theymosisms - A collection of posts for reference

[Steamtyme]

So a few months back I began to collect posts made by theymos that did a few things. They either clarified misinformation or provided an expanded explanation of the forum mechanics. It started as a curiosity as I would see members pull these quotes out all the time, and would follow the quote and dig a little further. What I found was that a lot of theymos's [Ann] threads buried some insightful information due to them being open topics for discussion and not a locked and updated resource. I would like to see both run parallel and the information threads maintained by Mods or Admin.

In lieu of that I'll post this topic. I reviewed theymos's post history back to when I started out on the Forum August 2017. Only took 44 pages of reviewing at the time. I might have missed something or left things out, feel free to make suggestions or add your own quotes in replies.  In some posts I removed the quoted reply, to try and shorten the post length. I also trimmed a couple quotes where I was only interested in a small part. I recommend people follow the quote back to the context and discussion if you find it interesting.

Link to Post 2 containing DT - Feedback - Merit

Forum Structure/Procedures

Bitcoin.org:
 - Cobra has ultimate control over the domain name. I have access to the domain name settings.
 - Cobra runs the server.
 - Will Binns holds the BTC.

Bitcointalk.org:
 - Cobra has ultimate control over the domain name. I have access to the domain name settings.
 - I run the server. Cobra has no access to the database or server.
 - The BTC is held by myself and the treasurers. Cobra has no access.

I am not Cobra. What would even be the point of that?

It's surprising how well-documented history can become totally forgotten... Satoshi created the forum on Nov 22, 2009, and was head administrator until almost 2011. Then Sirius was head administrator until 2012, which is when I took over.

Cobra also owns the bitcointalk.org domain name. I consider the forum to be basically owned by or at least dedicated to the Bitcoin community, though; I don't call anyone an owner of the forum.

That wiki article is kind of terrible...

I'll get right on that, just as soon as hell freezes over.

I won't make a habit of trimming these quotes but moving parts have made most of it irrelevant. Retention/Privacy info

Your mental model should always be that the forum logs everything, especially since it is behind Cloudflare, which is almost certainly an NSA-backed operation. But here is some more detail. Currently there are four classes of IP logs:
~snip~

This isn't a good example of me being a "rebel", since there's ~no legal risk in refusing to help police who don't have a court order, and there's even less risk when they're not even trying to enforce a law which exists in the forum's jurisdiction. Anyone in the US who would help foreign police with a Bitcoin ban is seriously misguided, at the very least.

Evil IP explained- I found it interesting and never really new how it worked.

I did this back in 2015, but I wanted to update it. I used exactly the same mapping code as last time.

When someone is banned, their IP and some of their neighboring IPs receive evil points. Here I've created a map of the IPv4 Internet according to evil points. Currently, IPv6 is mapped into the 240.0.0/4 range, which is the large square taking up the top-right sixteenth of the chart. (I'm not sure yet whether IPv6 is actually disproportionately evil, or if I'm just cramming too many people into that address-space. Probably the latter is at least something of a factor, since 9% of traffic is IPv6 but 6% of this address-space is IPv6.)

Here's the image (zoom in):
https://bitcointalk.org/banmap201805.png

For comparison, here's the one from 2015:
https://bitcointalk.org/banmap201510.png

Each pixel is a /24 address block (ie. each pixel represents 256 IP addresses). The colors are:
█ Zero or nearly zero evil
█ A small amount of evil
█ More
█ More
█ At this point you actually have to pay if you register an account in this block
█ More
█ More
█ More
█ Pretty high
█ A ton of evil, more than anyone is likely to pay

This is per block, so a single IP address could have an evil score requiring payment while its block still shows up as black here. A colored pixel indicates the evil score of a typical IP in that block.

Addresses are laid out in the standard way. So you can for example cross-reference with these maps: https://ant.isi.edu/address/

A /24 should almost never uniquely identify someone, but to be safe I randomly added, removed, and modified some of this data for plausible deniability.

Bans

He has several accounts all banned for ban evasion. It seems that the underlying offense which caused him to initially get into trouble (and often the thing which causes his alts to get noticed) is excessive multi-posting. But when he was warned and/or temporarily banned for this minor thing, he kept evading his bans. This forum cannot operate unless its few rules are followed, so ignoring the warnings and temporary bans that you receive and continuing to do the same stuff is unacceptable. People who do so are not welcome here.

His bans will not automatically expire, and any future alts we see from him will be permabanned. I may manually reconsider his ban if he promises to actually try not to break forum rules. The rules are not meant to silence anyone, but to keep the forum usable and fair. When someone multi-posts excessively, it monopolizes a thread in a way which harms everyone else's ability to communicate. Based on his posts in this thread, I think that he will just continue to break rules if unbanned, so I will not unban him at this time.

bitcointalk.org is not a normal for-profit company. Even if banning iamnotback somehow stopped all future ad revenue, he would still be banned, since his rule-breaking is disrupting the forum's mission of hosting free discussion of Bitcoin and related topics. (As explained above, "free discussion" is not "unmoderated discussion".) Similarly, I would welcome effective competition from decentralized forums, and I would be thrilled to be able to shut down bitcointalk.org in favor of a better-in-all-ways decentralized alternative. But although decentralized forums have existed for a long time (eg. Freenet's FMS is almost exactly what iamnotback keeps describing, and has existed since before Bitcoin), they have unfortunately not been widely used since the era of the semi-decentralized Usenet system, mainly due to vastly inferior usability.

Apparently my offense was by being highly expert in my technological, economics, sociology, and game theory analysis while I performed that analysis on various shitcoins thus plausibly offending some people who may have bought off one or more moderators behind the curtain.

LOL

It must be that other big-blockers like HostFat (moderator), franky1, jonald_fyookball, etc. have no problems here just because their arguments are ineffective. But faced with your incredible expertise, we had no choice but to ban you.

Look, you're banned because you've been fundamentally unwilling to follow any forum rules. This is a centralized forum, and if you want to post here, then you have to be willing to swallow your pride a bit, conform to forum rules, and take mods seriously when they give you warnings. If you're going to ignore mods, ignore rules, generally make a nuisance of yourself, and constantly escalate when called out, then you're simply not welcome on this centralized forum: go away and stop trying to sneak back.

As I mentioned before, I am willing to reconsider your ban if you promise to follow the same rules as everyone else and try to avoid getting banned, rather than having the attitude of "you can't ban me".

-

In general, I'm all for being lenient. There are users who have been temp banned many times but still haven't been permabanned because their contributions outweigh their misbehavior. I actively disbelieve in the idea of a "rule of law" where hard rules exist and are strictly applied across the board as if we're all robots. Every case should be considered individually in the context of the forum's mission.

Plagiarism is what gets people permabanned, not just copying. Plagiarism is copying with the intent of passing the work off as your own. In essentially all cases, plagiarism deserves a permaban because it usually proves definitively that the person is here for the wrong reasons: to fill up space in order to get paid, not to actually discuss or contribute. If someone was able to convince us that they were plagiarizing just to eg. impress people rather than to fill up space, then a lesser ban of a few months might instead be warranted. But this has never happened AFAICR. (Arguments based on plausible deniability aren't going to work; we don't need to prove that you had the motive we see in your actions.)

If you treat posting as a job, a chore, then you must live in fear, since the forum is not made for you. In this case, you need to blend in as someone who actually cares, but plagiarism will immediately out you, and producing a mountain of useless posts will also eventually be noticed, if more slowly. If you do actually care, then this will be obvious in your posts (and probably your merit score), and you will have nothing to fear from moderators; even allegations of plagiarism will be doubted when seen in the context of your other posts.

in extreme cases could be copyright theft?

Plagiarism is almost always a copyright violation which could conceivably get the poster in a lot of trouble, but it's not a bigger legal issue for the forum than anything else. (Using the forum to violate copyright is never allowed, though.)

when copying and pasting from the net can it lower google rankings? and internal copy and past could do the same thing?

That's not a particular concern of mine.

even memes may soon constitute copyright theft

Only in the EUSSR.

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There's been no policy change. redsn0w wasn't permanently banned due to several factors which made me think that permabanning him would be a net negative for the forum. Nobody is banned strictly because of "the rules"; it's always handled case-by-case, but almost always, plagiarists deserve to be permabanned.

If you think that a ban should be ended, make your case in a new topic from a "good for the forum as a whole" perspective.

-

What happened yesterday was that Marina Uni renamed the topic to something English, moved it to an English board, and then reported it. A moderator in that board, not being aware of any of this context, then trashed it for being off-topic.

I restored it and temporarily banned Marina Uni for moving the topic to where it would be off-topic. OPs do not own the replies to their topics, and unless it is self-moderated, they have no right to have the replies deleted.

Communication

~snip~
How I handle PMs:

 - I try to at least skim all PMs. Rarely I might misplace some, but usually not.
 - If I feel ready to immediately resolve your PM, and I feel that it is a reasonable request worth my time, then I do it. Often this is replying to questions or doing simple tasks, but sometimes I'll have already been working on / thinking about it for days/weeks/months and your PM will get me to devote a few hours to finally resolving the thing right then and there. If even newbies ask questions which I consider reasonable, I usually answer!
 - If I am not ready to act on your thing, often due to uncertainty or lack of immediate time, then your issue enters my "leaky queue". Unfortunately, a lot of these things never end up getting done. (But I do try to get to the most important ones.)


You have to do a lot more than disagree with me to get me to dislike you. And even if eg. MemoryDealers came to me with some reasonable issue with his usage of the forum, I'd handle it like I would for anyone else.

It says "Administrator" under my name, not "President". Anyone is free to PM/email me.

-

You seem to have mistaken me for some sort of politician. If anyone interprets anything I say/do as "I'm theymos so I'm right," then they have totally misunderstood me. I'm very interested in grin on a technical level (not so much for investment), and I didn't see any harm in supporting it, so I spent a few hours adding it to the forum. I'm not trying to make any grand statement here. If grin ends up failing completely, then that will not be too surprising.

Occasionally in other cases I might have an attitude of, "I'm doing it this way because I'm convinced that I'm right. If I'm wrong, show me." If you disagree with my view that all but a few altcoins are based 95-100% on marketing, with only very half-baked actual features/ideas, then that's fine; I won't stop you. Use one or more of those altcoins to build interesting things, and I will be happy to see the ecosystem usefully expand in surprising ways.

Moderation

I'm surprised that some veteran members don't know that the forum was founded by Satoshi.

Maybe he wouldn't want to post here nowadays, since the signal-to-noise ratio is too low. But he also wouldn't have liked posting on a forum with oppressive moderation, which would be necessary to make the forum something like how it was in the early days. I think that Satoshi just wouldn't have liked using any large forum.

Whether Satoshi would agree with current forum policies is another matter. You can agree that a policy is correct without necessarily liking the end result. The existing forum policies are pretty natural extensions of the policies under the administration of Satoshi and Sirius, intended to maximize freedom while still keeping the forum usable. Though if he disagreed, he'd probably say that there is too much freedom and not enough usability.

And while it may be interesting to speculate, Satoshi's approval is not required. You should do what is correct, as far as you can tell, not what you think some person (who is really just an abstract idea to most people rather than a real person) would want you to do.

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It wasn't deleted by -ck.

Nobody is out to get you. The posts looked in isolation like no-content "good project"-type garbage. Many moderators scan all posts as they come in, not looking closely at which threads they belong to. I agree that those posts were sufficiently on-topic when taken in context, especially when posted by non-newbies, and should not have been deleted. Their authors reposted them immediately, so get over it.

-

I restored the four deleted topics, but since they were all very similar, I locked all but one of them.

Except for a few special cases, it should not be policy for subjects to be confined to megathreads. It's OK for there to be overlap between multiple active threads. If a board seems to become monopolized by similar-looking topics, then some lockings or perhaps deletions might be warranted, but Hardware is low-volume.

A little treat in the middle I stumbled upon theymos's origin story - Pretty Epic

How did you came to know about Bitcoin first ?

I saw someone mention it on 4chan. They were complaining about the long block download time.

[Steamtyme]

Default Trust

New page with info on the DT1 live "voting": https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;dtview

But probably far less who will actually update their lists. Having said that, 10 people with 10 merits (and 1 with 100) trusting you is not a particularly high bar to be set. I would worry about potential scammers either buying or trading merits their way on to DT.

If I'm not mistaken, 200 sMerit is enough to create 10 DT1 members: Send 20 Merit to 10 accounts, send 10 times 10 Merit to the last account, and give all of them this Custom trust list:

All of the "DT1s" would also have to be of Member rank, which isn't trivial.

Anyway, there are many conceivable ways to abuse the system, but if it happens, you can just shoot me a PM and I'll fix it, probably in less than 24 hours. To do it in a way that's non-obvious, where I wouldn't blacklist the accounts, would require tons of time and sMerit, and is unlikely. I'm inclined to let the current criteria go for a while and see if "unknowns" actually start habitually getting into it, in which case changes would be needed.

Anyone knows if this counts as an -1 score on everybody on DT list if you are on DT1?

It doesn't. The algorithm would never work that way.

-

Am I understanding the 'random subset of 100 users' statement correctly?... that we will ultimately end up with a DT1 list of 100, before exclusions, when more people fall into the criteria?

Once there's more than 100 users who would be selected to DT1, a random subset of those eligible will be selected each month. Or that's my current thinking, at least.

This will help prevent people from being unfairly attacked by even a majority of DT1, since some month you might lose the dice roll and find yourself in the minority for a while. As I mentioned in the OP, it creates more of a credible threat of retaliation, which I believe will have a moderating effect overall.

It's a good thing that there are way more DT members. This incentivizes users to properly develop their own trust list rather than stumbling on a path of lunacy as we have scores of users sloshing about the feedback sewers. Beyond that, the value of DT has been diluted immensely and thus reliance upon it as a proper vector for trust isn't the most brilliant idea.

Yes, that's my intention. Once someone thinks, "DT is basically OK, but it's a bit chaotic, and every now and then I see something that I disagree with," then they've graduated from trust-newbie and are ready to build their own list. The old system was too safe/static/universal/untouchable.

(But I don't want DT to be absolute garbage, either, since trust-newbies need some guidance.)

-

So if a scammer made it onto default trust (it is inevitable in a decentralized system rife with scammers), would excluding everyone that included that scammer remove the scammer from default trust?

If you ignore the "DT1 voting":
 - ~ing everyone who trusts user X without ~ing X himself often won't result in X being excluded from trust networks.
 - ~ing X himself without ~ing anyone who trusts X might result in X being excluded from trust networks.
 - ~ing X himself and everyone who trusts him might result in X being excluded from trust networks, but to the exact same degree as the above option. It doesn't function as some sort of "super-exclusion".

If you take DT1 voting into account, then there's one exception: if you're on DT1 and your exclusion causes someone to drop off of DT1, then this could help you in your goal.

Feedback

I do not view it as appropriate for trust ratings to relate primarily to non-trust matters. By giving someone negative trust, you're basically attaching a note to all of their posts telling people "warning: do not trade with this person!". If we can get DT working well enough, in the future I'd like to prevent guests from even viewing topics by negative-trust users in trust-enabled sections, so you have to ask yourself whether your negative trust would warrant this sort of significant effect.

In particular, in my view:
 - Giving negative trust for being an annoying poster is inappropriate, since this has nothing to do with their trustworthiness. If they're disrupting discussion or never adding anything, then that's something for moderators to deal with, and you should report their posts and/or complain in Meta about it.
 - Giving negative trust for merit trading and deceptive alt-account use may be appropriate, but you should use a light touch so that people don't feel paranoid.
 - You should be willing to forgive past mistakes if the person seems unlikely to do it again.
 - It is absolutely not appropriate to give someone negative trust because you disagree with them. I'm disappointed in the reaction to this post. Although H8bussesNbicycles is perhaps not particularly trustworthy for other reasons, the reasons many people gave for neg-trusting him are inappropriate. You can argue that what he's advocating is bad on a utilitarian level, but he would disagree, and his advocacy of a certain Trust philosophy doesn't by itself mean that he's an untrustworthy person. DT selection is meant to be affected by user lists, and it is totally legitimate to try to honestly convince other (real) people to use a list more in-line with your views.
 
I'm not going to blacklist people from DT selection due to not following my views, since a big point of this new system is to get me less involved, but if a culture somewhat compatible with my views does not eventually develop, then I will consider this more freeform DT selection to be a failure, and I'll probably get rid of it in favor of enforcing custom trust lists.

~snip~

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However if he tried to actually "game" the system to his advantage (not saying he did) should THAT be tagged?

With gaming the system I mean influencing DT list for his own sake or agenda and not for legitimate reasons. See Thule et al.

If the "gaming" takes the form of strategically sending a lot of merit, creating sockuppets, and stuff like that, then no. That sort of gaming might get me to blacklist people, in fact. But if it looks more like politics, then that's OK, and that's what H8bussesNbicycles's thread looks like to me.

-

Is stingers still a merit source?

Not anymore. That's clear abuse, awarding merit for political reasons rather than any idea of quality. Only because he was a source, I effectively undid those merit sends. If he had not been a merit source, I still would've blacklisted anyone who got into DT1 through that type of shenanigans.

I hadn't read into the thread deeply enough to see that stuff. Those are better arguments against the trustworthiness of H8bussesNbicycles & co., but note that the current negative-trust-ratings were sent long before that. Before February, the thread looks like politics to me.

I'm wondering whether you specifically disapprove of account dealers being tagged--not necessarily your opinion on the matter, but whether you'd consider that an inappropriate use of the trust system.

Since some people view account sales as fundamentally untrustworthy, I think it's an appropriate use.

I have no problem with your (theymos) conclusion that "H8bussesNbicycles's thread looks like [politics] to me", but isn't there a bit of a problem with the self-moderation aspect of certain kinds of threads, especially when dealing with seemingly meta issues?  

For example, I had 6 posts deleted from that thread so of course, now I don't even attempt to participate or pay attention to postings in that particular thread, since I could not even contribute if I wanted to, except if I were to exclude Lauda from my trust list, then they might allow my posts, and I thought that my posts were innocuous, even though obviously the contents of my posts likely distracted from the message that they want to promote in that thread and spread through the forum if they are able, inaccurate as some other members might find such thread messages to be.

I don't find it unreasonable to have a restrictive selfmod thread. You can guess from the banner & deletion stats that it's going to be a restrictive, single-viewpoint thread. You could always start another topic.

That said, using selfmod topics in a deceptive way can be an appropriate reason for negative trust.

-

The majority of ratings seem to be warning people about red flags, not punishing provable scams. IMO this isn't a bad thing, since once someone has scammed, it's kind of too late.

What do you think about splitting the scam rating, with a "warning" rating for scammed previously OR you strongly believe that they will scam in the future, and a "scammer" rating for scammed previously AND you strongly believe that they will scam in the future? And then if you only have warning ratings, the indication displayed next to posts will be softer.
I think that you and I have a fundamental disagreement on this stuff, though:

Predictability and guidelines are often good. I wrote some Trust guidelines recently, and I may write more. But I don't believe in having a set of hard rules which is to be applied to all cases. Whenever an argument starts looking like it was written by a lawyer, or relying overmuch on precedent, you've stopped thinking about the real case and have started using rules to retreat into moral and intellectual laziness, divorcing yourself from the decision you're about to make. If you're making a decision about a case, then you're responsible for that case, and you can't say, "I don't agree with it, but I was just enforcing the rules." Every case needs to be handled individually.

-

129 users who were wearing a yobit signature and had at least 1 good report against them in the last 14 days are banned for 14 days. All yobit signatures are wiped. Signatures containing "yobit.net" are banned for 60 days.

Some people were talking about neg-trusting spammers for spamming. This is not appropriate; report the posts, and if that doesn't seem to be working well, come to Meta with specific examples and suggestions.

- Thanks to btcsmlcmnr

Logged-out users will now see a warning in trust-enabled sections if more DT members neg-trust the topic starter than positive-trust him.

This increases the responsibility of DT members not to give negative trust for stupid reasons, but only for things that cause you to believe that the person is a scammer.

Merit

I agree with this approach. I considered giving merit proportional to activity, but I decided not to because doing so would probably give far more undeserved merit than deserved merit in total. But undoubtedly some people got screwed by this, and if they have decent posts, by all means, give them the 250 or 500 merit that they need to rank-up.

I also agree with the idea of (free) "reviewer" topics in general, for finding high-quality posts that went unnoticed. Barcode_ created one in the Chinese section, as well.

-

The current status quo seems OK. If you have to pay $20 per merit plus a risk of getting red trust, then that's a situation that doesn't concern me at all. I'm not going to lose sleep over people going to ridiculous lengths to buy merit, since only a small number of people will be willing and able to do that.

As long as merit sales are a black market, I'm happy, since that makes it far more difficult and expensive to buy merit. If that's the case, then the small volume of black-market merit trades don't themselves bother me much, and I think that it does more harm than good to get too witch-hunty about it.

-

If they complain about amounts, tell them to complain to me. It's best if sources try to exhaust their source allocations, even if it means giving posts higher amounts than is typical. If you have 150 source merit and you only see 3 merit-worthy posts in a month, then I'd rather you over-give each of them 50 merit than let the merit expire. That way there are more people capable of sending merit, and the "merit economy" is less top-down.

If a DT member tags you for something stupid involving merit (ie. probably anything less than selling merit), then they're not going to be a DT member for much longer.

Aside from that, if people complain about whether things deserve merit at all, then that's something to perhaps think about, but if you conclude that they're wrong, then that's that. You don't need to stress about it or defend yourself constantly. It's conceivable that someday you and I will end up disagreeing too much about this stuff and I'll remove your source status, but it's really not a big deal.

The topsendban list is just a first indication of abuse, and many excellent people are on it. Your place on there acts as a sort of benchmark: eg. chandra12 has a similar score there, but whereas you are an extremely active merit-giver with a diverse selection of posts merited (most of which anyone would agree with), chandra12 only has two large merit sends. His behavior in comparison to yours while having a similar topsendban score is what creates a strong abuse impression.

I appreciate the work of you and other sources who take it seriously!

[Sharon121212]

Theymos is such a great poster and most of his post are targeted to enlighten member on particular issues but also theymos has a good sense of humour.
So pls mate don't leave that out like they say all work and no play makes theymos a dull administrator

Humour
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3232693.msg33646534#msg33646534

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5124947.msg50329422#msg50329422

[Steamtyme]

Theymos is such a great poster and most of his post are targeted to enlighten member on particular issues but also theymos has a good sense of humour.
So pls mate don't leave that out like they say all work and no play makes theymos a dull administrator

You are correct and you can see that in some of his replies. My focus was more on the informative snipits people might have missed. theymos has tried to get people to provide him with the funny pages though in the past. I'm sure some of the newer members will get a kick out of your quotes and give them an idea what to expect.

~snip~

I did cover a bit of the forum Admin changes I left out one quote that described the change over between Sirius and theymos as transitional and not a singular day hand over. It didn't add to much apart from that to the post that I did quote. I wouldn't mind seeing something in the more tab about the Forum staff/admin/treasurer list. I might have missed this stuff somewhere and never really thought about it.

Good idea on posting the quotes about new forum software.

[TheBeardedBaby]

I just gonna quote myself here, I think is relevant for the thread.

~snip~

I think you have to make a separate section to post your ideas, they are getting lost in this ocean of information ( mostly spam) and people have to intentionally remember that you had posted this good info somewhere, otherwise no one will come on a page 297 of this huge Multy-Mega-Mighty Merit thread.
Same happens with your good thoughts posted here and there around the forum. I sometimes read your post history to find some really good gems, but again they are all lost and almost forgotten. Sad.

[Steamtyme]

~snip~

Feel free to bring anything you feel would be helpful for people to find here. If this gets to long I'll eventually link to peoples replies of what they post. I think a lot of us have thought something like this could be beneficial in one shape or another. Like I said in OP I'd love to see some more locked topics maintained by Mods or Admins with current information.

[AverageGlabella]

Sad to say this, but I created my topic more than two weeks ago, and it has not caught too much attention from forum members. I don't know why my topic looks less interesting than yours (no reply till today), but it does not big matter. Maybe, my and your topics have something overlap each other, hence they are both constructive things for forum, then they are all good.
It might be a good idea to add a new category in your topic: To-Do List of theymos. You can feel free use some to-do things of theymos I collected in my topic.
Ideas and plans of theymos for the forum improvements

There is a fundamental difference to your content and this content. but I'll start with the minor issues with your thread and how this thread improves upon it. One of the minor things that stands out is theymos name is included in the first word with a unique spin on it. theymos is a name that will automatically jump out at people on this forum and with the unique spinoff of "isms" at the end it further peaks interest. Much like SEO is performed usually its recommended to include your keywords within the very first couple of words where as your "theymos" keyword appears later. Its normally determined on a ratio basis compared to the number of words.

Going on to one of the fundamental issues with your thread and this thread is topic. This topic is diverse and appeals to more people due to it not just being about the new forum. People will generally be less inclined to merit a topic which they are not interested in just because they likely won't read it and skim it or avoid it completely. This thread appeals to a more diverse number of topics. Even though the premise is the same (quotes from theymos) it shows different topics and his opinion on all of those topics where as yours is exclusively about the new forum software. Another point to make is a lot of people are sick and tired of hearing about the new forum software and the novelty has worn off since it took so long to release. The new forum software has a negative stigma around it due to the amount of money spent initially and how long development took. Although its now fresh news that beta tests are happening and you can host the forum yourself that novelty has likely worn off for many people.

Then of course there's the luck of the draw and a variety of other different reasons including a user which regularly posts great content and receives a lot of merit. People will hate to admit it but people fall into the same psychology of meriting those that they think are overall good posters and not just one offs. This is why we see a lot of merits going to higher ranks in the community and equally as good content created by lesser ranks won't receive as much merit. You have to consider timezones and what other active threads are going on at the time too. You can't expect to get merited for every quality post you make. I think that I've made some exceptional quality posts at times and they've received little merit. Then I post a average reply and it receives a lot of merit unexpectedly.

[hugeblack]

You can add some tricks in April Fools. Especially in the past year.
I can add some information like his age, almost 26 years and how he knows about Bitcoin.

I am a 21-year-old computer science student in the US and an avid bitcoiner since early 2010. I am the head admin of the Bitcoin Forum and the top mod here, though I didn't create either community. I wrote Bitcoin Block Explorer and ran it for a long time, but it is now run by Liraz Siri. I am one of very few people with a copy of the Bitcoin Alert Key.

You can read more here ----> I am theymos. AMA.

you can also add

<theymos> Probably I will leave someday, but not now.

<theymos> If these websites or my reputation end up being damaged/destroyed, then that's acceptable. At least I tried to do what was most correct. What wouldn't be acceptable to me would be to give into demands that I know to be incorrect.

There are some political, Altcoin and public discussions between him and Satoshi.

[Steamtyme]

~snip~

Glad to see you've gained some traffic and traction on your thread. For what I've been looking to do I won't be adding your list, but feel you should maintain and bump it, especially if theymos makes more mentions of projects. I'm more interested in capturing the snipits that tend to get lost in the fold but provide some insight into the forum and theymos.

I would suggest to not come off so "woe is me" I honestly lost interest in what you were saying for a bit, but made a note to go back and look. That with comments about merit, make the effort seem disingenuous, from my perspective.

~snip~

That's interesting I hadn't considered going outside the forum for information. I'll probably add the link to that info somewhere near the "origin story" quote. I'll have to check it out myself I must admit I never really got into reddit, but that would probably be a good read through. I have read some of the old discussions but not many, I like going down the history rabbit hole on slow nightshifts. There might be some quotes there I list or make a 3rd linked post about, out of interest, but I'm hoping more people start going back to the past themselves . You may also feel free to create a reply of quotes you like for future readers.

~snip~

Yeah I was reading up on that on my phone. This is a good example of something that would have made the list of I did this in a few weeks. I'll add the quote in later under in the second post.


As always open to suggestions or discussion if you disagree with something.

[The Cryptovator]

Thanks for gather all important quote of theymos. Sometimes it was very hard to find few important quote for use reference on the topic or reply. So now I have noted this thread and it will help me for quick search. Good collection.

[CryptopreneurBrainboss]

trust system is a big mess,lets face the truth no bullshits.

Then give a better suggestion on how the system should be operated and if it sounds reasonable and achievable I'm sure theymos would give it a second thought. You should note though dissolving the system isn't an option as that'll only make the forum worst as spammers will be able to rank-up easily and scammers or potential scammers would be disguise as the average forum user, which will be chaotic.

[Steamtyme]

trust system is a big mess,lets face the truth no bullshits.

Then give a better suggestion on how the system should be operated and if it sounds reasonable and achievable I'm sure theymos would give it a second thought. You should note though dissolving the system isn't an option as that'll only make the forum worst as spammers will be able to rank-up easily and scammers or potential scammers would be disguise as the average forum user, which will be chaotic.

Actually let's move those discussions to the appropriate and already existent threads. It serves no purpose to inject these opinions and discussions into every thread out there. Now if you find some lesser known quotes by theymos that can help spur discussion or provide insight I'd be happy to see them.

[xolxol]

fuck this list,theymos itself doesnt follow his own guidelines.He does allow alts but these abusive people on DT are keep tagging those who have alts.

fuck this list,theymos itself doesnt follow his own guidelines.He does allow scamming but these abusive people on DT keep tagging those who scam.

nice,that would be plagiarism if you copied my statement  you can now go to sleep and dream about sucking your own cock.

[xolxol]

trust system is a big mess,lets face the truth no bullshits.

Then give a better suggestion on how the system should be operated and if it sounds reasonable and achievable I'm sure theymos would give it a second thought. You should note though dissolving the system isn't an option as that'll only make the forum worst as spammers will be able to rank-up easily and scammers or potential scammers would be disguise as the average forum user, which will be chaotic.

got an idea on  how the trust system will operate better,what if when all of the feedbacks negative or positive will only shown to some boards which includes trading,hide in in most of the boards? the drama will stop..altcoinsections and bounty sections are the source of the spams in the forum?so be it its just trashy discussions so lets leave it to those spammers those who dont want to see spam do not go to those boards.Leave the feedbacks to those boards that includes trading,money,selling and buying stuffs...

feedbacks are only required to those boards,kaboom the drama will stop or better..

remove the signatures completely.

[Steamtyme]

Newest one from theymos on suggestion to add new board/ child board for Blockchain Developments. In fact, theymos rejected to create such an unnecessary board/ child board. I am not sure about your strategy to manage the thread, but in my opinion, you should create a new category, suggested namely like 'Denied Community Suggestions'.

That's not a bad idea. Most of it is covered in this post here it was a sweeping response to a lot of proposals. Re: Community generated suggestions to improve the forum (+ eventual voting on them)
One of the issues is that theymos doesn't directly state yay or nay to a lot of suggestions so they do sort of float in the wind. I may take a closer look one weekend and see if there are a significant mount of those denials but I don't recall to many.

Thanks for the last one. I had been reading it a bit on my phone. I was surprised to see the tit for tat approach being a tool towards curbing behavior. I'll gt it put in there. Overtime there will probably be a need for some other categories or add- ins. I'll likely just create a post and link it to OP when it happens.

[ChemicalSpillage]

"BSV is a scammy project created by two conmen"

[bones261]

This is a topic for theymosisms, and likely does not relate to BSV. I don't think we should discuss about BSV here. Did you really publish your post in wrong topic, that would have been published in BSV's ANN topic.
For Steamtyme, yesterday, theymos made announcements on Trust Flags, that is totally new system in the forum, with lots of clarification posts. I suggest Steamtyme to create new section for this in the topic.
Say Bye to Trust Drama, Welcome Flags

I think theymos may have said something to that effect in some PMs he sent to a few members. However, this is what he stated on the open forum.

~snip~
I hate having to "defend" BSV and BCH, which were created with deception in mind, are technologically bankrupt, and are run by huge assholes, but you can't say that their supporters broke a contract with you when they didn't. Give them a newbie-warning flag if you want, but not a contract-violation flag unless they actually broke a contract with you. (Note that you might have a case for breach of implied contract if you were actually tricked into buying one of these coins instead of BTC.)

[Steamtyme]

Sorry I'm on mobile and will update better later.

Yes I'm pretty sure that is -some long time member- with an alt of the day for whatever reason. I only grab quotes from obscurity to the and fill in the gaps of knowledge for the forum.

Theymos has an entire thread i came across once discussing altcoins but it doesn't reflect a forum system or policy so not really something that mattered for this thread as far as i was concerned.

I will spend time this weekend to go through the topic to find relevant snipits left by theymos once more become available for clarity.

Edit: by obscurity I mean publicly posted within the forum pages accessible by most users..

[Last of the V8s]

Well, that's a change I'll need some time to process this, maybe probably it's for the better, but it looks like theymos now officially got himself a part-time job as a quasi-lawyer?

I am one of the world's foremost experts on quasi-law, after all. Surely you've read my widely-cited article in the Journal of Laws or Whatever titled, "A new approach to the rigorous design of legal systems: just worry about it later."

In the heat of battle, here is theymos being droll. Maybe offtopic for this thread. Is there a thread for the more humorous side? I'll delete if you need.

[hd49728]

One more post for the thread, on the access of theymos to bitcointalk.org and bitcointalk.org DNS.
Please add.

Of course not, do you really need to ask?

 - I was made a forum admin in 2011, after Satoshi left. (Silk Road also appeared after Satoshi left.) I didn't have any special access to bitcoin.org until around 2013, and in fact I didn't even have any access to the bitcointalk.org DNS until 2013.
 - I've never bought or sold anything on Silk Road, Hydra or similar sites; nor did I have anything whatsoever to do with their operation; nor AFAIK did I even have interactions with anyone involved in running these sites. While I am opposed to drug laws, I have never used illicit drugs, and in fact I also abstain from alcohol & nicotine. Furthermore, since the beginning I have warned over and over again that Tor is not secure against active government attacks: I wouldn't be found dead running one of these sites.
 - I never had any interaction with CSW. I don't have any keys related to CSW's (probably fictitious) SSS thing.

CSW's whole shtick is to just lie constantly. He's so brazen about it that some people think, "there must be some truth there," but really it's 100% nonsense.

I admit I was a little tempted to troll the world by roleplaying CSW's allegations as totally true...

Emails Registration and Privacy

BTW, email is a big privacy issue in general. It's too expensive (mainly time-wise) to create new email addresses, but if you use the same one, it creates tons of links. Ideally, you should use one email per service. I've had two ideas in this area:

First, you could create a simple email forwarding service like this:
 - Without registration (but maybe with a tiny fee via eg. Lightning), take a user's email address, generate a random key, and use the random key to encrypt the email address.
 - Also encrypt the email address with a server secret.
 - Give the user an email address of the form ENCRYPTED_EMAIL.DECRYPTION_KEY@asdf.com
 - When the service receives email at a forwarding address, it decrypts the email first using its server secret, and then using the provided decryption key. Then it forwards the email to the email address
 - To destroy forwarding addresses, users could provide the service with both their forwarding address and target address, and the service could then send a confirmation email.

This would be convenient, and it'd fix the problem of services being able to connect users across multiple sites through email-address reuse. But it trusts the forwarder not to log the per-email decryption keys or give up the server secret key. Though if multiple services like this existed, you could chain emails through them to increase security.

My second idea is:
 - The user would be using his own software (like eg. Thunderbird or perhaps prontonmail). From this software, the user could instantly create low-capacity throwaway accounts on the server. Each throwaway account could be (or behave similar to) a POP3 account with low capacity (eg. 50MB) and quick message expiration (eg. 60 days).
 - The client software would use Tor and careful polling to download all of the messages on its throwaway accounts without leaking to the server info about which accounts are connected. To improve anonymity and efficiency, you could perhaps use PIR, or the server could publish hourly/daily bloom filters meant to match email addresses which received mail in the time period. The client software would collect all of the messages into a single inbox for the end-user. Since it polls frequently, the client wouldn't have to worry about the low limits on the individual throwaways.
 - The server could anonymously require a small one-time for each throwaway account by using blinded bearer certificates.

With this, the server shouldn't ever be able to connect any of the accounts together. You could also send mail from the throwaways.

The main thing necessary for this second idea is a really smart email client meant to juggle many throwaways. You also need a cooperative server allowing quick account creation (like cock.li), ideally via an API.

theymos is one of three admins, in 2011

The active administrators are currently:
theymos (me)
Gavin Andresen
sirius

Sirius runs the server.