text:
Somebody has rigged the voting system, I'm leaving
When I downvote questions by ripper234 my votes mysteriously vanish, but when I upvote his questions the upvote stays.  Must be pretty easy to get a huge rep by spamming the site with dumb questions and then deleting all the downvotes against you, no?
The votes are rigged -- abandon ship.  Trust has been broken.
This site is a cesspool.
Goodbye.

Wow. You triggered the abuse script not once, not twice, but three times within about a day? That's dedication!

Yes, it took dedication to do all the experiments needed to figure out that this only applies to ripper234 and only to negative votes.

Did you also "experiment" on the mods? I notice an awful lot of ScheduledController.InvalidateVotes() on all three of our profiles, as well as Ripper's, all in the same timeframe. I'm sorry to inform you that all you've managed to prove is that the SE equivalent to spam filters are working as designed. Far be it from me to dampen anyone's scientific/experimental spirit, but this is also the reason controls are important. Had you also attempted your experiments on a random user, even on a different SE site, the results would have been the same, thus invalidating this entire "experiment".

David, no, I did not.  So apparently nobody, including the moderators, fully understands the voting system -- or else it's being manipulated or has gone berzerk.  Not encouraging.

We understand the voting system just fine. The problem here is in your behavior. First you accidentally triggered a filter designed to protect against revenge downvoting - not a problem, happens to a lot of people. Then you attempted (successfully) to recreate the issue - still not a problem. The problem is that you immediately jumped to a ridiculous conclusion without bothering to ask or research your issue first.

Hmm, I should check out Meta more, there's an entire post about me, and I didn't even know it :) Maybe The Manipulator (a mythical Bitcoin puppet master supposedly controlling the price by whim) is the mastermind behind the voting on my questions as well.

FYI, Revenge Downvotes: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/28756/what-can-i-do-if-im-the-victim-of-serial-downvoting

Also, as a note for my future self - before renaming, this user was known as @eldentyrell. (Just because I hate user renames)

As much as this post wasn't really intended to be useful, it actually probably is useful. Maybe some upvotes would be sensible?

I'm going to go ahead and pretend you said this:

Why are my votes disappearing when I downvote the same user repeatedly, but the upvotes remain? Is he somehow canceling out my votes? I don't want to jump to any absurdly paranoid conclusions, I'm just curious what's wrong

The engine has a number of ways to try and detect vote fraud. One of them involves a single user downvoting another user repeatedly in a short time span. The site assumes that user has pissed you off and you're just downvoting them to be mean, so it cancels out the downvotes automatically:

If you irritate another user, they might be having a bad day and decide to take it out on you by methodically going through and downvoting every post you’ve made. The impact of this is pretty limited on Stack Overflow, as you only get 30 votes per day, and upvotes are +10 while downvotes are only -2 (and -1 to the votee).
... it’s unacceptable behavior, and I’ve been getting several reports of this sort of revenge downvoting now, enough that we needed to take action to combat it.

Individual users don't have the ability to cancel downvotes against them, that would kind of defeat the point. Neither do moderators; they can't even see whether or not you downvoted a post. I'm assuming that's what happened in your case; it's hard to know for sure without you providing more details

History confirms that the serial-downvote trigger was fired multiple times recently, but we have no ability to confirm whose actions fired it. In any case, Occam's Razor says Michael is probably correct.

Excellent answer.


text:
Should we create token questions for some problems that come up often?
Some basic questions come up every now and then, like "why am I stuck synchronizing at X?". Most of them are dealing with some specific user issue, so creating an answer encompassing all variants of the issue might be an overkill. Should we create some token questions on a few common, key issues that are often encountered and answer them very meticulously, trying to cover every aspect of the problem the user might face?

I think we should create a couple token questions on a few subjects that come up if the questions we have so far on the same subject are too localized.
For example, there are two questions on synchronizing with the network and downloading a blockchain [1], [2], both being a bit localized with their back story and answers that cover part of the problems a user might face - not knowing what synchronizing it, being stuck at some block. We also have a question about initial connecting to the network, and probably could cover such aspects as "why is this so slow?".
Hopefully an exhaustive question like that with an exhaustive answer would cover all future problems anyone can have (even if they are not aware of some aspects of the problem).

Definitely! Go for it.

I've started a collection of canonical questions and answers.

This generalized might be a candidate token question: How can I convert Bitcoins for withdrawal to PLN (to currency C from A via BTC)

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


text:
Why is Gavin listed twice on the “Top Beta Users” list?
The Top Beta Users List shows gavinandresen twice.
Is this a bug?  I asked this in area51 but maybe this meta site is a better place for it.

You just wanted to show us that you're in the top spot, right? ;) As for your question, I have no idea. Looks like a bug to me.

Looks like a bug, the SE folks are looking into it.

This has been addressed on your Area51 Discussion question.

@David - shouldn't someone post an answer on this? It's funny having it as status-completed, but with no accepted, upvoted ... or any answer.

@ripper234 Well, it looks like Emmett did answer it over at Area 51 but I'll copy/paste his answer here for completion's sake.

Emmett answered this over at Area 51:

A bug caused 65 users to be doubly listed in various Top Beta Users
  lists in Area 51. It's been fixed, and the duplicate entries have been
  removed, so gavinandresen only shows up once now.

It's happening again. I'm in the #1 spot twice, look: i42.tinypic.com/nzpqtd.png

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
are questions regarding buy and sell bitcoin operators acceptable?
I am having a hard time finding information regarding market operators of bitcoin that operate near where i live (Panama), i've seen lot of confusing information on the internet and is hard to know how trustable are most operators found on the internet.
In any case, i was hoping to ask about this in the forum but i'm not sure if it fits in the site guidelines, as i've seen most of the questions are regarding the bitcoin technology, rather than the actual market.

Such a question would probably get closed as "too localized" or as a dupe of this question. It's not necessarily that this site is for the technology rather than the market, it's that questions about the market tend to be a poor fit for the StackExchange format.
StackExchange questions should have lasting value, and questions which are very geographically or temporally constrained typically have no value for anyone but the asker or have value that fades almost immediately - definitely not what SE is hoping to achieve. In all honsty IRC or the forums might be a better resource for this particular question.
We definitely do appreciate your asking, however! Life as a moderator would be much easier if we had more users who asked good questions on meta before just posting on the main site.


text:
Just found a bunch of posts which are just links to random discussions from Bitcoin Talk…
The Bitcoin Stackechange is not intended to be a place for discussions, but a place for answers.
These rencent posts 1 (with self answer), 2 (with self answer), 3 (with self answer) are just trying to move discussions from Bitcoin Talk to here. Sometimes without even a summary of the problems discussed or the arguments to solve them.
I haven't tried to find more of those "threads", but I guess it would be easy find more…
What do you think? Should we allow such posts? I guess the answer is no; how to explicitly state they are not welcome, and discourage them?

I closed the worst of the three.

Actually it's a pity because the question was good (provided some explanation is added about of what is proof-of-stake), only the answer was terrible. But maybe closing is the only solution?

The question was a link, the answer was a link. The questioner knew the answer already. It doesn't get much worse than that. ;)

@DavidSchwartz - when I posted the question, I didn't know the answer. After learning a bit more, I posted an answer. It wasn't the perfect answer, but I felt that it was better than no answer.

Regarding questions. If the question invites to a lot of discussion then it's not a good question. I think that the decision by D. Schwartz to close the last one was a good one.
Regarding answers. Answers that just contain a link are never good answers. I had already made a comment to one of ripper's answers and he improved it.

how to explicitly state they are not welcome, and discourage them?

I think that things work pretty well as they are. Make sure to use the "close" link if you don't think that the question is appropriate (or write a comment / notify the mods if you don't have permission to vote-to-close). Also, write a comment to explain why you don't think it's good.

In my book, an answer that contains just a link is better (even if only marginally) than no answer, and of course an answer with more info is better than just a link. A link answer is certainly not worse than no answer.

@ripper234 the problem with link-only answers is that they aren't future-safe. SE can't guarantee that any other site on the internet will be up in the future, no matter how big or permanent they look right now. If the site you link to goes down, that answer is now entirely worthless to any future users. To this end, please refrain from posting link-only answers.

By some coincidence (or not), I am the author of all three posts, so I'll try to explain.
In my honest opinion, all three posts represent true questions. The fact that the questions behind them came from a forum thread is irrelevant. The fact that I posted my own answer to them is also irrelevant (self answers are not discouraged on Stack Exchange).
One legitimate critisisim is perhaps the lacks of enough details in the posts. The questions you linked to all have a positive total vote score, so I guess other site users didn't feel these details are missing. In any case, closing such questions is not the right response, but rather we should ask for the missing details (I'll be happy to fill in whatever details you think are missing).
Another possible critisim is that you think these questions are not real questions. We have the close vote process for that, you're free to vote to close any of them, and discuss individually why you believe they are not questions, or just not a good fit for this format.
I think that just because a question is hard, it doesn't mean it's not useful. For example this question has no simple answer at this point, but an answer can be derived at using game theoretical and economic principles. It is not, in my book, a speculative question (perhaps some rephrasing can improve it, but look at the core, not the specific wording, and edit if you can improve it).

Sure, I voted up one question, but then I was disappointed when I understood what was the motivation: just a link to another thread… I also already voted to close "this" question you talk about (which is technically a duplicate of a previous one) because it turn out it is non-constructive. The only answer I would like to see on this Q/A site is the game theory formalization of the problem, and the answer which results for it, not just “it can be done”, or random discussions starting with "I really think that".

At a minimum, the question should explain the issue that is being asked about and should invite real answers, not discussion or comments. The answers should actually try to answer the question, not debate it.

@David - All this can be addressed with specific comments and/or voting on the questions & answers. And once a once-bad post is edited, such voting should be updated to reflect the latest form of the question.


text:
What is the limit of self-answering?
I'm relatively new to SE and claim no experience on this issue, but this question seems beyond the boundaries of reasonable self-answering. The user behind it, imz, asked two others (here and here) of the same sort. His/her answers are reasonable and do not seem to be spam, but many of them could be combined. (He/she answers one of the questions 6 times)
To me personally, it seems like rep-whoring, but being new, I have no idea if my opinions would be those of the SE community. And so I ask you, is this acceptable? How much self-answering do we want to tolerate on Bitcoin-SE?

downvoted him a few times + commented. This is clearly too much self-answering.

I don't care earning many points for the answer. I wanted to save other people's effort when they will be in need of the same services I have been looking for. Can I do something that I won't earn points, so that people won't be worried by my answers?

@imz - self-answering is ok, and even good. The problem is with the amount of different answers you posted to your own questions. People usually post just one answer, and especially to one's own question. This is just a question of measure ... we do appreciate the effort.

@imz I assure you my intent was not malevolent. Answering one question six times just seemed rather extreme. Could you explain why you did that?

Different answers are there at StackExchange, so that the participants of StackExchange can assess the different variants and collectively select the better ones. I don't have the knowledge and experience with bitcoin to write a good review as an answer to my question, but I can put the answers I was able to find for the assessment by the community. The community can add more info and promote the better answers, so that we have good answers ready for this question.

@imz Sorry I did not make my question clear. I object not to your answers, but to the separation of them. There is no reason I can discern for separating what could have been one answer into six. This is not a review site; we are not here to compare domain name providers. Source

@BinaryMage: As to the domain name registration questions, I posted a single answer with a list of the services I had found. As to the quicker spending question, there I posted several answers because of the stated reason: I can't write a good review in one answer, but I hope that among the answers, the better answers will be selected and improved by the community.

@imz Thanks for consolidating your answers from 6 to 3. That's certainly an improvement. My point is that product or website comparisons are actively discouraged on SE, as stated in my previous link. The community doesn't want to vote on which website would be best for your purpose; they want to show you what you need to look for. (again, see the source, it phrases it much better than I can) If I'm not being clear, I apologize, and in any case, I'm not going to push the issue any more. My point has been made.

I meant not just a comparison between similar services, but between the different available ways to achieve the goal: will the account hold bitcoins, or they will be exchanged at the deposit moment. So, some consolidation was reasonable: either by whether the account is in bitcoins or by what you get from the service (a physical card, or a digital card, or a transfer to another payment system).

@imz Looks like your edits made that clearer. Thanks!

Personally, the main problem I see with the linked question's answers is that they try to work too much like reviews. If the person would combine all of those answers into one, there would be no problem.

Well, there is actually a badge explicitly for self-answering questions so there's nothing inherently wrong with it, but you're right to feel like there should be a limit. Unfortunately I don't have any hard-and-fast answers about "how much is too much." Beyond a certain point it almost certainly is "rep-whoring" as you called it, but the mission here is to make the internet a better place by cataloging accurate answers to good questions - as long as those criteria are met I really couldn't care less whether some "rep-whoring" goes on in the process... Of course there are limits to everything, but for this thing I've yet to run across someone breaching that limit.


text:
New Beta Theme Launched
Your site looks a bit different today. Yes, we are getting rid of the 'Sketchy' look and replacing it with a more-polished and finished design for sites in beta.
You can read more about the redesign of our Beta theme on our blog entry.
Please note: This will not affect your "graduation" status in any way. When your site is due for graduation, it will get its final(real) site design and branding.
If you're still seeing the old favicon, please do a hard browser refresh. (Although sometimes it may take Chrome a while to load the new image).
If you see any CSS or styling issues, please report it in this post I created on Meta Stack Overflow. It will be easier for me to track all the bug reports there.

A relevant post (on this meta) by one of our designers from last week: Custom Bitcoin design and logo - Information gathering :)


text:
Difference between tags "mining" and "miner"
I can think of a few reasons why there might be a difference between the tags "mining" and "miner", but I wonder if the difference is too subtle to be useful. What does everyone else think?

There appear to be about 200 uses of the tag "mining" and only 2 of "miner". The popularity sort of speaks for itself - the tag "miner" is not that far removed from "mining" as to make it useful by itself. I'd make it a synonym.

As this suggestion has been put forth again, I just did so.


text:
Are questions that would function as peer reviews in scope of this SE?
Say someone wanted to know what is the opinion of the Bitcoin community on "On Bitcoin and Red Balloons" - whether what Microsoft has written about Bitcoin is accurate, or did they make some errors on the matter. Would such a question be in scope on this SE, as it could be quite useful to get some respectable opinion on the matter, or would it not be really welcome as it would "solicit opinions" and function as reviews or the like?

As long as the question is finite and answerable and actually pertains to Bitcoin it should be on-scope here. We would prefer questions that can be phrased in the question area itself rather than simply linking to an external source and saying "is this accurate" since we have no control over external sources and whether they remain available or not. If your question is little more than a link, it will probably be closed, though a good description or quotes from the text itself go a long way.

I personally would welcome such questions on Bitcoin SE, as it is easy to have misconceptions about how Bitcoin works and there don't appear to be any way to peer-review Bitcoin-related papers in a away that would be meaningful to the community. The Bitcoin forum would be too unmoderated to function properly in this manner, whereas the Stack Exchange offers a good way to solicit meaningful insights, rather than opinions of community newbies. The main problem I see with using SE for this, is that the answer-reviews could get quite lengthy, but not like we haven't seen that before.


text:
Synonyms - [payment] and [payments]
Should we make [payments] a synonym to [payment]? It's rather a no-brainer.

By the way, you now have enough rep in that tag to propose the tag synonym.

@NickODell Done so.

Yes. I think so. I would have just merged them, but I'm torn about which should be primary. In a sense, they have different meanings. "Payment" means the way that people get paid. "Payments" are the things people use to accomplish a payment. If it was just singular versus plural, I'd take the singular as primary.
I think "payment" should be primary. First, it's the singular, which is preferred over the plural. (Just as questions about cars should be tagged "car".) And second, it also includes mechanisms for payment and not just the payments themselves. If nobody has a good counter-argument, I'll merge them this way. Everything now tagged "payments" will become "payment".
Note: Anyone with sufficient rep can propose/upvote the merge. You'll get extra rep for your trouble. And if enough of you do it, then this question will become academic. (And while I can't propose it, I can upvote it! So if someone else proposes it, then I get extra rep if I upvote it before I do it. Go figure.)

How do we "merge" tags? Do we simply edit the tags for all 100 questions tagged with the conflicting tag?


text:
Completely changing the meaning of the question body for "How does 'Sign Message' work?"
This question has what seems to be a useful title, and in fact the answer provided does answer that question. However, the body of the question goes off on a tangent that is going to be unhelpful to most people.
Should the question be rephrased to just ask about what message signing does in the Bitcoin client?

I edited the question that reflects the title better, while still expressing author's doubts that turn out to be irrelevant. I hope that it is more suitable now. If it later turns out that the question should be handled differently, we can always roll back the edit.

I think the message body should be changed to reflect the useful title more strongly, but at the same time try to contain the doubts raised by the question author in the body.


text:
Which tag is appropriate for MultiBit and Electrum clients: "thin-clients" or "lightweight-clients"?
Currently, there are 2 questions using the "thin-client" tag and there is no tag description.
A thin client application is defined in Wikipedia as "simply one which relies on its server to process most or all of its business logic".
It could be argued that a Bitcoin client does the bulk of the important processing, or on the other hand that most of the processing has already been done (and stored in the blockchain).
Both Electrum and Multibit describe themselves as lightweight clients rather than thin clients.
For this reason, I personally would prefer to use the "lightweight-client" tag for those clients. However, I'll put it to a vote before I change anything.

The tags should be synonyms of each other anyway, so it doesn't really matter.

The "lightweight-client" tag is better to use for questions relating to Electrum and Multibit.

The "thin-client" tag is better to use for questions relating to Electrum and Multibit.


text:
Should references to the bitcoin.org client use a standard name for it? What should it be?
This issue was mentioned in the answer to this question, but I don't see any further discussion.
Terms used so far include:

official client
main client
bitcoin.org client
Satoshi client
original client

I have a slight preference toweards bitcoin.org client, as it's very clear which one is meant by it.
Also, is capitalisation important?

related: Should bitcoin-qt and standard-client be synonymous?

I personally refer to it as "standard client", but I don't see anything wrong with having a couple synonyms.
As for capitalization, it really depends - whether we use it as a name of the client, or as a description of it. In my master thesis I was capitalizing all Bitcoin-related terminology (like Address, Transaction, Network, etc), which made things quite easy to distinguish from non-Bitconi terminology. However, it would be hard to encourage most users to do the same.

We've actually had the capitalization question before, so I'll let that answer stand on its own. As for the name of the application, I'm fond of "Satoshi Client" but really any of the options specified do an adequate job of correctly identifying the appropriate client. If you're asking about tags, on the other hand, we've had a standard-client tag for quite some time (68 questions using it at the time of this writing) so that is our preferred terminology here, at least for the purpose of tagging.


text:
Why can't some questions be commented on?
For example, this question. You can add answers to it, but there is no "add a comment" link on the question or any of its answers. Does this mean we're supposed to "shut up and answer it already?" Or is additional Reputation required to comment?

Commenting on other people's posts requires a reputation of 50, read more about it here. As you have already noticed you can always comment on your own questions.


text:
Why is this SE so deserted?
There is an active Bitcoin community at bitcointalks.org and the interest in Bitcoin is increasing at a fast pace.
Isn't there a way to get all the people asking questions on bitcointalks to this medium. Fora are way outdated when it comes to just Q&A and most fora (what about 99.9%?) still require you to make an account... People just wanting their question answered have way less hassle asking them here than on fora.
We should promote this place harder imho :)

We certainly need more questions/day but our other traffic metrics are doing all right. I've noticed that traffic here is pretty "bursty" - every time something new comes out there are a thousand questions at once about it and then... silence... Still, if anyone wants to try to bring bitcointalk users over to the SE site, I won't complain and I'll probably even help ;-)

You could try starting a campaign "This question would work great on the SE!" - seeing what new, interesting questions some up on the forum and redirect them here with some link.

Fun fact: We are now ranked 11th among the (around 50) StackExchange Beta sites based on traffic. That's pretty good.

First, we need to revisit our definition of "deserted" because we're at least meeting SE's baseline criteria in most cases and exceeding it in a few others. We get a pretty fair amount of traffic. If you're interested in increasing our traffic, though, there are plenty of things we can all do to help out:

Generate backlinks to the site - this is as simple as linking to the
site from any sites you control, tweeting the link or otherwise
putting it out there. This doesn't have to be spammy, it can be as
simple as legitimately sharing an interesting link. If you've got a
blog, check into the
StackTack plugin.
Not only does this increase traffic via the links themselves, but
it also helps increase our search engine rankings.
Participate. The best way to sell a site like this
one is the network
effect so your simple
participation helps quite a bit.
A bit more social interaction might take this from being a
place people come for Q&A and make it a place people actually enjoy
spending time. We do have a chat feature and it's grossly
under-utilized on our site. Some of the most successful sites in the
StackExchange network have very active chat rooms. Given that we have
a very active chat room on freenode we should have a built-in
audience, and SE chat is certainly simpler than IRC.
I'm sure there are a thousand other ways we can all contribute and
bring loads of traffic, questions, answers, new users etc. to this
site and make it the best it can possibly be. If anyone has
additional suggestions I'd be happy to incorporate them into this
answer as well!

I was looking at this today. 1/3 of users (25 pages of ~75) have a rep of < 15. This means that they (currently me) cannot even upvote questions. This seems like a problem to me since the community appears to be small still.
Maybe it's not (and I'm disgruntled because I can't upvote) and other SEs have fought through it, but I would like to see upvoting encouraged for  any sort of participation.
For comparison, SO has 43490 pages of users, 31000 of them are < 15 rep making their ratio 71% of users can't upvote. But pure numbers (~12490 pages) obviously dwarfs this site.

SO is not what you should compare with. Compare with other SE websites in Beta or some that just grew out of Beta.
We're not doing the best job here in our Beta, but really not the worse either.
Check out our area51 page: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/30763/bitcoin

I feel like many users come, ask a question, get their answer, and forget about the site. There are lots of people who peruse this SE rearing to answer questions. I've personally learned more from researching to answer questions that I ever could have simply reading BitcoinTalk.

Voting is merely a decentralized regulation measure - the point of SE is helping new (and old) users by giving them quick, clear, and useful answers to their questions. As long as we're doing that, I think we're doing just fine.

A user that has less than 15 rep, has contributed little if anything worthwhile to the SE, yet. Why should he be able to upvote?

But that's part of my point. Because the community is small even if/when people contribute they aren't getting the recognized upvotes to earn the ability to do even basic things. I'm not saying people under 15 rep should be able to upvote, for example, but that the existing community should aggressively promote new member activities. It's a little bit of a chicken/egg problem IMO.

So much ripple spam I stopped watching the rss feeds and answering *coin questions, and I know i m not the only one annoyed by this ripple marketing spam

I am annoyed too.


text:
Should the for-beginners tag be retained?
I recently added a "for-beginners" tag because I thought it was important to the site; my view at the time was that too many answers (and questions) are beyond the understanding of beginners.
I've since read this:
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/
which discourages the use of a "beginner" tag.
I'm not sure that this changes my view though, given the highly technical nature of how bitcoins work. I can still see value in it.
However, I'm willing to go with what the community wants, and remove that tag if others don't want it. So, is the Bitcoin site a special case that needs that tag, or should it go?

Related: http://meta.bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/14/what-does-the-basics-tag-mean?rq=1

I don't really have anything to add in addition to what's in that blog post but the fact that  it is so clearly discouraged by StackExchange is enough for me to suggest that we remove it. A lot of experience from StackOverflow went into that decision and I don't think that our site is that different from SO.

There’s no reason these sites need to repeat all the mistakes we made with tagging two years ago — we can do it better each time for each new community, and feed those improvements back into the entire network.

Please delete this tag quickly. This meta-tag satisfies both 1 and 2:

the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question
means different things to different people

Issues are already there. This question has virtually no tag. The meta-tag will ease access to off-topic questions, multiple unrelated questions in a single post, etc.

I've removed it from all questions, though I'm not sure I entirely agree with it satisfying condition 2 any more than many other tags do. It could also be argued that it would make sense on its own, but it's not a debate I care to continue, and I'd probably lose anyway for other reasons I haven't figured out yet...


text:
Why I am not able to make a comment in different questions?

Possible Duplicate:
Why can't some questions be commented on?

Why I am not able to make a comment in different questions?
I though it is possible, but now i feel it is not.

50 reputation is required to comment anywhere. You can always comment on your own questions and answers.


text:
Tag dupe: legal, law, illegal
Unless I'm mistaken, on most SE site they use the legal tag; here we had ~10 posts with that tag, 5 with law and only 1 with illegal.
Hence, I'm removing those two in favour of legal.

Thanks for your efforts, I agree that legal is a much better tag for law-based questions and as such have created synonyms for law and illegal pointing to legal as well as merged the tags. Since you've already retagged the posts the merge did precisely nothing but it never hurts to be thorough ;)


text:
retagging [tag:mywallet] --> [tag:blockchain.info]
There were only 5 questions tagged mywallet, most of those were also tagged blockchain.info anyway (and most of those were mine, too).
Hence, I've retagged them all to blockchain.info.

Sounds good to me.


text:
Bitcoin self-evaluation: let's get critical!
You love your site and we love your site, but there is a whole world of people out there who might not even know it exists. When they do find it, their first impression will either scare them away or keep them around. Given this, let's take a hard look at the questions and answers here and make sure newcomers see the site at its best!
Below you'll find ten questions randomly selected from this site. What do you think about each of them and their answers? Are they the best they can be or can they be improved? Would they look interesting and inviting to an outsider or are they a little embarrassing?
Upvote the corresponding post here on meta when we're awesome. Downvote when our content just isn't quite up to par.
Oh, and do comment to let everyone know your thoughts and take part in this conversation. :)

What is an "unspent output"?
What do you think about this question and its answers? Vote and comment to let everyone know.

This is the way an honest question should look. There's a lot of ethical gray area surrounding self-answering, but in this one case at least ripper did it right. He asked a question, found the answer ~10 minutes later and posted it,. then almost 8 hours later Chris posts his truly excellent and thorough answer, it gets upvoted and even accepted over the self-answer. This makes me quite happy to see.

@DavidPerry - I actually knew the answer when I posted the question. It is sometimes a good idea on StackExchange to do this. It's like writing a wiki entry, but it gives other people the chance to give better answers.

Does merged mining require clients to download both blockchains?
What do you think about this question and its answers? Vote and comment to let everyone know.

Good question, good answer, it's only got the one answer but it's correct, upvoted and accepted. I'm not sure why there's a close vote for "off topic" as the question clearly belongs here. It's borderline with only 1 answer but I'll give it a +1 for the excellent clarifications in comments.

Simple question with a simple answer, clearly explained, with a bit of further details in the comments. Can't ask for much more.

Can a miner remain anonymous?
What do you think about this question and its answers? Vote and comment to let everyone know.

The question is good, for a new user, and it's got a couple of decent answers. The new user even accepted an answer, which seems uncommon now that I'm looking at these questions critically, so good for Joshua. My only criticism is that the question's title doesn't really match the questions content very well.

I think the answers we have do a reasonably good job of answering the question. The answers all seem to assume a solo miner though, so an answer covering pooled mining would be nice.

Can I spend a coin sent to myself before it confirms?
What do you think about this question and its answers? Vote and comment to let everyone know.

Maybe it's not just new users who don't accept. This one is from a user with almost 7k rep and he didn't accept an answer, nor did he comment as to why. Other than that, the question is quality, as is the answer - even going so far as to cite the bit of code that governs the answer along with a good explanation. If we could get Stephen to either accept an answer or tell us why he didn't I would consider this a model question.

The tags are not very helpful. Someone with great knowledge of bitcoin-qt might not realize this question is for them.

Is Proof of Stake a hard-fork?
What do you think about this question and its answers? Vote and comment to let everyone know.

It's honestly hard to vote this one up or down. I don't really like the way the question was asked - it relies too much on links to give context. On the other hand, there's more than one answer, they're all good answers and the best answer has a few upvotes and has been accepted. I'm going to give it a +1 for the answers but the question itself could use some work, IMO.

This just isn't a very good question.

This is an awkward question as it's not really relevant to the Bitcoin concept.

Bitcoin Block Download frozen
What do you think about this question and its answers? Vote and comment to let everyone know.

I think we did... OK... on this one. Just OK. I think it's great that Kumala stuck with the question until he got it resolved and I applaud the instinct to take the conversation elsewhere after 9 comments but I really wish he'd used SE chat instead of jumping to email so that we'd have a record of it. I also wish Alyssa had accepted his answer and that more folks had voted on it, but all of that sort of washes out and leaves us with a Q&A that's just... OK.

This is (or at least was) a pretty common problem. It's kind of a shame that there's no answer that clearly walks through how to solve it.

Is there an easy way to purchase Bitcoins?
What do you think about this question and its answers? Vote and comment to let everyone know.

I'm beginning to notice a pattern with new users not accepting answers and I'm kind of wondering what we can do about it... Other than that, I'd like to see more voting going on but otherwise the question was good and the top-voted answer is both correct, thorough and polite. I'm pretty happy with this one

It is tough to give this question a good answer because it's a localized question. It's unfortunate that we don't have a "generic" answer that talks about the categories of ways to buy bitcoin and how you would find things in that category.

Can more than 1 block be solved per 10 mins on average (LONG TERM)?
What do you think about this question and its answers? Vote and comment to let everyone know.

This one gets a -1 from me because of the answers only. There are 5 answers here and this isn't the kind of controversial question that can actually get 5 completely different answers. Some of the answers are copies of the currently top-voted answer and a couple others are one step short of calling the asker an idiot, which there's plenty of on the forums and we certainly don't need here. If there's any question that this is detrimental, note that this was the asker's first, last and only action on this site.

I'm not as unhappy with these answers as David Perry is. We do have at least one answer that explains the mechanism pretty clearly and we have several that explain why this isn't really sustainable.

Yeah, I agree that it's not that bad. Lots of answers is not really a problem as long as good answers are at the top.

Psychological price
What do you think about this question and its answers? Vote and comment to let everyone know.

This question might be a hair on the subjective side and if econ.SE had survived I might have suggested it would be a better fit there, but it's just close enough that I'll allow it. The asker has phrased their question well, it solicited a few good answers and one was upvoted/accepted. That's enough to merit a +1 IMO, even if the question is verging on off-topic.

Even though the question is phrased well and could be a pretty interesting discussion I don't think that it fits very well here. It's more about psychology than Bitcoin and it will "solicit debate, arguments or extended discussion". So I'll downvote it here even though I'd be happy to have the discussion at a forum.

Is performing a 51% attack / double spend on Bitcoin illegal?
What do you think about this question and its answers? Vote and comment to let everyone know.

I almost want to close this question, actually. "Is x illegal in the U.S./Europe" is soliciting way too many responses. Europe includes 47 member nations, each with their own laws, and the U.S. has an over-arching federal law system and 50 states with their own laws. That's 98 different jurisdictions he's asking about, each with a potentially different answer. Add to that the fact that there's no precedent and lots of fuzzy gray area and this question seems unanswerable to me.

It's a vague question that invites speculation. But I'm pretty happy with my own answer.

I'm with Perry here. The combination of it being a legal question and that it's not specific to a jurisdiction makes it pretty bad.


text:
New tag to represent value added services (on top of Bitcoin)
I think it would be benefical to tag services (current or future/proposed) layers of the Bitcoin network accordingly.
One example is this question where I ask about a P2P anonymous rating system.  This relates to Bitcoin in technology, but is layered above the base protocol/technology.
Thoughts?

The only name for such services I could think of currently is "Bitcoin Ecosystem", a term I started using in my master thesis. However, I don't think such a general tag would be too beneficial, whatever it would be. Trying to establish a convention top-down might not work too well if there isn't any work going from bottom-up. So I would argue to just let everyone tag their question how they please, and if we see some tag emerging and being useful, we could try incorporating more question to it.


text:
Should Bitcoin centric questions related to Quantative Finance be asked here?
I'm looking for a home for a downvoted & closed question that requires not only a deep understanding of the Bitcoin network, but also of Quant. Finance.
I believe this is something that could eventually become a forum of it's own due to the unique attributes of the Bitcoin network + quant finance, but for now the emerging Bitcoin standard needs as many eyes on it as possible.
So the question is... should this SE site accept advanced finance questions? ... at least until the user community is large enough to sustain a dedicated Bitcoin-quant site of its own.
Finally, how should these questions be tagged, so users can easily search for (or ignore) such questions?

This is a tough question: How to best handle interdisciplinary questions?
There's no ideal answer that fits all cases. The best guidance I can give you is to remember that the purpose behind a "Bitcoin Stack Exchange" is to build a compilation of knowledge about the subject of "Bitcoin" — It cannot reasonably become a site about any possible questions of interest to Bitcoin *users*.
See the difference?
The best acid test I have right now is: "Is this question primarily about Bitcoin? Or is it really about another discipline that just happens to involve some Bitcoin issues?"
So on the face of it, the closure looks justified. The main focus of the question is in financial issues. It's just a fortunate (or unfortunate) coincidence that it takes a bit of Bitcoin understanding to answer the question. It's not really a question for a Bitcoin expert.
It's not an idea answer because it doesn't leave a clear home for this question. But know that the issue of interdisciplinary collaboration is a problem across all academia.


text:
Is there any difference between commerce and merchants tags?
Current state:

commerce has 14 questions
described as “The transacting of business using Bitcoin or related technologies”
merchants has 6 questions
(without a description).

I was considering a merge, but I'm asking first whether there is any difference?
If there is one, how could the descriptions be updated?

Hmm, I think that the commerce tag is a bit more general than merchants. For example, talking about commerce could include payment processors, identity verification for business, TOR technology as used for shops and so forth. Merchants on the other hand could involve questions about the people that are doing the trading, such as business and shop owners.
I guess the distinction might be a bit arbitrary at times and the tags could overlap often. I still think they should be separated, but I wouldn't mind a merge should it happen.

Did I see the word “discussion”? Besides, “payment-processors”, “identity-verification”, and “tor” should be tags on their own. The meanings of the two tags now seem so vague that I wonder whether they should not be removed altogether.

As we by now have shopping-car-interface, exchanges, finance, companies, merchant-services, ecommerce, payments, payment-processors, merchants, and a number of tags for specific services, it seems that there should be an appropriate tag available for any area of commerce.
I'd actually say that we could consolidate a few more of them.


text:
Being strict or kind about "newbie" questions?
Recently a few newbie questions popped up on the SE, like this one. Seeing them one knows that they were already asked before a couple times. My question is - should we be strict or kind about such newbie questions? That is to say, should we answer the question before closing it down and referring the user to relevant sources, or just do the latter without providing an answer to the question? The first approach might help the user asking the question with their problem faster, while the second would teach them that they should search before asking a question.
Which approach should we try to apply in most cases as a community?

This person obviously didn't read the instructions.
Close the question and direct the poster to the FAQ.
If there was only one issue (e.g. multiple questions in a single post) mention it to the OP.
By no way you should start a discussion. This would be encouragement for others to do the same.


text:
"Business" or "businesses"
There are two tags on this wiki - business and businesses. Which one should we keep?

Keep business, because that's the most obvious tag. Either way, though, merge the services tag with it.

I think we should keep businesses, as plural forms appear to be more appropriate for tags.

I would keep “businesses” which is less ambiguous than “business”, with the following description:

Questions about specific bitcoin-related businesses.

Note: if this is the convention we adopt, on some questions the tag should be removed, on some others it should be added.


text:
Should we keep the question about GLBSE protected?
The recent question about the GLBSE closing down was protected by me. However, some believe the protection was unwarranted. Should we keep this question protected?

I think protection is warranted to prevent significant abuse/misuse. While I don't know which number counts as "significant", I think we're just not there yet.
Just downvote + comment any inappropriate answer.

I would tend to agree that we're not at an abusive point just yet, but rest assured the mods will be keeping a close eye on this question. The moment we're spending too much time moderating one question it will get protected :)

I believe this question should be protected. For not we have 3 answers with reputation 1 - one is just a random comment, one is making claims without giving sources, and one being balanced, but a bit uninformative. I'd rather avoid the mess of the first two types of answers by keeping the question protected.


text:
"Cheapest" question will get out of date...
This question is asking for the cheapest of a particular service. Not only will answers vary by location, they will also get outdated reasonably quickly.
We could perhaps change it to ask for a link to a site that maintains such information on an ongoing basis?

I agree, it's localized in multiple ways. If we go by the StackExchange standard it should probably be closed.

The discussed question was closed in Nov 2012.


text:
Recent Community activity
Recently (2012 10 23) our Community bot seems to have dug out about 10 questions to the front of the SE. Does anyone know the reason for that?

The 'Community' user will periodically poke old, unanswered questions every hour so they get some attention and have a better chance of being answered.
From the 'about me' description:

Hi, I'm not really a person.
I'm a background process that helps keep this site clean!
I do things like

Randomly poke old unanswered questions every hour so they get some attention
Own community questions and answers so nobody gets unnecessary reputation from them
Own downvotes on spam/evil posts that get permanently deleted
Own suggested edits from anonymous users

(emphasis mine)

Well, some of those questions were answered as far as I know - http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/5061/323 , http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/2293/323


text:
Do we not vote enough?
For awhile now I've been looking at other StackExchange sites in the beta and I think we don't vote enough. We have some questions that reach 20 or even 40 upvotes, but a vast majority don't even reach 10. Now looking at sites like Workplace SE, being in beta for half of the time we have. Even on their front page we can see a lot of high voting questions, not to mention their overall scores.
I know that we shouldn't be comparing ourselves to other sites, but I still feel that the Bitcoin SE community doesn't vote enough.
Do you think that we should try to promote the "vote early, vote often" mentality more so on this StackExchange? Are there any other issues you think are contributing to our low amount of votes? Any opinion or idea is welcome.

Yeah, I think that we should vote more. I'm a bit lazy with that myself but apparently I'm in 12th place so yes, we could definitely vote more. So how do we promote it?

@D.H. Hmm, maybe we should post something on the Bulletin Board? http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/130892/nailing-it-up-on-your-community-bulletin-board . It could keep reminding people to vote early and vote often. Asides that, I guess we should be shining as an example.

@D.H.-bitcoin.se: Funnily enough you're still ranked 30th even today. :'(

I agree that this is important so I took ThePiachu's suggestion of using the bulletin board and made the Vote early, vote often! post "featured". That post is now visible on the site's bulletin board.

Hmm, by the way, how many questions can you feature? It would probably also be beneficial to give some exposure to this one in order to show people that we are having some small problem.


text:
The question "What was the last life sign of Satoshi Nakamoto" should be reopened

Possible Duplicate:
Should we allow question about the developers?

I really did not understand why this question (4 up-votes so far) was closed:
What was the last life sign of Satoshi Nakamoto
The guy who closed it seems to be a StackOverflow staff: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/users/97/robert-cartaino
It is unfair because he don't necessarily understand about Bitcoin stuffs. He has 99 reputation, what is not significative.
I sent an email to him, asking to reopen but he simply said "NO".

Felipe, you are egregiously misrepresenting what I said. I said that I originally closed the post due to numerous flags, and now that Bitcoin has an active and functioning community, I would leave the management of that post up to the community.

OK, I disagree but I got the lesson, I understood who charge here. I tried to erase the question but I have to wait 20h more. Thanks.

A decision was made rather early on that Satoshi-related questions were to be killed on sight with fire and napalm and nuclear munitions. This was primarily because we were seeing a tremendous amount of Satoshi-related questions that were little more than rampant speculation about identity, nationality, where he was last seen and with who and while Satoshi may be a meaningful figure in the Bitcoin world he's not Bitcoin itself and is therefore off-topic.
Similarly, we will kill with fire similar questions about Trendon Shavers (PirateAt40) and other such prominent figures who pull disappearing acts. Questions of this ilk are simply not constructive - and trust me this is the voice of experience speaking.
While this one specific question may actually be answerable, most Satoshi questions aren't and since they tend to bring trouble in their wake, we've declared them off-topic and as such this question will not be re-opened without some serious changes to the current scope.
Currently, we've defined the scope in such a way as to explicitly allow questions about the developers as long as they're actually relevant to the Bitcoin project and have a clear and correct answer. While this question is certainly answerable, it has no bearing on Bitcoin whatsoever. Satoshi is gone and the specifics of his leaving might make an excellent Wiki article but they don't belong here.

Wrong. Satoshi is history of Bitcoin.

History of Bitcoin or not, questions about any member of the Bitcoin community, developer or not, are only in-scope if the question pertains to the product, not the person. You can ask what Satoshi's motivation was for writing code a certain way, or for clarification of something in the whitepaper, but not where he went, what his favorite color was, what pizza toppings he liked etc. It's out of scope.

I am sorry to still strongly disagree. You are trying to kill Satoshi Nakamoto, who is like a semi-God for Bitcoin users. He is the founder! I know maybe he's only a pseudonym to a group of people, but what matters is his public signature. And of course the favorite color of Satoshi Nakamoto doesn't matter, but his last signature yes, it is important to history and to future. The users still want to have a contact with the founder.

And why did you closed the question as "exact duplicate"? Duplicate with which question?

It lists the duplicate question right up at the top. You're fairly new here, so I'm being quite forgiving but trust me the Satoshi question has been discussed at great length many times. We've put a lot of thought and effort into defining the scope as it pertains to this issue and it's unlikely to change any time soon. We're not trying to kill anything, there are plenty of places for such things but we're shooting for a certain type and quality of information here and this sort of chatter is just noise that we'd rather avoid.

It is very weird decision for me. But if you are the boss and I am the newbie, what can I do? :) Thanks anyway.

Trust me, it wouldn't have worked out that way if it weren't causing a huge amount of trouble. It was basically the only way to keep this from turning into Satoshi.StackExchange.com. We take the decision to bar a topic very seriously, but sometimes it just has to be done.

I understand the motivation, but an entire StackExchange site dedicated for Bitcoin cutting one of the biggest curiosity of Bitcoin users is weird for me. Thanks and I am sorry if I didn't understand, maybe my English is too weak yet.

The choice was made based on the kind of questions we were getting - remember that answerable questions that have bearing on Bitcoin itself are still on topic. There was, however, sort of a flood of nonsensical questions about Satoshi that either couldn't be answered or which had no bearing on Bitcoin at all. Stopping that flood so that folks who legitimately needed help or had important and high-quality questions became a high priority.

Just curious, what kind of "trouble" would those questions bring: administrative, community, or legal? (or some of the above)

Administrative. Almost all such questions become overactive hotspots of activity that isn't productive and provides nothing of value. That combined with the fact that most Satoshi questions are unanswerable just makes them a bad fit for SE and we'd rather limit the scope to keep the signal to noise ratio high.


text:
Delete links to Bitcoin mixing/laundry sites?
2 questions in particular have an answer by the user @rando:

What Bitcoin Mixing/Laundry Services are availble today?
How can I hide my bitcoin transactions to protect anonymity?

Both answers provide a link that has now been labelled as a scam by other users. The "other users" have no solid reputation rating though, but one semi-believable link was provided as evidence in what was essentially a vandalism answer-edit. I rejected the edit and added a comment with the link, as it was an inappropriate edit.
What I really believe needs to be done though is to remove the links altogether. This would include both the answers from @rando. If there are any other direct links to laundry services, I'd remove those too.
A link to a list of services, in somewhere like the Bitcoin wiki, would be an appropriate answer, with a sensible warning to the users that the services are highly likely to be completely dodgy.
I'm happy to do some clean up; Would anyone like to comment on my proposed strategy?

Protecting the questions may be sensible too.

Have flagged the offending answers as spam. There was one by a different user too.

Linking to a list of related services sounds like an acceptable solution to me.

Any time any link is known to be spammy/scammy you should flag it for moderator attention. We hate spam quite a lot here and will burninate such links (and often those posting them) with extreme prejudice while shouting some variant of "NOT ON MY WATCH MUTHAF***A!!!"
We should also put some serious thought into whether we should allow questions about mixers at all since their most common use is quite obviously money laundering and we neither a) want to portray Bitcoin in a negative light nor b) want to make recommendations that could be illegal. I think it's defensible since mixers can also simply address anonymity concerns of legitimately obtained funds, which brings it to a question of the image we'd like to portray on this site. Thoughts?

Mixers should be allowed. You can open a separate question to discuss it. Heck, even questions about silk road should be allowed. Knowledge is power, let's not try to bottle it up, but rather spread it.


text:
Possible to track sitewide voting progress over time?
With regard to this meta question, is it possible to see the number of votes cast, over time (per day) for Bitcoin.SE?
I think a nice overlay to this graph would be the #of questions or answers that have been created or updated in the past 3 days.

Such statistics are available to both site moderators and StackExchange staff, though not typically to the general public. We have, on occasion, been given permission to release tidbits of information but in general such statistics are not made public beyond the values posted on our Area51 proposal page.
Suffice it to say that we know what our site's traffic and interaction levels look like and are always actively pushing the community to fill in the weak spots, which right now is questions asked per day.


text:
A "wallet-recovery" or similar tag?
There are a lot of questions about recovering lost bitcoins, frequently due to the user having to re-download the blockchain and not having compleeted it yet, but also with lost passwords, corrupted files etc.
How about using a standard tag for these, such as:

wallet-recovery
data-recovery
recovery (this exists, but has only been used twice)
loss (exists, used 4 times)

Or something else?

Since the answer is nearly always the same no matter the circumstances of the wallet loss, shouldn't these be getting closed as duplicates?


text:
How should we handle questions that require mostly speculative answers?
Primary question in question being What is the maximal value of 1 BTC?
I feel like this and other questions require answers that can only be suggested based on speculation, be it researched opinion or merely a historical reoccurrence.
Should questions like this be permitted, so as to engage in potentially productive discussion, or should they be closed because a definitive answer cannot be reached, rather only agreed upon as a consensus? I understand that SE works on consensus, using votes to express the best answer or best way to solve a problem, but when all answers are speculative, well, it becomes a popularity contest of plausibility.

No matter how productive the discussion might be, StackExchange wasn't built to handle discussions, it was build to handle Q&A. Anything soliciting discussion or purely speculative should be closed as non-constructive.
If people want to engage in speculative or other non-constructive discussion on the SE site they should really do it in chat.


text:
Do you think we need more mods from different time zones?
From time to time (like today) we get some spam on this website. As I've noticed, all our mods are online at a similar time and thus not all time zones are covered. Do you think we need one or two more mods to cover a few other time zones so we would have some wider mod presence coverage?

DH usually takes what those of us in the U.S. would refer to as "the night shift" - plus we've got awesome high-rep users who handle things quite nicely in our absence. I'm cleaning up those questions now, though.

Doesn't answer the main question, but I just got the URLs that are being spammed blacklisted by an SE admin, so we shouldn't see any more of that particular troublemaker.

I've had less time for moderating than usual lately but I think I'll be able to step it up a bit again. The monthly stats tells me that there has been 120 flags with an average handling time of 3 hours and 38 minutes. I would say that that's acceptable but not great.
As far as I know all of us have day jobs (and probably other interests too) so it is obviously hard for us to cover 24/7. In my opinion it wouldn't hurt to have a fourth moderator but it might be more important to strive for an active community (how do we do that?). I believe that if the community works well there shouldn't really be much work left for the moderators.
Anyway, if we're gonna have another moderator his name obviously needs to be David. ;)

Last part reminds me a bit of this video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=rexKqvgPVuA#t=272s (joke at 4:45-4:50)


text:
Do we have a layout for the site yet?
On area 51 we still need more questions asked to get our full site. That said does anyone thought of a layout yet?

While those stats are important and I agree that we should try to shoot for optimal in every category, I have seen other sites graduate with stats in the red/orange. I think StackExchange just wants to see a healthy thriving self-sustaining community which I think we absolutely have.
As for the design/layout, SE employs an excellent web designer and we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Oh ok I see so we do not need a web designer for our selves...perfect.


text:
Should we remove the data tag?
I think we ought to remove the data tag. Questions tagged with it vary between bandwidth, fields in RPC, wallet.dat, and mining difficulty.

Yeah, that didn't help anyone. I have removed it.

It looks like the data tag is back.


text:
A small error in the FAQ
There appears to be a small error in the main site's FAQ:
a cryptocurrency or technology derived directly from Bitcoin such as [Namecoin][2]

The [Namecoin][2] should be a link, but it is just a plain text.

Thanks. Copy-paste mistake. Fixed now.


text:
Should this SE also cover questions about Ripple?
Ripple is a new peer-to-peer system that allows for money transfers. Should the questions about Ripple be handled on this StackExchange, or should new one be created just for the system?

Maybe you could post a thread on the ripple forum encouraging users to come here and answer the questions?

@Lohoris I did post a question whether they should join us in Bitcoin StackExchange or form their own, and linked them to this topic before it was answered.

Link to the thread?

@ripper234 - https://ripple.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=22

I know we initially intended for all cryptocurrencies to be in scope, but I can't help feeling like this is scope creep. Still, the Bitcoin questions were dwindling so I have no objections.

I think this is an important question because there's a lot of confusion about "where to ask" at SE. There separate SE sites for Etherium, Monero, Cardano, EOS.IO, Tezos, but also a lot of other blockchains without dedicated SE sites and none "blockchain.SE", so obviously bitcoin.SE is the next place after SO where some developers will ask questions and a consistent policy about such is needed

My recollection is that this SE was supposed to be broad enough to cover crypto-currencies generally. However, the current FAQ seems to be narrower, even saying "a cryptocurrency or technology derived directly from Bitcoin such as Namecoin". Personally, I'd like to see this SE broad enough even to cover centralized systems like MintChip if there are interesting questions about them.
I'm not exactly a disinterested observer here, being one of the folks working on the new Ripple system. It is not as similar to Bitcoin as NameCoin is. However, it is much more similar than MintChip.
Bitcoin and Ripple share these similarities:

They are both built around signed transactions.
They both have a public record of all processed transactions.
All their system state is public.
Neither's design requires a central authority.

Because of my conflict of interest here, I'll defer to what others decide.

+1 If crap like namecoin is in topic, I see no reason why serious projects like this one should be off...

It's never really been clearly defined what crypto-currencies to allow, probably since there hasn't been a whole lot of crypto-currencies around other than the Bitcoin clones. I'm all for allowing Ripple and I think that might actually be the final push that this site needs to get out of Beta. Let's change the FAQ to reflect that unless there are some protests here in the next couple of days.

No protest from me. I think that including ripple would be a useful addition. If it turns out that ripple gains massive traction then they can split from this SE and form their own, migrating their questions if they so desire.

While Ripple is not a system derived from Bitcoin, nor does it share all of its characteristics, I think the questions about Ripple should be on topic for this StackExchange as we are also dealing with a decentralised peer-to-peer approach to currency.

Bitcoin.stackexchange.com appears to have been misnamed as the scope of "allowed topics" is much wider than bitcoin.

I wonder if Bitcoin will become a pseudonym for cryptocurrencies in the public mind? Similar to iPod for mp3 player. If so, then this is a good name.

@GaryRowe I doubt it will become a pseudonym, still I see no reason why we shouldn't use a wider topic, especially since the questions on Bitcoin itself were dwindling...

@StephenGornick: Actually, before the launch of the Beta the proposal was called "Bitcoin & crypto-currency" but SE staff decided to name it just Bitcoin. You can see from the most popular topic in the definition phase that many people thought it would be a good idea to have a broader scope.

@GaryRowe That's something to avoid as long as possible. It only causes confusion.

I think Bitcoin and Ripple are different enough that they should be split if the volume warrants it, but similar enough that they can be combined if it does not. At the moment, the latter is the case, but that may change should both continue to grow.

If staff wanted a simpler name for the forum (avoiding extra 'and other crypto currencies') in the title then I see no reason for further objections. The decision may have been unfortunate but it is what it is now.
Other similar forums don't have limitations like : only compiled programming languages are allowed, just because some individuals don't like interpreted languages. Or believe that non-SQL database is not a real database or are in direct competition with their preferred database (and thus possible advertisement ploy).
Users should be trusted to be able to filter by tags.
Finally, if I am buying Bitcoins for XRPs and have some questions that may involve a commercial entity, that should hopefully be tolerable even to Mr Ansgar.

Bitcoin is still rocket science to 99% of the people. There are possibly thousands of questions about Bitcoin people might ask that are not yet answered here on this SE. Despite that, I keep running into a Ripple related question or an answer mentioning Ripple.
Most new visitors to this SE will have googled a question related to Bitcoin. If the purpose of this SE is to educate the people about Bitcoin then I'd say that anything not directly related to Bitcoin should not be here.
It feels like this site is being used for marketing purposes by people related to Ripple right now.

I have been using this site to learn about Bitcoin for about two years now. I have read most of the questions and a good portion of the answers. From my experience I can say that this StackExchange covers most of the important Bitcoin topic, what's left is mostly "I am having problems with service X". Ripple is a new technology that is quite innovative and is being developed by a lot of people related to Bitcoin. There are tons of uncertainties surrounding it. I am personally interested to learn more about it, while not being related to Ripple.

"If the purpose of this SE is to educate the people about Bitcoin" I feel the point is to be a useful reference site.

This is a flawed circular argument. This site wants to be a great Q&A site about its topic, and here we are deciding if something is in-topic or not.

"This is a flawed circular argument. This site wants to be a great Q&A site about its topic, and here we are deciding if something is in-topic or not." What is the flaw in the argument? And how is it circular? If the site wants to be a great Q&A about its topic, then it makes sense to first decide what is on topic and what is off topic.

"From my experience I can say that this StackExchange covers most of the important Bitcoin topic" I don't think it's possible for a site to have covered every question related to Bitcoin. It's still evolving, marketplace is changing, mining is changing, laws might be changing. There is also the fact that Bitcoin brings a ton of political and theoretical questions with it. I don't believe this SE can ever be covering all possible important questions that need to be asked now or will need to be asked in the future.

I'm sorry to be harsh but you are manipulating the subdomain bitcoin.se.com to promote a direct competitor/alternative to Bitcoin. You are using the possible traffic this site will generate to make people learn about your project. You're asking questions related to Ripple and answering them yourself. This is artificial. I don't think this is a good direction for this SE.

100% agree : "It feels like this site is being used for marketing purposes by people related to Ripple right now." and this is spam

This site is abused by ripple marketing team

Care to give a few examples?

http://meta.bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/425/558

@neofutur A link to a different one of your own posts making the same unsubstantiated claim does not count as an example.


text:
Merging fee tags
We have the winner fees with 35 results, and others which should be merged into that:

fee (1 result)
exchange-fees (1 result)
transaction-fees (17 results, we might merge into this one if you prefer, but I'd rather use simply "fees")

I think we should merge them all into fees. While the transaction-fees is also a good tag for discussing those fees in particular as opposed to fees charged by exchanges and what have you, I don't think there will be too much confusion.


text:
tag "alternatives" losing focus
I thing the tag alternatives is now losing focus, now that we have established that currencies so different from Bitcoin such as Ripple are IT.
We should either define precisely what is that tag about, or abolish it.
I hope nobody expects to tag that way all non-bitcoin questions, because it would be inconsistent with the enlarged scope of this site.
edit: either I get some answer to this question, or I'll consider going on and manually removing it one by one...
edit: deleted them again. Stack is failing. Either stop re-adding it, or answer here! It would be better if the mods just banned the tag, of course.
Fuck, it was just linking me to "unanswered", but there's a ton more. I have better things to do than manually removing something that should have been done automatically by a mod, I give up, ignore reality and reason and keep it.

disclaimer: in past I have already been in favor of deleting this tag, but for entirely different reasons

Arguments in favor of removing it:

As a tag, it's pretty vague. It's sort of like tagging your questions with 'not-bitcoin'.
If it's supposed to go on all non-bitcoin questions, then that's not being done right now.

Argument against: Some questions, like this one are actually about alternative blockchains in general. In that context, it doesn't really make sense to remove the tag.
My opinion: Remove the tag on questions that have a more specific tag. However, when someone wants to ask about bitcoin alternatives in general, leave the 'alternatives' tag.
For example: If I'm asking about how Litecoin's hashing algorithm works, then that shouldn't be tagged alternatives. However, if I'm asking for an overview of different proof-of-work schemes used by alternate blockchains, then that ought to be tagged alternatives or alternative-blockchains

That would be ideal, but it will be a pain to enforce. Still better than the current situation.

Done it manually.


text:
A problem I noticed about smaller SE such as this one
I noticed most people will read most questions anyway, hence posting a bounty is completely useless: if someone had an answer, they likely would have already given it.
Do you agree?
Does anyone have an idea on what to do about that?

Why is this a problem?

@ripper234 because we have a feature - bounties - which in this SE not only doesn't work, but is actually harmful (i.e. people might spend their reputation completely in vain, hoping to receive answers when it won't happen).

I personally will make a special effort to solve a question that has a bounty, even if it requires research, testing, or even making a phone call to an expert. It's not because I need the reputation but because it alerts me that someone might really need the information.

When I have a question that needs answering and it doesn't appear to be getting any attention, I personally share it through Reddit. It usually brings enough exposure to the question to get it answered.
As for bounties, I do agree that at the time they generally don't do much to help promoting a question. However, they can also be used to thank someone for a really good answer. While I also had the same problem as you described - posting a bounty and nobody answering the question - I don't really see it as much of a problem. It's just another tool that will have its usefulness at certain situations in the future.


text:
Adjusting the FAQ to make clear Ripple is on-topic
It seems there's an emerging consensus that questions about Ripple should be on topic here. However, we're seeing people voting to close Ripple questions as off-topic. They may disagree with the consensus, but more likely they're just not aware of it.
So, what should we do about it?
The FAQ says "a cryptocurrency or technology derived directly from Bitcoin such as Namecoin". This is ambiguous and would seem to exclude Ripple questions. So if the consensus holds, we need to change that. At a minimum, we should change "derived directly from" to "similar to". We could add "or Ripple" at the end.
Note: I'm one of the core Ripple developers and an employee of OpenCoin.

The consensus appears to be holding, so I went ahead and edited the FAQ. I personally liked the language in the "derived directly from" sentence and wanted to preserve it, so I just added another bullet point.

Ripple is a very interesting cryptosystem, with entirely different solutions to currency distribution and double-spends. Because of that, I feel it ought to be discussed. However, Ripple is definitely too small of a topic to deserve its own stackexchange site.
Assuming we want to allow Ripple, we have a choice:

Make a one-time exception for Ripple.
Change the rule from "a cryptocurrency or technology derived directly from Bitcoin such as Namecoin" to "a decentralized cryptocurrency like Bitcoin" in order to show that all secure-by-design cryptocurrencies are welcome.

Now, about the name: If you choose tack 2, I think that the name Bitcoin will be too broad. However, I don't think this is a problem. Bitcoin is much more famous than any of these other currencies, so "Bitcoin" gets across the point much better than "Virtual Currency".  "Cryptocurrency" is closer, but it has an important problem. If you asked a random person on the street what a "cryptocurrency" was, I think they'd probably say it is a currency that is hidden, probably by cryptography.

I think broadening the scope at least to "a decentralized cryptocurrency like Bitcoin" is a good idea. Personally, I'd even like to see it broad enough to cover things like MintChip. "Bitcoin" is definitely the right name for the site.

MintChip's not really a decentralized currency, though. The security of it depends on people not breaking the smart cards and changing the balance/extracting the private keys. In that sense, the design needs to come from a central authority, and it can't be open-source.

"derived from bitcoin" means fully opensource and fully decentralized, ripple is offtopic here in my opinion, just like amazon coins

This is a discussion of what the FAQ should be. Using what the FAQ currently is to justify what it should be is silly - by that logic, the FAQ should never change.

just saying "emerging consensus that questions about Ripple are ontopic" is false imo, even if their marketing team have many accounts


text:
wot != "web of trust"
I'd rename wot to web-of-trust, since usually "wot" means "wall of text".

I suppose we could make a synonym, but I can't imagine being confused by [tag:wot] since I can't imagine someone tagging anything as "wall of text"

I agree with David's comment that confusion is unlikely.
Still I like the suggestion as I think that some people won't immediately associate "wot" with "web of trust". They could hover the mouse to see the description but to me that's an unnecessary step as I don't see any downsides of using "web-of-trust" as the tag. Sure, it's a bit longer, but does that really matter?


text:
Should questions of the form "Is X a scam?" be removed?
Example 1
Example 2
These questions frequently don't have definitive answers. They ought to be referred to bitcointalk, which has, literally, an entire section of the site dedicated to accusations of scamming.
"Is X a scam?" has two sorts of useful answers:

Yes, they are a scam, they scammed me, here's my proof.
I think X isn't a scam, because of circumstantial evidence Y and Z.

Second, these questions are much better answered by a forum.

I disagree.
They are often somehow answerable, especially if the answer is "yes".
For instance, if a site asks to hold your money, and you cannot retrieve information about its owner, or it incorporated in a city-state, it is likely a scam to avoid.
Or if a site doesn't put his money where his mouth is (such as GLBSE not being listed on GLBSE itself), it is highly at risk too.

I agree that they can be answered. The issue I have is that they don't have a definitive answer. "Is X a scam?" is a question that can be answered both yes and no at the same time, with each answer being entirely valid.

@NickODell but only one answer will be correct since it either is or is not a scam. Sure, it is more difficult to understand which is the correct one...


text:
Spam invasion
In the last weeks I've noticed loads of spam messages here on Bitcoin SE.
Is this happening on other stacks too?
Are we planning something about it?

We've been banning the offending URLs as they appear. Needless to say, Bitcoin-related spammers have scripts and TOR so account and IP bans are useless, but we can blacklist the sites they're linking to. It takes a minute to get a new URL ban in place but it's pretty effective once we do.
Consider it a badge of honor that someone thinks our site is worth spamming on :)

Does the reporting the post as spam actually hide the post after a few reports, or it waits for moderator action anyway?

I believe it waits for moderator action. The reason for this is that spam is taken somewhat more seriously than most offenses on StackExchange and comes with long-term bans and permanent blacklist entries based on your content, which is not something we trust an automated system with. Keep up the good flagging, though! We're pretty good at catching obvious spam questions but we've got a lot on our plate and can't always catch every spammy answer or comment without the community's help.

It would be a nice feature to hide those posts after a few reports, without applying the bans before moderator action. Not that I expect them to code such a thing...

I'm being informed that 6 spam flags will auto-delete a post. Not sure if that means we have less than 6 avid users who are flagging things as spam or if there just isn't a collection of 6 users that are collectively faster than the mods.

David, it looks spammers have two counter messages - typing like "g o o g l e . c o m", and URL shorteners. I don't think we can do much about the first one, but for getting rid of url shorteners, you could take the first 20 entries of this list and ban them.

Is there a way to require moderator approval before new questions are seen publicly?  This is getting out of hand.

Requiring mod approval before allowing questions to go public would break both the site and the mods, we're just quietly deleting them as they come up. I'm also discussing the URL shortener issue with SE staff but maintaining such a list can get unwieldy, especially when it's easy to register a domain or twenty and install your own url shortening software.

Any user who finds spam should flag the post as such:

Click the flag link under the post
Choose “it is spam”
Validate.

That's it.
After 6 spam flags the post will be taken care of by the system, without moderator intervention being required.
Do not edit the title or the body of the post. It actually makes the task of other users and moderators more difficult, since they would have to check that the post is originally spam.


text:
Downvoting on closed questions, is alright?
I got two down votes this for my question that was closed 4 months back, I have also marked it for deletion. then why downvoting?

This answer on meta.SO explains the reasoning. The basic idea is that the question may also get up votes, votes to reopen, edits, and so on that might salvage it. It takes sufficient delete votes to establish the question as unsavable and end the process.
If you'd like, I'll delete the question for you. It just didn't get enough delete votes.

yes, please delete it. In future, you may consider deleting a question if it received only one delete vote from the same person who asked the question.

@vi.su. it is automatic if it has no answers, but if there are answers, then it's up to the community to decide if they are worth keeping or not.

@vi.su. though it may be a bit controversial in some circles the basic idea here is that things posted on a SE site belong to that SE's community. A delete vote from a question without answers or activity usually just means someone thought twice about their contribution, but once a question has answers or comments deleting it would destroy the contribution of other individuals as well so the choice to delete should belong to the community at that point. Very often one can learn a lot even from closed questions. Don't worry about rep, just keep participating and the rep will handle itself.


text:
Who hates Ripple?
There are a few people that constantly downvote & attempt to close Ripple questions.
This is a callout to them - who are you? Why are you doing this?

I don't hate Ripple.  I hate the Bitcoin stackexchange being abused (my opinion) by inclusion with non-bitcoin questions.   StackExchange provides a mechanism called upvote, downvote, and close.  I use these to communicate that I think Ripple is off topic.

There, and I voted to close this question too.   Sorry if that offends you.  Don't take it personally.

@StephenGornick well, this is meta ... usually less pedantic about closing questions. But feel free.

I think personally that Ripple is not particularly on-topic here, but I know other people think differently. I do not downvote Ripple questions because they are about Ripple, but I don't really like them.

wether or not I hate ripple is offtopic, I just consider they are abusing this stackexchange with offtopic ripple questions and marketing, they need their own ripple.stackexchange.

This is still an issue, although -from what I gather- it was decided that crypto-currencies are on-topic. If Ripple were off-topic, why would it have a tag!? I wish these people would just add ripple to their list of ignored tags and be done with it.

Who is doing it is irrelevant. The important question is why. Ripple questions are getting close votes, but nobody's spoken against Ripple's inclusion in this discussion. (edit: AntonAnsagar has now, and Stephen Gornick posted something that can kinda be interpreted either way.) There are two possible reasons for that:

People voting to close are unaware of the previously linked discussion. I think this is unlikely; you need 500 rep to cast one, and I would imagine that somebody who's been here that long would have visited meta.
People voting to close feel that replying to that post wouldn't convince anybody, and that making close votes on Ripple questions is best approach to winning people over.

What should we do? Nothing, until 1) they make a meta post explaining their position or 2) gain enough support to actually close questions.
One more thing to remember: this isn't Us vs. Them. We're a community of people, and while we might disagree on some minor points, we're still going to build a kick-ass reference site.

Good post, I agree.

Well, I think it is "people who accept community-backed decisions" vs. "people who abuse the system and ignore the decisions taken democratically"

I don't hate ripple but my scam/bs radar is very much warning me about it. Here is why: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=147789.0
Obviously 5-6 accounts are trying to promote Ripple here. These accounts are most probably owned by people who have a stake in Ripple or OpenCoin or whatever.
You are abusing this SE to promote your project/company.
I've given my thoughts with my answer here https://bitcoin.meta.stackexchange.com/a/362/2995 and in the comments.

"These accounts are most probably owned by people who have a stake in Ripple or OpenCoin or whatever." Not only is this an ad hominem, but it's also not falsifiable. In other words, there is no way for me to prove that I don't own OpenCoin stock.

Whether that statement is true or not does not change the fact the project is being marketed through this site. If they are Ripple "enthusiasts", start another SE or forum etc. Don't abuse the traffic this SE generates from Bitcoin.

The world of alternative currencies and alternative money exchanges is still very new.  There are good arguments for why ripple might succeed or might fail, and arguments for why it might be great for bitcoin, and arguments for why it might be bad for bitcoin, etc etc.  There are arguments for why it might be a boon to the developers, and arguments for why it might be a way bigger boon to the world, in a way that would make whatever profit they make from it all a drop in the bucket compared to its overall positive impact.  So I doubt that talking about it here is bad or inappropriate.

I'm not saying talking about Ripple is bad or inappropriate. Please talk to your hearts content where ever you want. This SE is not the place for it. I'm just saying using this SE to promote Ripple is inappropriate.

Ripple is offtopic here, they need their own stackexchange and stop spamming here, imo altchains are welcome, but ripple is not an altchain anf have nothing to do here, even if the ripple guys are very good at marketing and manipulation.


text:
Asking question to which you know the answer
Is it reasonable that I make questions for which I know the answer?
A couple of examples:
What is Freicoin's annual and per block demurrage rate?
How will Freicoin's fixed supply be initially distributed?

Yes, this is in the StackExchange FAQ
http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/17467/11236

For some reason I can't seem to post the above comment as an answer. It gets auto-converted to a comment. First time I'm encountering this feature, and I don't like it. Anyway, it is the right answer.

According to the StackExchange FAQ, answering your own questions is perfectly fine and even encouraged. The idea behind StackExchange is to get answers to the questions, not "ask questions so other people can answer them and get reputation". ;)


text:
Should I delete the tag, "puzzle"?
I have (accidentally) created a tag, puzzle. Should I delete this tag?

Note that unused tags (not associated with a question) are removed periodically and automatically.

OK, I will remove it from the question..

Sure. There is not much reason to keep it around.


text:
How should we handle outdated answers to questions?
As time goes on, some questions and answers are getting out of date. This is especially true of answers that cite behavior of specific, older versions of software in a general manner.
E.g.: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/5391/1409

An unreleased version (well, it's released as a beta, but is intended to be a version release 0.8) of the bitcoin.org client alters the syncronization process, which should heavily reduce the time required to get the client functional. If I understand it correctly, the process will be faster through being less disk intensive.

That version is now released and the behavior is default.
How should we handle questions and answers such as these?

In the case of that specific question, where the question is still relevant but the answer just contains obsolete information, I think editing the answer is probably the best way.

Simply edit the post so that it reflects the current situation.

Sometimes this, sometimes post a new answer. It depends.

I say we make a list - not only of answers that have changed, but answers that will change.
I'll start:

How much would it cost for a government to undermine Bitcoins?
How much would it cost to execute a 51% attack?
Needs to change when commerical mining ASICs begin being shipped.
What happens if Gavin and the other developers get hit by a truck?
What is the current (Feb 2012) "bus factor" of the standard client?
Needs to change when the list of core contributors changes.

Feel free to edit this.


text:
What tags are Bitcoin specific and shouldn't be confused with Ripple? (and vice versa)
I want to avoid the overloading of terms that are common between Ripple vs Bitcoin, and think this may effect the tags on this site.
What tags need to be updated to reflect the difference?

"transactions" comes to mind.

@NickODell why?

@ripper234 Because you can have Ripple transactions, and Bitcoin transactions.

@NickODell - so? I don't think that this is reason enough to have two different tags.

@ripper234 I was stating the term was shared, not that I thought it ought to be split.


text:
What tag should be used to for questions about "green mining" or the overall earth impact of mining?
I'd like to add a tag to questions that

Quantify the electrical cost of mining
Connect the dots between mining and the impact on the earth's resources

What tag is most appropriate for this?
The end result is that we can improve searching and reduce redundancies when dealing with this type of question.

How about the [tag:electricity] tag?

How about an [Ecology] tag?


text:
Bounty for invalid question?
What should I do after setting bounty for a kind of invalid question, and answers are useful but not actually solving the problem specified in the question?
Can I use single address for all my transactions?

To be honest, I'm not really sure what you're asking. Have you tried clarifying your question?

Yes. My motivation is to keep my firstbits address to receive Bitcoin always. Any solution would fine with me, but that question only explores possibility with scripts.


text:
Should the Bitcoin tag be permitted if another useful tag is included?
I tried to tag a question with "bitcoin" and was unable to, even though I had other qualifying tags.
Given that not every post on this site refers to Bitcoin-per se, I think that the tag may resolve some confusion when dealing with shared terms such as "transaction"
Question
Should the Bitcoin tag be conditionally allowed if there is another qualifying tag (Bitcoin can't be the only tag)

In my opinion, unless you have a tag like 'ripple,' you're dealing with bitcoin by default.

I agree with Nick's comment. This site is mainly about Bitcoin, the site name is "Bitcoin" and the overwhelming majority of questions is about Bitcoin. Users should assume that the question is about Bitcoin unless it is tagged with another crypto-currency.
If things change in the future and other crypto-currencies start to really compete with Bitcoin we might have to reconsider.


text:
Bad readability of front page
The light blue color (less so for visited links) and the very slender font face hurt readability, especially on laptop screens which are sensitive to viewing angle. It is merged into the white background very easily.

The font, color scheme etc used on Bitcoin.SE is a standard theme for all SE Beta sites and is not under the direct control of the moderators here. That said, I can bring this up to an SE employee if enough people feel it's a real problem. I'll let the upvotes do the talking.

Long time since I was on a beta SO site. I remember them having the chequered background...

Yeah, they used to have a "graph paper" scheme, but that got changed along with many other design elements some time ago.

I think all white backgrounds are a problem and should be avoided, hence I use an extension to remove them manually each time. [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbmkiecgbjeifoejpgmdaleoha] It would be nice if they were changed server-side, though...

If you think black text on a white background is a "problem and should be avoided" you're going to have issues with a LOT of web sites out there - and there's a large community of UX designers who will disagree with your premises.


text:
[tag:countries], really?
I fail to see any reason to have tag countries.
Is everyone fine with deleting it?

I retagged two questions with countries, but this one makes sense with it, so I left it.

Also see: Do tags for specific countries make sense?

I respectfully disagree. In the bitcoin realm especially, setting and origin can paint the Topic at hand equal shades of subversive,  truly disruptive or positively purposeless grey. No one cares about a BTM in Venezuela because they are a little tied up by their shoe strings on cold concrete wrap in mats.
Take for example a question posted from an Argentinian inquiring about arbitraging the Blue Note V. Official Note Market, then finally converting into or out of BTC. This is a geographically isolated opportunity and with it comes regionally specific regulation and licensing considerations to say the very minimum. I see weight set upon the scale in instances such as these.
Similarly, a poster inquiring about the particular confidence in BTCx leveraging platforms that are central to Shang Hai, or Singapore for instance, again carries with it a distinct geographical flavor.
-YourBloke

The 'countries' tag, was literally 'countries'. If there was a lot of question activity specifically concerned with one country, a tag for that country might make sense, but a tag that just says 'countries' doesn't really distinguish anything. ;)


text:
Block [tag:fees] and in favor of [tag:transaction-fees] and [tag:exchange-fees]
I'd like to block / prevent the use of fees in the general context and retag most of them as transaction-fees or exchange-fees
There are a few questions that relate to Ripple and it's possible to retag them as ripple-transaction-fees
You think this would be a good idea?

It might make things confusing for people that don't understand the difference, but that can be fixed with clear explanations of both tags.

I thought this was a good idea, so I edited the tag wikis, and retagged 10/42 questions.

When is a good time of day to edit these tags?  I'd hate to bury good/new questions with these edits

@makerofthings7 I think the most important factor is staggering out the edits.

Done. I left 2 questions because I didn't feel they precisely fell into either category.

Sure!
Being fees ambiguous, I see no reason to keep it, since we have valid alternatives.