The forum was originally located at bitcoin.org/smf, then forum.bitcoin.org (hence the redirect), and finally bitcointalk.org. Fun fact: The name "bitcointalk" was invented by Jeff Garzik, and he's the one who bought the domain.
Does it mean that Cobra is the account of Jeff Garzik ?
More information about Cobra:
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?
The most interesting thing of the forum is its decentralization, at least in its ownership. There is no one personally own the forum. I don't know how it started and maintained its core approach to be developed, managed like this. Maybe it started with determinantly development plans from Satoshi Nakamoto, in the way he decentralized the forum, then over some head admins, and theymos in recent years, the forum has maintained its decentralization very well (through some types of system - Trust, merit).
Theymos has seriously had plans to more decentralize merit system.
This thought occurred to me recently:
If you wanted to implement Merit in a decentralized forum (ie. one in the vein of Freenet's Frost or FMS), you could do it in this way:
- Everyone can, from their own perspective, give unlimited merit to posts, and these merit transactions are put into files which each user publishes via the decentralized system. (Like a merit.txt.xz which every user publishes.) Unlike on bitcointalk.org, you can also give people merit without an associated post.
- For everyone who has merit, you download their merit-transactions-list, but scale down/up all of the numbers so that the total merit that they send is equal to the actual sMerit that they own. It might or might not be useful to do this via some sliding time frame scheme so that merit transaction amounts aren't just continually diminished over time as they increase in quantity.
- Apply the above step recursively, creating a web-of-trust-style merit network
Then every user has a subjective merit score for each post (sort of like the bitcointalk.org trust system, which was inspired by FMS). And if you wish, you can assign people to be merit sources from your perspective by sending them large amounts of merit directly; these might or might not appear in the merit-transactions-list which you publish.
