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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 cens

by Vozze 11y ago

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... http://imgur.com/xNjN0kH http://imgur.com/xNjN0kH ...and find ways to get together and discuss their opinions without censorship: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/48zggz/a_behind_the_scenes_look_at_how_bitcoin_core/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/48zggz/a_behind... https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/

studentrob 11y ago
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.
- Taek 11y ago
  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.
  - threeseed 11y ago
    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.
    - rsi_oww 11y ago
      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.
  - rsi_oww 11y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_brigades
    - girvo 11y ago
      > small technical change to a protocol I have no horse in this race, but isn't that understating the impact a bit?
      - rsi_oww 11y ago
        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.
        Laforet 11y ago
        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?
  - Andrew_Quentin 11y ago
    That sounds like a lot of conspiracy theory with zero evidence. Mind producing some actual evidence of brigading, sock puppeting, etc, preferably before theymos started banning everyone and was downvoted to -1,000 by the bitcoin community, not by whatever your paranoid head imagines. 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.
  - riprowan 11y ago
    So we're supposed to believe that same side that supposedly disrupted the community through sockpuppetry is also at the mercy of DDoS attacks? Seems like anyone capable of orchestrating DDoS, can also organize sockpuppets.
  - freework 11y ago
    > /r/bitcoin has been subject to spam attacks, sockpuppets, brigade voting, and a huge number of manipulations. How do you know it's "sock puppets" and the like, and not real people who are expressing real opinions?
rsi_oww 11y ago
> 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: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/499bai/51_of_bitcoin_classic_nodes_hosted_on_aws/ 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?
- threeseed 11y ago
  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.
  - rsi_oww 11y ago
    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.)
lhl 11y ago
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.)) [1] https://bitco.in/forum/threads/who-is-theymos-and-what-did-he-do.87/ https://bitco.in/forum/threads/who-is-theymos-and-what-did-h... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin/about/stylesheet https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin/about/stylesheet [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/44umxm/i_have_to_say_theymoss_72000_character_70_kb_css/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/44umxm/i_have_to_say_t... [4] http://gavinandresen.ninja/a-guided-tour-of-the-2mb-fork http://gavinandresen.ninja/a-guided-tour-of-the-2mb-fork [5] https://bitco.in/forum/threads/buip010-passed-xtreme-thinblocks.774/ https://bitco.in/forum/threads/buip010-passed-xtreme-thinblo... [6] https://bitco.in/forum/threads/iguana-parallel-sync-full-btc-blockchain-in-30-minutes-uses-half-the-space-but-starts-up-instant.911/ https://bitco.in/forum/threads/iguana-parallel-sync-full-btc...
bitshare 11y ago
Can confirm. Try the new Bitcoin Reddit sub /r/BTC instead as the main Reddit sub is heavily censored.

by Vozze 11y ago

studentrob 11y ago

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.

Taek 11y ago
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.
- threeseed 11y ago
  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.
  - rsi_oww 11y ago
    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.
- rsi_oww 11y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_brigades
  - girvo 11y ago
    > small technical change to a protocol I have no horse in this race, but isn't that understating the impact a bit?
    - rsi_oww 11y ago
      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.
      - Laforet 11y ago
        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?
- Andrew_Quentin 11y ago
  That sounds like a lot of conspiracy theory with zero evidence. Mind producing some actual evidence of brigading, sock puppeting, etc, preferably before theymos started banning everyone and was downvoted to -1,000 by the bitcoin community, not by whatever your paranoid head imagines. 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.
- riprowan 11y ago
  So we're supposed to believe that same side that supposedly disrupted the community through sockpuppetry is also at the mercy of DDoS attacks? Seems like anyone capable of orchestrating DDoS, can also organize sockpuppets.
- freework 11y ago
  > /r/bitcoin has been subject to spam attacks, sockpuppets, brigade voting, and a huge number of manipulations. How do you know it's "sock puppets" and the like, and not real people who are expressing real opinions?

rsi_oww 11y ago

> 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: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/499bai/51_of_bitcoin_classic_nodes_hosted_on_aws/ 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?

threeseed 11y ago
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.
- rsi_oww 11y ago
  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.)

lhl 11y ago

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.)) [1] https://bitco.in/forum/threads/who-is-theymos-and-what-did-he-do.87/ https://bitco.in/forum/threads/who-is-theymos-and-what-did-h... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin/about/stylesheet https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin/about/stylesheet [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/44umxm/i_have_to_say_theymoss_72000_character_70_kb_css/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/44umxm/i_have_to_say_t... [4] http://gavinandresen.ninja/a-guided-tour-of-the-2mb-fork http://gavinandresen.ninja/a-guided-tour-of-the-2mb-fork [5] https://bitco.in/forum/threads/buip010-passed-xtreme-thinblocks.774/ https://bitco.in/forum/threads/buip010-passed-xtreme-thinblo... [6] https://bitco.in/forum/threads/iguana-parallel-sync-full-btc-blockchain-in-30-minutes-uses-half-the-space-but-starts-up-instant.911/ https://bitco.in/forum/threads/iguana-parallel-sync-full-btc...

bitshare 11y ago

Can confirm. Try the new Bitcoin Reddit sub /r/BTC instead as the main Reddit sub is heavily censored.