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:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/499bai/51_of_bitco...

Where do you get this claim that "whole districts of cities" are being cut off the internet?

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.

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.

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.

Not really. Any criticism of bitcoin or even worst, any bad news, about bitcoin are censored in /r/bitcoin

For instance, when back in 2014 MtGox failed, some days before a user from /r/bitcoin posted a lengthly article that discussed the MtGox resolution citing the problems MtGox was facing, that they had lost a big part of their bitcoins and that they were going to close doors. This came directly from an internal document and he was actually showing it.

That post was of course censored in some minutes and only the people from other forums saw it before the MtGox demise.

Like this case, there are many others. /r/bitcoin is indeed heavily censored and there is this almost cult like mind hive thinking inside it that makes it impossible to get any idea about bitcoin reality from it.

When two-bit-idiot or whoever it was posted that doom and gloom document regarding MtGox in 2014 you would have had to been completely out of the loop not to have seen it re-linked on twitter or any of a dozen other outlets. My memory of the Gox timeline has grown fuzzy over time, but from what I recall, everybody with half a cluestick knew for at least a few days prior to this release that Gox was circling the drain and god have mercy on anyone with funds left sitting in their wallets. They hadn't been processing fiat withdrawals at all for weeks, at the very best you could withdraw in Yen with a two or three week delay. This should have been everybody's signal that shit was hitting the fan. A few weeks later they started getting spotty about processing BTC withdrawls, and it wasn't until after this that the bankruptcy planning doc got "leaked".

Or, maybe, a lot of people read the white paper, and took significant issue with command-and-control style Bitcoin development.

Everything needed to understand the roots of the debate can be found here: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

> The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote. The majority decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested in it.

Bitcoin development is anything but command and control. Please stop repeating nonsense.

If development isn't already centralized, then by definition, it cannot be "taken over" by anyone.

> 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.

Funny thing though is that /r/buttcoin that was made as a criticism of bitcoin in general is actually much more open and censor free than /r/bitcoin to the point that you can actually read some technical pro bitcoin articles there without any censoring or even down voting.

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

If you want to promote Ethereum, you can do so on /r/ethereum/.

I am sure promoting dog ownership over cats is frowned upon by /r/cats readers, too.

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.

You are wrong, nobody on /r/cats have gotten their comment removed or been banned for talking about dogs or any other pet on /r/cats.

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.)

That's malarkey. Not a day goes by that Lightning Network isn't heavily promoted.

Lightning, for the uninitiated, is the "scaling solution" that's going to "fix" Bitcoin by completely turning the original protocol into a settlement layer for an entirely new, incomplete, untested, and full-of-holes payments network.

This complete rewrite of the Bitcoin protocol is being foisted on the community take-it-or-leave-it, but we can't discuss increasing the base protocol to even a modest 2MB, because "that would be promoting a different protocol and ledger."

I hope that non-redditors can appreciate the profound, biting irony in the situation for the BS it actually is.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

It's a rule that prevents anyone but developers to effect a change in the max block size value.

I'm permanently banned from /r/bitcoin, despite:

* despite not promoting any alternate client

* not being a sockpuppet

* not being trollish

* having a very popular posts

This was simply because I argued Bitcoin would be better off with a higher max block size value.

How easily people look to conspiracy theories.

The science is settled.

How interesting that a group of people capable of wielding DDoS doesn't know how to counter-sockpuppet.

Could it be that they are simply vastly outnumbered?

The mods of r/Bitcoin have also personally tried to get me banned from reddit through untrue accusations to the reddit admins (they tried to get me globally banned for "doxing" theymos, notice the timestamps: http://i.imgur.com/THhruNm.png when I called him by his first name, which he himself publicizes on his LinkedIn page as associated with his handle "theymos"). Obviously the ban had no merit so it did not stand up to admin scrutiny.

- A bot that automatically removes users' posts and comments without actually banning them or telling them the items are being removed (this is a subreddit-specific "shadowban", though it's not a built-in feature of reddit it has the same effect)

- Moderators that eagerly attempt to ban all dissent, not only from their subreddit but from all of reddit

They are both wrong, both unforgivable, and both forms of censorship. Just ban people you don't like from your subreddit, no need to code custom bot features or try to lie to the reddit admins to accomplish political goals.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg153...

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.))

[1] https://bitco.in/forum/threads/who-is-theymos-and-what-did-h...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin/about/stylesheet

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/44umxm/i_have_to_say_t...

[4] http://gavinandresen.ninja/a-guided-tour-of-the-2mb-fork

[5] https://bitco.in/forum/threads/buip010-passed-xtreme-thinblo...

[6] https://bitco.in/forum/threads/iguana-parallel-sync-full-btc...

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.

Moreover, didn't theymos say he would ban coinbase from r/bitcoin. I suppose coinbases is a sockpuppet too right and maybe they out to destroy bitcoin because it isn't bitcoin that gives them their business.

All we get from small blockers is conspiracies and conspiracies, all the while you engage in ddosing, banning, censorship, changing of sorting orders, secret honk kong meetings, backroom deals with miners and on and on.

There is an attack going on and that is the insanity of the small blockers - a tiny minority of only 10% - crippling bitcoin by keeping network capacity limited, creating a huge backlog, unreliable transactions, and now we on HN discussing it.

Congrats - nutheads.

How do you know it's "sock puppets" and the like, and not real people who are expressing real opinions?

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.

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.

Seems like anyone capable of orchestrating DDoS, can also organize sockpuppets.

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

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).

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

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.

If you support Bitcoin, much in the same way as people support many open source projects, this isn't a lot of money to fork out. Compared to the amount of time contributors spend writing software for free for the good of the world.

People actually using bitcoin wanted the 2MB increase months ago.