What's wrong with Bitcoin?

[eMansipater]

I think once all of this is over banksters, politicians and soldiers should be lined up and shot at dawn

The individual then clarified himself:

There is every reason to kill them. They are all useless and unnecessarily consuming resources of this planet

Your response made it clear that advocating the murder of "banksters, politicians and soldiers" is acceptable here. I should note that at least one more "Global Moderator" was aware of these posts.

This is disgusting and shameful, and I'll not mince words. Your response was pathetic.

My response that drew attention to the same issue you're concerned with by replying like this,

And people wonder why readers of this forum often dismiss BitCoin entirely.

then warning that

this particular type of line-crossing is predictably common here, to the point that the brand of BitCoin is highly impacted.

and splitting his comments out of the stickied, high-visibility thread?  Put the gun down, gene:  we're on the same team.

Experience has just taught me that sometimes pointing out the larger issues has a stronger long-term effect than ending up in a flame war, and in this particular case I had recently made my position clear in other threads.  Compare, for example with this one.  I've also started a whole thread on the topic to demonstrate where I stand on these things.

But as a moderator I don't get to just make up the rules--there needs to be a community consensus first, or actions like deleting posts (which is the only further thing I could have done) will be treated as censorship and routed around.  Start a thread in meta with your ideas for new forum guidelines and I'll fully back you (Gavin probably would too), but the community has to be on board before the standard of moderation changes.  As it is there was a tooth and nail fight to ban illegal goods, but now (as you might not know because the mods are pretty fast at it) we regularly remove posts that sell drugs, credit card numbers, etc.  Consensus building is hard work--you can't just start wiping things out left and right (as I'm sure people who think I'm being too hard-line will reply next.  Ever hear that proverb that the job of a bridge is to get walked on from both sides?).

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[goatpig]

You guys need to take it easy. To get outraged by some loon who goes around spouting his murder fantasies is not befitting of an adult. This is the internet. There are content parsing practices that are your sole responsibility in here. Don't feed the troll, don't read the people you don't respect, don't take part in threads you don't value and so on. To blame the whole Bitcoin community for it is childish. To demand for the content you can't stand to be "moderated" is borderline whimsical. It's akin to hating on Facebook or Youtube because you stumbled upon an religious fanatic spouting hateful nonsense. This is a public forum, you don't like some of the content, simply ignore it.


From my standpoint, I think eMansipater is already too tolerant and welcoming with pontificating hypocrites thinking they hold the keys to the universe and the block chain because they read half the front page on the wiki and were told by their grandma that inflation is golden, so you people better cherish that cause you won't get it any better from anybody else in here.

Lastly, to delve in the spiral of forum ethics in this thread only serves to bloat the discussion, the topic of which is for the community to offer new comers answers as to why this critic of Bitcoin is fallacious. You want to discuss ethics and moderation, there's a meta forum for it.

Now to get back on topic, the DoS attack is a joke, and so far the only technical issue this guy is able to raise against Bitcoin, and if I got it right, he states he needs around a million USD to DoS the network down. That casts a huge doubt over his actual skills, knowing Botnets and LOIC are pretty much free of charge. It always amuses me when people speak of how easily they could tear down the network but won't take it to the test net. This gets even better considering the amount of valid technical issues discussed on the forum, which that man obviously didn't bother researching.

His economical and political critics have been debated to death long before Bitcoin even existed...

[eMansipater]

From my standpoint, I think eMansipater is already too tolerant and welcoming with pontificating hypocrites thinking they hold the keys to the universe and the block chain because they read half the front page on the wiki and were told by their grandma that inflation is golden, so you people better cherish that cause you won't get it any better from anybody else in here.

Lol, knew I wouldn't have to wait too long.  Goatpig's right about this being off-topic though.  Let's definitely continue this in meta, because I believe forum image is a big problem for BitCoin right now.

[shady financier]

You guys need to take it easy. To get outraged by some loon who goes around spouting his murder fantasies is not befitting of an adult. This is the internet. There are content parsing practices that are your sole responsibility in here. Don't feed the troll, don't read the people you don't respect, don't take part in threads you don't value and so on. To blame the whole Bitcoin community for it is childish. To demand for the content you can't stand to be "moderated" is borderline whimsical. It's akin to hating on Facebook or Youtube because you stumbled upon an religious fanatic spouting hateful nonsense. This is a public forum, you don't like some of the content, simply ignore it.

In terms of my own personal enjoyment of the forum this holds true. But in terms of the bitcoin project itself appearances are important. For every forum reader happy to just ignore loonspuds, there are ten more that are completely put off by the whole idea because of the insane ravings of some internet sociopath that has attached himself to bitcoin.

Quiet acceptance of this sort of thing is bad for the image. I'm one of those that want bitcoin to succeed, and not be tripped up by too high a bullshit ratio on its forums

threadjack done.

[eMansipater]

Anyone who's serious about improving the image of the forums, join in here.

[unk]

1. Most of the exchanges between Bitcoin and other currencies are illegal or, at the very least, unlicensed and illegitimate. They likely run afoul of US securities laws and US banking laws. This is not just a pub-style bull session about law; it is the result of a reasoned consideration informed by legal experts, though of course it does not constitute legal advice to you. Speaking generally, though, individual users of these exchanges risk having their assets and accounts frozen, risk running afoul of money-laundering laws, and generally risk losing even more than they put into the system.

2. Related, given that the exchanges are entirely unregulated, they can themselves be manipulating the market. Given that Bitcoin is touted as a distributed currency, it is ironic that there is absolutely no check on "Mt. Gox," the major Bitcoin exchange, through which $200,000/day is (unbelievably) passing.

just happened to run into this again on fatwallet and thought it was interesting enough to 'bump', as they say.

[Shinobi]

Holy hell. I can't believe I'm reading a thread here with consistently intelligible and insightful comments. Where have all of you been hiding?

[w1R903]

As a relative newcomer to Bitcoin, I can tell you my impressions of the board.  They seem like, well, any other forums on almost any other subject, except for those where the participants know each other personally (i.e., not anonymous forums).  And to offer counter-evidence to the poster who thought it was ridiculous to believe that a major entity, such as a financial or government entity, would bother posting against Bitcoin on an Internet forum, I'll just point out at the prevalence of Twitter messages critical of Bitcoin over the past few days.  If you follow many of them to their source, you'll see that many of them are the same Twitter users who are twittering about Gucci handbags, or S.T.U.P.I.D Technical University for Adults -- they're paid shills.  So someone cares enough that Bitcoin should fail that they're paying money to see it come true.

That said, one thing the original poster said shook me a little.  It's seems obvious now that it would be possible to steganographically encode anything into the blockchain, but the thought that malicious users could plant CP or other malicious content into the block chain is nonetheless a major concern for me.  The day that the average Bitcoin user finds out he or she has been accidentally downloading illegal porn is the day Bitcoin will cease to be a viable currency.  The press will have a field day.  Is there no way to avoid this vulnerability?  Mike Hearn mentioned that users who didn't want to store such content could simply delete non-financial data, but how easy would that be to do?  Manually delete the blockchain after each financial transaction, and then re-download the entire chain before the next transaction?

[amincd]

Thanks for the bump unk!

Fear, uncertainty and doubt, frequently abbreviated as FUD, is a tactic used in sales, marketing, public relations,[1][2] politics and propaganda. FUD is generally a strategic attempt to influence public perception by disseminating negative and dubious/false information designed to undermine the credibility of their beliefs. An individual firm, for example, might use FUD to invite unfavorable opinions and speculation about a competitor's product; to increase the general estimation of switching costs among current customers; or to maintain leverage over a current business partner who could potentially become a rival.