Haven't you heard .... Woodcollector went from not knowing what a bitcoin was 2 months ago to leading the New Forum Revolution so he can be the head scammer..
So why bother with the current system when you have your own waiting .......
The “default trust” system is a failed concept and does more damage to this forum than good.
I'm new here, only a few months into bitcoin. In that few short months I have learned a lot about the bitcoin ecosystem, its strengths and its weaknesses. Bitcoin as a technology is a great thing, it truly has the power to change the future of finance in ways that have not even been publicly discussed yet, but bitcoin as a currency and a community is becoming a plague that is forever stunting the growth of Bitcoin among merchants and companies. Like it or not, the community is a large part of the bitcoin ecosystem.
The easy solution to this problem is simple. Dont use Bitcointalk.org or /r/bitcoin if your involved in the bitcoin ecosystem. That's all good and well if you have been involved in bitcoin long enough to know what you need to know and you are simply choosing to participate in discussion and know the other places and websites to get the info you might want in the future. But for those who are not technology savvy, merchants who want to explore alternatives to credit cards or standard merchant processing options, well... They are stuck with this forum. Not because this forum is such a great place to find out information any more, not because this forum is the backbone of the bitcoin community, No, its because of search engines. Take a few seconds, open a new browser tab, go to google, bing, yahoo, you name it. Then search for ___________ Bitcoin. You can fill in the blank. Almost 80% of the time over half of the search results on that first page are links to something on bitcointalk.org and that's a huge problem.
I have spent many, many hours diving into this forum, threads from 4 years ago and threads from today. This forum at one time appears to have been one of the greatest resources for Bitcoin knowledge on the web. As of late, it has become nothing more than one giant elementary school playground. The worst part is for those of you whom are visual people and analytical thinkers, If you take the bitcoin price for the past 6 months, and the amount of quality vs. useless posts on every given day on this forum and graph them, you will see that as the quality of content and discussion decrease on this forum, so too does the value of your precious bitcoin. Long time contributors and Bitcoin veterans are leaving, merchants who come to find out information about the community they would be catering to are choosing to overlook bitcoin as a payment option for lack of wanting to deal with the mentality of what is portrayed as the average bitcoin user, and the only people left in the community are either really thick skinned, or here to satisfy their need for attention most likely as a result of a personality disorder called
Histrionic personality disorder or HPD for short. It is a very common disease to find among people in video game communities or large social media sites such as BCT.org.
This history of not just this forum but documented history of the internet over the past few years is exactly why a “default trust” system is not just a bad, but a horrible idea for ANY social gathering site online today. The default trust system as implemented on this forum, turns this from an online knowledge base and place for discussion, into a video game. There is now a prize that can be achieved for trust farming, use of your skills at manipulating a situation via shills, and alternate accounts, and more easily a reward if you transact with or can get escrow set up with a few people on this forum like Canary In The Mine. Because of this default trust system, this once great knowledge base has become the breeding ground for virtual popularity contests and gaming which would be all good and well if it was not for the fact that as far as search engines have indexed, this is still suppose to be the one stop shop for people interested in learning about bitcoin.
I will use my own experience over these past few months as an example. Not to further the debate and thousands of useless posts that have already been spilled into the database which is Bitcointalk.org, but as an outline that I am sure dozens of you can relate to. (although it will anger and probably cause another 20+ pages of useless posts by those who suffer from HPD on this forum)
It was November of last year, I received a gift from a family member. A paper wallet with 10
BTC loaded onto it. I was told to spend it on something. It was his attempt at trying to get me to learn about how bitcoin works. Me being me, a woodworker and and artist (contrary to the speculation of the HPD's on this forum) my first and only thought was, “we'll i'll see if bitcoin can buy me some wood for my warehouse”, and so came my account on this forum, and my very first post here
[WTB] Exotic woods from around the world with Bitcoin on November 5th 2014. Long story short, within 1 day all 10 bitcoin was gone and I had a lot of new wood on its way to one of my warehouses. Until that day, I obtained wood via brokers and wholesalers. It is expensive and inconvenient as firstly you have to pay the middle man who probably has a few middle men himself, you pretty much had to pay shipping 3 or 4 times as you know they are charging you for the shipping and customs fees from the country of origin, shipping from customs to the mill where the cants are cut, then shipping to their warehouse and finally shipping to me the end user. On that day back in November I realized I could literally save millions of dollars this year re-stocking my warehouses by buying the wood direct using bitcoin. So.... I did. I was buying bitcoin like a mad man, talking with people all over the world, turning that bitcoin into wood via this very forum. People in borderline 3rd world countries were making thousands of dollars which to them might as well be a million just by chopping down that tree in their back yard and having it shipped to me. By the end of December millions of dollars worth of bitcoin had been bought, sent, and spent. Just as bitcoin was intended to be used. Along the way, I had dozens of people contacting me to make them things out of wood related to bitcoin. It was neat and all, but not really why I was here, I did it more so as a way to say thanks and give back to the community that was saving me a fortune by using bitcoin. Because of this, I quickly got a bullseye painted on my back and it was all in part due to the default trust system and the gamers with HPD on the forum. Within 1 week there was over 500 posts which when you look at them are nothing more than the same crowd of guys gaming for virtual popularity, a feud that still carries on today.
Why? The default trust system. It's a video game. Almost by definition its a MMORPG. I cant and dont have the desire to count the number of times battles have been waged over this “virtual points system”. Now, just from my own hired hit (the 1,000+ posts for nothingness) there is yet another debate currently 10 pages long about having the instigator Nubbins removed from the default trust list. Do I agree that he should be removed from that list? Absolutely, Peoples opinions should not be allowed to be weighted as fact as a result of them doing business with someone like CITM in the past. Not just Nubbins, there are dozens and dozens of people on this forum who you can tell after just a few short minutes of browsing through their post history and sent feedback are clearly doing nothing more here than playing the game. Like farmville on Facebook but with trust points. The truth is, removing Nubbins from the default trust list only puts an end to a single gamer here and does not solve the problem. Sure, it would solve my problem, although most of the people he convinced to leave me negative feedback have already removed it and I went from a -618 rating to a -4 he is still one of those 4 that leave me @ -4. But it does not solve the bitcoin problem, it does not fix the problem that this forum has turned into an MMORPG where trust rating and feedback is a game, and the people or gamers who are playing it all carry around a false flag of “scam buster” a job once left to the people who had proven they could handle the responsibility like Tomatocage.
In summary, the default trust system has turned a once great online knowledge base for all things bitcoin into an MMORPG where feedback is the currency and default trust is the way to game the system. People are entitled to their opinion, I am not against that in any way, but putting a system in place where someones opinion can be weighted because they have done business with a few people on a very short list makes this a game and a perfect place for sufferers of HPD to come to get the gratification they so desperately need like a drug. In case you have missed it, this forum now has more alt's than actual users. The actual users who use to make this place great have left as a result of this online gaming mentality and went to their own, private, invitation only discussion boards, and as a result the information that use to make bitcoin valuable is now being shared and hidden on private sites which hurts bitcoins growth as this forum is all that new comers are exposed to when they are thinking about giving bitcoin a try.
Theymos has already made his millions from this forum, the only thing left for him to do is run away with them like everyone else. He no longer has to care about this forum, it would take less than $1,000 a month to keep this forum online 24/7/365 and he cant even spend the money for a mirror and take 5 minutes to edit the DNS server list to include it in the event that the main server goes down. You really think that he is just going to willingly take the time out of his day to step away from the trans gender sub reddit to address the problem that has arisen here? Not likely, not unless you, the respectable people of this forum petition him to do so. It wont be easy, we all know that what proceeds this original post will be hundreds if not thousands of posts by the HPD's and Gamers here to fight for their virtual popularity points that they have spent thousands of hours trying to game. But it is up to you, the ones who care about bitcoin, the ones who are here for knowledge and the sharing of information to take it upon yourself s to fight for change.
To close:
I would like to announce the beginning of the future of bitcoins community space. I have pledged along with the support of a handful of other community members $250,000usd towards the development of a new bitcoin community site of which development has started as of February 2nd . Estimated time frame for completion is 6 months and we will be making beta testing announcements within 3 months. More details will follow in the coming weeks. We are
NOT taking donations, and are
NOT looking for more developers. Our project is fully funded and fully staffed. In the mean time, those of you who really care about BCT.org beyond just being here to game should put a little effort into getting the default trust system removed and restoring this forum to a knowledge base as it has been in the past as it will be the only way this forum will survive through the summer if it does not go offline completely after Theymos runs away with your money for the new platform you will most likely never see.
Let the gamers begin 
