[POLL] Should we ban something on the Bitcoin marketplace?

[theGECK]

I know I was surprised when I saw the heroin thread, and reconsidered my involvement with the project. However, I know that cash is used for heroin as well, and I don't stop using cash because of the use of the currency. I do know that it would bother a few of the people I've introduced to bitcoin if they ever wanted to read the forums, as they are strongly against supporting something that allows discussion on illegal topics. The amount of anti-establishment talk on here surprised me as well, but I assume that the early adopters of a crypto-currency would be those who want to be outside the establishment.

Just a thought, the last website I saw which allowed discussion about anything and everything was Anontalk, and that website doesn't seem to be doing very well, and is continuously attacked.

[1714970953]

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[1714970953]

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[Quip]

I know a few people that were interested by the bitcoin stuff and, after visiting this forum, told me that "hey, this is just a project for junkie and anarchist retards that hope to defeat the governement".

So, yes, the current forum has already turned away 2 people I know.

And when I first read the "Heroin thread", I nearly gave up completely for the whole bitcoin thing.

I find this forum definitely not friendly in that regard and I believe that Bitcoin reputation is already suffering because of this.

+1

[carp]

If it won't cause the forum to be shutdown then I see no reason to ban anything. With the exception of childporn. There are some things that people wont tollerate and thats anything to do with childporn.

If that were being discussed in the forum, aka "selling wild pics of kids for btc" sort of thing then thst will bring large groups in attacking not just bitcoin but the forum too. That would make us a major target for politicians, the media and others.

At least until the forum is hosted as a tor hidden service and accessed only through a tor inproxy or someting.

Would it though? While its true that it wouldn't be tolerated by the world at large, how many here would really "tolerate" it. The "girls for btc" got a few sneers and accused of being fraudulent, and talked about as over the line as it was.

Recently, after reading about the whole HBGary debacle, I decided to go check out 4chan. Heard of it many times, but never actually checked out the site before. On there I ran across a thread where someone posted some sick, sick, evidence of the torture of dogs. The response that this ilicited was interesting, people were, trying to figure out who he was.... trying to... do something about it.

Do we really need to ban anything? I would like to think that if such activities come here, the community will act accordingly. The police and media will not need to stumble upon such things themselves, because everyone has lines they don't want to see crossed, and even if not everyone, there will be enough who will point the thugs in the right direction, and look the other way.

Truth be told, just as everyone has lines, not everyones lines are that extreme, I wouldn't be shocked to find that an (admittedly smaller) segment of the community will do it for drugs and adult voluntary prostitution too.

Banning it just means that it goes elsewhere, drives it under ground, I don't see how that is preferable.

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

I know a few people that were interested by the bitcoin stuff and, after visiting this forum, told me that "hey, this is just a project for junkie and anarchist retards that hope to defeat the governement".

So, yes, the current forum has already turned away 2 people I know.

And when I first read the "Heroin thread", I nearly gave up completely for the whole bitcoin thing.

I find this forum definitely not friendly in that regard and I believe that Bitcoin reputation is already suffering because of this.

+1

++20

This is exactly what i was walking about when i argued that allowing of trade of such materials is bad for Bitcoin's publicity. We - anarchist/minarchist/libertarian types don't have any problem with freedom of speech & freedom of trade.
But most of "normal people", when they see something like "heroin store", they just run away and don't look back.

So selling stuff like drugs/arms/other illegals on this forum will be viewed by general population as proof that "Bitcoin was created for evil" or some other bullshit. This makes it extremely easy for governments to delegalise it, and kill mainstream adoption for next few years/decades.

How is possible to fight government while simultaneously putting weapons into his hands ? As i said before, this is a childish strategy (which is no strategy at all actually).

[eMansipater]

Yes, as even a basic standard of professionalism nothing that is not intentionally being made part of the "bitcoin brand" should be allowed on these forums or anything else officially connected with the project.  If people want to use bitcoin for these things they can do it in a back alley somewhere like they do with any other kind of cash.  I know that some of the users here are big libertarian/anonymity etc. fans but there are plenty like me who don't have that as a priority at all and just want to use bitcoin as a much more efficient version of paypal.  To be frank, if the world market for bitcoin is libertarian techies we've probably already saturated it.  Bitcoin adoption on any significant scale will be more to do with people like me--people who want to conduct normal, above-board transactions and build businesses based on the economic model that it enables.  It's perfectly fine for anarchists/libertarians/whatever to appreciate particular aspects of bitcoin, but I think it's quite smallminded to think that any particular community or philosophy, especially outside of the mainstream, is "what bitcoin is about."  Just think about it for a second:  What is cash about?  Who uses it?  Particular forms of cash have advantages and disadvantages from different economic and philosophical positions, but in real life cash is something that people from every aspect of life use for purely non-philosophical reasons.  If the current users of bitcoin can get that into our heads we will be much better positioned to actually make bitcoin successful, which depending on your particular slant might have those particular benefits you are looking for.

eMansipater

[schnak]

While I would love to see the illegal content and scams blocked out completely from the system. However, would something even be possible to accomplish given the anonymous goals and nature of the system?

really I think the best we could do is a community wide blacklisting/boycott of these services. (i.e. remove the adult sites from the Wiki trades listing.) I pick on adult content mostly cause I work at a k/12 school and think theres too much of it in society as a whole.

So we cant ban for technical reasons. Boycotting 'offensive' material becomes a matter of culture which would fall on the side of more restrictive rather than less. I'm not an economic mind nor do i even pretend to know what would actually be required to make a new economic base work (a-la bitcoin) but If what I've gleaned from the boards and other reading is that more trade is good. Be it illegal goods or donating to a major/minor charity the more the currency changes hands the stronger it becomes.

Much as I hate to admin it the gambling/adult/illegal will probably be one of the first broad range adopters to the system as they have been for so may other advances in technology. First microtransactions - hand of poker, webcams - adult chat, etc. now if the community were to collectively take a political PR approach we can change how some of this is perceived.

Would I ban it if I could? yes, but I would also live in a utopian world if the potion were there. its not, I've looked. the really sad thing is that people will probably blame bitcoin for making this possible. Which it didn't, It's just made it a little easier.
if someone wanted to run a drug deal then all they needed was a backpack and a couple of train lockers. anonamity would still be possible just requires people to get up and do it rather than use an existing system.

I'm tired and ranting. I should stop before this turns into something involving the 7 dead-lies.

[kiba]

The controversy is caused by bitcoiners with different goal in mind, not just what they think will be effective/ineffective.

Nonetheless, I think there's a goal of bitcoin we all could believe in:

Destroy and replace fiat money, and facilitate the economy toward human prosperity(material wealth, health, etc). That's it.

I believe this is what Satoshi would have wanted. He thought all those trusting we must do are unnecessary and harmful to our economies. He designed bitcoin to fix the flaw inherent in fiat money.

We should achieve his goal without compromising its very principles. When we get down to it, the government will never and should not have power to dictate the monetary policy of bitcoin by mere decree.

The forum and community here may ban drugs and illegal goods for the pragmatic reason of protecting and growing the bitcoin economy, but we cannot compromise the system that Satoshi laid out for us, nor can we compromise the integrity of the community dedicated to achieving this goal.

Remember, we must make bitcoin prevalent in the world, without compromising its power as a cryptocurrency, if we were to have any chance of changing the world at all.

We don't much care if you don't approve of the software we write. We know that software can't be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down.

[schnak]

The controversy is caused by bitcoiners with different goal in mind, not just what they think will be effective/ineffective.

Nonetheless, I think there's a goal of bitcoin we all could believe in:

Destroy and replace fiat money, and facilitate the economy toward human prosperity(material wealth, health, etc). That's it.

+1 and Amen!

[breandan81]

Bitcoin is a replacement for cash, do what you will with the forum, but the entire point of the thing is to be able to trade it like cash.  No control on what it can be spent on is possible, by design.

[ploum]

The controversy is caused by bitcoiners with different goal in mind, not just what they think will be effective/ineffective.

Nonetheless, I think there's a goal of bitcoin we all could believe in:

Destroy and replace fiat money, and facilitate the economy toward human prosperity(material wealth, health, etc). That's it.

No. I don't have the goal to destroy anything. I only want to have an easy and decentralized way to buy stuffs online. No, we are not all against the system.

On a forum where I posted a link to bitcoin.org, somebody explained to someone else that "After reading the forum, he understands that Bitcoin was made to allow drug selling on the internet". No irony there.

[FreeMoney]

No one here is suggesting we can or should stop trades from happening in the world at large, we're only talking about banning actually offering them on this one forum. I don't think it matters much, but at least make sure to allow a link to the site where we can talk about it

[rebuilder]

Not to repeat myself too much, but I still think the entire trade forum will need to go away sooner or later. Maybe now's the time to figure out a better place for trade announcements?

[marcus_of_augustus]

Bitcoin wasn't designed to bring down the current fiat monetary systems, they are failing under the weight of their own false premises. After they have failed, bitcoin cryptocurrency, or its descendants, will replace the failed centralised, fiat monetary experiments.

Libertarian techies have bought this currency to the world, you can do whatever you like with it, so will they and they have every right to say "what bitcoin is about", they invented it and bought it to life.

As for branding, if it don't work nobody wants to own it. But when skunkworks, everybody wants to drink from the well ... who cares what it smells like.

This is about functionality, confidence and branding are now but a small part and will become less so as the substance of performance trumps the BS.

"Failure is an orphan but success has many parents." - some wise-guy.

[freetx]

Not to repeat myself too much, but I still think the entire trade forum will need to go away sooner or later. Maybe now's the time to figure out a better place for trade announcements?

Agreed. Does the website for Visa - or the Federal Reserve - list every single merchant that uses its currency?

Its understandable in this nascent stage to have a place to announce what you can buy with these new BTC, but really bitcoin.org should be reserved for technical, philosophical, strategy, general discussion.

It would be best to have a separate domain (bitcoinmarket.com or whatever) be the place where merchant wares are pimped (pun intended).

[breandan81]

Perhaps there should be several sites to discuss new merchants.  Maybe a separate site for some of the more controversial subjects available on i2p or tor would be a good idea.  Honestly, trying to market illegal items on here seems like a bad idea for everyone involved, that sort of thing should be done more discreetly.  I just don't want to see some sort of unwritten rules become written ones.  For example I can sell ammo, legally, even online, without a license, but no payment processor will touch it.  So if I wanted to sell ammo I would have to go to a gun show and do it for cash, not because I'm breaking the law but because I'm at the whim of paypal if I do business as a small merchant on the internet.  Bitcoin is designed to be the perfect online currency, and it's a niche it will fill well.  I don't really care what's allowed on the forum, but don't see bitcoin as a brand of payment processing please, it is a peer to peer virtual commodity, nothing more nothing less.  Trying to modify what people do with bitcoin will only hurt it's acceptance.

[ribuck]

This forum is growing very quickly and soon will be too big for one person to follow. It's inevitable that the rapid growth will spawn other forums, and each will develop its own character.

Because this forum is the main one, the one linked from bitcoin.org, it will be the first port of call for many mainstream bitstream users. It won't be long until we have the AOL crowd here, and the Fox News crowd, the Oprah crowd, and all the other mainstream crowds.

With this change in demographic, it's natural that the marginalized elements of the bitcoin economy will drift off to other forums, for their own interests rather than because they are pushed out.

For now, I think every aspect of the bitcoin economy should be welcomed here. Very soon, each subculture will create or find its own niche anyway, so the "problem" is self-correcting.

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

With this change in demographic, it's natural that the marginalized elements of the bitcoin economy will drift off to other forums, for their own interests rather than because they are pushed out.
For now, I think every aspect of the bitcoin economy should be welcomed here. Very soon, each subculture will create or find its own niche anyway, so the "problem" is self-correcting.

Well i hope you're right since we already have a Marijuana sale thread in the "Market".
It won't take long before new threads will start appearing, and then some "authorities" will start bugging our asses about it.

Not to repeat myself too much, but I still think the entire trade forum will need to go away sooner or later. Maybe now's the time to figure out a better place for trade announcements?

Agreed. I also think this may happen.

[eMansipater]

This forum is growing very quickly and soon will be too big for one person to follow. It's inevitable that the rapid growth will spawn other forums, and each will develop its own character.

Because this forum is the main one, the one linked from bitcoin.org, it will be the first port of call for many mainstream bitstream users. It won't be long until we have the AOL crowd here, and the Fox News crowd, the Oprah crowd, and all the other mainstream crowds.

With this change in demographic, it's natural that the marginalized elements of the bitcoin economy will drift off to other forums, for their own interests rather than because they are pushed out.

For now, I think every aspect of the bitcoin economy should be welcomed here. Very soon, each subculture will create or find its own niche anyway, so the "problem" is self-correcting.

I would agree, with one difference--rather than leave this to some future anonymous person, consider the following.

Either there are people present here who think it is important to have a place to offer "questionable" goods/services for sale or there are not.  If there are, now is a good time for them to create some sort of Bitcoin Alt forum somewhere else due to ribuck's second paragraph above, and we can get any such activity moved over there.  If there are not, then we can probably agree it is time to intentionally narrow this forum away from illegal goods and other things that you can be sure are already stopping some people from using bitcoin. 

I'm not going to pull any punches in stating my opinion here:  these forums are linked directly from bitcoin.org, and anyone who doesn't think branding and image don't matter has never tried to launch anything of popular scale on the internet.  Bitcoin's underlying technology has already been proven sound--the hard work is now popularizing and implementing it among the masses.  We are in that stage already.  The leap from early adopters/technophiles to the mainstream is no accident--it takes a lot of hard work and requires appropriate and timely decisions on matters of precisely this kind.  I think anyone with a question in their minds needs to take a good look at the comments on Slashdot, etc--bitcoin does have an image problem right now, and it's causing people who should be the biggest bitcoin fans in the world to dismiss or even attack it.  Not what we need.  A 5 million dollar value base is a good start, but we are going to need a lot of enthusiastic people to take this all to the next level.  Personally I'm investing a lot of time, interpersonal trust, and mindshare into growing the bitcoin economy.  To me the idea of having that thrown away just so that some faceless person can sell drugs on the official forums is kind of ridiculous.  The difference between bitcoin's success and failure is a lot of hard work, and I'm willing to do my fair share of it.  That's something a lot more valuable to the future of bitcoin than merely being able to brag that these forums don't have any rules.

sincerely,
eMansipater

[genjix]

seriously if bitcoin is destined to go mainstream then it's bound to happen regardless of 'image'. quite simply because it's so unique and there's nothing else like it.

i say allow the freedom of expression. it's the best way to develop ideas to strengthen bitcoin. you might not see the value in offering drugs for bitcoin, but neither did people in the past at other outlandish ideas.

nothing has to be done. just sit back, ride the wave and work like beavers. the types of people easily put off by these things aren't that valuable anyway (rats jumping ship at first sign of trouble).

[ribuck]

It won't take long before ... some "authorities" will start bugging our asses about it.

I think it's likely that the authorities will bug people's asses much harder about the monetary aspects of bitcoin than the illicit substances aspect.