Any reasonable observer would conclude from this that Wright is unable to claim this connection through legitimate means, and is not Satoshi Nakamoto.

    • Wright has attempted to defraud the courts for his own personal advantage on previous occasions. For one example, he perjured himself in an earlier legal proceeding, which was exposed by the true owners of $200M+ in bitcoins he claimed to own producing unforgeable digital signatures stating that Wright was a fraud. His claims cannot simply be taken at face value, even when made through counsel.

It is therefore my good faith belief that I have valid license to distribute copies of the Bitcoin Whitepaper and that Wright’s claims do not have any bearing on that right. Upon that belief, I am hosting a copy at [ADDRESS].

I am providing notice to your firm so that any credible claims to the contrary may be addressed in a timely fashion to avoid running out the clock on equitable defenses.

Best,
[NAME]

Old version:

To: Simon Cohen <Simon.Cohen@ontier.co.uk>
Cc: Paul Ferguson <paul.ferguson@ontier.co.uk>

Mr. Cohen,

I have recently become aware that the firm of Ontier LLP has been sending notices on behalf of Craig S. Wright to parties hosting “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” (the “Bitcoin Whitepaper”), alleging that Mr. Wright is the rightful copyright holder of the Bitcoin Whitepaper and that further distribution is an infringement of Wright’s exclusive rights.

I believe this to be a fraudulent misrepresentation of both the authorship of the paper and of its licensing status for many reasons, including but not limited to the following:

    • The Bitcoin Whitepaper was released, along with the initial public version of the software, under the MIT license. This license is a perpetual grant to the general public of the right to “use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies” of the software and associated documentation files (including the Bitcoin Whitepaper) and may not be revoked or rescinded, even by the true author.
    
    • The Bitcoin Whitepaper was authored by a person or entity writing under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, and any exclusive rights under copyright are held by that person or entity (or their assignees). There is no evidence that Wright is that person; in fact, despite challenges in courts of law and mass media journalism, Wright has been either unable to provide proof, unwilling to produce proof, or produced documentary support in the form of forgeries. Any reasonable observer would conclude from this that Wright is unable to claim this connection through legitimate means, and is not Satoshi Nakamoto.

    • Wright has attempted to defraud the courts for his own personal advantage on previous occasions. For one example, he perjured himself in an earlier legal proceeding, which was exposed by the true owners of $200M+ in bitcoins he claimed to own producing unforgeable digital signatures stating that Wright was a fraud. His claims cannot simply be taken at face value, even when made through counsel.

It is therefore my good faith belief that I have valid license to distribute copies of the Bitcoin Whitepaper and that Wright’s claims do not have any bearing on that right. Upon that belief, I am hosting a copy at [ADDRESS].

I am providing notice to your firm so that any credible claims to the contrary may be addressed in a timely fashion to avoid running out the clock on equitable defenses.

Best,
[NAME]

https://medium.com/@ledgerx/ledgerx-announces-the-launch-of-exchange-listed-bitcoin-mini-futures-afceb1a046ae

LedgerX has been doing physically settled  BTC (european-style) options for a couple years, I've had pretty good expirences with them.

They've just started listing futures and apparently they have a lot of new products coming down the pipeline.

A 40 minute long high production value video by a pseudonymous author was recently published that regurgitated a number of Roger Ver's false statements about the history of Bitcoin and topped it off with a bullshit claim about the identity of bitcoin's creator.  

The video has been previously discussed on Bitcointalk at some length. (I wouldn't recommend watching it unless you want to both waste time and make yourself dumber)

Weirdly, the creator is claiming their research was "original".

Problem is even beyond the fact that it copies the Ver/Falkvinge playbook almost exactly, I can't find anyone that was contacted or interviewed by them. In particular, none of the people who were discussed in the video that I've asked had heard from them. I certainly wasn't contacted (and I'm mentioned in the video a number of times). Had they contacted me (or any of many of the other people they smear in the video) they likely would have been pointed to places where their material had already been debunked.

(although they actually showed screenshots of reddit threads that themselves had comprehensive debunkings, so maybe it wouldn't have mattered.)

So is there anyone that heard from them as part of the "research" they supposedly conducted?  If so, would you be willing to share the content of your communication?  Keep in mind, the video went on at some length that there was no reason for people to keep Satoshi's emails private (a position I strongly disagree with)-- so sharing their communications even without their consent would only be acting consistently with the moral principles they expose themselves.

The latest published expert testimony in the Wright court case are amazing.

Wright submitted several lists of the Bitcoin he claims to own to the court.

The first was claimed to be a strict over-estimate, submitted because wright claimed that he couldn't determine what coins were his until they were submitted by a bonded courier. This first list was generated by his employ using a list of supposed characteristics of Satoshi's mining provided by Wright  (but really plagiarized from old research by bitcoiner that linked together that may have been mined by a single large miner early in Bitcoin's life).  The code they used to generate this list had an embarrassing bug and as a result it also included a bunch of other coins matching a complicated additional pattern in addition to the pattern Wright specified. Since this list was supposed to be a conservative list, the fact that the bug added some more didn't seem to be a big deal, but it later became a smoking gun.

The other lists were provided months later and wright claimed they were generated years ago (e.g. 2011) and in delivered recently by the mysterious bonded courier.  These new lists were strict subsets of the first list: Unsurprising because he'd swore before the court that the first list was a superset-- that all the blocks he mined matched that pattern. However, the way they were subsets was extremely revealing.

In particular, these new lists included most of the coins that were only on the first list due to the bug!   One of the criteria used to generate the first list was that none of the coins had been spent, to match wright's story about his temporary lack of possession of the keys keeping him from spending them---  but they apparently looked only at the BSV blockchain to generate their lists and included some spent ones, and also some were just spent after their filings-- so as a result wright's list included coins that were spend when he swore he had no access. 

Finally, the "bonded courier" excluded enough of the first list to bring the total number of coins down to match Wright's earlier provably forged "tulip trust" documents ... but it did so mostly by leaving out coins in two big blocks of _consecutive txids_.  TXID's are sha256 hashes, so they're close to uniformly random.  The only way to get big gaps in a list of your txids is if you specifically filter out ranges by rejecting transactions.

In other words, Wright's court submitted address list which he claims is an authentic document from 2011/2012 was almost certainly generated by a process similar to:

1. In 2019, directing his employee to use a list of criteria identifying an early miner's blocks which Wright copied out of a webpage. The employee messed this task up, but their mistake makes any data derived from this list without correcting the bug extremely identifiable.

2. Taking that list removing some coins that had been spent (either on BSV or after the first list was created), but ... unable to predict coins that would be spent later, he failed to remove those.

3. With it sorted by txid, he removed two bug chunks of consecutive transactions to bring the total down to match his earlier claims.

4. Fraudulently submitting this list to the court as an authentic document written years ago when it couldn't have been because it was clearly derived from a list created by recently written buggy software.

The really fun part is that by the time Wright's employee testified before the court they knew about the bug in their initial list.  Wright's inclusion of these bug coins in the list he provided the courts much later must either be due to another instance of gross incompetence in his forgeries or because he'd already shared a bug-list-derrived-list with someone else (his lawyers or one of his victims) prior to learning about the bug.

There are a fair number of posts on BCT where the poster is confused to the point of being infuriating or even being maliciously dishonest, trying to manipulate markets or shill altcoins, or whatever. 

The threads fill with other confused people while sensible people just shy away. For example: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5223659.0

What we really need is a button that stabs someone in their motherfucking face over the internet.

But failing that, a "this is awful wtf"  button that e.g. can only be pressed by users who have recieved over (say) 1000 merit and which only shows something on the post when it's been pressed at least three times, would at least be a start.

This post might ruffle feathers but no sense incubating a lark. I'm just going to wing it.

After years of Wright puffin up his accomplishments some hawk-eyed observer spotted that most of them were parroted! He probably thought leaving twitter was da skies enough to avoid being caged for his ill eagle activities but he should have spent more time defending his nest and stayed out of Satoshi's territory.

While some might applaud his respect for national tradition, I don't think that this albatross is anything to emu-late. His raven about Bitcoin's Turing completeness generated much mocking but those it flew over were left thinking of him as Coq-of-the-walk. *Now* even his flock will know that he's a turkey. Who did he think was that gull-ible?

Even CSU has to find this too hard to swallow. Degree printer may go Brrrrrr but Brrrr-d is a cardinal sin! Letting it stand would cheepen their reputation.

Wright's migration to the UK has no doubt made handling the ensuing flap pretty cuckoo. Although I'm sure he'll keep preening, I bet he privately r-egrets hatching this plan.

I fully expect he'll be dis-quail-ified. Once he re-terns his ducktorate will he get a booby prize or will he be left brooding over a goose egg?  Either way I don't think it will be long before his fowl play goes entirely tits up and we hear the swan song of a caw-nvicted jail bird and, at last, the end of his robin.

Coming next: A shocking revelation that Wright's "first draft" of of the "Bitcoin Whitepaper" was also plagiarized!

Blockstream has announced a new version of their satellite bitcoin blockchain stream: https://blockstream.com/2020/05/04/en-announcing-blockstream-satellite-2/

It now supports getting the entire blockchain history over the satellite!

I've been beta testing this the last few weeks. The software is still pretty new but it's great.

One of the exciting new technical features in it is that it has an alternative serialization of Bitcoin transactions which is more bandwidth efficient.  Any bitcoin transaction can be losslessly converted, one transaction at a time, into this alternative serialization and applied across the whole Bitcoin history it reduces transaction sizes by about 25%.

It saves a little more on older blocks, in part because their transactions have a lot more uncompressed pubkeys and compressing pubkeys is one of the things it does to shrink transactions. Newer blocks are more like 20% smaller using this serialization.

Similar, but somewhat less reduction in size can be achieved by using standard compression tools like xz or zstd on groups of blocks.  But because the new serialization in blocksat works a single transaction at a time it's compatible with both transaction relay and fibre's-mempool-powered-reconstruction. (if you do want to work whole-block-at-a-time it can also be combined with traditional compression to get a little more savings).

If a Bitcoin nodes were to use this generally, they could drop their on-disk storage requirement for the full block data by about 25%, they could also negotiate using it with supporting peers and lower their bandwidth used for initial sync and transaction relay. Post erlay, this would give a 15% reduction in the total ongoing bandwidth usage of a node (pre-erlay the bandwidth used by INVs would diminish the gains a lot for anything except history sync).

The cool thing about it is that it's not a consensus change: How you store a block locally, or how two consenting peers share transactions data is no one else's business.  This is why blocksat 2.0 can use the new format without anything changing in the rest of the Bitcoin network.  Right now the blocksat software only uses this new serialization over the satellite-- where space savings is also critical--, but using it on disk or with other peers wouldn't be a huge addition.

The downsides of the new serialization is that it's more computationally expensive to decode than the traditional one, and of course the implementation has a bit of complexity. I've been pushing for this [sort of idea since 2016](https://people.xiph.org/~greg/compacted_txn.txt) (note: the design I described in that link is only morally similar, their bitstream is different-- I'd link to docs on it but I don't think there are any yet), so I'm super excited to see it actually implemented!

The history download is pretty neat: Every block is broken into ~1152 byte packets and redundantly coded with 5% + 60 extra packets.  A rolling window of about ~6500 blocks is transmitted in interleave, resulting in about one packet from each block in the window per minute.  With this setup, which can be adjusted on the sending side,  you can take an hour long outage per day or so plus 5% packet loss and not suffer any additional delays in initial sync. If it does lose sync it saves the blocks it completely received--even if it doesn't have their ancestors yet-- and will continue once the history loops back around again. If you have internet access (potentially expensive or unreliable; or maybe even sneaker net!), you could also connect temporarily and just get the chunk of blocks you missed instead of waiting for it to loop around again.

The software was also rebased on 0.19-- their prior stuff had been falling behind a bit.

The satellite signal is doing some neat stuff:  They time division multiple two different bitrate streams  (one about 100kbit/sec like the original blocksat stream, and one about 1mbit/sec) on the same frequency.  The low rate stream can be reliably received with a smaller dish and under worse weather, and only carries new blocks, and transactions.  The high rate stream also carries new blocks and transactions (when they show up), but in addition carries the block history. When new blocks come in the data from both streams contribute to how fast you receive the block.

I believe they're recommending an 80cm dish now, mine are 76cm and the signal on both streams is very strong and robust against poor weather. YMMV based on location and weather conditions. The low rate stream should be reliable on pretty small dishes.

This new high rate stream also significantly reduces the latency for transmitting blocks, making it more realistic to mine using blocksat as your primary block feed (and then using $$$ two-way sat to upload blocks when you find one).  Right now 4 second latencies are typical though there is some opportunity for software running that should get it consistently closer to 1 second.  The updated stream also handles multiple sat feeds more seamlessly-- in some regions you can see two different blocksat feeds, such as in California where I live, and if you have two receivers it'll half the latency to receive blocks (and obviously increase the robustness).

The new setup makes it easier to separate the modem from the bitcoin node.  You can have a modem left closer to the dish(es) connected to ethernet (directly w/ their ethernet attached modems, or w/ a usb modem and a rpi) have it send udp multicast across a network to feed one more receiving bitcoin nodes.  This can help eliminate long annoying coax runs.

Finally, they also preserved the ability to get the stream with a pure SDR receiver *and* added the ability to use an off the shelf USB DVB-S2 modem, and the DVB modems are more flexible in what LNBs you use... so if you're in a location where getting more blocksat specific hardware is inconvenient or might erode your privacy-- they've got you covered.

All in all, I think this is pretty exciting.

Posts by anyone promoting Wright/BSV will be removed from this subforum.  This subforum is for technical discussion related to Bitcoin but is not useful for that purpose when discussions are repeatability derailed by people with scam to market or an axe to grind.

Posters promoting other scammers, scams, or knock-off cryptocurrencies may receive similar treatment in the future if they are similarly annoying.

There are plenty of other less focused subforums which are more willing to entertain a broad spectrum of raving fraudsters.

I was commenting in a thread securing Bitcoin for inheritance and made the comment that if there is some asset you're going to give away after you die, it's usually better to give it away earlier and that made me think to post this year-end reminder:

For those fortunate enough to have a decent amount of highly appreciated Bitcoin: giving it away to less fortunate friends and family can be both a generous and tax efficient way to deal with it.

In the US, gifts of up to $15,000 per person per year (twice that if married) can be gift without triggering any gift tax, diminishing your lifetime gift tax exception (and even if your current holdings don't put you at risk of estate taxes, bitcoin value could go up or estate tax thresholds could go down...), or requiring any tax reporting.

The recipient of your gift inherits the cost basis and holding period.  Giving to family and friends who pay lower taxes than you (due to lower income, better deductions, etc.) is tax efficient because they pay the taxes at rates that apply to them if/when they sell your gift.

For example, say you have a sibling that only worked part of the year and earned $24,000.  You could gift them up to 2.1 BTC which you acquired years ago for $100, and they could sell it and pay no capital gains tax (because the LTCG rate for <$39,375 in income is 0%).   That's an extra $2236  (or $3548.58 if you are fortunate enough to have a 23.8% marginal LTCG rate) that stays among friends and family instead of getting paid in taxes compared to you selling the coins yourself and gifting cash or purchases using the proceeds.

Gifting away from ATH's works better, because the limits allow for more coins.

A big stash of Bitcoin doesn't do you any good after you're dead, and for people you'd otherwise consider bequeathing your coins to ... they would usually benefit more to receive them earlier and doing so can be a lot more tax efficient as an added bonus.

[Giving appreciated assets to a charity can have additional tax benefits, but because of recent changes to US tax code-- it's much harder to make use of those benefits than it used to be.  The standard deduction is so great now that you'd have to give a really large amount to overcome it, particularly with state taxes no longer creating a reason to itemize for many people. If you do intend to give to a charity it can be best to batch all donations up into a single year, potentially via a donor directed fund, so that you can just use the standard deduction in later years.]

I'd like to get in contact with the person whom I spoke to in mid 2011 on Bitcoin IRC who was using the nick lolwat`.

If you happen to see this message, please shoot me a PM here or an email at gmaxwell@gmail.com. I owe you something.

[2011-06-12 02:44:13 <theymos> jgarzik and Diablo are now global moderators (for now). Please only delete spam and trolling.]

Bitcointalk was originally a forum under www.bitcoin.org/smf/ and then later on a subdomain at forums.bitcoin.org but it isn't anymore.

Here is the 2011 announcement, but it doesn't give the backstory.

It seems like people have been systematically nuking logs of Bitcoin's history off the Internet for whatever reason, so many of you who weren't personally there and involved in 2011 probably have not seen this bit of history.

I'll just let the chat logs tell the story of why it was moved and how it got the name bitcointalk.

(I've trimmed out some irrelevant cross-talk and bolded a few lines for interesting events)


2011-06-12 01:47:41 <ArtForz>   gaah, I'm gone for 3 days and someone lets the trolls on the forums?
2011-06-12 01:51:52 <noagendamarket>   the trolls are really bad
2011-06-12 01:51:57 <ArtForz>   yup
2011-06-12 01:52:13 <ArtForz>   are the forum mods on vacation or something?
2011-06-12 01:52:21 <noagendamarket>   anyone would think they unleashed the troll army
2011-06-12 01:53:13 <noagendamarket>   It feels like world of warcraft
2011-06-12 01:54:55 <jgarzik>   ArtForz: sigh
2011-06-12 01:55:08 <jgarzik>   ArtForz: current email discussion between devs + prominent bitcoiners, about that.
2011-06-12 01:55:26 <jgarzik>   ArtForz: we have concluded the forums are totally useless.  Gavin just created bitcoin-development mailing list.
2011-06-12 01:55:39 <jgarzik>   ArtForz: current forum mods are "anti censorship"
2011-06-12 01:56:10 <MC1984>   still trying to stir fud
2011-06-12 01:56:13 <gjs278>   where is the list
2011-06-12 01:56:45 <jgarzik>   ArtForz: Long term, one proposal is to swap weusecoins forum with current forum, and enforce "business professional" code of conduct on the new forum
2011-06-12 01:56:49 <jgarzik>   gjs278: sourceforge
2011-06-12 01:57:03 <gjs278>   ok
2011-06-12 01:57:23 <ArtForz>   jgarzik: soudns good
2011-06-12 01:58:14 <ArtForz>   trying to read up in the general and mining forums... ugh.
2011-06-12 01:58:18 <jgarzik>   indeed
2011-06-12 02:00:00 <dirtyfilthy>   i think somethingawful good squad has been deployed
2011-06-12 02:00:05 <noagendamarket>   yep
2011-06-12 02:00:20 <noagendamarket>   someone paid a bounty to have their site hacked
2011-06-12 02:00:26 <noagendamarket>   lol
2011-06-12 02:01:27 <jgarzik>   anyway, until the forum swap, we need triage
2011-06-12 02:01:36 <jgarzik>   either "no newbie posts" or "newbies cannot create threads" or somesuch
2011-06-12 02:01:47 <ArtForz>   how about "nuke it from orbit" ?
2011-06-12 02:01:58 <ArtForz>   j/k
2011-06-12 02:02:07 <ArtForz>   well, it's the only way to be sure...
2011-06-12 02:02:09 <jgarzik>   
...
2011-06-12 02:16:50 <MC1984>   wow the bitcoin forums are irredeemable
2011-06-12 02:31:39 <jgarzik>   MC1984: yes
2011-06-12 02:37:04 <brocktice>   MC1984: Yeah I haven't delved in  much lately, I hear it's troll central?
2011-06-12 02:38:16 <noagendamarket>   the forums hit a trollberg
2011-06-12 02:40:43 <Diablo-D3>   the bitcoin forums are just too high traffic
2011-06-12 02:40:48 <theymos>   Who here uses the forum a lot and wants to be a mod?
2011-06-12 02:40:49 <Diablo-D3>   I dont read any of it except very specific threads
2011-06-12 02:40:54 <Diablo-D3>   theymos: me.
2011-06-12 02:41:04 <Diablo-D3>   I just want mod powers on the mining part
2011-06-12 02:41:37 <jgarzik>   theymos: will you give me permission to lock just about even damn thread?    or prevent newbies from creating new threads?
2011-06-12 02:41:38 <theymos>   Your account is "DiabloD3"?
2011-06-12 02:41:42 <jgarzik>   *every
2011-06-12 02:41:54 <Diablo-D3>   theymos: yes
2011-06-12 02:41:57 <theymos>   No point in locking them -- just delete troll threads.
2011-06-12 02:42:05 <jgarzik>   that works too
2011-06-12 02:42:14 <noagendamarket>   lock them unless you have certain post levels
2011-06-12 02:42:30 <theymos>   They're all backed up in case of false positives. There's too much junk. Lots needs to be deleted.
2011-06-12 02:42:37 <jgarzik>   yep
2011-06-12 02:42:57 <jgarzik>   theymos: and _please_ don't post a "moved" or "deleted" thread, for each one...
2011-06-12 02:42:58 <Diablo-D3>   theymos: you can set it so only established users can start threads
2011-06-12 02:43:00 <jgarzik>   shades of Kiba
2011-06-12 02:43:22 <theymos>   I'm going to prevent non-established posters from posting at all for a while.
2011-06-12 02:43:46 <Diablo-D3>   why not just turn registrations off for awhile
2011-06-12 02:43:52 <Diablo-D3>   OOH
2011-06-12 02:43:53 <Diablo-D3>   I KNOW
2011-06-12 02:43:55 <Diablo-D3>   HEY THEYMOS
2011-06-12 02:44:03 <Diablo-D3>   MAKE PEOPLE PAY BTC FOR NEW ACCOUNT
2011-06-12 02:44:13 <theymos>   jgarzik and Diablo are now global moderators (for now). Please only delete spam and trolling.
2011-06-12 02:44:33 <Diablo-D3>   theymos: how do I sticky threads?
2011-06-12 02:44:39 <theymos>   Don't sticky threads.
...
2011-06-12 03:07:07 <jgarzik>   theymos: how/where do I delete an entire thread?
2011-06-12 03:07:25 <jgarzik>   theymos: I see 'Delete' beside each post, but not at top where I would expect
2011-06-12 03:07:28 <theymos>   jgarzik: Bottom of the thread, "remove topic".
2011-06-12 03:08:26 <jgarzik>   theymos: tnx
2011-06-12 03:09:13 <theymos>   SMF is really not good for fighting trolls. It's too much work to take any administrative action. I used to moderate on a site where moderation was so easy a single person could fight an active invasion of twice this size or more. Probably I'll make modifications in this area once I get time.
2011-06-12 03:13:10 <jgarzik>   theymos: ugh
2011-06-12 03:13:17 <jgarzik>   theymos: fscking impossible, with the forum so slow
2011-06-12 03:13:19 <jgarzik>   I give up
2011-06-12 03:13:29 <theymos>   It seems pretty fast to me.
2011-06-12 03:14:07 <jgarzik>   theymos: deleting 1,001 troll threads one at a time is... tedious, even if it only takes ~10-20 seconds per thread
2011-06-12 03:14:27 <theymos>   jgarzik: enable quick-moderation in your profile settings. You'll get checkboxes for threads.
2011-06-12 03:15:14 <theymos>   Here's the page with the setting: https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?action=profile;u=35;sa=theme . It's near the bottom.
2011-06-12 03:15:24 <noagendamarket>   can we get a proper forum software ffs
2011-06-12 03:15:29 <jgarzik>   theymos: that helps
2011-06-12 03:15:34 <genewitch>   theymos: i've been posting all day... it just blocked me out after 6 hours
2011-06-12 03:15:42 <theymos>   genewitch: I just changed the policy.
2011-06-12 03:16:38 <jgarzik>   theymos: can we disable animated images?
2011-06-12 03:16:40 <theymos>   genewitch: I will whitelist you. Just a moment.
2011-06-12 03:16:44 <genewitch>   Thank you sir.
2011-06-12 03:16:48 <jgarzik>   theymos: image spam drowns out a lot of threads, too
2011-06-12 03:16:49 <genewitch>   or ma'am
2011-06-12 03:17:44 <Diablo-D3>   dear lord
2011-06-12 03:17:48 <Diablo-D3>   the rest of the forum
2011-06-12 03:17:51 <Diablo-D3>   is whacko bullshit
2011-06-12 03:17:57 <theymos>   Delete it all.
2011-06-12 03:18:03 <luke-jr>   theymos: what will it take to split the dev/mining forums appropriately?
2011-06-12 03:18:04 <Diablo-D3>   http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=15351.msg204817
2011-06-12 03:18:08 <Diablo-D3>   this thread for one
2011-06-12 03:18:42 <Diablo-D3>   theymos: think I should nuke it? its troll vs troll vs troll cagematch kinda shit
2011-06-12 03:19:05 <theymos>   I locked it because there seemed to be some OK responses. But I dont' really care.
2011-06-12 03:19:27 <Diablo-D3>   so I can nuke it? I dont think we really need this shit even readable
2011-06-12 03:19:34 <theymos>   Sure.
2011-06-12 03:19:42 <luke-jr>   eek, does Diablo-D3 have mod access? :>   
2011-06-12 03:19:44 <genewitch>   I didn't notice much spam on the devel boards
2011-06-12 03:19:55 <luke-jr>   genewitch: it could use categorization though
2011-06-12 03:19:59 <Diablo-D3>   15_year_old_blonde probably should be banned too
2011-06-12 03:20:07 <theymos>   Diablo-D3: Already done.
2011-06-12 03:20:13 <luke-jr>   genewitch: for the many different softwares or at least types of software
2011-06-12 03:20:34 <genewitch>   do i have to delete a cookie to get my "reply" button back?
2011-06-12 03:20:55 <theymos>   genewitch: Are you able to post now?
2011-06-12 03:21:52 <genewitch>   theymos: no, not in the Bitcoin Forum > Bitcoin > Project Development
2011-06-12 03:21:55 <genewitch>   threads
2011-06-12 03:21:58 <theymos>   genewitch: Oh, wait. It didn't work. It might take me a bit to figure this out.
...
2011-06-12 03:31:03 <luke-jr>   theymos: why the heck is Diablo-D3 a mod? he's a freaking troll
2011-06-12 03:31:56 <theymos>   luke-jr: Maybe that will help him to identify other trolls.
...
2011-06-12 03:33:19 <theymos>   Global mods made tonight are probably temporary. This mess just needs to be cleaned up. Though DiabloD3 will probably stay at least a local mod of mining, since he is a long-time community member with expertise in this area.
...
2011-06-12 04:02:40 <jgarzik>   theymos: is there any way to make someone read-only (disable posting)?  Atlas isn't too happy about the animated image thing
2011-06-12 04:03:25 <jgarzik>   theymos: I don't want to ban him, though
2011-06-12 04:03:27 <theymos>   jgarzik: What animated image thing?
2011-06-12 04:03:28 <genewitch>   jgarzik: not here, and there's no errors whatsoever :-/ but clients can connect to it, and bitcoind hands out work just fine, and the frontend is assigning passwords and stuff
2011-06-12 04:03:35 <jgarzik>   theymos: animated image signature
2011-06-12 04:03:59 <theymos>   Are you deleting all of his posts because he has an animated signature?
2011-06-12 04:04:19 <jgarzik>   Diablo-D3: I don't want to ban him permanently
2011-06-12 04:04:24 <jgarzik>   theymos: damn right I am
2011-06-12 04:04:33 <luke-jr>   ………….
2011-06-12 04:04:33 <Diablo-D3>   jgarzik: well, give him a warning
2011-06-12 04:04:37 <Diablo-D3>   be an annoying fucker again
2011-06-12 04:04:38 <Diablo-D3>   its perm
2011-06-12 04:04:44 <theymos>   That's not cool. He has lots of good posts. I'll just remove his signature.
2011-06-12 04:04:45 <jgarzik>   Diablo-D3: already done -- and already ignored
2011-06-12 04:05:10 <jgarzik>   <shrug> he refuses to change his sig.  making a personal stand.  I presume he will just change his sig back.
2011-06-12 04:05:13 <Diablo-D3>   images shouldnt be allowed in sigs
2011-06-12 04:05:20 <jgarzik>   Diablo-D3: 1000% agreed
2011-06-12 04:06:10 <jgarzik>   theymos: whatever makes his sig stop appearing, that's fine
2011-06-12 04:12:51 <theymos>   jgarzik is no longer a moderator because I now have to restore like 50 of Atlas's posts...
2011-06-12 04:21:11 <jgarzik>   theymos: <rolls eyes>
2011-06-12 04:21:21 <jgarzik>   Just confirms that the forum is toast
2011-06-12 04:21:29 <Diablo-D3>   the forum has too much fucking traffic
2011-06-12 04:21:33 <Diablo-D3>   but I think I saved the mining forum
2011-06-12 04:21:37 <Diablo-D3>   er, section
2011-06-12 04:21:45 <gmaxwell>   :-/
2011-06-12 04:21:50 <gmaxwell>   The forum is a cesspool.
2011-06-12 04:21:51 <jgarzik>   Diablo-D3: bitcoin-development list was just created @ SF by Gavin
2011-06-12 04:21:56 <jgarzik>   devs agree
2011-06-12 04:22:08 <gmaxwell>   I don't know what posts that jgarzik moderated, but I find it hard to believe that it wasn't crap.
2011-06-12 04:22:09 <Diablo-D3>   jgarzik: url?
2011-06-12 04:22:16 <jgarzik>   and it's utterly impossible to show forum to reporters or business professionals
2011-06-12 04:22:50 <jgarzik>   Diablo-D3: https://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=244765
2011-06-12 04:23:31 <theymos>   The forum is more than just Bitcoin development. It is (supposed to be) a good, low-moderation forum for discussion of many topics. Moderation needs to be increased when there is a ton of trolls, however.
2011-06-12 04:23:44 <gmaxwell>   What jgarzik said. I'm embarassed to tell friends about bitcoin for fear that they'll load the forums and find a wall of dickhead blabbering on about black helicopters and prediction markets for killing babies or whatever.
2011-06-12 04:24:28 <Diablo-D3>   yeah
2011-06-12 04:24:34 <jgarzik>   discussion among devs + major exchange ops + major pool ops seems to lean towards swapping weusecoins forum with current forum
2011-06-12 04:24:45 <jgarzik>   and then pushing for "business professional" conduct
2011-06-12 04:25:14 <Graet>   i like that
2011-06-12 04:25:50 <Graet>   is there somwhere small/new pool owners can join to observe (apart from in here?)
2011-06-12 04:25:58 <gmaxwell>   I do too. I'm not really too concerned with people being rude as I am about people being crazy. But asking people to behave professional is probable adequate.
2011-06-12 04:26:31 <noagendamarket>   jgarzik that sounds like an excellent idea
2011-06-12 04:26:36 <genewitch>   people who own fast video cards generally aren't professional
2011-06-12 04:26:41 <genewitch>   i'm just throwing that out there.
2011-06-12 04:27:32 <jgarzik>   genewitch: and they can stay on the "old" forum after the switch...
2011-06-12 04:27:38 <jgarzik>   genewitch: you're not wrong, though
2011-06-12 04:28:13 <theymos>   A separate professional forum is fine, but I like the "unprofessional" forum.
2011-06-12 04:28:58 <gmaxwell>   genewitch: Even most 14 year olds can behave if required to. I don't see the problem there.
2011-06-12 04:29:07 <jgarzik>   theymos: it needs to move away from *.bitcoin.org
2011-06-12 04:29:19 <noagendamarket>   just make the current forum nsfw/unregulated as a section in the new forum
2011-06-12 04:29:34 <jgarzik>   noagendamarket: no, that just leads downhill quickly
2011-06-12 04:29:46 <genewitch>   e.g. 4chan
2011-06-12 04:29:51 <jgarzik>   yes
2011-06-12 04:29:58 <gmaxwell>   theymos: sure, there should be a forum to shitcan the nutbags into so they can talk about buying babymulching with bitcon without bothering everyone else.
2011-06-12 04:30:25 <gmaxwell>   genewitch: "the letter b means bitcoin, go post over there"
2011-06-12 04:30:25 <theymos>   I happen to like 4chan...
2011-06-12 04:30:33 <Netsniper>   you can buy babymulchers with bitcoins?
2011-06-12 04:31:00 <nanotube>   theymos: what about making a mod queue, assuming we can get enough reasonable people to be mods? before post goes live, has to be approved?
2011-06-12 04:31:13 <gmaxwell>   Netsniper: dunno but if so you'd expect to learn all about it in graphic detail on the bitcoin forums.
2011-06-12 04:31:37 <nanotube>   theymos: can mark certain users as perma-ok, so only need to do this on new people. good way to thwart trollwaves?
2011-06-12 04:31:54 <gmaxwell>   nanotube:  I think theymos already commented on what he thought about reasonable moderation above when he commented on jgarzik moderating.
2011-06-12 04:32:35 <theymos>   nanotube: I'd be OK with that (for new users). Maybe only enabled when there are lots of trolls.
2011-06-12 04:32:46 <nanotube>   theymos: right, a 'panic mode'
2011-06-12 04:32:52 <theymos>   Yes.
2011-06-12 04:32:54 <noagendamarket>   heh
2011-06-12 04:32:57 <nanotube>   gmaxwell:
2011-06-12 04:33:12 <theymos>   I increased required time between posts to 5 minutes. I bet that'll help.
2011-06-12 04:33:31 <nanotube>   how hard would it be to implement? does that come built into smf, the mod-queue bits?
2011-06-12 04:33:46 <gmaxwell>   That will just annoy normal users and the crapflooders who don't know how to select tor exits, no?
2011-06-12 04:33:55 <nanotube>   Graet: cheers
2011-06-12 04:34:01 <Graet>   
2011-06-12 04:34:03 <theymos>   nanotube: It doesn't come built in.
2011-06-12 04:34:11 <nanotube>   gmaxwell: based on user accounts, not ips.
2011-06-12 04:34:24 <nanotube>   gmaxwell: and based on account age
2011-06-12 04:34:44 <nanotube>   so 'normal users' who are not made-this-week, won't see any changes, ideally.
2011-06-12 04:34:48 <theymos>   I would totally redesign the forum system if I had time. The current moderation scheme is very bad.
2011-06-12 04:35:09 <nanotube>   theymos: well, how about phpbb's system? that seems to be the most popular forum sw
2011-06-12 04:35:19 <nanotube>   though i can't say i have experience with it myself
2011-06-12 04:35:23 <theymos>   That's just about the same, IIRC.
2011-06-12 04:35:28 <jgarzik>   [ANN] New bitcoin development mailing list - http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=15527.0
2011-06-12 04:35:31 <nanotube>   theymos: iow, also shitty?
2011-06-12 04:35:50 <nanotube>   jgarzik: who controls who's allowed to post? hope that's moderated.
2011-06-12 04:36:47 <gmaxwell>   nanotube: usually unmoderating new users on the first good post, and then kicking off people who are complete idiots is more than enough.
2011-06-12 04:37:04 <gmaxwell>   I think most of the problems on the forums are a few jerks plus an overall stupid culture.
2011-06-12 04:37:12 <Diablo-D3>   theymos: so, lets see if my plan cuts down on the absolute bullshit that is the miner section
2011-06-12 04:37:15 <Diablo-D3>   gmaxwell: dude
2011-06-12 04:37:18 <Diablo-D3>   90% of people
2011-06-12 04:37:20 <Diablo-D3>   suck dick
2011-06-12 04:37:40 <Diablo-D3>   hitler was wrong... why kill jews when you can ground stupid people up for cat food?
2011-06-12 04:37:42 <gmaxwell>   Diablo-D3: most people can pretend to be reasonable if they know that its required and expected.
2011-06-12 04:37:50 <Diablo-D3>   gmaxwell: bullshit
2011-06-12 04:38:03 <nanotube>   gmaxwell: that'd work just as well. as long as there's /some/ barrier to entry, in addition to just creating an account.
2011-06-12 04:38:06 <Diablo-D3>   do I have to go find the commercial from that one movie theatre that bans text messages?
2011-06-12 04:38:28 <gmaxwell>   I mean, I assume you have a job and such— and that you don't act like you do on IRC everywhere else…
2011-06-12 04:38:31 <gmaxwell>   
2011-06-12 04:39:57 <jgarzik>   nanotube: unmoderated... we'll see what happens
2011-06-12 04:40:10 <theymos>   Anyone want to be a mod for the newbie section? It's going too fast for me to handle.
2011-06-12 04:40:18 <jgarzik>   nanotube: I doubt 4chan people know what email is
2011-06-12 04:40:38 <nanotube>   jgarzik: haha they can probably read wikipedia about it and figure it out, given sufficient time, though.
2011-06-12 04:40:41 <theymos>   You know, there are plenty of very good discussions on 4chan outside of /b/...
2011-06-12 04:40:45 <Diablo-D3>   gmaxwell: nope, I pretty much wont stand for bullshit anywhere
2011-06-12 04:41:19 <nanotube>   theymos: what's the newbie section? must be new? is it "people with accounts < 1week old can only post here" board? or some such?
2011-06-12 04:41:20 <gmaxwell>   nanotube: if it gets too bad require new users pay 1btc to the faucet to join.
2011-06-12 04:41:21 <genewitch>   i may be biased but as i mentioned earlier xkcd forums sort of automod anyone that posts pictures, links, etc in the first 10 posts, and usually require the first post to be in a huge newbie introduction thread.
2011-06-12 04:41:35 <genewitch>   it's a tiny barrier to entry, that will shuffle out all but the most anal of trolls
2011-06-12 04:42:02 <gmaxwell>   genewitch: barriers to entry usually toss more good users than trolls... you only notice the troll reduction.
2011-06-12 04:42:05 <theymos>   nanotube: Yes, though it's based on post counts since SMF doesn't support age restrictions (or at least not both age+post, which is necessary).
2011-06-12 04:42:08 <nanotube>   gmaxwell: haha indeed, that'd be cool.
2011-06-12 04:42:47 <nanotube>   theymos: ah i see. well, the ability to pump up post count by spamming the newbie section seems... counterproductive.
2011-06-12 04:42:51 <gmaxwell>   genewitch: a troll is trying to cause trouble and is burning effort to do it. A good person is probably instead trying to do _you_ a favor. Making it cost more to do you good isn't a good tradeoff.
2011-06-12 04:43:01 <theymos>   nanotube: That's why mods are needed.
2011-06-12 04:43:23 <nanotube>   so is that section auto-moderated? i.e., post doesn't make it through before mod lets it?
2011-06-12 04:43:26 <genewitch>   i would mod if i had time
2011-06-12 04:43:36 <theymos>   nanotube: Nope, SMF doesn't support that, either.
...
2011-06-14 17:59:54 <topi`>   jgarzik: what's your issue with drugs, anywys?
2011-06-14 18:00:18 <topi`>   of course drugs ought to be mentioned whenever somebody mentions bitcoin
2011-06-14 18:00:35 <sipa>   ...
2011-06-14 18:00:43 <topi`>   it's just unfortunate that drugs are not mentioned whenever people talk about plain chas.
2011-06-14 18:00:46 <topi`>   cash.
2011-06-14 18:00:54 <jrmithdobbs>   topi`: only if you want to give schumer and his ilk more ammo ...
2011-06-14 18:01:02 <topi`>   sorry to come in the discussion too late wife needed help with homework
2011-06-14 18:01:22 <topi`>   jrmithdobbs: I regard that as a problem internal to the USA
2011-06-14 18:01:46 <topi`>   although I'm losing faith that something as stupid would not happen in european politics.
2011-06-14 18:01:58 <jrmithdobbs>   topi`: whether you like or not us legislation against bitcoin will have global consequences
2011-06-14 18:02:11 <topi`>   jrmithdobbs: that remains to be seen (I don't believe that personally)
2011-06-14 18:02:30 <topi`>   some african countries will find out that they benefit immensely from things like bitcoin
2011-06-14 18:02:35 <jrmithdobbs>   topi`: just like anti-internet-gambling laws, KYC, etc haven't had global implications *rolleyes*
2011-06-14 18:02:38 <topi`>   of course Mugabe will try to ban it
2011-06-14 18:03:03 <jrmithdobbs>   (if you don't catch the sarcasm they ... they very obviously have)
2011-06-14 18:03:21 <jrmithdobbs>   topi`: or the DMCA etc, the list goes on
2011-06-14 18:03:44 <topi`>   yep, it all started with DMCA
2011-06-14 18:03:51 <topi`>   I think it was already back in 2000
2011-06-14 18:04:10 <jrmithdobbs>   topi`: point was, us legislation against is detrimental no matter what you think of the US and it's foreign policy
2011-06-14 18:04:20 <topi`>   but I have funded EFF, for what it's worth, in order to fight these things
2011-06-14 18:04:28 <jrmithdobbs>   topi`: therefore distancing official stances from LOL DRUGS LOL and silkroad is beneficial.
2011-06-14 18:04:30 <TD>   well, the EFF didn't want your donations, it turns out
2011-06-14 18:04:41 <TD>   they're giving the funding back, perhaps to the faucet
2011-06-14 18:04:49 <TD>   (i mean the bitcoin funding)
2011-06-14 18:05:01 <jrmithdobbs>   TD: they couldn't figure out how to tax it / etc
2011-06-14 18:05:18 <cosurgi>   forum is slashdotted?
2011-06-14 18:05:28 <TD>   topi`: anyway the people actually doing work don't tend to agree with you
2011-06-14 18:05:36 <jrmithdobbs>   diki: "patterns" always emerge to those looking for them. they're usually false patterns.
2011-06-14 18:05:47 <TD>   topi`: if you think it's a good idea to heavily promote criminal behavior as a use case for bitcoin, you need to familiarize yourself with the eGold case
2011-06-14 18:05:50 <topi`>   TD: what kind of work?
2011-06-14 18:05:50 <diki>   i sincerely hope
2011-06-14 18:05:55 <diki>   that you are not right
2011-06-14 18:05:58 <TD>   topi`: writing code. running exchanges, etc
2011-06-14 18:06:06 <topi`>   TD: drugs aren't criminal things in some countries
2011-06-14 18:06:12 <TD>   no, but they are in many
2011-06-14 18:06:17 <topi`>   alcohol is a drug, for what it's worth
2011-06-14 18:06:17 <jrmithdobbs>   topi`: doesn't matter
2011-06-14 18:06:18 <TD>   like the countries where developers live
2011-06-14 18:06:32 <jrmithdobbs>   topi`: all the actual work on bitcoin and related software is verifiably being done in places where they are illegal
2011-06-14 18:06:53 <jrmithdobbs>   topi`: you realise that anti-bitcoin legislation would make jgarzik and gavin criminals defacto, right?
2011-06-14 18:06:59 <jrmithdobbs>   topi`: you understand why this is bad, right?
2011-06-14 18:07:11 <TD>   sadly a lot of people jumping on the bitcoin bandwagon, apparently don't understand that
2011-06-14 18:07:32 <jrmithdobbs>   topi`: if the lead devs can no longer contribute because of legal hassles it will come tumbling down
2011-06-14 18:07:50 <jeremias>   hmm
2011-06-14 18:08:02 <jeremias>   isn't bitcoin software pretty stable currently
2011-06-14 18:08:09 <TD>   it needs constant work to keep up with the network scaling
2011-06-14 18:08:18 <TD>   not having devs is not an option. the system is already creaking under the load
...
2011-06-14 18:10:04 <TD>   anyway, bitcoin has no future as a purely black market currency, because you need to be able to exchange with existing currencies
2011-06-14 18:14:14 <TD>   anyway. to get back "on topic", public service announcement:   do not promote drugs or other criminal activity as a legitimate use case of bitcoin
...
2011-06-15 03:29:06 <jgarzik>   theymos: what's the status on moving the forums to another domain?
2011-06-15 03:29:42 <theymos>   I don't like the idea, so I'm not going to do it. Sirius can do it if he wants.
2011-06-15 03:31:59 <jgarzik>   rather unilateral, for a decentralized project
...
2011-06-15 03:35:29 <jgarzik>   genewitch: no, pretty much the entire dev team, major pool operators, major exchange ops, and lots of users think the forums have become a ghetto, and are becoming an embarrassment to the bitcoin project
2011-06-15 03:35:44 <jgarzik>   one person disagrees
2011-06-15 03:35:55 <genewitch>   jgarzik: ask moot to make a /bc/ topic
2011-06-15 03:36:02 <jgarzik>   rofl
2011-06-15 03:36:22 <genewitch>   i only see the dev forums and the pool forums sometimes, so i don't see the ghetto.
2011-06-15 03:37:09 <genewitch>   jgarzik: so the dev team and pool operators want a seperate more professional forum?
2011-06-15 03:37:41 <jgarzik>   genewitch: a more professional forum, yes, but more importantly stop presenting the current forum as "The Official Bitcoin Project Forum"
2011-06-15 03:38:04 <jgarzik>   which it's not, with so many major peeps abandoning it
2011-06-15 03:38:14 <theymos>   I'm in support of not presenting it as the official forum. I just don't want to move it from bitcoin.org.
2011-06-15 03:38:29 <jgarzik>   theymos: anything on bitcoin.org is clearly official
2011-06-15 03:38:49 <theymos>   Let's change that perception.
2011-06-15 03:39:03 <genewitch>   jgarzik: you want the "good" forums on forum.bitcoin.org and the current forums on a different domain?
2011-06-15 03:39:10 <jgarzik>   theymos: show me _one_ other person who actually thinks that is possible.  just one.
2011-06-15 03:39:26 <theymos>   I'm sure I could find someone if I asked around.
2011-06-15 03:39:42 <jgarzik>   bitcoin.org was started by satoshi, and it's all over the print media, online media, search engines and ... duh .. it matches the project's name.
2011-06-15 03:39:45 <genewitch>   does that mean like drop database and start over with forum.bitcoin.org?
2011-06-15 03:39:50 <jgarzik>   nobody thinks that is realistic
2011-06-15 03:39:53 <jgarzik>   genewitch: no!
2011-06-15 03:39:55 <theymos>   The weusecoins guy reacted positively to my idea.
2011-06-15 03:39:58 <cacheson>   theymos: people are naturally going to assume that subdomains of bitcoin are official, there's nothing you can really do about that
2011-06-15 03:40:09 <cacheson>   er, subdomains of bitcoin.org
2011-06-15 03:40:27 <jgarzik>   genewitch: no one is proposing deleting or turning off anything
2011-06-15 03:40:31 <jgarzik>   genewitch: just moving away from *.bitcoin.org
2011-06-15 03:40:36 <theymos>   Not very "decentralized" of you to demand that any website be "official" at all. I argue that there should be no official websites.
2011-06-15 03:40:47 <genewitch>   except mine
2011-06-15 03:40:49 <genewitch>   mine is official
2011-06-15 03:40:52 <jgarzik>   theymos: then let's not have -any- forum on bitcoin.org
2011-06-15 03:41:11 <jgarzik>   theymos: ceasing use of bitcoin.org would be fine
2011-06-15 03:41:12 <genewitch>   jgarzik: the wiki can link to forums for bitcoin users
2011-06-15 03:41:53 <jgarzik>   theymos: you cannot have it both ways.   if you truly want "no official websites" then let's stop using bitcoin.org altogether.
2011-06-15 03:41:56 <genewitch>   hey you guys remember webrings? we should bring that back.
2011-06-15 03:42:06 <thallium205>   hahaha
2011-06-15 03:42:38 <theymos>   Why is bitcoin.org necessarily official? It's not linked anywhere in the program. No development takes place there. No developers own it.
2011-06-15 03:42:54 <cacheson>   genewitch: for stuff like "my super-awesome geocities bitcoin homepage"?  
2011-06-15 03:43:08 <gjs278>   I'm highly opposed to how crappy bitcoin.org is
2011-06-15 03:43:09 <genewitch>   cacheson: exactly
2011-06-15 03:43:12 <mrb_>   one more thing to consider is that using different domains makes it (a bit) harder for a government to go through the redtape to block access to all domains
2011-06-15 03:43:14 <gjs278>   I was very vocal about this like two months ago
2011-06-15 03:43:25 <luke-jr>   jgarzik: bitcoin.org doesn't have any claim of "official" IMO
2011-06-15 03:43:39 <theymos>   Ha! There's one person who agrees with me.
2011-06-15 03:43:40 <mrb_>   (thinking of The Great Firewall and other repressive countries)
2011-06-15 03:43:42 <luke-jr>   theymos: the program isn't official either
2011-06-15 03:43:42 <gjs278>   it's the title of our channel
2011-06-15 03:43:48 <gjs278>   if it's not official take it out
2011-06-15 03:43:49 <cacheson>   theymos: eh, bitcoin.org is a decent place for the mainline client
2011-06-15 03:43:59 <cacheson>   theymos: it's like getting openoffice from openoffice.org, etc.
2011-06-15 03:44:10 <genewitch>   luke-jr: maybe not "officially" if you'll pardon me for a second here but as mentioned when someone mentions bitcoin in the media it references bitcoin.org, hence it becomes the defacto official server.
2011-06-15 03:44:12 <luke-jr>   IMO, bitcoin.org should be like weusecoins.com
2011-06-15 03:44:26 <jgarzik>   should be... but isn't
2011-06-15 03:44:37 <theymos>   luke-jr: That's exactly my position.
2011-06-15 03:44:40 <jgarzik>   luke-jr: I would be fine with that
2011-06-15 03:44:48 <jgarzik>   luke-jr: as long as the forums aren't on there
2011-06-15 03:45:09 <luke-jr>   if you guys don't think a forum is appropriate, I'd be welcome to have something on bitgit.org (or whatever TLD I ended up with)
2011-06-15 03:45:10 <thallium205>   bittorrent is highly decentralized, but there still exists bittorrent.com (and it has community forums)
2011-06-15 03:45:21 <jgarzik>   there is not a single forum linked on weusecoins.com
2011-06-15 03:45:22 <genewitch>   can't the devs and powerusers switch to a bugzilla/regular forum format and let the community host the user forums?
2011-06-15 03:45:24 <gjs278>   bittorrent.com is nowhere near as official as bitcoin.org tries to be
2011-06-15 03:45:36 <luke-jr>   which I had planned to be a hosting site for Bitcoin-related projects (incl bug tracker, git, etc)
2011-06-15 03:45:39 <gjs278>   but that's due to there being hundreds of clients
2011-06-15 03:46:02 <luke-jr>   gjs278: forums in general are irregular
2011-06-15 03:46:10 <gjs278>   they are
2011-06-15 03:46:47 <genewitch>   basically what i am hearing here is that we wish there were an opensource way for people to collaborate and ask questions on the internet semi anonymously?
2011-06-15 03:46:50 <jgarzik>   luke-jr: so you actively support illegal activity?
2011-06-15 03:46:51 <gjs278>   if bitcoin.org is the officlal website, it should be in a public repo the same as the "official client"
2011-06-15 03:46:58 <genewitch>   Where nodes could come on and drop off and not really affect the whole?
2011-06-15 03:47:01 <genewitch>   I think this exists.
2011-06-15 03:47:12 <genewitch>   hold on i have to google the name
2011-06-15 03:47:13 <luke-jr>   jgarzik: what? no
2011-06-15 03:47:25 <theymos>   I support some types of illegal activity. Free trade, for example.
2011-06-15 03:47:26 <luke-jr>   gjs278: there is no official
2011-06-15 03:47:40 <gjs278>   bitcoin.org is in our title, we give the impression away that it is official
2011-06-15 03:47:47 <genewitch>   oh i found it! It's called IRC!
2011-06-15 03:47:53 <theymos>   Why is bitcoin.it not official?
2011-06-15 03:48:05 <genewitch>   theymos: cause who's ever heard of .it
2011-06-15 03:48:05 <luke-jr>   gjs278: this channel isn't official either. there is no official, or Bitcoin becomes the Fed
2011-06-15 03:48:09 <gjs278>   the sourceforge page should be linked here, not bitcoin.org
2011-06-15 03:48:17 <jgarzik>   um, satoshi did not register bitcoin.it.  the press does not link to bitcoin.it.
2011-06-15 03:48:29 <jgarzik>   ...as "official bitcoin website"
2011-06-15 03:48:33 <genewitch>   defacto "official" the media have to link somewhere
2011-06-15 03:48:57 <genewitch>   jgarzik: you mean "just google it" isn't a valid way to get users to the community?
2011-06-15 03:50:12 <luke-jr>   I propose Bitcoin.org be a general repository of links to community resources, laid out for newbies
2011-06-15 03:50:32 <luke-jr>   ie, download page links to most popular client at the time
2011-06-15 03:50:35 <jgarzik>   luke-jr: sounds great
2011-06-15 03:50:37 <luke-jr>   maybe to be voted in every year
2011-06-15 03:50:38 <genewitch>   luke-jr: can it have animated balls and marquees?
2011-06-15 03:50:41 <jgarzik>   luke-jr: like weusecoins.com...
2011-06-15 03:50:41 <luke-jr>   or month, if it gets competitive
2011-06-15 03:50:59 <luke-jr>   jgarzik: yeah, maybe bitcoin.org should just forward there
2011-06-15 03:51:00 <gjs278>   it's all up to whoever owns the site to do that
2011-06-15 03:51:10 <luke-jr>   sirius-m does IIRC
2011-06-15 03:51:24 <jgarzik>   luke-jr: RE illegal activity:  people are actively soliticing illegal activity on the forums.  "bitcoin.org as official website" passes the layperson's obviousness test, and that's a major problem.  bitcoinj might end due to that, for example.
2011-06-15 03:51:29 <jgarzik>   it's become a serious problem
2011-06-15 03:51:46 <genewitch>   jgarzik: more active policing
2011-06-15 03:51:49 <jgarzik>   trying to convince businesses to accept bitcoins under those conditions is... difficult
2011-06-15 03:51:50 <genewitch>   jgarzik: pay in BTC
2011-06-15 03:51:55 <jgarzik>   genewitch: theymos is the police
2011-06-15 03:52:05 <jgarzik>   genewitch: centralized administrator by fiat
2011-06-15 03:52:09 <luke-jr>   jgarzik: ok, good reason to (re)move the fourms from bitcoin.org :p
2011-06-15 03:52:13 <genewitch>   he needs to deputize peopl
2011-06-15 03:52:16 <jgarzik>   luke-jr: yes
2011-06-15 03:52:29 <gjs278>   good reason to not use bitcoin.org because one guy has complete control over it
2011-06-15 03:52:31 <jgarzik>   genewitch: anybody who tries to delete signs of illegal activity has their mod powers yanked
2011-06-15 03:52:44 <luke-jr>   jgarzik: srsly?
2011-06-15 03:52:45 <jgarzik>   gjs278: unfortunately we cannot tell the press nor google that
2011-06-15 03:52:49 <jgarzik>   luke-jr: yes
2011-06-15 03:52:52 <luke-jr>   
2011-06-15 03:52:59 <genewitch>   businesses don't know how to use BTC. also the "it's used for illict activity" is a silly excuse. Every American $20 has more cocaine on it than ink.
2011-06-15 03:53:03 <gjs278>   yeah it is a little late now
2011-06-15 03:53:07 <genewitch>   er don't know how to use forums*
2011-06-15 03:53:09 <theymos>   That's not true at all. I've never removed a moderator. And I'm not the only administrator: Gavin was the one who made me an admin.
2011-06-15 03:53:16 <luke-jr>   my worthless vote goes to moving forums off bitcoin.org, and censoring them heavily
2011-06-15 03:53:30 <jgarzik>   theymos: blatant lie.  you removed my mod powers.
2011-06-15 03:53:31 <luke-jr>   and splitting the subforums more
2011-06-15 03:53:37 <luke-jr>   …
2011-06-15 03:53:40 <gjs278>   force everyone to gpg auth to forum post
2011-06-15 03:53:53 <genewitch>   gjs278: screw that gpg is annoying
2011-06-15 03:53:54 <theymos>   That modship was only temporary. I said it at the time.
2011-06-15 03:53:58 <gjs278>   exactly
2011-06-15 03:53:59 <jgarzik>   uh huh
2011-06-15 03:54:02 <luke-jr>   jgarzik: he did say it was for 24 hours..
2011-06-15 03:54:11 <jgarzik>   luke-jr: it lasted < 60 minutes
2011-06-15 03:54:15 <luke-jr>   O.o
2011-06-15 03:54:31 <gjs278>   I would trust the cbs interview man to fairly moderate the bitcoin.org forums
2011-06-15 03:54:36 <luke-jr>   well, I think everyone agrees forums shouldn't be on bitcoin.org at least? XD
2011-06-15 03:54:42 <jgarzik>   theymos: will you make me moderator again, and permit me to delete posts encouraging illegal activity?
2011-06-15 03:54:53 <gjs278>   ;;ident jgarzik
2011-06-15 03:54:54 <gribble>   Nick 'jgarzik', with hostmask 'jgarzik!~jgarzik@unaffiliated/jgarzik', is not identified.
2011-06-15 03:54:55 <cacheson>   luke-jr: theymos doesn't, hence the argument
2011-06-15 03:55:11 <theymos>   No. It is the policy of the forum to allow such discussions. Sirius owns the server, so he can change the policy if he's worried about legal action.
2011-06-15 03:55:11 <gjs278>   I'm not convinced this is the real jgarzik, don't mod him yet
2011-06-15 03:55:48 <genewitch>   i know how to tell
2011-06-15 03:56:02 <genewitch>   jgarzik: pushpoold is not updating my hashrate in the database, what up with that
2011-06-15 03:56:19 <jgarzik>   ;;ident
2011-06-15 03:56:19 <gribble>   You are identified as user jgarzik, with GPG key id DA1DC20F2DBF0CA8, and key fingerprint 60B00235B3355D84BF2A4E35DA1DC20F2DBF0CA8.
2011-06-15 03:56:22 <jgarzik>   Now I'm me
2011-06-15 03:56:26 <gjs278>   mod this man
2011-06-15 03:56:39 <luke-jr>   sounds like nothing will get accomplished without sirius-m in the discussion
2011-06-15 03:57:32 <genewitch>   well, i mean there are ways of preventing users from accessing something
2011-06-15 03:57:53 <luke-jr>   genewitch: you're not implying we DDoS the forums I hope? :/
2011-06-15 03:57:58 <genewitch>   no never
2011-06-15 03:58:10 <genewitch>   i meant ask nicely
2011-06-15 03:58:42 <jgarzik>   official website bitcoin.org points to the forums on forums.bitcoin.org.  new users are essentially automatically directed there.
2011-06-15 03:59:01 <theymos>   I'd be fine with removing the link.
2011-06-15 03:59:40 <jgarzik>   it needs to move away from the satoshi's domain
2011-06-15 03:59:58 <genewitch>   jgarzik: well, i mean, a comprimise sounds good for this instant
2011-06-15 04:00:15 <genewitch>   we might see less influx of complete idiots if there's no link on the quote official unquote page
2011-06-15 04:00:19 <luke-jr>   yep, nothing is going to change significant without sirius-m
2011-06-15 04:00:38 <jgarzik>   hooray for centralized control of a decentralized project...
2011-06-15 04:01:32 <genewitch>   jgarzik: there should be an official wiki, with a committe
2011-06-15 04:01:35 <jgarzik>   the forums have changed hostnames before, and it was not a big deal
2011-06-15 04:01:42 <jgarzik>   genewitch: hehe
2011-06-15 04:02:08 <genewitch>   well i mean that's how most FOSS projects are run, commitee, LINUX "penguin pee" TORVALDS excepted, of course.
2011-06-15 04:02:16 <theymos>   Centralization is an effective management technique as long as there are many centralized organizations to compete.
2011-06-15 04:03:01 <cacheson>   theymos: right, so splitting the forums off from bitcoin.org furthers that
2011-06-15 04:03:27 <cacheson>   theymos: makes the forums and the development stuff into two visibly separate organizations
2011-06-15 04:03:46 <jgarzik>   indeed
2011-06-15 04:03:58 <cacheson>   that way you can let people talk about what they want to on the forums without the developers getting (as much) flak about it
2011-06-15 04:04:24 <jgarzik>   being under "bitcoin.org" the domain that satoshi created, and that search engines and press link to, obviously heavily favors "bitcoin.org" over any other domain
2011-06-15 04:04:44 <genewitch>   jgarzik: bitcoin.blogspot.com is a close second though
2011-06-15 04:04:45 <luke-jr>   cacheson: "development staff" is too vague too
2011-06-15 04:05:00 <luke-jr>   bitcoin.org shouldn't be biased to any one project
2011-06-15 04:05:25 <luke-jr>   besides a "default" by popularity
2011-06-15 04:05:28 <cacheson>   luke-jr: I don't see anything terribly wrong with it being associated with the mainline client
2011-06-15 04:05:45 <luke-jr>   cacheson: because there's multiple mainline clients
2011-06-15 04:05:53 <genewitch>   luke-jr: who gets to decide what goes on the main page though? group editing of a website... hey we can patent that and call it something cool
2011-06-15 04:05:56 <genewitch>   like
2011-06-15 04:05:57 <cacheson>   luke-jr: uh... no?
2011-06-15 04:06:00 <genewitch>   wiky
2011-06-15 04:06:14 <genewitch>   yeah wiky, and we can make an encyclopedia
2011-06-15 04:06:41 <luke-jr>   genewitch: popular vote
2011-06-15 04:06:54 <genewitch>   luke-jr: it works so well for prom king
2011-06-15 04:06:57 <cacheson>   this is just like bittorrent, openoffice, etc.
2011-06-15 04:07:02 <luke-jr>   cacheson: no
2011-06-15 04:07:10 <jgarzik>   I'll even purchase the domain (bitcointalk.org?) for 10 years, register w/ privacy enhanced domain registrar, and transfer it to theymos  or whomever wants it


In these logs "TD" is Mike Hearn, none of the others strike me as people posters here probably know under other names.

Also see the Mailing list discussion at the time. (John Smith is Wladimir)

From today's perspective where Bitcoin itself appears to be safe in most of the world and where not much too shocking goes happens on the forums this all might seem like an over-reaction.

But back then it was far from crystal clear that Bitcoin itself was legal in jurisdictions where many of us were, and there was some scarry noises from the US goverment-- every ounce of additional negative attention was an additional threat that people who already felt exposed working on Bitcoin didn't want to deal with.

The forums themselves were a lot more wild and crazy then they are today-- from the infamous incident of one well known party offering to sell nudes of their 16-year-old sister, to other things that at least sounded like outright human trafficking. Some of the crazier stuff was almost certantly fake, but it still showed up and many people weren't sure how real any of it was.

Bitcoin was this crazy new thing and just seemed pregnant with possibilities: Could it really be that underage stripper assisan slaves could be purchased anonymously for a mere few-thousand Bitcoin with the press of a button or is that just some sick fantasy?  Well, for all of us decentetralized digital money was just a fantasy a few years before.  It was impossible to be excited about the potential without being aware that there were also potential downsides.

As usual, Theymos was pretty prescient ... with his remarks about the importance of avoiding any site as being an official anything.

I think it all worked out okay.