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When is a question a request for service reviews?
One of our site's closing reason reads:

Questions seeking product or service reviews are off-topic because
they tend to attract subjective, low-quality, and spam answers. On
the other hand, offerings in the Bitcoin space are still evolving
rapidly which often renders answers outdated quickly. For more
information see this meta-discussion.

What is meant by "product or service reviews" in this context? When should we vote to close questions under this reason?

Relevant post from the Stack Overflow blog: Q&A is Hard, Let’s Go Shopping!. Also, a related MSE post: Why was my "shopping list" question closed?

The way I interpret this closing reason, we do not want questions that ask for an evaluation or comparison of services. Examples for off-topic questions:

What's the best exchange in country foo?
How do you like service ABC?
Is X or Y better for Z?
Is ABC a scam?
Let's collect all XYZ by posting one book/service/course/wallet per answer…

These sort of questions inherently subjective and prompt one-line answers, astroturfing, and other answers that quickly outdate.
However, I would consider the following questions legit and on-topic:

How can I do XYZ under these circumstances?
What should I watch out for when I choose a solution provider for that problem I want to solve?

Questions that focus on the how and why prompt answerers to provide expertise. While expertise is still somewhat subjective, it is valuable and non-trivial to come by for new users. Note that these questions still often get low-quality answers, so we should rigorously require answers to such questions to elaborate: how it solves the issue the user is facing, why the answerer is recommending a specific solution, and how they know about it.


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Please add tag BIP85
There are some existing questions on this topic.
The tag would make them easier to surface.

Sure, no problem. I've added bip85-deterministic-entropy  to a few questions where it seemed to fit.

Wow look what happened!! https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/112528/132451

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

sort: votes


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Custom Bitcoin design and logo - Information gathering
Congratulations Bitcoin community! We’re going to be creating a custom site design for you that we hope will represent your subject and we want you all to really love it. You’ve been waiting for some time and we really want to do this well. To facilitate this, we’re reaching out now to ask you for what you’d really love to see in the design and logo.
My name is Jose Santiago, and I am a Product Designer at Stack Overflow.
A quick history lesson about site theming
Originally, site designs were part of the site graduation process. When a site left beta, they'd get their design. But, at the time we only had one designer who was working on designs and the designs were very specialized and often involved a lot of custom illustrations. We got into a situation where several sites were in queue for graduation but the designer didn't have the bandwidth to actually create the designs.
Before she worked here, one of our Community Managers, Catija, asked the question Can Beta sites slated for graduation get full-site abilities without site design upgrade? on MSE. This kicked off several discussions within the CM team of the time and community members and the eventual decision was to implement "Design-independent graduation" in September 2015. This meant that many sites were finally able to leave beta without waiting on a design!
At that time we also had much more strict guidelines for when a site could graduate - they had to consistently get 10 new questions per day. This level of volume made graduation impossible or very unlikely for many sites - meaning many would stay in beta forever. As such, the CM team considered another request Catija made - Let's break up with "Graduation" and remove a bunch of "Beta" labels - and that's what eventually happened, too. In 2019, we removed the beta label from 29 sites and another 59 in December 2021.
We've also gone through several design systems changes, including launching Stacks version 1.0, which make creating and building in designs much simpler for both our design team and the developers. In fact, we showed off how flexible it could be in our April Fools prank this year "Filters for Stack Overflow".
What to expect
Over the next few weeks, we'll be communicating with you about your site design, so please help us out as much as you can. While we may not be experts in Bitcoin, we know that you are and that you have great ideas about what you want this site to look like - so share them with us! You've got a week now to pool up your thoughts in answers to this question, at which point I'll start working on this site.
I will spend some time working on a design based on your guidance, and we'll be back when it's ready to show you what the design and logo look like. At that point, y'all will have a week to make suggestions for adjustments to the design. Our hope is that there will be little that needs adjusting but, due to the size of our backlog, we can't incorporate more than one phase of feedback, so any changes will need to be recommended at this point.
We'll then consider the changes proposed and make any adjustments that we feel are beneficial. Changes that are too big or are out of scope likely won't be possible, but we'll make sure to explain why we opted against making a change should that happen. Please understand that design is often a subjective thing and we may end up with community members differing in their opinions, so we'll be taking that into account when deciding. Decisions about the final design will be made by the design team and CMs with the concerns of the community taken into account.
Also, it's worth keeping in mind that the goal of these designs is to make something topical, unique, and attractive, but we'll be designing within the scope of our newer site theming. We'll be able to create a logo, background colors, and textures in addition to your logo - but please don't expect illustrations like what you may have seen on some of the older site designs.
Process
Over the next month or so, we’ll be going through a few steps to get your site design up and running. This post is the first of those steps. I’ll also be using this post to track the phases in the table below.

Step
Status

Information Gathering
complete

Design V1
complete

V1 Feedback
complete

Design adjustments (if needed)
complete

Developer cleanup and shipping of final design
complete

What we need from you
As I've mentioned already, we need some inspiration from you so that we can get started on this design and create something you'll really be proud of. So far, I was able to find an older discussion about logos and site designs here on Meta: What should our logo and site design look like? Feel free to reference it if there are ideas you like already - or give us new ones! If I've missed any, please link them in a comment so we can find them. We're really looking for design ideas rather than needing you to design anything for us.
When you're answering this question, think about:

What symbols or images are important to the subject of this site?

Especially things that speak to insiders that we might not find on our own

Are there any colors that are tied to your subject?
What tone/mood/feeling would you like your theme to emit? While this is subjective, it helps to set some design guardrails. So, when answering your thoughts, some good axes to mention are where the theme might sit inside these spectra

From fun to serious
From classic to modern

From simple to complex

How could a good logo represent your subject?

If you have any questions, let me know! We're really looking forward to hearing from you and getting your site design underway.

Thanks for reaching out, I'm very excited. I figured I'd just drop a few thoughts from the top of my head to help you get started.
Bitcoin is the native currency of the internet. This community helps users that run into issues using Bitcoin, engineers building software that interacts with the Bitcoin network, and researchers learning about the involved protocols. Occasionally, business-related, economic, or game-theoretic topics will come up, but questions about the current exchange rate or speculation are off-topic. Other cryptocurrencies are not on-topic. Regarding the mood, I think we would like to emphasize that we are a technical community.
The most important symbol would be the Bitcoin logo: a slanted white ₿ on Bitcoin Orange. You may find the Bitcoin Design Guide (especially the Visual Language section) interesting. Our color is "Bitcoin Orange": #F7931A. There is a UTF-8 character for Bitcoin meanwhile, ₿ (U+20BF). As the Lightning Network (lightning-network) is one of the most important protocols in the context of Bitcoin, lightning related themes may also be pertinent.

Good ideas. Thank you for sharing!

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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Site design and logo — Draft
After gathering your feedback and doing some research, I have spent some time working on the design for the site, and I am excited to share the result. Hope you like it, and I look forward to your feedback!
Bitcoin site design
The design is based around the universal bitcoin symbol and the lightning network, which is one of its most iconic characteristics. The Bitcoin logo was slightly modified to be unique to the site but still distinguished as the bitcoin logo everyone knows. The lightning network and blockchain is represented in the background as a simple connection of dots that can be representative of nodes.
Color scheme
The colors chosen are a palette inspired by the Bitcoin Orange.

Logo
As mentioned before, the logo is a slight variation from the universal logo paired with the Bitcoin title that uses Poppins Semibold as the font. A font that is geometrical and clean.

Favicon

Page Design

We hope you enjoy this design, but if something doesn’t feel right, now is your chance to share your feedback. This window for feedback will be open for one week. We will then work to incorporate feedback as best as we can, finalize things on our end, and lastly, deliver the design to your site.

Hi V2Blast, Catija, and Jose, I was just wondering whether you had an update on the status of this project and whether there was something else we could do to help.

Hi all, any update on this?

Sorry for the late reply. We are expecting the new theme to be live next week. I appreciate the feedback given and patience.

Update: Your new site design is live!

I agree with not altering the logo too much as it could be mistaken for an altcoin. Background looks good.
Sticking with the original #F7931A orange and 14 degree tilt inside a speech bubble is my suggestion.
Made a quick mockup below:

The SVG file Stephen's shared above is outdated and has some minor issues with the vector so I made a Figma file that has updated assets for the original bitcoin logo (not just the icon but also the wordmark and "B" on its own).
I detailed what very slight alterations I made in the File. I also included my mockup above if you wanted to use / modify it - it's all yours!
Figma file: https://www.figma.com/file/zMyIHY7iGVTpP8uc7prM5x/Bitcoin-logo?node-id=1%3A6
You can DM over at the Bitcoin Design slack mentioned by Murch if you need any help / feedback.

Thanks for taking the time to build a custom branding for the Bitcoin Stack Exchange! Here are some thoughts on logo and background.
Logo
I would suggest using the Bitcoin logo in its proper form, meaning #F7931A orange with a 14 degree tilt. You can find the SVG file for this here.
https://bitcoin.design/guide/getting-started/visual-language/#update-by-bitboy
In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with modifying the bitcoin logo when you are trying to conform it to an existing brand. But there isn't really an existing brand for Bitcoin Stack Exchange, so making modifications to it seems a little arbitrary in this context.
The way that the tips of the B have been extended and sharpened looks very harsh. They remind me of daggers or knives. It looks very dangerous and unfriendly. Since many in this community see bitcoin as the most open monetary network on the face of the earth and a beneficial technology for humanity, it makes more sense for the bitcoin logo to appear more friendly. Therefore, best to use the original logo in this situation.
Speech bubble logo
I think the speech bubble logo is a good idea, but I'd recommend using the original Bitcoin B, tilted and with the proper orange.
Background
We can say it represents a network of bitcoin nodes. It looks very standard B2B technology stock imagery, but it will get the job done.
Maybe try lightening background very slightly, or darkening text? Technically, the colors pass WCAG AA and AAA a11y requirements, but for some reason when I eyeball it just looks a little low-contrast. That might just be me. Not sure if others feel the same way.
https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=61605C&bcolor=F0EAE3

I don't have much of an eye for design myself, but when I had a look at this draft, I had a few concerns. The Bitcoin Logo is usually slanted 14° clockwise. There is a forkcoin of Bitcoin, essentially a scam, that uses an upright ₿ on a yellow background for its logo. The main color of the proposed scheme falls somewhere in the middle between Bitcoin Orange and that forkcoin's color.
The logo itself feels a bit too customized. Since there are scores of Bitcoin copycats, it might be better to stick closer to the original logo.
I asked a befriended member of the Bitcoin Design community for her thoughts. She provided the following questions and comments:

Bitcoin site design
Is the site design based on technical execution? I
like that there is inspiration from a branding standpoint but I wonder
if UX/UI strategies are considered.
Color scheme
Is this accessible? Has it been tested? Iterating on
Bitcoin Orange is an interesting idea but I am not sure these colors
meet web standards. This new Bitcoin Design Accessibility page
may be worth consideration.
Logo
If the plan is to go for geometrical and clean, this logo needs a
bit of tweaking. Bitcoin icons has been polished and may provide more
of the desired look and feel for this logo. There
are github and figma environments to build and share.
Page Design
Readability is a challenge. More space and visuals to
communicate would offer a much smoother user flow. It would be useful
to see flows and wireframes. From the screens shown it isn’t clear how
different personas may interact and make sense of the site. Bitcoin UI
Kit could be the best tool for the job here.

She also invited you to join the Bitcoin Design Slack, if you wanted to bounce a few ideas around, and suggested that probably a few of the 3,000+ members of the Bitcoin Design Community would be excited to help the effort.

As a non-designer, it reads that the response in some cases (e.g. page design) don't relate to the design/artwork itself, but rather to the layout of our platform, which this design is not touching. Is it possible to clarify whether these points are about the artwork before/after rather than about the entire layout of the page?

Sorry, I may have initially failed to convey that the layout is mostly fixed, but only the color scheme and artwork are up for a do-over. My friend thinks that "using bitcoin design icons and changing the logo could be the easiest wins here". The linked Bitcoin Icons are open source, free to use, and under an open license. If your designer were interested, she'd be happy to help "jam it out on figma sometime".

I'd like to echo Murch's concerns about the logo stylization in this draft. As a site devoted to technical Q/A help, I feel that we should stick to the well-adopted open-source standards, rather than trying to break the mould with something novel/fancier. Specifically:

I agree that including the 14° clockwise tilt is highly preferable, and also important in regards to maintaining a distinct brand amongst the many imitators/scams.
Likewise, keeping the 'orange' colour in the colour palette as close to #F7931A as possible is preferable to differentiate against imitators/scams.
The angled ends on the vertical and horizontal lines extending out of the 'B' look odd to me, and break away from the normative design. I think sticking to flat ends is highly preferable (for the vertical lines, at the very least).

On the positive side, I really do like the connected dots in the top left, I think they are a simple but effective element that represents the P2P nature of the Bitcoin network well.
Thank you for your work on this, I am excited to see the final product.


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Constant harassment and false accusations on bitcoin stackexchange

Accused of being a sockpuppet account created by Samourai: How does dumplings work?
Neither Wasabi nor NBitcoin support Signet. I created a transaction on signet that is detected as coinjoin by dumplings and  shared the steps to reproduce. This proves there can be false positives and its easy to create fake coinjoin that dumplings would count as coinjoin.

Accused of being sockpuppet again and some agenda in the comments Wasabi Wallet 2.0 coin control. How secure / private are sent coins now?
The question was about coin control in Wasabi and I shared all the details with a screenshot. There was a disclaimer added with link to the post written by zkSNACKs team as a newbie reading the answer should be aware of such red flags.

Is it okay to accuse random people on bitcoin stackexchange of something based on your feelings? Can I do the same everytime nopara73 writes something on bitcoin stackexchange?
I am not sure if bitcoin stackexchange requires KYC but I can prove my identity to one of the moderators if its kept conifdential, nopara73 can apologize publicly and stop writing false things about anons online.

Thanks for the heads-up. I responded to each of the three comments and communicated expectations for acceptable behavior. Please let us know if this happens again.

Thank you Murch


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New tag for questions concerning mining reward structure
Lately (and for the past 10+ years) there have been many debates over the shift from block subsidy to transaction fees as the main part of block rewards, and how that impacts Bitcoin's security. Current questions that touch on this topic are variosly tagged with any combination of mining-reward, reward-schedule, transaction-fees, mining-theory, economic-theory and even future-proof.
Given that there is currently no tag specifically for this topic and it's not obvious what its name should be, I wanted to open a discussion first before I go and start retagging.
Notably, these two tags don't exist yet: reward-structure and security-budget. I'm slightly in favor of the latter for the use case described above, but there are surely other options I haven't thought of yet. Or maybe I'm wrong and this topic doesn't need its own tag (though I suspect this is a topic that will only become more prominent over time).

Also related is [tag:blockspace-market], still thinking about an answer.

I think the new tag you propose might have a bit of an overlap with mining-reward and blockspace-market especially, but I agree that it is an interesting sub-topic that we could group. I like security-budget since it emphasizes the role of the mining reward as an incentive to thwart attacks.


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Congratulations on the new site style!
the new style is fairly sweet at first sight!!
just seen it and felt I owed you this after harsh critics a few months ago
keep up the good work!

You may want to post this as an answer on the announcement that just went up: Your new site design is live! :)


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Your new site design is live!
As you can see, the new design just went live! At this point, we are done with major revisions to the design (although you can still report CSS/styling bugs by starting a new post and tagging it with design and bug). Thank you for your valuable design feedback and for your patience while we got this out for you.
We really hope you like the design! Thanks so much to Jose for his work on this!

Very nice design, Thanks!

The new style is fairly sweet at first sight!!
I've just seen it and felt I owed you this after harsh critiques a few months ago.
Keep up the good work!


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New site logo doesn't appear on Sites overview
I noticed that our new shiny logo doesn't appear on the site overview.

It doesn't appear on mempool chat either. I suppose some services won't show the icon until restarted. Surely normal.

Are you still experiencing this? Assuming you're talking about the sites list on https://stackexchange.com/sites, I'm seeing the new logo there now.

Thanks, it's fixed now!

The favicon on Chat is still the old one, though

@Murch: Looks like the icon is updated in chat now as well. I blame caching.

The new logo is visible on the site overview now.


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Symbol feels off-center in favicon
If you feel that this one is too nitty, please let me know and I'll close it.
It feels like the ₿ in the Favicon is closer to the right side of the speech bubble than the left. I'd assume that it's centered, but may appear off-center due to the slant?

disagree, can't see the misalignment

Now that you've pointed out, I can see it too. Moving it half a pixel to the left on the 32x32 favicon feels about right.

I'd agree, it looks slightly off-centre to the right to me as well


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Do we want Code Syntax Highlighting?
We've had more questions lately in which people asked about specific code from various Bitcoin-related codebases. I've also been approached by a developer who requested that we get Code Syntax Highlighting. I reached out to the Community Manager team who told me that it could be made to happen if the site's community agreed.
Please weigh in: Do we want Code Syntax Highlighting for Bitcoin Stack Exchange?
See also this prior request from a decade ago: Code Syntax Highlighting - Is Code In-Scope For Bitcoin.SE?

Just reviewed your request and the syntax highlighting is enabled.

Yes, absolutely! I think syntax highlighting will really help make a ton of answers easier to parse.

Yes, of course, I don't see a reason why not, and there are many hundreds of questions that would benefit from this. These appear to be the most popular programming tags:
python 298 questions
bitcoinj 253 questions
php 172 questions
java 134 questions
javascript 92 questions
bitcoinjs 84 questions
c++ 83 questions
c# 66 questions
node.js 56 questions

You could perhaps also mention [bitcoin-core-development] which we use for questions about the Bitcoin Core source code with 541 questions :)

Or, I could go through all questions tagged with [bitcoin-core-development] and make sure they also have [c++] where applicable. Looking through a few of them it appears most don't actually contain code snippets, more often it's bitcoin-cli commands.

It was just a loose idea. :) Going through all those questions sounds like a lot of work, I'm not sure that's necessary. I'd rather your valuable attention be spent on other stuff like e.g. your excellent edits on wiki excerpts

Thank you! Though I do like to occasionally just go and spend some time fixing tags, so this wouldn't be dividing my attention.

I have been spoiled and can't live without it. Often when I have trouble grokking a piece of code online, I paste it into VS Code and the clouds part. Would be great to have it here.

Yes.
I'd also like to see LaTeX rendering...

Mh, I was thinking that we should maybe have a second topic for that.

Yes, please! I think it would be pretty helpful

I think this would be an excellent addition to the site, +1

I always wondered why it didn't have syntax highlightning - given it is a sister side of stack overflow.
I wonder though which programming language it will be? I am pretty sure they can't support Bitcoin Scrip easily. And the typical Code Blocks syntax that we have don't signal which language is being used. If we had to signal it we would have to edit many posts.
Tl;DR: yes please!

It doesn't help that Bitcoin scripts are often written with placeholder variables like <key> CHECKSIG, and AFAIK there is no standard for that.

"I always wondered why it didn't have syntax highlighting" ex-SE staff explained the reason on How to get syntax highlighting activated on another SE site?: "The problem is with performance (two additional resources - JS and CSS), these are additional HTTP calls meaning pages load a bit slower. Additionally, the JS needs to run on each and every question page load on sites where it is enabled, the actual work required to highlight is not trivial and takes time."


text:
Question closed without a valid reason
This question was closed by one of the moderators as offtopic although it isn't offtopic. Reason mentioned in the comment does not make sense because a summary with the question is always good to understand the concept or what exactly someone is looking for.
Research article about impact of BGP hijacking on bitcoin p2p network
There are lot of questions on bitcoin stackexchange that requested for research articles or papers: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/search?q=research

What question is "this question"?

Sorry forgot to add the link. Added.

It was pointed out to the asker that the scope of the question was unclear via a comment per a custom close reason. The question was reopened after the asker addressed some of the feedback.


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How to address requests for Bitcoin book overviews?
I noticed that we have multiple questions that collect bitcoin book recommendations per answer post. So far I have found:

What are some good resources for understanding Bitcoin?
Any books about Bitcoin?
Is there a reference, authoritative resource or book on Bitcoin programming?
Blockchain programming books C#?
Where can I find resources for programmers to understand Bitcoin?
General book recommendation
cryptography book or resource
A "Bitcoin for dummies" guide?
Is there developer documentation for the Bitcoin Core source code?

These sort of questions are generally a bad fit for the stack exchange work flow: later answers are inherently disadvantaged in score, the big number of posts makes it hard to get an overview, duplicates need to be curated, the answer quality tends to be all over the place, there is no clear “best, complete answer”, and other issues.
I'm curious to hear ideas how we should approach the situation (e.g. close the “shopping list” topics, merge all of them, leave everything as is, …).

I propose that we convert one of these topics to a canonical-question with a community wiki answer, and collect the answers from most of the above questions into a table overview similar to the answer on “The Definitive C++ Book Guide and List” on Stack Overflow. Excerpt below:

If there is support for my proposal, we could discuss in another topic the categories and which of the listed (and maybe additional) topics should be collected.

+1. I can already think of some categories, and also of some non-categories like "blockchain programming" (lol) or "cryptography" (which has its own SE site).


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Are Homework questions on-topic? If so, what standards do we want to set for them?
We have recently had a few questions that either outright indicated or strongly gave the impression of being homework. I do not think that it is our place to do students' homework for them. It is cheating, does not benefit the student, and leaves us with questions that are unlikely to be interesting to the general userbase of our site. However, if a question is asked in which the asker describes their approach and wishes to learn more about the background or needs guidance on how to think about the question at hand, there might be room to nudge them in the right direction.
Either way, I felt that we should perhaps have a discussion here to establish a policy how we want to deal with homework questions and what our expectations and standards for such questions are.

Related: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/334822/how-do-i-ask-and-answer-homework-questions, https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6166/open-letter-to-students-with-homework-problems


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Weekly Topic Challenge: Let's ask about replace-by-fee‽ [2022 edition, Finished]
Replace-by-fee has been a hot topic in the past few months. Our site already has 82 questions, but we probably have not everything covered yet.
Please use replace-by-fee to tag your questions, and consider asking about opt-in RBF, mempoolfullrbf, the criteria to evaluate replacement transactions, and any details on the mechanisms per which transactions in the mempool get replaced.
Please also check out previous work, add more answers where they are missing, improve content where it should be improved, and vote on what's there!
This weekly topic challenge runs from 2022-12-08 – 2022-12-14. Happy posting!

I realized that this was actually a topic in 2016 when we last did weekly topics as well: https://bitcoin.meta.stackexchange.com/q/793/5406

There were two questions asked about replace-by-fee during the challenge which each got one answer:

persistence of the RBF bit in post-fullrbf chain – Mercedes, answered by Michael Folkson
What are the arguments in the `mempoolfullrbf` debate? — Murch, answered by Michael Folkson

There were also three answers added to previously existing questions and more than twenty posts on replace-by-fee edited during the Topic Challenge!
Thanks for participating!


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Monthly Topic Challenge: Let's ask about Lightning Development Kit‽
Lightning Development Kit (LDK) is a library to integrate Lightning into existing Bitcoin wallet projects written in Rust. Our site so far has only a single question about LDK. That feels like an oversight!
Maybe our topic week is a prompt for you to learn more about its functionality, have a look at their code base, or try to play around with LDK. However you engage with it, please be sure to use lightning-development-kit (or the synonym ldk) when you ask all questions that come up while exploring.
Are you already working on integrating LDK into something? Did you resolve some blockers already? Add a question and answer it yourself to help the next developer.
Please also check out other topics that get started to add additional answers where they are missing, improve existing posts where they can be improved, and vote on what's there.
This weekly topic challenge runs from 2023-01-04 – 2023-01-10. Happy posting!

Unfortunately, no new posts were added to lightning-development-kit topics this week.


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Let's keep tag excerpts crunchy
Tag excerpts show just the first couple sentences when a user is tagging a question. Many of our tag excerpts start with “collects questions about <tag-name>…”, “should be used to collect questions about <tag-name>…”, or similar phrases.
When we tag a question or hover a tag to read more about it, we already know that we are looking at a tag and that tags label questions. Instead of repeating the basic function of tags in each excerpt, let's start with relevant information right away instead of wasting the first few words a user gleans.
E.g. the tag excerpt for address started with “should be used for Bitcoin addresses”.

but could instead start with a brief summary of the purpose of addresses which also establishes that we talk about Bitcoin addresses rather than IP-addresses or physical addresses

As a second example, the wallet tag excerpt was “should be used for questions that pertain to wallet software. A wallet software is a piece of software which manages users' keypairs, addresses, and transactions. Wallet software also allow a user to send and receive Bitcoin.”

Which I replaced with “A wallet manages a user's private keys. Wallet software is used to send and receive Bitcoin. It also keeps track of the user's transactions, addresses, and balance.”

Let me know what you think.


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Should “address“ be a synonym of “invoice-address”?
Many novice Bitcoin users misconstrue addresses as a permanent identifier like email addresses. However, Bitcoin addresses should rather be perceived to have the character of a unique invoice identifier. A few years ago, BIP 179 proposed “Bitcoin Invoice Address” as a new term for “address”. They suggest that Bitcoin and Address are optional, the former only necessary when the context of Bitcoin is not present, and the latter only meant as a transitional step.
I propose that we introduce the tag invoice-address and make address a synonym for it. Any questions tagged address would then be automatically tagged invoice-address instead.
This would help clarify the character of Bitcoin Invoice Addresses as a single-use artifact, perhaps help curb address reuse, and also dissuade misuse of the tag in the context of email addresses, physical addresses, or IP addresses.

I don't think Bitcoin SE should use its position to attempt to "right great wrongs" (similar to WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS), and that includes trying to push a change in widely established terminology. At worst this could confuse people into thinking "address" and "invoice address" are two different things.
Address reuse is also not as big of a problem as it used to be. Most wallets used today generate a new address for each transaction and many will display a warning when attempting to view a previously generated address. According to Jameson Lopp's latest annual review most address reuse is probably due to deposit/withdrawal mechanisms on exchanges that encourage it, which aren't guaranteed to change even if the terminology changes.

I agree with this exactly. Using non-established terminology on a Q&A site is just going to make the answers confusing, and barely have any effect in changing people's behavior.

It worked for "fee market" ⇒ "blockspace market", tho ^^


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Should we remove links from tag excerpts?
There are some tags whose excerpts include a link, for example lightning-development-kit:

Lightning Development Kit (LDK) is a library written in Rust that
allows you to build a lightning node without worrying about
implementing low-level lightning logic correctly. More details here:
https://github.com/lightningdevkit

One problem is that this link is not clickable either in the tag tooltip or the tag info page, you actually need to copy and paste it. And I don't think it even makes sense conceptually to have links in tag excerpts. I propose we establish this as a general guideline and move current offending links to the full tag wiki.

That's a good idea!


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2022: a year in moderation

As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:

We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
-- A Theory of Moderation

That doesn't eliminate the need for having moderators altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.
So as we say goodbye to 2022 (and where did January go, right?) and dive head first into 2023, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some exciting stats. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Bitcoin over the past 12 months:

Action
Moderators
Community¹

All comments on a post moved to chat
1
0

Answer flags handled
988
628

Answers flagged
80
1,538

Comment flags handled
193
439

Comments deleted⁷
477
760

Comments flagged
0
632

Comments undeleted
9
0

Posts bumped
0
2,227

Posts deleted⁶
467
1,302

Posts locked
0
354

Posts undeleted
4
24

Question flags handled⁵
517
678

Questions closed
368
85

Questions flagged⁵
74
1,122

Questions migrated
7
0

Questions protected
1
85

Questions reopened
17
0

Tag synonyms created
13
0

Tag synonyms proposed
13
0

Tags merged
17
0

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Close votes" queue
47
380

Tasks reviewed⁴: "First answers" queue
16
274

Tasks reviewed⁴: "First questions" queue
18
531

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Late answers" queue
5
66

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Low quality posts" queue
42
113

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Reopen votes" queue
2
2

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Suggested edits" queue
146
210

Users contacted
4
0

Users destroyed³
151
0

Users suspended²
3
50

Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Bitcoin without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes). Community can handle these flags by at least one person voting to close a question that has a close flag.
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:

Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: 2021: a year in moderation

You can also check out this report on other sites

Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

Wishing everyone a happy 2023! ^_^


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I just want to thank this community with all the respect I have for helping people to not get scammed
I just this morning got the bit coin mining scam and was excited to find out that I had $30,000+ in Bitcoin n to withdraw it after the 364 days of a 365 day period for $64. Well I decided to Google that n it led me here to find out it a scam. I can't thank this community enough for saving me my money n the embarrassment of calling my friends n telling them I just got $30,000 only to be embarrassed. Thank y'all again for this community n your infinite knowledge!

Everyone starts somewhere, consider yourself fortunate that you decided to do a little bit of research before proceeding. Bitcoiners always say "verify dont trust" and this applies to basically everything at this point.


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Odd behavior with @ sign
On this answer, Ugam Kamat  left a comment that tagged me with an @sign.
I responded with a comment where I attempted to reciprocate by starting with @UgamKamat, but when the comment was posted, that tag had disappeared.  I'd thought that maybe I'd somehow forgotten to include it, so tried adding another comment (now deleted), but the same thing happened.
Is this a bug, or is it some intentional behavior that I don't understand?  I have not had this happen on other stackexchange sites.
Edited to add: It occurs to me that the @sign was probably superfluous, because I am commenting on Ugam's answer so he'll get notified anyway.  But I am still pretty sure that when I've used the @ sign on other stackexchange sites, it has not disappeared like this.

@Murch ping - verified?.

Yes, if only the post author and you have been commenting on a post thus far, mentions of the author at the beginning of your comment will be removed:

via https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/43020/232061


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Improved site description
I've noticed the site description for Bitcoin SE, shown in the sites overview and in search engines, has not changed since its inception in 2011:

Q&A for Bitcoin crypto-currency enthusiasts

Now, I don't know how exactly this description came to be back in the day, but I feel like it could use some improvement. How about "Q&A for Bitcoin users, developers and enthusiasts"? It specifies the scope in more detail and gets rid of the somewhat controversial term "cryptocurrency" (with a hyphen, no less). I'd be interested to know if you like it, have another proposal or think the current description doesn't need changing.

I asked the community team how one might update that description.

I was told that this description is set on Stack Exchange’s side somewhere, but if this proposal gets more support, we can get it done.

This meta post describes the process: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/393320/whats-the-process-of-changing-site-description

Wish granted. The site description has been updated.

I agree that the site description should be improved. I like Vojtěch’s suggestion:

Q&A for Bitcoin users, developers and enthusiasts

Agreed! I like Vojtěch’s suggestion too

I agree with this description change as well.

Agreed. The change would more accurately reflects the site's updated scope as well.

I feel like we've reached consensus on this


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Middle Sidebar Advertising
As you all know, advertising is an important source of revenue for Stack Overflow and it helps us support all the sites across the Stack Exchange Network and the resources that go into maintaining and improving the experience on the platform. We are going to be introducing middle sidebar ads, which have been on the main Stack Overflow site for years, to some of the tech sites including bitcoin.
The middle sidebar ads have the same standards as any other ads on the platform. Ads are non-intrusive and static. Ads go through a vetting process to ensure they are appropriate for the communities on Stack Exchange. If you see an ad that may not follow our established standards and guidelines, you can let us know by using the "report this ad" functionality. Here is a mockup of what these will look like when two ads are showed (the existing ad placement and the new middle sidebar ad placement):

This ad space won’t be available for display until May 10 because we wanted to give you a heads-up before you started seeing them. Ads are an essential line of business for us and we’re committed to giving you advanced notice whenever we introduce a new form of advertising on the network sites. If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know.


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Notice: We are participating in the Moderation Strike [resolved]
Stack Overflow recently announced that we are no longer to take action against content that was produced using large language model based text generators (e.g. ChatGPT). In my experience, such posts sound authoritative and are well-written, but contain anything from vacuous restating of the question to slightly misleading advice to outright bogus, e.g. a recent example hallucinated RPC commands that don’t exist.
After investing many hours a week for over ten years, the quality of posts on this site is dear to my heart.  While we previously saw some astroturfing and lots of spam, I am concerned that the cost of generating posts with LLMs is negligible, but imposes a significant vetting cost on our users. It is incomprehensible to me that Stack Overflow is essentially giving a carte blanche to any user to flood our sites with mediocre to malicious content while taking our tools to curb such behavior.
You can read more about the moderation strike in this open letter, and this meta topic.

Update:
Andrew Chow and meshcollider have joined the strike.
As part of my our strike, I we will not participate in

Raising and handling flags.
Closing or voting to close posts.
Deleting or voting to delete posts.
Reviewing tasks in the various review queues.

brace yourself: Why is SE staff violating SE policy by un-featuring posts about the strike on per-site Metas?

hope yall are listened to

Glad you're all on board!

Yesterday, a number of results from the negotiation between representatives of company and moderators got announced: Moderation strike: Results of negotiations
Among other things, some of my personal highlights include:

The policy regarding AI generated content is changed to permit moderation of content that matches at least one of several strong heuristics or multiple of several weak heuristics
Stack Exchange, Inc. commits to a review period for new binding policies
Stack Exchange, Inc. staff cannot mandate moderation actions be taken without a public policy supporting those actions
There are several commitments to communication improvements between moderators and company

Thank you very much for your patience while we were striking. We have started working through the backlog of flags.


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New voting buttons make it hard to distinguish voted upon posts on MAIN site
The new voting buttons have made it significantly more difficult to see whether the user has already voted on a post. I’m aware that on other sites the filled-in background after voting is a different color with a better contrast (including now our meta site), but in our main site’s styling, it is hard to see.
Would it be possible that the voting button background could be amended in some fashion on the voted posts for our main site styling?

Update 2023-08-02:
I just saw this color scheme on a different part of Stack Exchange. Perhaps something like this could work well on our main site using “Bitcoin Orange”.

Update 2023-10-30:
The new color scheme that was launched recently appears to improve the situation slightly by making the background on the voted button darker (before, not-voted, after):

It seems to me that the contrast could still be more pronounced.

I assume this is about the voting buttons on the main site (and not on Meta, which has already been adjusted)?

@V2Blast: Yes, I noticed the issue on the main site.

Thanks. This issue is already on our radar via the MSE post I can't see if I've already voted on something, so I've linked the ticket for this post to the existing issue for that (so we can hopefully respond to this post as well if/when that gets addressed).

Ah excellent. Thank you very much for your help, @V2Blast

@V2Blast: This user interface issue on our main site still persists. Any chance that you have an update?

No updates at this time, but we'll make sure to let you know when we have something to share.

Thanks @V2Blast

A fix has been now deployed. A button indicating a prior vote now has a significantly darker styling. Screenshot from the main page:


text:
maintenance page shows no styles
maintenance page shows no styles:

for reference, another site:


text:
Are Ordinals and Inscriptions on-topic?
In the past, there was broad support for narrowing the topic of Bitcoin SE to “technologies that are applicable to supporting the bitcoin currency, in the past, present, or future”.
While it seems obvious to me that BRC20 tokens are off-topic, since we’ve previously also treated other cryptocurrencies built on colored coin projects such as Omni as off-topic, it doesn’t seem obvious to me whether ordinals and Inscriptions are on-topic or off-topic here. There have been some questions asked and answered, but the topic seems to have gotten a tepid reception.
Please weigh in on how we should treat questions about Ordinals and/or Inscriptions. Are they on-topic or off-topic? On what grounds are you arguing either position? Where’s the border between on-topic and off-topic? What criteria are we using to assess whether to keep open or close such topics?

If Murch is not sure Ordinals are off topic, then they are on topic.

@Mercedes -  you should add an answer here so your opinion can be discussed and voted up or down.

tl;dr: How to Ordinal = off topic. Sky falling because Ordinals = on-topic.
Although I find Ordinals and Inscriptions interesting, I am certain that is insufficient grounds for suggesting they be made on-topic. I think questions about making or using Ordinals Inscriptions, or how to mint or transfer a BRC-20 token, should be off-topic if this site is to be consistent about it's Bitcoin-only policy.
I think there is some merit in accepting questions relating to Ordinals impact on the performance and sustainability of the Bitcoin network and currency.

Per the highly upvoted answers on Proposal: Narrow topic of Bitcoin.Stackexchange to questions applicable to Bitcoin, this site should collect questions about technologies that are applicable to supporting the bitcoin currency, in the past, present, or future.
After they have been around for almost a year:

Inscriptions appear to have no relation to the bitcoin currency, they merely use the Bitcoin network and blockchain as a publication mechanism. I consider inscriptions off-topic.
Ordinals are a social convention how to keep track of specific satoshis. This convention is completely out-of-band and appears to be irrelevant to the bitcoin currency. I would therefore also consider ordinals off-topic on this site.

Questions about e.g. bitcoin script, blockchain footprint, or mempool behavior might still be on-topic even if they are caused or related to ordinals or inscriptions.

Agreed.  I consider inscriptions and ordinals off-topic, and indeed any future tech that is not about Bitcoin itself would be off topic.  The bar here should be "does this question and any potential answer help the bitcoin.se audience understand Bitcoin and the bitcoin network."


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2023 Moderator Election Q&A – Question Collection

The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it here.

Bitcoin Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election next week, 2023-10-10. In connection with that, we will be holding a Q&A with the candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.
Here’s how it’ll work:

Until the nomination phase, (so, until 2023-10-10 at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post one question per answer.

If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of [text](link), as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.

This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into currently.

We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The following two questions are guaranteed to be included:

How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc. a question that you feel shouldn’t have been?

The community team may also include the following three questions if the community doesn’t supply enough questions.

In your opinion, what do moderators do?
A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching enough reputation to access moderator tools or become a trusted user?

At the start of the nomination phase, the Community Team will select up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. We exclude any suggested questions that are negatively scored.

We will post the final questionnaire on the Election page. Candidates will have the option to fill out the questionnaire, and their answers will appear beneath their intro statements.
This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&A.

If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.

Apologies for the delay in posting this - our tools are not working as expected at the moment but we're working on fixing them. If you would like, I can leave the question collection open a bit longer than scheduled.

Folks who may be thinking of running can check their mod score here

"If you have questions about the election process itself, please ask your question on the Bitcoin Meta." How free is discussion? I one finds out that a nominee has been convicted of a felony, can that be mentioned here?

@MichaelHardy That seems like a very... specific thing to ask. I'm not sure quite how to respond to it. What you're quoting relates more to the actual election process, meaning the phases of the election and such things. Issues related to participants should be handled in the usual sorts of ways - through flags or the contact form. In general, if you want to get our attention to a user who has nominated in the election, feel free to flag their nomination with an explanation. This will ping me (the election leader) to review the flag.

"Flag their nomination"? To what extent would one be allowed to criticize candidates by providing factual information and arguing that it is a reason why a person should not be a moderator? Is that to be done only by flagging?

@MichaelHardy There's a comments section under candidate nominations that can be used to ask questions of the candidate's use of the site and tools and other behavior as well as to get deeper understanding of their answers to the questionnaire but I should be clear that accusing or otherwise attacking the users will not be acceptable, particularly as it relates to things that have nothing to do with use of this site that are impossible for others to confirm. If you have accusations for why a candidate should be deemed ineligible, it's better to flag rather than commenting.

What are your criteria for upvoting a question?  What are your criteria for downvoting?

As a moderator of the Bitcoin Stack Exchange site, what would you do to improve engagement on the site?

What is your opinion around comments remaining on questions and answers after they become somewhat stale?  What do you consider "somewhat stale" to mean?

As a moderator, how would you approach a poorly phrased question that asks about an interesting issue?


text:
2023 Community Moderator Election
The 2023 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
Community moderator elections have three phases:

Nomination phase
Primary phase
Election phase

Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.
Please visit the official election page at
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/election
for more detail, and to participate!
If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged election.


text:
2023 Community Moderator Election Results
Moderator election #2 on Bitcoin has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the new moderator is:

They will be joining the existing crew shortly — please thank them for volunteering and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!
For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results here or view a summary report online.

Thank you; it will be my pleasure to serve the Bitcoin.se community.

Congratulations on your election, Hannah! I’m looking forward to working with you. Thank you to everyone that participated in the election.


text:
Join us in celebrating Pieter's amazing accomplishment!
Pieter Wuille recently reached a special reputation milestone on the Bitcoin StackExchange site!
Join me in congratulating Pieter on this accomplishment - he's the first person to reach 100,000 points.
Pieter - thanks for being so knowledgeable, friendly, and always willing to help - without you, and folks like you, this community just wouldn't be the same.

 ██████╗ ██████╗ ███╗   ██╗ ██████╗ ██████╗  █████╗ ████████╗███████╗
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██║     ██║   ██║██║╚██╗██║██║   ██║██╔══██╗██╔══██║   ██║   ╚════██║
╚██████╗╚██████╔╝██║ ╚████║╚██████╔╝██║  ██║██║  ██║   ██║   ███████║
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 ██████╗ ███╗   ██╗     ██╗ ██████╗  ██████╗ ██╗  ██╗
██╔═══██╗████╗  ██║    ███║██╔═████╗██╔═████╗██║ ██╔╝
██║   ██║██╔██╗ ██║    ╚██║██║██╔██║██║██╔██║█████╔╝
██║   ██║██║╚██╗██║     ██║████╔╝██║████╔╝██║██╔═██╗
╚██████╔╝██║ ╚████║     ██║╚██████╔╝╚██████╔╝██║  ██╗
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██████╗ ██╗███████╗████████╗███████╗██████╗ ██╗
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██║     ██║███████╗   ██║   ███████╗██║  ██║██╗
╚═╝     ╚═╝╚══════╝   ╚═╝   ╚══════╝╚═╝  ╚═╝╚═╝

Yay, congratulations @PieterWuille

SInce I am addicted to worthless internet points, I too congratulate Pieter on this milestone. More than that, it is an opportunity to thank him for all the carefully thought out and well written answers, invariably with helpful & friendly tone, that Pieter has contributed here over many years.

Thanks all! It's been a pleasure so far.

In last two years I've asked over 50 questions on the Bitcoin.SE and you answered many of them. I learned a lot from your responses, whether answers or comments. Thanks a lot.

You deserve this credit absolutely, thank you for answering even the stupidest of questions in the most intelligent ways.

Never cease to be amazed by PW. Patient, thorough, great breadth of knowledge, posts everywhere, amazing amount of output. What a star.


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Please make the cards colored
I saw the "Ask Question", "Review your question", "Save edit", "Start writing", and "Got it" cards are black in the main site just like its meta. But black cards are for metas only. I haven't seen these cards black on any other main sites to date. The OP card also has a gray color just like the meta.


text:
Please color the links on the main and meta sites
I have seen the links are black in the main site and they are just underlined. Please make them colored like other main sites on SE. A link should be different than the rest of the words so that it's obvious they are links (and just to be underlined doesn't necessary mean the word(s) are links).
Other problem is that with black links it's very hard to differentiate removed accounts from active ones in comments and OP cards when the username is user***** (* is a number). We have to click on all of them in order to find if they are active or not.
The other problem is when we want to put images in our questions. With black links the "Browse" and "paste" options are like plain text (they aren't underlined in any sites). Of course, we are still able to post our images, but I think it would be more beautiful to have colored links here.
On meta too, the links are black and that's because of the colored tag cards. The tag cards should be black just like other per-site metas so that the links are orange/brown.


text:
Tag for "verifying software download during installation"
We have now a number of questions about how to verify release binaries during the installation process. Perhaps there are enough to start using a tag for that.
What do you think about release-verification, or perhaps release-binary-verification? Open to  better suggestions!

Is this about calculating a file hash?

Yeah, or rather the process of verifying that they received the actual release binaries

I like release-verification since it pretty succinctly wraps up the intention of the tag.  My only (slight) concern is that it may not be obvious to users asking how to hash a binary that this is the tag to use.  But then, that's arguable for all tags, I suppose.
As long as the guidance is clear, it should be A Good Thing™


text:
Why are questions asking for proofreading of long descriptions of a concept not well received?
I saw a question that went into a lot of detail on a concept and then asked whether that description was correct. The question post ended in asking a number of additional questions about the topic. What is the problem with such question posts?

I think this would be a good candidate for the meta frequently-asked-questions list.

Good idea, I have added the FAQ tag. I wasn’t even aware of that one. I think I have a few other candidates

Bitcoin Stack Exchange is a Q&A platform. We are aiming to collect information on as many different topics as possible. However, not every explanation works best for every user, and not every answer post comprehensively covers a topic. This is why the site is designed to allow multiple competing answers on each topic. Other than a forum, those answers do not form a thread in a fixed order, but are presented in order of usefulness via the feedback of users.
A question post that contains a long-form description of a concept and then asks "did I get that right" is not a question, it is a request for proofreading. Posts of this style interact poorly with many mechanics of the website:

Responders are pushed to focus on the misconceptions of the asker rather than explaining the concept itself since the topic does not pose an open question.
It is a lot of work to comprehensively respond to all aspects of the question post, since there may be multiple different misconceptions in the asker’s description of the concept.
Often answers focus only on the misconceptions they find most important. This makes it hard to compare answers.
Responders are often tempted to quote large parts of the question and answer in-line. This wastes site visitors’ time by making them read the question text multiple times, when they really are looking to further understanding of the concept.
It is hard for other readers to assess whether an answer is complete.
It is infeasible to close such a topic as a duplicate, because most topics focus on one issue, and no one topic will cover all the questions featured in a last of questions.
Because answers contain scattered information about various details of the concept in which the asker erred, the topic provides little benefit to other site visitors beside the asker

What would be a better approach as the asker?

A good question focuses on a single topic and provides the minimal sufficient context to pose an open question about it: the asker should distill their question post down to one open question and only keep the context necessary to understand the actual question.
Find or ask a question on which their long-form description of the concept fits as an answer. As Cunningham’s Law states, "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer". Posting an answer still gives other users the opportunity to provide feedback and corrections in the comments of the answer post, but gives other users the option to respond to the question themselves.

What should a potential responder do?

Don’t answer requests for proofreading or topics that ask a multitude of questions. Vote to close and provide guidance how to ask instead.
If you do want to answer, ask a better question and answer that instead.

The /TLDR - "Don’t answer requests for proofreading or topics that ask a multitude of questions. Vote to close and provide guidance how to ask instead." is spot on IMO.


text:
Should we more proactively act against bad questions?
I find the Bitcoin stackexchange a gold mine of information about the Bitcoin network. Unfortunately the large number of good questions and answers is dwarfed by the much larger number of poor questions and answers.
I'm concerned valuable information is harder to find for a visitor and good contributions are not put forward as much as they would deserve compared to the rest of the content. I think this may create a negative feedback loop: if what's put forward to new visitors is lower quality content, they are less inclined to start contributing good questions and answers. The same goes for keeping active contributors interested.  To be honest, the state of the landing page is sometimes quite depressing.
I think we've got three main types of questions on this site, with some nuances between them:

Good questions. They sometimes invite long answers, sometimes concise and precise answers. They aren't necessarily well researched. They are just relevant and not redundant. Here is a few examples:

Why are indexes in cmpctblock and getblocktxn messages calculated as differences?
When was the first OP_RETURN output in a coinbase?
How does headers-first prevent fill-disk attack?
How do virtual size, stripped size and raw size compare between legacy address formats and native segwit?

Bad questions. Those are either poorly formatted, display no effort or understanding of the topic at hand, are generalistic programming question ("can you do my job/homework for me?"), etc. A couple instances (see especially the version before Hannah tried to salvage them):

How to calculate checksum of Address using Python
Error sending Bitcoin on testnet using Nbitcoin and QBitNinjaClient C#

"Mildly bad" questions. Those are in the middle (and most of the time closer to bad than good). But for some reason they usually get a (most of the time also poor) answer. They ask for the thousandth time about tpub vs xpub vs ypub. Ask about something unrelated to the Bitcoin network. Ask about how to use a specific software with no context. Talk vaguely about a seemingly plausible situation where an answer could clear up a possible confusion, but the question is so confused it's not possible to give an appropriate answer. A few examples:

Hello, I want to know if they use blockchain and if I have to pay any transaction fees
Sent BTC to public key instead of my address
What is the difference from Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Cash ABC? Its so confusing for noobs
Copay wallet transaction history unavailable?
The transaction is still 0confirmation
From Edge to Poloniex
Blockchain vs. Banks: which one has more affordable transaction fees?
I am trying to solve a wordsearch but i cant get the words in order
Error when mining with MacMiner
Is it true that a cryptocurrency exchange could freeze any account with suspicious bitcoins?
Where did my bitcoin go?
How much bitcoin do companies have on their balance sheets?
Coinbase account closed. Transfering to bitcoin wallet

I didn't put too much time into compiling these lists of examples for each category. I might update them as i encounter new, more illustrative, ones. But i trust any active contributor to this site would have instances in mind for each category.
The issue with those questions is that since there seems to be a tiny bit of something relevant, and there is usually an answer, it's not clear what to do. Of course one obvious answer is to edit to improve the question if possible and if one finds out they can't, suggest to close them. But we get so many bad questions that it would basically become a full time job.
Another recommendation is to simply downvote poor questions (and answers). But this needs a coordinated effort to achieve anything. Worse yet, a non-coordinated effort costs a contributor its internet points. Whereas answering a poor question with a poor answer earns you the internet point for an accepted answer even if nobody upvotes you. edit: @Murch points out downvoting questions is actually free. It's not the case for answers though.
Therefore it seems the incentives aren't quite right: a contributor trying to fight against the load of poor questions and answers on this site would see their reputation decrease while another actually feeding this bad feedback loop would increase their reputation. So we see very little downvotes and a lot of poor questions get answered.
Do other contributors share my concern about the load of bad, or mildly bad, questions we get on this site? Do you also share my analysis that while obviously bad questions can be flagged or closed, mildly bad ones often are not, worse they are often answered, and thereby become by far the most common threads? Is there anything we can do to improve this situation?

Repeat after me: Downvoting questions is free. ;)

Downvoting questions is free.

Added https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/121307/101498 to the list as it's the exact illustration of what i'm describing. A very poor question gets downvoted (only) twice, someone answers and gets 2 upvotes..

Thank you for bringing this up. Yes, we absolutely should be more proactive against bad questions. I agree with your analysis: an uninviting frontpage drives away would-be contributors, and I especially share your concern about "mediocre" questions.
One clarification: Downvoting questions is free, only downvoting answers costs one reputation.
Your downvote matters
Downvoted questions disappear more quickly from the frontpage and a negative score prevents a question from being bumped back to the frontpage. There is also an automated deletion process that cleans up abandoned or low-quality questions:

Closed topics where neither the question nor any answer have upvotes,
and no answer is accepted are automatically cleaned up after 9 days.
Unanswered question with negative score and no answers get automatically deleted after 30 days (including duplicates).

Please close vote where appropriate and downvote any question that “does not show any research effort; is unclear or not useful”. You can also cast both a downvote and a close vote.
Upvotes help too
Upvotes motivate users to continue contributing. Upvote posts that you find interesting, valuable, or useful. Upvoted content is shown longer on the frontpage. If you see topics that should get more attention and are more interesting, please upvote. Vote early, vote often!
Don’t answer bad questions
If you write a good answer on a bad question, you are protecting bad content. It may also be a waste of your time, because the correct course of action is for your answer to get deleted along with the bad question (also see Reminder: Please DON’T answer "bad" questions).
While it is recommended to upvote any question that you answer, perhaps the rule is also useful in reverse: if the question doesn’t deserve your upvote, it doesn’t deserve your answer.
Don’t reward answers to bad questions
This might be more controversial, but I would suggest not to upvote or even to downvote answers to bad questions. As you describe, if answering bad questions earns reputation, people will do it more. If the answer is good, perhaps ask them to delete it and post it on a better question instead. If there is a no good home for a good answer on a bad question, you can even ask a new good question just for this purpose. Moderators can merge topics. This can be used to move good answers on a bad question to a good question. Please raise a moderator flag to ask for a merge where it would obviously improve our site. Alternatively, open a meta topic or swing by chat to start a discussion whether this should be done for a specific topic.

"if the question doesn’t deserve your upvote, it doesn’t deserve your answer" that's a good takeaway.

Another takeaway from an offline discussion with Murch is that votes should be used for triage, not for "deserving" post. We should vote more. Always upvote content which shows some effort, is on-topic and well-formatted even if you don't find the question particularly smart or otherwise good. Always downvote content which is not a good fit for the site, even if it's not extremely bad.


text:
2023: a year in moderation

It’s that time of the year again! As we wave goodbye to last year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.
As most of you here might be aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:

We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
-- A Theory of Moderation

That doesn't eliminate the need for having moderators altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks — folks like you. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference in ensuring Stack Exchange sites remain a valuable source of high-quality content on the web.
So as we say goodbye to 2023 (and January 2024… ahem) and move into 2024, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some exciting stats. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Bitcoin over the past 12 months:

Action
Moderators
Community User¹
Community²

All comments on a post moved to chat
3
0
0

Answer flags handled
791
574
0

Answers flagged
114
196
1,028

Bounties canceled
0
0
0

Comment flags handled
50
76
1

Comments deleted⁸
540
19
538

Comments flagged
2
2
122

Comments undeleted
15
0
0

Escalations to the Community Manager team
0
0
0

Posts bumped
0
1,935
0

Posts deleted⁷
346
1,041
273

Posts locked
7
471
0

Posts undeleted
13
0
28

Posts unlocked
2
1
0

Question flags handled⁶
474
1,014
5

Questions closed
345
107
3

Questions flagged⁶
76
2
1,399

Questions merged
4
0
0

Questions migrated
3
1
0

Questions protected
0
81
0

Questions reopened
8
0
0

Questions unprotected
0
0
0

Revisions redacted
5
0
0

Tag highlight language set
0
0
0

Tag synonyms created
26
0
0

Tag synonyms proposed
26
0
1

Tags merged
30
0
0

Tasks reviewed⁵: "Close votes" queue
9
0
501

Tasks reviewed⁵: "First answers" queue
3
0
179

Tasks reviewed⁵: "First questions" queue
6
0
405

Tasks reviewed⁵: "Late answers" queue
1
0
57

Tasks reviewed⁵: "Low quality posts" queue
14
0
116

Tasks reviewed⁵: "Reopen votes" queue
0
0
5

Tasks reviewed⁵: "Suggested edits" queue
120
27
176

Tasks reviewed⁵: "Triage" queue
0
0
0

User banned from review
0
0
0

User review-bans lifted early
0
0
0

User suspensions lifted early
1
0
0

Users contacted
9
0
0

Users deleted
0
0
0

Users destroyed⁴
199
0
0

Users suspended³
5
91
0

Footnotes
¹ This refers to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² This refers to the membership of Bitcoin without diamonds next to their names.
³ The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
⁴ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁵ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁶ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes). The community² can handle these flags by at least one person voting to close a question that has a close flag.
⁷ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁸ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:

Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: 2022: a year in moderation

You can also check out this report on other sites

Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

Wishing everyone a happy 2024! ^_^


text:
Is javascript syntax highlighting working?
From here, it seems that syntax highlighting should work.
However, it doesn't seem to work for the javascript question I asked earlier, and some others - e.g:
Bitcore-p2p: Peer.connect does not work
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/76394/34190
Invalid checksum when generating BIP-39 Mnemonic
But it does work for other questions:
How to build a transaction using bitcoinjs-lib
Could it be something to do with my setup? Or is this a problem?

Syntax highlighting is only active when the code block is marked with the specific language. To that end, enclose your code block in three backticks followed by the language and three closing backticks:
```js
let variable = value
let something = new Class(variable)
```

Thanks, just saw your edit and realised - right there in the help section too!

It's automatic on stackoverflow, that's what threw me.


text:
Canonical topic for "exporting private key from descriptor wallet"?
We have been getting the question "How to export a private key from a descriptor wallet?" a bunch of times in the last year or so. I know there are a number of answers to it already. Is there a clear best answer to it yet, so we could promote it to canonical answer and close the other topics as duplicates of it? Which one would you recommend?