[rsi_oww]

> 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_bitco...

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

[TazeTSchnitzel]

> 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.

[hartpuff]

> 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.

[studentrob]

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.

[ikeboy]

The actual technical discussion takes place on the mailing list. No points of view have been banned from there as far as I know.

[freework]

The dev-mailing list is very censored, I can verify this based on my personal experience. Many of my posts strengthening on-chain scaling points have been deleted from the dev-mailing list.

[jbmorgado]

> The only rule on the /r/bitcoin Reddit is not to promote these network fork attempts.

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.

[Phlarp]

Honestly if you are paying any attention what-so-ever to bitcoin and using /r/btc or /r/bitcoin as your primary or sole source of information then you deserve every bad thing that happens to you.

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".

[jbmorgado]

Well, the all point is that /r/bitcoin is an heavily censored forum of discussion where only pro bitcoin (and now, only pro bitcoin core) posts are accepted, unlike what the OP was trying to dismiss.

[riprowan]

> The people pushing the need to fork would bombard the Reddit forum for many months, very likely with sockpuppets.

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.

[maaku]

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

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

[riprowan]

Nonsense?

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

[Lazare]

> > 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.

[SolaceQuantum]

Because the people promoting alternative forks were using scripts and bots to censor the original bitcoin developers, criticism on the forks, and other discussion not promotion...

[jbmorgado]

There is a long, long tradition, going back as far as the end of 2013 of censorship of any criticism or even any bad news about bitcoin in /r/bitcoin

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.

[roarkjs]

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

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

[rsi_oww]

That is true, because /r/bitcoin is about bitcoin.

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.

[Lazare]

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.

[CydeWeys]

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.

[lololomg]

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

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.

[vertex-four]

/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".

[threeseed]

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]

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.)

[riprowan]

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

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

[newjersey]

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.

[aminok]

>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.

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.

[forgetsusername]

>very likely with sockpuppets

How easily people look to conspiracy theories.

[riprowan]

"very likely"

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?

[gasull]

You cannot even mention an altcoin without being shadowbanned. It happened to me. Mentioning an altcoin isn't the same as promoting it. You might want to point out that some users are flocking to Ethereum because of the fees.

[debacle]

Reddit mods can't shadowban people.

[pdaian]

The r/Bitcoin moderators are running a bot that has a list of accounts whose comments or posts it automatically removes. It's essentially being shadowbanned from that subreddit alone, and the users in question are not notified of that. Want to test? Make a new account and make a comment against Bitcoin Core or pro-blocksize increase, and see what happens within a few minutes.

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.

[debacle]

That's called a ban, not a shadowban.

[pdaian]

There are two separate issues here:

- 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.

[debacle]

Right. Look, I don't care. Reddit is reddit. I'm just saying, neither of those things is a shadowban.

[wslh]

If Satoshi Nakamoto him/herself appears and he/she promotes increasing the block size, would you change your position?

[riprowan]

Satoshi Nakamoto did promote increasing the block size, in 2010. As you can see from the discussion, many of the same players were already freezing their positions in this debate six years ago.

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