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Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

gavinandresen.ninja

21–30 of 116 posts

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#21
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. You're even getting down voted here without explanation. EDIT: Well you used to be grey and at the bottom. Now you're up top.

There has been an enormous and coordinated effort to disrupt the Bitcoin community, and many of the actions have been far from subtle. /r/bitcoin has been subject to spam attacks, sockpuppets, brigade voting, and a huge number of manipulations. The moderator team tried to control it, honest people became victim to heavy handed moderation, and a lot of damage was done. The grandparent comment really does not seem genu…

The group that is promoting the network fork is extremely good at social media.

A clue that it is not genuine, is simply that nobody cares this much about a small technical change to a protocol. Yet these constant, daily, aggressive attacks against the developers have been going on for at least 10 months now.

All anyone has to do is read the pro-fork subreddit, /r/btc, and see how toxic and hostile they seem. It does not seem genuine and I cannot imagine anyone spending so much time writing the same things over and over for nearly a year.

It reminds me of the “Putin troll army” story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_brigades

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#22
post #18
post #9

There is a revolution going on in Bitcoin land. Very similar to how dictatorship gets overthrown in the real world. In the real world, dictators fight with censorship and violent force. In Bitcoin land these are social media censorship and DDoS attacks. The main Bitcoin forum on Reddit is censored heavy handed. No criticism allowed, mentions of alternative software or forums get deleted right away. People who run alt…

> The main Bitcoin forum on Reddit is censored heavy handed. No criticism allowed, mentions of alternative software or forums get deleted right away. This is simply not true. The only rule on the /r/bitcoin Reddit is not to promote these network fork attempts. This is not just alternative software, it is software that follows DIFFERENT rules from the main bitcoin software and would follow a different ledger history i…

As a non Bitcoin user it does seem very strange that /r/bitcoin would take a position not to allow discussion over a particular issue relevant to the community. And not just any issue but the biggest issue that is critical to its future direction.

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#23
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has been an enormous and coordinated effort to disrupt the Bitcoin community, and many of the actions have been far from subtle. /r/bitcoin has been subject to spam attacks, sockpuppets, brigade voting, and a huge number of manipulations. The moderator team tried to control it, honest people became victim to heavy handed moderation, and a lot of damage was done. The grandparent comment really does not seem genu…

The moderators of /r/bitcoin should explain why they automatically change the sort mode of specific threads to "Controversial" which effectively reverses the rank order. And why they have custom CSS which affects what comments appear hidden or not. No other subreddit that I am aware of engages in this form of comment manipulation. I am not even a Bitcoin user but this sort of behaviour was extremely unusual.

You are wrong about the CSS. What was happening was: the brigades of pro-fork users would downvote anyone who disagreed with them.

Reddit hides posts that score -5 or lower. So, the moderators changed the CSS to show all posts (even As for sorting by Controversial - same concept. The pro-fork brigades would force popular posts to the bottom, now the moderators use the built-in Reddit sort tool to make those appear higher up, in threads where vote manipulation happens.

Because reddit lets anyone create an account in about 3 seconds, it is easy to game and control what gets seen and what does not. Hacker news does the right thing by not giving everyone a downvote button on the first day.

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#24

Can anyone point me to good resources to understanding the technical side of Bitcoin? I tried to read the white paper but it glossed over technical details (for instance, what does "signing" actually entail?). Everything else is either very hand-wavey and high level or assumes you already know how it works. I'm interesting in understanding the spec and potentially expanding on it or being able to understand the ongoi…

I found Mastering "Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies" by Andreas M. Antonopoulos to be a good introduction.

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#26
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main Bitcoin forum on Reddit is censored heavy handed. No criticism allowed, mentions of alternative software or forums get deleted right away. This is simply not true. The only rule on the /r/bitcoin Reddit is not to promote these network fork attempts. This is not just alternative software, it is software that follows DIFFERENT rules from the main bitcoin software and would follow a different ledger history i…

As a non Bitcoin user it does seem very strange that /r/bitcoin would take a position not to allow discussion over a particular issue relevant to the community. And not just any issue but the biggest issue that is critical to its future direction.

You can discuss it all you want. You can't promote it just as you can't promote Litecoin or any other different protocol and ledger.

Basically the only thing you see on /r/bitcoin for the last 10 months is discussion on this issue, constantly.

Yeah, people who say "Developer Joe blow is a fraud, download the superior Bitcoin classic" get their posts removed. That's moderation. (And it is moderation that actually didn't happen for many months before things got so out of control.)

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#27
post #21
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has been an enormous and coordinated effort to disrupt the Bitcoin community, and many of the actions have been far from subtle. /r/bitcoin has been subject to spam attacks, sockpuppets, brigade voting, and a huge number of manipulations. The moderator team tried to control it, honest people became victim to heavy handed moderation, and a lot of damage was done. The grandparent comment really does not seem genu…

The group that is promoting the network fork is extremely good at social media. A clue that it is not genuine, is simply that nobody cares this much about a small technical change to a protocol. Yet these constant, daily, aggressive attacks against the developers have been going on for at least 10 months now. All anyone has to do is read the pro-fork subreddit, /r/btc, and see how toxic and hostile they seem. It does…

> small technical change to a protocol

I have no horse in this race, but isn't that understating the impact a bit?

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#28
post #25

As someone who's studied economics at the grad level, bitcoin has never made sense to me.

I don't understand why people buy baseball cards, either. But if I could send those baseball cards over the internet nearly as easily as an email, I could see it becoming a small niche currency (small as in millions of people).

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#29
post #18
post #9

There is a revolution going on in Bitcoin land. Very similar to how dictatorship gets overthrown in the real world. In the real world, dictators fight with censorship and violent force. In Bitcoin land these are social media censorship and DDoS attacks. The main Bitcoin forum on Reddit is censored heavy handed. No criticism allowed, mentions of alternative software or forums get deleted right away. People who run alt…

> The main Bitcoin forum on Reddit is censored heavy handed. No criticism allowed, mentions of alternative software or forums get deleted right away. This is simply not true. The only rule on the /r/bitcoin Reddit is not to promote these network fork attempts. This is not just alternative software, it is software that follows DIFFERENT rules from the main bitcoin software and would follow a different ledger history i…

/r/bitcoin is also censoring mentions of Ethereum - it's main rival right now.

https://twitter.com/DiginomicsNews/status/705258811192438784

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#30

Can anyone point me to good resources to understanding the technical side of Bitcoin? I tried to read the white paper but it glossed over technical details (for instance, what does "signing" actually entail?). Everything else is either very hand-wavey and high level or assumes you already know how it works. I'm interesting in understanding the spec and potentially expanding on it or being able to understand the ongoi…

The beauty in what Satoshi did was that he took several existing technologies (p2p, hashcash, public key cryptography, etc.), combined them and added only a slight twist (how the consenus is achieved).

In his white paper he only describes the twist, so you won't get a complete overview on how bitcoin works (even if you know how the stuff he's building on works).

This link has been posted to HN before and gives a pretty good overview on how bitcoin works: http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-a... So you won't get

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