Naive question about this forum

[Morbo]

So you are all fans of bitcoin. It is decentralized, and you probably acknowledge that this is one of its main strengths.

Why are you using this forum - a centralized solution - to communicate, and not something decentralized as well?

Just because it was already working when you've got into bitcoin? Any other reasons?

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[Serge]

can you name a decentralized method of communicating?

i can only think of IRC closest to being decentralized, and that is also utilized by many folks

[Bono]

Look at the roots of the word.

A FORUM is just a place people go to talk and be heard. We exchange ideas and information. We are free to walk away at any time, and this forum doesn't record any personal data unless we want it to. It does not have a direct effect on our Bitcoin or our other assets.

It's a meeting place. Not a centralized control center.

[joeroxor]

can you name a decentralized method of communicating?

i can only think of IRC closest to being decentralized, and that is also utilized by many folks

IRC would be the closest thing, I agree. Many people use it to for general communication, support channels, news, trading, you name it!

irc.freenode.net is the popular server

searching the channel list for keywords like bitcoin altcoin etc is a good way to start

[HELP.org]

A FORUM is just a place people go to talk and be heard. We exchange ideas and information. We are free to walk away at any time, and this forum doesn't record any personal data unless we want it to. It does not have a direct effect on our Bitcoin or our other assets.

All the scams and scammers on here have a direct effect on Bitcoin.  There have been many reports to law enforcement about the people involved in running this forum and it gets mentioned in some serious criminal cases.  Many people have lost money who have participated in this forum and who have answered the ads run by the forum administrators.

[Bono]

A FORUM is just a place people go to talk and be heard. We exchange ideas and information. We are free to walk away at any time, and this forum doesn't record any personal data unless we want it to. It does not have a direct effect on our Bitcoin or our other assets.

All the scams and scammers on here have a direct effect on Bitcoin.  There have been many reports to law enforcement about the people involved in running this forum and it gets mentioned in some serious criminal cases.  Many people have lost money who have participated in this forum and who have answered the ads run by the forum administrators.

Every major website that deals with Bitcoin has been the center of controversy at one point. This forum is no different but at the end of the day it's gullible people and bad people who are responsible for the scams and theft. None of it is centralized.

How many defunct trading spots and exchanges can we name? A lot. And most of them were pretty big, relatively speaking... yet here we are in December 2013, and BTC is chugging away at $700+

If any place were truly big enough to act as a centralized node that controls the majority of BTC transactions, we'd be fucked, but I doubt it's gonna happen. After all, China couldn't break it.

[AnonyMint]

A FORUM is just a place people go to talk and be heard. We exchange ideas and information. We are free to walk away at any time, and this forum doesn't record any personal data unless we want it to. It does not have a direct effect on our Bitcoin or our other assets.

All the scams and scammers on here have a direct effect on Bitcoin.  There have been many reports to law enforcement about the people involved in running this forum and it gets mentioned in some serious criminal cases.  Many people have lost money who have participated in this forum and who have answered the ads run by the forum administrators.

Don't let yourself be scammed. How can you blame a stove for burning your hands, since you put your hands there. A stove is for cooking.

Do you really need Big Brother to hold your feeble hand always? Your comment is the antithesis of decentralization.

[beetcoin]

uh, maybe because this forum does not enforce laws.

[HELP.org]

As you can see from the responses there are many people on here who confuse a libertarian view with people who use Libertarian ideas as an excuse to engage in criminal activity.  They also try to rationalize obviously ridiculous behavior.  These irresponsible people damage the value and reputation of Bitcoin but the technical idea is probably good enough to survive these things.   

[Mike Christ]

As you can see from the responses there are many people on here who confuse a libertarian view with people who use Libertarian ideas as an excuse to engage in criminal activity.  They also try to rationalize obviously ridiculous behavior.  These irresponsible people damage the value and reputation of Bitcoin but the technical idea is probably good enough to survive these things.   

Just a heads up: you sound like a broken record, and your ignore button is starting to glow because of it.

[BitChick]

Many people are lurkers who want to remain anonymous.

I am not as concerned as I probably should be.

For the most part the site is quite anonymous though and it is great to post ideas and speculate about what the price is doing and where it is going and it is also very useful in trying to understand why the market is going up or down.

I owe many people on this forum a huge "thank you" for giving great examples of the potential of Bitcoin and it has helped keep me grounded when the price has fluctuated.  I was able to weather the lows and just hold through them all, thanks in part to learning from others on here.  

There are some "veterans" on this site and their knowledge is very valuable!  

[beetcoin]

Many people are lurkers who want to remain anonymous.

I am not as concerned as I probably should be.

For the most part the site is quite anonymous though and it is great to post ideas and speculate about what the price is doing and where it is going and it is also very useful in trying to understand why the market is going up or down.

I owe many people on this forum a huge "thank you" for giving great examples of the potential of Bitcoin and it has helped keep me grounded when the price has fluctuated.  I was able to weather the lows and just hold through them all, thanks in part to learning from others on here.  

There are some "veterans" on this site and their knowledge is very valuable!  

i've known about this site since 2011.. but decided not to post because i was a bit paranoid about the whole idea of bitcoins, and government wanting to lock it down... but i figured it's time to take my pants off and join in on the fun 

[Kyt Dotson]

Bitcoin itself is a decentralized technology for a single purpose (to permit the transaction of BTC.) This forum, however, may not be "decentralized" but it's only one service for communication amid thousands. BitcoinTalk is not the end-all-be-all of communication about Bitcoin. It is a single service amid other forums, reddit, Twitter, Google+, Skype, in person...ad nauseam.

[Morbo]

can you name a decentralized method of communicating?

I have a counterquestion. Did you try to do a few searches before asking this? I had to ask this rhetorical question at the risk of sounding rude, because I don't want the original post to look like having a hidden agenda. BitMessage is decentralized. RetroShare is decentralized. These are just two examples. There are probably other options as well. My point is that the technology is ready. I am trying to understand what made the Bitcoin community to choose the forum option and stick to it over years. I tend to think I'm a conservative person, I'm not eager to jump into new shiny things. I just wonder if I'm the only one asking myself if sticking to an obsolete form of communication is a good choice in the long term.

i can only think of IRC closest to being decentralized, and that is also utilized by many folks

Not really. IRC is client-server. It is possible to bridge multiple servers into a network, that's true, yet IRC is not decentralized. Neither is it very secure by design, but that's completely another question.

[Morbo]

Look at the roots of the word.

A FORUM is just a place people go to talk and be heard. We exchange ideas and information. We are free to walk away at any time, and this forum doesn't record any personal data unless we want it to. It does not have a direct effect on our Bitcoin or our other assets.

It's a meeting place. Not a centralized control center.

I am looking at it from a strictly technical point of view. Forum is a generic name for a specific kind of communication platform. It is centralized, technically. It is hosted on a server. Server goes down - nobody can communicate anymore. Server gets under attack (I think it happened very recently) - everyone is screwed. Server may be hacked - everyone's account credentials get compromised.

[Morbo]

A FORUM is just a place people go to talk and be heard. We exchange ideas and information. We are free to walk away at any time, and this forum doesn't record any personal data unless we want it to. It does not have a direct effect on our Bitcoin or our other assets.

All the scams and scammers on here have a direct effect on Bitcoin.  There have been many reports to law enforcement about the people involved in running this forum and it gets mentioned in some serious criminal cases.  Many people have lost money who have participated in this forum and who have answered the ads run by the forum administrators.

This is a very categoric statement, yet I have to agree that this forum is the "face" of the bitcoin community. Many people who get interested about bitcoin eventually get here.

[Morbo]

Many people are lurkers who want to remain anonymous.

I'm not sure how is this related to my original question. Are you trying to claim that decentralized communication tools are less anonymous? Regardless of this, it would be interesting to hear your own definition of anonymity in this context.

There are some "veterans" on this site and their knowledge is very valuable! 

What exactly a "veteran" is? Someone who has high activity or high trust reputation? Someone who is a long time poster here because he was an early adopter? Someone who is flashing a vanity address?

It is a big community, of course a certain subset of it are nice, knowledgeable and intelligent persons. But that's just statistics.

[coinrevo]

Morbo, very good question indeed. A forum as it has evolved is a descendant of the usenet. It is a public space for topic related discussions. Several primary concepts include:

* threads, with messages by users
* threads structured into a tree (develop, projects, meta, ...)
* all messages are public by URL
* it is administrated by the owner

This forum contains discussions which can be found nowhere else. People can read up the discussion. It is "centralized" by design and that is important. If you think about it Bitcoin is highly centralized in one regard. The blockchain is a public data source. So the words central and decentral are much too crude for good analysis. With current known techniques you need a server to host content. I have been thinking about new models in this regard, but it hasn't been done before. Bitmessage is not public, and not organized in threads (a structured, sensible format with public matches of user : message). In fact there is discussions to ban meta-data from the blockchain. I'm not sure what the likelihood is. You can't host software on a torrent. Torrents are distributed data stores. Incidentally it takes a central initial access point (piratebay). You can't run software in a decentral way yet, although cloud virtual images to some extent do that. But in the end they are still servers owned and controlled by an account holder (SSH, linux user model).

By the way, everything on the internet, all URLs are subject to change. Most historic URL's don't work anymore, The blockchain is the first data store, where there is pretty high certainty it will not be lost.

Actually the history of Bitcoin goes back almost to the start of the (public) internet. The cyperpunks got started in 1992:
http://www.cypherpunks.to/faq/cyphernomicron/chapter3.html#2  at the same time PGP was released (as a book, because it was not allowed to be distributed as software). The idea of Bitcoin is much, much more than almost all people think.

The forum is in parts not a good representation of that. Unfortunately bitcointalk suffers from bitcoins success. Its the same as with reddit and why people flock to hackernews instead. same thing is happening here.

The server hosting is significant in terms of hacks, but also in terms of how it is structured and who has influence. For example the admin could decide to ban shady altcoins. But then there would be a debate what are proper rules for that.

One could do a lot of interesting things if one were to develop a new system from scratch with bitcoin as its core. If anyone wants to work on that let me know. The problem with doing something commercial is that it is not a good representation of an open community. But the forum itself certainly could be vastly improved. One could start with a fork of https://github.com/discourse/discourse  although I personally wouldn't use Rails these days. But the underlying software he is known to be crap and unsecure. I'm not sure why anybody is doing something better. Perhaps for the reasons mentioned - it is mostly uncontrolled and uncommerical. So it's up to us to improve it and see if people think its better.

[AnonyMint]

BitMessage is decentralized. RetroShare is decentralized. These are just two examples. There are probably other options as well. My point is that the technology is ready.

No it is not. Those are not permanent data archives.

A forum as a public blockchain though, would be very interesting. As far as I know, no one has invented it yet.

[coinrevo]

Forum on blockchain might be structured similar to namecoin, yes. Not an easy problem to solve though, and there are better models where to compute stuff. Also there are many more deeper issues to think about, see  http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt  . because just doing a forum "decentralized" is not nearly as interesting as other things which could be done.