Madhatter, you are making this seriously annoying!! I'm not ranting--I'm just tired of this thing dragging out so long here. I have bent over backwards here to find your mistake, and to make peace. This is win-win, bro! Don't make me put this in my signature  . Just bite the bullet and admit you got a little too busy with everything and missed a detail--I don't think anyone here cares about bruised egos. Are you telling me that in three months neither of these letters have arrived? Because they haven't ended up back here. I have better things to do right now than explain to my bride-to-be why I still don't have the 214.45 bitcoins OR the missing-in-transit $200 OR even the 21.44 in bitcoin deposits you keep saying you'll return. And don't give me that "I don't have an address to send them to" bit either, because my address is right there on those pages on your server that I've linked to several times now. Seriously man [playful bulldog face]. The whole reason people who don't send money are scamming you is that the agreement is made at time of deposit. You can't insert deadlines after the fact without warning, and me re-sending MIA cash is more than fair since I'm taking the hit. You've got to be filthy wealth at this point--just bite the bullet and do the right thing before rising prices make it feel even harder. I am not going away. |
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Some of you may have noticed I've been scarce around these parts for the past 7 days, and that despite a couple new donations to the "New to BitCoin" thread I haven't done any more writing for it, updated bitSyndicated, been drumming up support for the BitCoin Q&A site, moved things any further on the BitCoin Wikipedia translation bounties, pushed to increase usability on the forums, or generally done any of the things that I'm normally seen puttering about on here. The reason for this is very simple--on May 28th (last Saturday) the most beautiful woman in the world agreed to marry me! In order to fit the wedding in before some family members leave the country we will be getting married on June 19th (two weeks from tomorrow). To say it's been the busiest week of my life would be the understatement of the century. So why isn't this in Off-topic? Well, despite all the joking about this community being so male-heavy my fiance is (if possible) even a bigger fan of BitCoin than I am. So I suspect that our wedding, with similar echoes to PLATO's BitCoin road trip, is going to be essentially the first "BitCoin Wedding": When we send out invitations today, we will be including a bitcoin address alongside the gift list as our preferred financial favour. Bitcoins we receive are not going to be sold for fiat currency. Instead they will either be held for our future together, invested as bitcoins within the bitcoin economy by buying goods or services denominated in bitcoins, or donated to worthy BitCoin causes. Given the number of friends and relatives we have who are now bitwealthy after buying on my advice, this is more practical for us than it would be for most couples at such an early stage of BitCoin adoption. Also, our friends and relatives are spread out all over the world so sending money by other means is difficult at best. The bitcoin economy isn't quite broad enough yet for all the little things (decorations, etc.) to be bought in bitcoins, but a significant part of the income that pays for them will have come from bitcoin earnings (now the majority of my income for several months running). Our sound technician has expressed interest in being paid by bitcoin, and if we receive enough we hope to pay our photographer partly in bitcoin as well. Even the minister officiating our wedding (who holds more bitcoins than I do!) would likely accept his honorarium in bitcoins. We are still working out the details, but my fiance and I want to try and stream the wedding (for which a videographer would be paid in bitcoins) and/or record it to upload for our friends and family around the globe. If we get it all figured out, we might be able to acknowledge bitcoin donations as they come in live during our special day. This is the digital age and this is what a wedding looks like. BitCoin is at home here. There's been some joking around in the community about kitty activism (using BitCoin for emotionally unassailable things in order to protect it), but I think the more serious issue this idea brings to mind for me is that if bitcoins don't have uses in the everyday world where people live, they're going to at best be relegated to the dark alleyways of Silk Road and Tor. Getting married is a part of my real life, and I want to use BitCoin to make something possible that wouldn't be possible without it. It's as simple as that. Thank you all for understanding that I might not be as active around here until after my wedding and honeymoon, especially Meni/Holy-Fire. After your verbal and financial support I wanted to pump out one or two more threads right away but now those probably won't happen until the end of June. Just know I didn't forget about you  . Here's to a beautiful technological future for my kids to grow up in! |
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While we're at it:  |
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Just as a heads up, showing even 5 or 6 digits of an address is sufficient to find it in the blockchain if it has been used. All you have to do is search them at block explorer. |
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BEWARE
Relax, JackRabbit. @xerces the reason many people are hesitant to do trades with newcomers is that the demand for bitcoins has dredged up a massive number of scammers, and some people have been burned pretty bad. Here are ways to improve your trustability: First, use as many existing methods and connections as possible to establish who you are. Do you work at a respectable company, know someone who's already trusted in the BitCoin community, etc? That will help a lot. Second, offer to conduct the trade through ClearCoin, which is an escrow service that will hold the bitcoins until the received payment has been verified. If you are wanting to use a payment method that has a long chargeback period, such as PayPal (chargebacks for up to 90 days), you will unfortunately have to wait that long to receive your bitcoins. Alternatively, be willing to use some sort of payment method that isn't as vulnerable to chargebacks. Once you have conducted a few trades and established yourself as a trustworthy person, you will find it much easier to do trades. The community is pretty good--they're just trying not to get scammed. Hope this helped! |
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I don't think you realise how discredited anything with a slick PR "official" look to it has become after the rip-offs perpetrated from on high for so long. Sure make a "Business" section for the "high-rollers" or whoever you think it is that is offended by the bitcoin rabble but don't expect the vast majority of the people that are using bitcoin now to give a damn what you are saying in there ....
Yeah, like how everyone has stopped using Tor because their homepage looks like this:  It's too bad such a useful tool has become so discredited. |
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Excellent job on this one, all! Next goal--simple tooltips on startup that explain what "xxxx blocks" means in the lower right as the blockchain is downloaded. Can't tell you how many new users are a) confused about what's happening and b)think they're mining these blocks!
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Postal strikes are perfectly legal here, however it works out.
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No, it's from the karma mod. It was always listed on profiles.
When the karma mod was on I specifically noted that I had both a karma and the same old "Respect:0" displayed on my profile. It was a surprise to me since I would have thought they would be the same thing too. But maybe the karma mod we used added a new one or something? |
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Ahh, but then who would you hop to?
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Pools these days are designed to punish pool hopping, so it can't be done profitably. This topic is only useful for people starting new pools--not sure it makes sense to have it in a newbies guide.
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Hi guys At first glance this may seem a topic that has been discussed ad nauseum, but bear with me. I am a financial journalist and recently learned of BitCoin. I was surprised that I hadn't come across it before as I have been a Linux user for many years and talk of BitCoin is rife on user boards - which then made me realise how little community engagement I've been doing… Having now done some research on the currency I am working on a story about it for a leading financial publication I write for. I thought it would be best if I wrote the article from the perspective of someone who is actively trading in BitCoin. The problem is that it is impossible to get going. Mining coins now seems to be a waste of time unless you have your own data-centre. I live in a country where sending cash or checks (cheques) to the USA would be impossible or more difficult than it would be worth. Services that used to accept PayPal for BitCoin have shut down and the community of traders online won't sell currency to anyone who isn't in their circle of trust - and getting into that increasingly closed circle is difficult if PayPal is all you have to offer. The only viable option seems to be meeting someone in person and paying them cash, but in my country there are very few traders and no one in my city. So my question is - how should I get started? I have no goods or services to sell for BitCoin, no way to buy BitCoin except PayPal - and I fully understand and agree with the community's reasons for not wanting to use PayPal. I also do not own my own data centre to mine with  Any suggestions would be welcome. But for an "open" currency system, this is all very closed at the moment… If you're a journalist for a respected entity and can verify through work contact info, I could probably do some trades for you using clearcoin. What payment method would you be able to use? |
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Actually I was curious about this: respect seems to be something different from the "karma" that was briefly experimented with, since they were briefly both listed. Is that from this mod? If so, it seems to address a lot of the concerns that were raised during the karma experiment, by allowing: -vote on posts, not just users -disabling of negative votes -list to see who voted on a post and how -disabling of voting per board etc. |
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I support eMansipater. Let's face it this forum is as official for bitcoin as it gets and perception matters. A lot of juvenile flames does not help it. If it comes to that I would prefer politics and flames moving to another forum. +1 As a reasonable compromise though we really could coexist. eMancipater, you are the damn moderator, go and expand list of subforums and set up some simple, subforum specific rules. Problem solved.
I realise not everyone knows this, but moderators don't have the ability to create new boards/subforums. That's reserved for admins. |
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If we're going to use bitcoin.org marketplace as a hub of commerce, let act like it is a hub of commerce.
Simple rules:
1. Don't hijack other people's threads for your opinions, especially when they're trying to conduct business transaction or access trustworthiness.
2. Offtopic chatters will simply be moved to split off to some place else.
I think they're already in place anyhow, but I don't moderate the marketplace forum for thread hijacking much.
Yep, I'm with you on that. And just a very brief "business etiquette expected" label on the board subtitle would be fair enough notice to all. |
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"Business etiquette" as a topic doesn't really make sense taxonomically. But on most forums you have a chance to see what you're getting into before clicking. Heck, even 4chan keeps /b/ separate from everything else. Is there a good reason that we can't simply designate some of the main boards as business etiquette and then create enough "enter at your own risk" boards that people can talk about whatever they want? Lots of the main boards are getting overloaded by pure quantity of posting anyways, so this would be a helpful way of enabling people to both find things and post more effectively. I think a strictly business board might be a good idea, but I'm not convinced that Project Development and Marketplace boards are inadequate. From what I've seen in my brief experience is that they are quite active and productive. But I am not exactly sure what you are trying to accomplish. Just trying to improve the signal to noise ratio, and give people a chance to discover bitcoin without having to drink from the firehose of the untempered internets. I would suggest adding a board for specifically for dissent or disagreement on bitcoins, where there are stricter rules to keep conversation productive and avoid possible flame wars. It seems a lot of people have strong emotional ties defending or attacking bitcoins, and understandably so.
This might be a good idea if implemented very carefully. For now it'd be better to make a politics subforum, IMHO, like how there's one for economics.
The problem is that "Bitcoin Discussion" is too vague so it's constantly being flooded with stuff that's barely on-topic, like the current sovereign citizens thread. There needs to be an area for stuff that doesn't obviously fit, or for people to ask newbie questions. Stuff that's political in nature could just be moved. Spam (like the citizens thread) should just be deleted.
Politics/philosophy is definitely a big enough thing to warrant its own no-holds-barred zone. eMansipater, you are a mod so if you think something is off-topic why not just move it or lock it?
If something is obviously so according to community consensus, I do. But the job of a moderator is to hold the community to its own standards rather than just impose mine instead, which is why something like this has to be a discussion rather than just a skew in my own practice of moderation. If you were referring to the citizens thread I am just giving people a chance to see it before I move it with fair warning, since that's why PLATO bumped it. ...If we could keep "business etiquette" boards public and simply make other boards require log-in it would help prevent that sort of thing.
I vote a plain fat no. By the way, that was just me thinking out loud about the technical side of things. I've removed it since that's not the gist of what I'm getting at here. |
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Why is it so unacceptable just to designate a specific portion of the board "business etiquette"? Is that really some sort of assault on personal freedom? Create a competing forum. bitcoin.org should not be considered any more official than weusecoins.com or any other site.
In theory, I agree with you. In practice, without big bold letters proclaiming that on the front page, no reasonable person will come to that conclusion. And in any case, de facto official is sufficient for the point I'm trying to make. This. The main point of Bitcoin is its decentralization. The technology is public. It's not Gave Andresen's or anybody elses. We don't totally reflect its use and direction. Every individual does whether he be on the forum or outside of it.
Which is why I, as an individual, am making a suggestion to a community of individuals who have a larger impact on the image of BitCoin than any other identifiable group that we voluntarily self-organise a little to our mutual advantage. |
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Anyone who's serious about improving the image of the forums, join in here. |
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