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 alternative implementations of Bitcoin get DDoSed so heavy, that sometimes whole districts of cities get cut off from the internet. But this is the internet. people manage to jump over the fence pretty fast...
> 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 if a fork happened.
In fact talking about this topic, criticisms of developers and the like is practically all you see there, for the last 8 months!
You are not explaining the origin of the "please don't promote network forks" rule. ("Bitcoin XT", now "Bitcoin Classic").
The people pushing the need to fork would bombard the Reddit forum for many months, very likely with sockpuppets. They were extremely hostile and aggressive, down voting anyone who would disagree with them. Readers would notice their posts would instantly be scored negative only seconds after a post. This pro-fork group would harass the developers with personal attacks and threats, forcing some developers to leave due to the harm it was having on their mental health.
Only after this went on for a very long time did the moderators finally try to get things under control. The pro-fork crowd yelled “censorship”. But this is not censorship, it is long needed moderation.
> People who run alternative implementations of Bitcoin get DDoSed so heavy, that sometimes whole districts of cities get cut off from the internet.
The majority of the fork software run on freebie Amazon AWS servers:
> This is simply not true. The only rule on the /r/bitcoin Reddit is not to promote these network fork attempts.
A meaningful discussion cannot be had if you are only allowed to speak negatively of a subject.
> The majority of the fork software run on freebie Amazon AWS servers
> Where do you get this claim that "whole districts of cities" are being cut off the internet?
You do realise that some people do still run full Bitcoin nodes on their home computers, yes? Home Internet connections are more susceptible to DDoS attacks. The poster is most likely referring to a specific case where someone's Internet connection was cut off due to the attacks. I can't remember who it was, but I've certainly heard of it before.
> A meaningful discussion cannot be had if you are only allowed to speak negatively of a subject.
I agree censorship of ideas or opinions is a bad thing, but if what he says is true, that the sub was being essentially rendered unusable by sockpuppeting, trolling, organized downvoting (which is also censorship, BTW) or other abuse, then what option is there but to clean it up? This is not a specific /r/bitcoin point, it's something that dates back to Usenet times, and applies to every forum since.
I don't know who is telling the (most) truth here, I have no idea, because I don't read that group and don't really follow Bitcoin (or even Reddit), but I do think it's fairly absurd that Bitcoin (a supposedly democratic, decentralized technology that nobody owns) has always had what are essentially a handful of very powerful 'official' channels and representatives, with enormous influence, and AIUI major forums, including /r/bitcoin and BitcoinTalk, are actually owned by one single person (perhaps the parent of your post).
But nobody in Bitcoinland seemed to care that much about such "dictatorships" before.
It doesn't look good when you ban a mode of thought entirely
I've no skin in this game, and I don't fully understand the technical problems and solutions for bitcoin. I also don't understand the challenges facing moderators of reddit.
It does seem strange to me, however, that people are calling for consensus on an issue where 1) most discussion occurs online, and 2) for which there exists no balanced forum that allows all points of view to be heard.
Perhaps the community should solve this problem first. Or get the right people in a room together again and hire someone like Dale Carnegie who's good at helping people work together to lead a session. If they haven't tried that, they haven't tried everything.
> > 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.
So anyone trying to discuss alternative software won't have their posts deleted?
> The only rule on the /r/bitcoin Reddit is not to promote these network fork attempts.
In other words, heavy handed censorship. Thanks for clarifying.
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.)
I completely agree with this moderation. I am ashamed at the spin coinbase is putting on this making the core team sound like they have no communication skills. Shame on them.
/r/bitcoin has never been a venue for discussing alternative cryptocurrencies. Due to reddit's lack of a concept of sub-subreddits or the ability to have a subreddit's front page filter out a certain tag, the only way to remove floods of people discussing off-topic subjects is to say "sorry, please discuss that in another subreddit".
I participate in a subreddit focused on one particular modded mincraft launcher and set of modpacks (r/ftb, for the Feed The Beast launcher). Posts about modded minecraft in general are welcomed; /r/ftb is the largest modded minecraft subreddit, and there's a lot of overlap in terms of contents, users, mod authors, etc.
Similarly, I've never seen anyone upset about people discussing non-Javascript languages in /r/javascript; there's specific subreddits for some popular variants and libraries (like /r/coffeescript and /r/react), but nobody cares. The rules do say posts should be at least indirectly related to javascript, but a post talking about a better language would be seen as easily related enough.
/r/bitcoins rules do not follow the norms for Reddit communities, as far as I've seen.
As a counter-example, there are lots of tightly-modded subs that I follow that benefit from strong moderation of off-topic posts. Such subs include /r/personalfinance, and /r/askhistorians.
For those unfamiliar with how crazy the shenanigans at r/bitcoin (and bitcointalk.org), the historical primary online discussion forums for Bitcoin (both run by the same individual [1]), the subreddit uses a 70+KB custom stylesheet [2] to unhide collapsed (downvoted) comments, hidden points, thread sort order set to controversial, and very heavy-handed moderation/banning to unduly influence/control conversation [3].
The community seems to have done an ok job working around this with r/btc (although conversation there is almost completely dominated by discussions on the hard fork and against Core) and the bitcoin.com forums (although again, not without some drama/controversy, and both of those forums are still run/controlled by a single person (Roger Ver)) - it seems like guaranteeing open/neutral discussions for crypto-currencies is still an unsolved problem.
Personally, while I'm following along (and running a Classic node), I've liquidated the few coins I've had to see how it shakes out. It's incontrovertible that Bitcoin has hit its current capacity limits which is especially dangerous with the upcoming halvening, and the primary development cabal has been unwilling to scale it, despite foreknowledge/certainty and increasingly urgent calls over the past 2 years. If Bitcoin becomes viable again, I'll throw my money back in the ring, but if it doesn't, well, it was an interesting experiment and spurred a lot of innovation, but also pointed out some still unsolved problems (tracking consensus/governance among stakesholders and for protocol evolution, independent development funding, figuring out how mining/nodes should be incentivized in light of pooling behavior, mining concentration pressured by electricity pricing, etc).
(It's worth noting even besides the relatively simple/bullet-proof XT/Classic block-size increasing hard-forks [4] there are some really interesting other scaling technologies like [5] Xtreme Thinblocks or [6] parallel sync that have been either ignored or outright rejected while Core chases a Blockstream (sidechain, lightning network) focused agenda that simply doesn't seem to fix the right now problem.))
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 genuine. Maybe I am disillusioned, but bitcoin's news aggregate presence feels like it's being very distorted.
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.
Given the fuss that Bitcoin Core itself makes about this change not being possible, it is surely not a trifling matter.
This is disingenuous, anyhow. The limit on how many transactions the Bitcoin network can handle is fundamental to growth, of course it would be a big issue.
> 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.
This is what happens when a group is cast out from the main community (in this case by moderation policy).
Yes, the pro-fork group say they simply want to change the limit of megabytes per block from 1MB to 2MB. Somehow this is worth forking the network over.
This may not sound like much, but also keep in mind eight months ago it was 20MB, with an eventual jump into the GB range, that they were pushing for. Also, recently they are talking about removing any limit altogether.
This change seems small but the consequences would not be, since it limits who can run a full client and centralizes control to those who can (companies, not individuals).
There are better ways to achieve the same goal and keep the decentralization, but they are not so simple, and need to be fully tested before rolling out. One exciting thing in the pipeline, is a caching layer that sits on top of bitcoin, which allows instant, true microtransactions. In the short term there's "segwit" which also brings all sorts of other advantages.
Honest Question: As an individual what incentives are there for me to run a full node? Currently the storage/bandwidth requirements are not outrageous, but high enough that they will cost $20-$50 depending on how many connections I allow. Why would I bother?
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 < -5 posts) as an anti-censorship tool. The reddit.com administrators are aware of this.
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.