text:
Is there a problem with stackexchange community?
For some reasons I though that stackexchange is a place where you can talk to experts. How is that possible, experts seem not to be willing to read or to understand: https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/27019/problem-with-the-crypocurrency-community (For me, it is very unprofessional way to describe different topics and communities/technology, it already is a provocation in it's statement)
I decided to create a new question here, where people are supposed not to have a problem understanding this topic.
We have here indeed experts who say that ion is the same as bitcoin: https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/27019/problem-with-the-crypocurrency-community
Now, as some experts do suggest that all coins and all topics of all coins should belong here . Great, lets try it out.
I do assume that those questions are offtopic here for this channel as well as some other channel like neocoin, ethereum and dodgecoin.
Here are my questions:

Reading through stackexchange proposal, I start to get a feeling that many experts do believe, ethereum is a blockchain or maybe that bitcoin is blockchain. Now my newbie :) question to the experts: Is bitcoin blockchain? If not, why should I believe to get a possibility to talk to experts?
What is a blockchain/ethereum/bitcoin/ion coin?
What has ion coin to do with bitcoin?
When ion coin was attacked, thief was stealing many coins. On bitcointalk trolls trolled about it. Nobody of bitcoin community steped in to help out. When we stopped the attack 2 things happened:

yobit was lying and claming that they lost 100 btc because nobody informed them about setting back the blockchain. This is not true, buth with for me yobit had a motive. Since months yobit was stealing ion on their platform and they never replied to anybody for hostaging coins, they banned those who asked.
Very funny was, when attack was prevented and fixes imlpemented, there was a setback in blockchain, which was also properly communicated. There is nobody known to me except same group of trolls on bitcointalk which were complaining very much about the setback and even were suggesting to let thief get his stolen coins, which is very curious. With that, there are already 2 actors which clearly show their motives in public, one of them seems to be supported not only by bitcoin community but a platform on bitcointalk is provided for such questionable agenda.
So far about thief and how bitcointalk's community was acting. Nobody came to help or even to try helping. Why not? Do bitcointalk devs follow any ethics and if which? Is it the same for ion?
Those facts can only tell me that no, neither bitcoin nor another coin should be in one channel, unless they are 100% identical (clones) where there is not known to me that there are 2 different coins, using different blockchains and at the end being the same. This is simply not possible.
Now I would like to ask some for sure off-topic questions, the point is that I would like you (bitcoin.stackexchange) channel to reply me if those are ontopic and if, then reply please:

What are electrons of ion coin?
What are atoms of ion coin?
What are masternodes of ion coin?
Is PoS the same which bitcoin uses? (I know this question is silly, for those who read and dont know, bitcoin uses PoW not PoS)
Can you explain me the difference of blackcoin's PoS2.0 and PoS3.0 and which and why is used for ion coin?
How does staking work in ion coin?
Why did bitcoin community never helped out ion, especially if it was attacked?
There is a ton of other coins outside which never implemented a fix, mostly because they do not know? Why does stackexchange community think, that this is on-topic for bitcoin's channel?

I guess I could continue with the list of off-topic questions but let's keep it simple, I think those question are enough to define if ion coin should be here, in this channel.
My opinion is that it is straight wrong to mix up coins in bitcoin's channel as well as it would produce only trash.
I was one of the people who stepped in to help them out, we applied a fix and implemented new algorithm which is publicly available. There are no ion developers who you could discuss some topics with, like how to shape MIDAS algo and how does such algorithm fit to a PoS coin. Beside that, there were many settings not properly set or lets say left as test values. Those are all topics which are very specific and have less to do with bitcoin.
I am sure, nobody here would mind to talk about those topics in details, as well as how and why we did what we did to implement a fix. However, stack exchange community is even the opinion that such question is just a copy of that: https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/27025/there-are-already-one-for-bitcoin-and-another-one-for-dodge-coin
I might be stupid, but can somebody of you point me out, how is the question the question and those answers a copy of: https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/27025/there-are-already-one-for-bitcoin-and-another-one-for-dodge-coin
I do not want to be rude, but for me it sounds more like if somebody who wrote it has not much knowledge about the topic, where I would gladly discuss about those questions, but I dont get it, how could Ion related questions, technical or simple, how can they be ontopic here?
That is the proposal: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/111266/ioncoin
That is troll thread, where bitcointalk moderator followed the agenda of trolls which included crime like doxxing, usage of stolen documents, instignation, theft and more which I really dont want to point out here. They also banned everybody who was trying to make any conversation, 378 pages of trolling and crime, enjoy: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1443633.0
With such support of bitcoin community I understand that ion community does not see themself as "bitcoin". I guess it would raise their value a lot :), however, if it is really what bitcoin community on stackexchange thinks then I will gladly ask to take down the proposal and send all ion holders (beginners/devs) here to this channel. Would that be correct?

Reading through stackexchange proposal, I start to get a feeling that many experts do believe, ethereum is a blockchain or maybe that bitcoin is blockchain. Now my newbie :) question to the experts: Is bitcoin blockchain? If not, why should I believe to get a possibility to talk to experts?

Yes, Bitcoin is a blockchain. Ethereum is also a blockchain.

What is a blockchain/ethereum/bitcoin/ion coin?

A blockchain is a database with some synchronization and validation logic on top of it. It's usually but not always byzantine fault tolerant. It's usually but not always used to implement some kind of currency. 'Blockchain' is a really broad word.
Bitcoin is a blockchain which implements a currency and a simple scripting system.
Ethereum is a blockchain which implements a currency and a Turing-complete scripting system.

What has ion coin to do with bitcoin?

Ion seems to be a Bitcoin-based currency. Looking at one of the source files of Ion, there is a comment saying that the file was written by Pieter Wuille, one of the developers of Bitcoin.

When ion coin was attacked, thief was stealing many coins. On bitcointalk trolls trolled about it. Nobody of bitcoin community steped in to help out. When we stopped the attack 2 things happened:
yobit was lying and claming that they lost 100 btc because nobody informed them about setting back the blockchain. This is not true, buth with for me yobit had a motive. Since months yobit was stealing ion on their platform and they never replied to anybody for hostaging coins, they banned those who asked.
Very funny was, when attack was prevented and fixes imlpemented, there was a setback in blockchain, which was also properly communicated. There is nobody known to me except same group of trolls on bitcointalk which were complaining very much about the setback and even were suggesting to let thief get his stolen coins, which is very curious. With that, there are already 2 actors which clearly show their motives in public, one of them seems to be supported not only by bitcoin community but a platform on bitcointalk is provided for such questionable agenda.
So far about thief and how bitcointalk's community was acting. Nobody came to help or even to try helping. Why not? Do bitcointalk devs follow any ethics and if which? Is it the same for ion?

Why did members of the Bitcoin community not help? Speaking for myself, I didn't know that Ion was attacked at all. Further, there was no way I could have found out, since none of the blogs that I read would've covered it.
Do bitcointalk moderators have ethics? I assume so. Every time I've interacted with them, they have been friendly and nice.
Having never talked to Ion devs, I have no idea if they have any ethics.

Those facts can only tell me that no, neither bitcoin nor another coin should be in one channel, unless they are 100% identical (clones) where there is not known to me that there are 2 different coins, using different blockchains and at the end being the same. This is simply not possible.

Various members of the site have expressed that opinion. I see your point, but I don't agree.

Now I would like to ask some for sure off-topic questions, the point is that I would like you (bitcoin.stackexchange) channel to reply me if those are ontopic and if, then reply please:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 are on topic. 7 is off-topic, because it is argumentative and open-ended. (Even internally unified groups have multiple different motives for an action, and Bitcoin is not internally unified.) I don't understand question 8, (what fix?) so I can't tell you either way.

I was one of the people who stepped in to help them out, we applied a fix and implemented new algorithm which is publicly available. There are no ion developers who you could discuss some topics with, like how to shape MIDAS algo and how does such algorithm fit to a PoS coin. Beside that, there were many settings not properly set or lets say left as test values. Those are all topics which are very specific and have less to do with bitcoin.

Yes, that's a weakness of this system. If no-one on the site knows the answer to your question, it won't be answered.
But you can change that, you know. If there's a critical mass of people who know how the unique parts of Ion work, and they ask and answer questions about it, then questions will get answered.

I am sure, nobody here would mind to talk about those topics in details, as well as how and why we did what we did to implement a fix. However, stack exchange community is even the opinion that such question is just a copy of that: [..]
I might be stupid, but can somebody of you point me out, how is the question the question and those answers a copy of: [..]

Both questions are of the form, "Given that we have all of these cryptocurrency websites, why don't we merge them into one big site?"

I do not want to be rude, but for me it sounds more like if somebody who wrote it has not much knowledge about the topic, where I would gladly discuss about those questions, but I dont get it, how could Ion related questions, technical or simple, how can they be ontopic here?

We have a list of things that are on topic: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic
Also, you might want to read the tour page: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/tour

That is troll thread, where bitcointalk moderator followed the agenda of trolls which included crime like doxxing, usage of stolen documents, instignation, theft and more which I really dont want to point out here. They also banned everybody who was trying to make any conversation, 378 pages of trolling and crime, enjoy: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1443633.0

I don't want to read 300 pages of a thread. It doesn't sound relevant to what we're discussing.

We see another restriction of this forum, I replied to both of you, please read: https://pastebin.com/nFVsq7MY  . I can't comment here it is to long. Another downsid of stackexchange :(

Your defintion of blockchain is wrong. According to your implication that all coins are definition of the blockchain, why isn't then bitcoin a part of some predecessors of decentralized ideas, like GPG, i2p? They use same technologies like bitcoin, only not the blockchain itself ... Please reply to questions 1-7 if you think they are ontopic and reexplain me please what blockchain is. I claim you did explain me something wrong

@CEVAP: I don't comprehend what you're trying to achieve. As Nick said, a large part of your questions would be considered on-topic on our site. If you have questions such as 1-6, please ask them on the main site separately as their own topics. Questions about the topic go on the main site, questions about the main site go here. You're here on "meta" where we talk about the main site.

Ok, let me ask here, what are atoms? Please reply me here what they are, what they have to do with crypto at all or with blockchain at all?

Another question? If I ask about gaming, like my gravity game does not work. How is that ontopic in bitcoin channel? What do have games to do with bitcoin??

@CEVAP meta is where the site itself is discussed. main is where on-topic questions are answered.

@CEVAP On hyperledger event in Amsterdam, MIT professor ignored my questions I don't know this guy, and I can't help you if he's ignoring you. I would say, that if it is trolled on bitcoin's forum and moderators as well as users do know it, then it can't be simply true that bitcoin community was not aware of this. People are very aware that bitcointalk has a very low signal-to-noise ratio. That's why I don't post there, or read it.

@CEVAP Also, I said that question 7 is off-topic.

Maybe my laguage skills add addtional confusion. I neither expected you to answer nor to comment on what I said in Amsterdam. Just to clear, I would have written exactly what I said if I would want to talk about. The point was, that you can't deny a qualification of somebody who clearly is qualified and academic. I am also not slamming anybody, I just bring to point a very big problem for cryto adaption (especially as non digital currency) which is ignorance and not knowing something. In science is no place for ignorance. That is at least my opion.

You can think and assume whatever you want, everybody is free. I have enough proof for my words. But dont you see? You already implicate that they are trolling for good reason. This is double standard. Such stance could influence a lot if you threat them (ion community) that way and invite to come here to get helped, this sounds more like a bad joke if you ask me. This is not the way I would expect you guys and girls here to offer communication platform and for sure it is not democratic, as your base is only assumption.

I am sorry, I wrote 7 by mistake. Yes, please reply to 1-6 if that is not making you big efforts or time loss

@CEVAP That's not how this works. This site is meta. This site is questions about the main site. Questions 1-6 would be ontopic on the main site, but not here. The main site is for questions about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

Ok, I will not ask those questions there as I simply hate spamming and I do threat offtopic questions as spam, no matter if you tell me that this is ok as it is me who is responsible for what I write. I do not know what to suggest, I would say my question was not replied and we got to nowhere which would only strengthen my opinion that it is huge mistake to put all coins and technologies into one basket. However, I would be happy if you reply to those 6 questions, as there is something offtopic in them, then it is not offtopic to reply here. I am new here according to my rep, please suggest.

Issue 11: Beside that, it was migrated to here with the meaning that questions are about the site, they were actually not. They are about ion.

@CEVAP: Why do you think it's offtopic, when both Nick and I have explicitly told you that it is on-topic.

Because ionomy ltd has nothing to do with blockchain except that they develop games which work with blockchain technology.

Atom as well as Electrons, those are products of ionomy limited, not of the blockchain itself

And because I really cant understand what is ontopic if I ask about games, can you please explain?

Example: Is there any cheat mode or walkthrough for Gravity? This is clearly offtopic and if you want to overspam bitcoins stackexchange with such things, which are clearly offtopic, then it does degrade image of stackexchange in my eyes. Please elaborate, how can games be part of ontopic for bitcoin or any other crypto channels which exist?

Bitcoin.SE is a site to collect questions and answers about cryptocurrencies. Some other projects in the space have felt that their use cases and user bases are sufficiently different to create their own sites and have successfully done so.
If you want to establish a new cryptocurrency as a topic on Bitcoin.SE, I would suggest that you ask and answer a few questions about it here. Content on Bitcoin.SE is organized by tags such as ion. If we don't have a tag for it yet and you don't have enough reputation to create one yet, feel free to request one to be created by flagging for "moderator attention". Once there is a tag for your topic, you should subscribe to receive email notifications when new questions are asked about the topic. Whenever you see interesting questions about the topic that are on-topic here, feel free to post them as your own question here and answer them. You could then link them to get people here, or might get some people searching the web to find them, this may attract more activity for the tag.

We see another restriction of this forum, I replied to both of you, please read: https://pastebin.com/nFVsq7MY  . I can't comment here it is to long. Another downsid of stackexchange :(

Thanks for suggestion but it misses 100% the point. We are here because we do not want to be dependant on bitcoin's community. You have already in your name bitcoin and bitcoin's community was the only one which did harm this project and still continue to do so. I hope you understand my issues, but if you or anybody ads ion to bitcoin.se, let me know about it please.

@CEVAP: Well, I've read your post thrice, and I still don't get what you want then. You're providing large amounts of information about all sorts of unrelated side-events. Could you please just state your issue in ~3 sentences at the top of your post?

Issue 1: bitcoin is not blockchain

Issue 2: I try to figure out which points are offtopic for this channel

Issue 3: Many points of ion have nothing to do with blockchain, bitcoin or any other crypto currency

Issue 4: Community (bitcoin) which only harms until now ion, why should we have channel here? On bitcointalk they banned everybody and claim devs left. I hate double standards and sadly they exist also on stackexchange

Issue 5: Democratic process can go very wrong if not all aspects are correctly handled. Speaking about putting all coins to bitcoin

Issue 5: If one channel, then it should be probaly Blockchain, which includes all projects, including bitcoin. Why is bitcoin different? I read here that they are all the same, defined as blockchain by comments (see above).

Issue 6: It is not about bitcoin, it is about ion what I talk about. Your answer and not understanding what I talk about is good point to show that ion related topics are not being handled correctly here. And then you might even mark it as offtopic and close. It would again harm only ion itself if they come here for a question.

Issue 7: I am interested in discussion. I do threat it as incomplete answer if you tell me that 1-7 (I know it was not you) is ontopic. I asked, please reply and I do claim it has nothing to do with bitcoin and it would be 100% offtopic

Issue 8: Looking at issues 1-7, does this channel or some other have agenda to keep everything under control, like it was on bitcointalk. Are you in some race to be defined as "Blockchain" before "Ethereum"? As how else could you explain then implication that both of them are the definition of the same, then they must be the same. Clear fact proving you it is wrong, they are not same just look at them, as well at source code like at the chain itself.

@CEVAP: Bitcoin.SE is a question and answer platform for "cryptocurrencies". Is "ion" an opensource cryptocurrency project? Then it is on-topic here. If you disagree on the definition of 'blockchain' with someone, I don't see how that is relevant.

thanks for asking and elaborating. I hope I did wrote it now in a more understandable way. Please ask if you have any further questions.

yes, it is. Ionomy took our coding to 100% over, you can look at it: https://github.com/cevap/ion/

Issue 9: Ion is also about a gaming. Gaming/Games is to 100% offtopic here, please correct me if I am wrong.

Bitcoin.SE is a question and answer platform about cryptocurrencies, we mostly focus on technical aspects. If you want to add questions and answers about technical aspects of ion, please feel free to do so. Just like we don't accept questions about shopping or speculation, which is something you can do with many cryptocurrencies, we will not accept questions about gaming or games. I don't understand why you keep making us repeat ourselves.

Thank you. I would gladly and you speak now to me (CEVAP) who can speak for community. I am founder of CEVAP and CEVAP is a community maintenancing currently ion. I look at it like indirectly as  community overtake. I dislike going and using your platform by providing a lot data again and the rest. If bitcoin is correct place here (we still did not define) I would gladly reply/write everything bitcoin.se related.

As you see, I am not promoting, not placing adds or anything else. I am also not interested to go to different platforms and promote ion. This was never the goal. I simply helped out because nobody else did, I have other projects and things to do and thats maybe also a reason why I write here. All blockchain devs should stick and help each other, instead of slamming or restricting. If you want official Q/A with Ion Core team and ionomy ltd, I can ask them to do so. If you would like to have a hangout with everybody of them, I could ask them to organise it. There all Q/A can be discussed.

Issue 10: On proposal page, it was downvoted that it is a good question to ask how did we implement the fix and what exactly did we do to prevent the attack. Whoever downvoted it followed either some questionable agenda or simply does not understand that there is probably more than one coin having same or similar issues. Just a fact that somebody marks something that could fix many other coins is not understandable to me. I do put in question now the ability to differentiate lingual skills and way of wording if providing such help is wrong.

Issue 12: This decision current diskussion/post is not related to decision if ion is here ontopic or not, but they suggest it to be here. Somehow something does not fit :), would you agree on opinion of those who did close very fast a reasonable justification for own chanel: (I'll post it italic in next comment):

"This question does not appear to be about a Stack Exchange site proposal, the Area 51 process, or the Area 51 software." – Robert Cartaino
If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit your question.

@CEVAP: You seem to be severely confused. We are an open community that provides a platform that collects knowledge about cryptocurrencies. We don't want anything from you. Nobody forces you to be here, or on SE in general. Frankly, I had never heard of ion before yesterday. We have nothing to do with your proposal, except that people have told you that your topic would be partially on-topic here. We have confirmed that.— Now you demand that we champion your project. I don't see why you would be entitled to that. I volunteer my free time here, and have zero interest in your project.

I do not see any demands from myself. You have never confirmed that some off-topic parts are clearly ontopic. I was told to ask them, but first post was the question and has been wrnogly put into meta before replying to 1-6 as you say it is ontopic. Would you agree on that? Before making any proposal, if people there clearly state that all of that is here ontopic, then we have at least a discussion about that. That is all what I was saying and doing and no, it was not me who put it to meta. Means, ion questions would not be replied if you ask me. Thats why proposal was made at all. Thats all

Thank you for for taking time to reply. I am not here to spend it useless and I also use currently my free time, as well as I did by getting involved here. As I said in my first post, I try to figure out which parts/topics of ion are clearly offtopic here. You do missunderstand me in one point. If this communit says that all of that is ontopic then everything is good. But if one month later users come and complain about somebody waisting their time in closing questions related to ion or ion gaming. That would be a mess and I do not want to tell anybody to come over before being clear about it.

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

For some reasons I though that stackexchange is a place where you can talk to experts.

Others my disagree, but I feel that this is what you are mistaken about.
I feel that a lot of people make the mistake that Bitcoin SE is a site for conversations...but it's not.  It's a site where users are dedicated to building a useful repository of answers to the many questions that come up in realm of cryptocurrencies.  It's a community with a goal and a purpose, and therefore some rules need to be enforced.  Conversations still happen, but they should be based on providing accurate information to each other, not in arguing a point or expressing opinions.
We are certainly not the center of the Bitcoin/blockchain community, and I don't feel that is the goal.  Our niche in the community is more about building a reference for people to find the information they are searching for.  Some people confuse this site as a place to pitch their ideas (like BIPs) or hold long, opinionated conversations.  That type of activity does not suit our goals, so it is discouraged.  There are plenty of other forums for that sort of thing, but this isn't one of them.
Starting with a question about cryptocurrencies, a good rule of thumb for what is on-topic would be "does this question lead to an answer that someone else may one day be searching for".  Questions like

Why did bitcoin community never helped out ion, especially if it was attacked?

clearly don't lead in that direction.  This is an unaswerable, loaded question, and the most traffic it will receive would be a fight in the comments.  It's not appropriate for this forum.
Even so, it doesn't hurt to try asking an off-topic question, so long as they aren't inflammatory.  Stack Exchange is community moderated, and off-topic questions get closed and voted down rather quickly.  If this community decides a question is off topic, don't feel hurt or discouraged.  You can learn from the comments and the reason for closing, and then post on-topic questions.  This community welcomes new questions, and certainly new sub-topics, but it's the people posting questions and answers here who ultimately decide whether the question is appropriate for this forum.


text:
Add "future market values" to close reason
Currently one of the close reasons reads:

Questions on current market values, energy costs or service provider availability are off-topic as the answers are changing too frequently to be useful to others.

I suggest amending this to read:

Questions on current or future market values, energy costs or service provider availability are off-topic as the answers are changing too frequently to be useful to others.

Nothing productive ever arises from a discussion about future market values.

I think that's a good idea.

@NickODell: I've created the reason, could you accept?

@Murch It's done.

I also think that's a good idea. I've created a new close reason in line with Greg's suggestion. @Nick could you please deactivate the old one, then activate the new one? I can't approve it myself.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
Vertical space without grey quotation box
hello my name is Mike..
good to meet You all

..i am new here, question is

how do i do Big spaces without grey box?
i tried doing enters, to make spaces,
Only the grey box with spaces in front lets enters show..
it says do not make code?.. thanks, Mike

Also, don't use tags that have nothing to do with your question.

thanks Nate Eldredge, Tags box said hashing block ripple, Sorry

The idea is that you should participate in the main site first before using meta.  You get reputation by posting useful questions and answers that people vote up.  Also, the tags in the tags box were as examples only.  I'd suggest that you spend some time looking at the existing questions on the site to get a sense of how it works, then it will be easier to see what makes good questions and answers.  In the meantime, perhaps a moderator can migrate your question to meta.

okay thanks.. How do big spaces in Comments ..? mike

I don't know.  Comments are not a good place to ask new questions, either.

You can control the size of spaces by adding non-breakable spaces into your text with the html symbol  .
This would create a                      space like the one in this line.
You can add a line break
by putting "two spaces" at the end of the line
which will allow you continue writing in the next line.
You can also add new paragraphs by  inserting the html code <p> ... </p>.

but.. how do i put in Tall space ?

Oh, right, vertical space. Do you mean, how to force a line-break?

yes.. grey box with spaces before makes enters appear... Enters on same line without grey box..? thanks, mike

Hi Mike, I updated to include linebreaks.

Thank you Murch this is very helpful

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


text:
At what point do I flag "not an answer"?
I see a lot of answers to questions that could be better as a comment, is it just to flag these as "not an answer"? The dialog in the flag box tells me answers-as-comments should be flagged but I don't see this often?
Should I just comment to the user and tell them their mistake?

Hey Jacob, I had almost the same question a little while ago, so perhaps check out When to flag low-quality, flag "not an answer", and when to downvote answers?. The question's text and especially Tim's answer might be sufficient to resolve your question here.

The answer that Murch linked to does provide some good guidance, but Bitcoin has some unique challenges when it comes to moderation in general.
Ordinarily, moderation activity is commensurate with the growth of the site. The bigger the site, the more (and more interesting) moderation becomes. Bitcoin is still a smaller site, yet interesting developments in the news can send participation (and an influx of very low quality posts) through the roof.
Think of it like a small town named Bedford Falls. Now, somehow - this town has become a popular destination for party seeking college students, and there's no way to reasonably predict (and brace for) these waves of people arriving. They're loud, they leave litter all over the place, and many of them aren't going to be back until the next party bus pulls in.
Moderation styles on sites vary depending on the size and the expectations of the community. Since we're prone to random explosions in activity - we might want to consider adopting the 'firmness with finesse' style of moderation that larger sites like Stack Overflow are using - at least during the periods that we see increased calls for moderators to do things. This means we can't always wait around for the community to handle stuff, especially if it looks like spam, or is of extremely poor quality. It's these kinds of broken windows that become self-replicating, damaging to search placement and off-putting to people finding us while looking for a higher-than-usual quality of resource.
In the coming weeks, I'm going to be providing a lot of coaching and input on discussions surrounding site moderation, growth and scope - much of it coming from my experience as a moderator in various capacities before joining the company last year.
I'm digressing a bit from your original question; I could have probably just said that we're at a sort of weird point where a blanket philosophy isn't quite possible - but I wanted to get into some better detail.


text:
Is a "Does X exist?"-type question a product recommendation?
We have had a lot of questions closed as product recommendations. I feel that this is appropriate when somebody asks "What is the best X?", while there is a multitude of options.
However, when somebody asks a "Does X exist?"-type question, should it be closed as a product recommendation?
An example for the latter would be:

Is there a website that shows different the Bitcoin exchange rates of different exchanges in one graph?

The distinction being, that the asker doesn't ask for one thing to be recommended over others, but rather wants to fulfill a specified need with whatever he can get.

related: Aren't recommendation questions off-topic?

These can be good, but they're also an enormous source of overhead. Have a look at the guidance that I laid out for Software Recommendations SE to get an idea of how they can turn out well.
These aren't, as you noted, technically 'recommendations' - It's more along the thinking of "There must be something that does this, but I have no idea what that would be called or where to look for it" and I do think that they fall squarely into the support genre that a Bitcoin community would expect from a resource such as ours.
That said, you have to moderate and edit these with an iron fist - they tend to attract a lot of low quality, mostly link answers and we've already got problems deciding what is or isn't spam / guerrilla marketing.
If the question is narrowly scoped and very specific when it comes to the endeavor of the author, then I suggest a case-by-case basis for now. We should be able to extrapolate what they're trying to accomplish, constraints that they must work within and provide (at most) 10 answers to the question.
Answers that consist of barely more than a link, are only tangentially related to the question, are written in the form of an advertisement or don't otherwise answer the question should be flagged as "Not An Answer" and deleted on site without ceremony.
I don't think we can flat out disallow this specific category because most common beginner questions are precisely this. A good collection of canonical and well maintained answers would be helpful, as long as we keep a close eye on it.

I was just reading a question on the network and saw the post notice that they apply for a similar type of restricted question on their site:
Regarding our "Recommendation to solve Problem"-type questions, we could make a guidance post on meta, create a specific tag, and make a post notice similar to the one shown here. –– Then ruthlessly delete posts that don't adhere to the required standard.
Would that improve the situation with such posts?


text:
Why do i need to have reputation before i can vote?
I see some real good answers on this site but I can't vote and I can't comment. How do i get reputation points the quickest?

This question would fit better in the meta.bitcoin.stackexchange.com area.

Wait what...? I thought this was about Bitcoin?!

Thank you for the notice! Actually, there is a flag for just this case: Below a post, you can click flag > Off-topic > "This belongs on a different site in the SE-network" > meta.bitcoin-se.com. You should already have enough reputation to use it, if I remember correctly. :)

@Jori, oh wow, I didn't even realize he said SO. :)

Thank you @Murch, I have not learned to do that yet and now you've taught me to fish :)

Glad to hear that. :)

Welcome to Bitcoin.SE.
Reputation is a measure of your contribution to the website, and thus a measure of the community's trust in you.
You can earn reputation by generating useful content, i.e. asking good questions or providing good answers. You can also gain smaller amounts of reputation by suggesting improvements on existing posts. If you haven't seen it yet, check out the about page for a short introduction to Stackexchange.
The help center has a section on Reputation & Moderation, which covers your question in greater detail, e.g. it provides an overview how much reputation you will gain for which actions.

Thank you so much Murch. Thats very helpful. I feel bad for asking the question now. I should have looked in the help first. However its people like you that give positive help that all of us will learn the most from. Thank you!

Don't feel bad, we've all been there before. :)


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Collecting questions related to Mt.Gox' insolvency
I am attempting to collect questions that are related to the Mt.Gox insolvency and linking them here.
Please provide any additional suggestions as answers or suggested edits to the question.
Mt.Gox

Why is the disappearance of Mt Gox a problem?
I have/had 31 bitcoins on MtGox; What are my options now?
Does the Mt Gox attack constitute theft of Bitcoins or just a Denial-of-Service attack?
Huge price difference between Mt.Gox and others. Why?

Transaction Malleability

What is Transaction Malleability?
Is this "transaction malleability" really an issue?
Wouldn't the “malleable transaction” attack be foiled by common sense?

Other sources

Joint statement by other exchanges regarding Mt.Gox
CoinDesk – Mt. Gox Files for Bankruptcy, Claims $63.6m Debt
Falkvinge – The Gox Crater: Crowd Detectives Reveal Billion-Dollar Heist as Inside Job
CoinDesk – Optimism Grows as Mt. Gox Chapter Ends and Bitcoin Turns the Page Especially check out the full time-line at the bottom.


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List of Altcoins
I propose that the community here try to keep a list of altcoins. There are a few on the web, but none of them are comprehensive. I read some where that there are over 90 altcoins, but any list I have seen has never listed more than 50. I think this is the best list currently available. This one is pretty good too.
The first consideration is how the list will be organized. I see two possible ways that are useful:

Organize by use and popularity
Organize by type, relative to Bitcoin

Number one is straight forward and easy to tell. There would be categories such as Large, medium, small, new and dead.
Number two is a little more in depth and I honestly don't have the knowledge about altcoins to even suggest categories, except that I understand Ripple is centrally controlled, where bitcoin is not, so that can be a category, and that Litecoin is "Script" not "SHA-256".
I see no reason, of course, to not make a hybrid of each organization style. I see no reason to not have categories of both, or even have the same list twice, but organized differently.
If we make the list, I suggest that we link to questions tagged for that coin, if they exist. We should also link to any official sites, if they exist. Wikipedia articles might be a good idea, again, if they exist.
Organization within categories can go any number of ways, but alphabetized is easiest and never changes and also avoids arguments.
So here is an example format:

Large
Litecoin (Tagged Questions) (Official site) (Wikipedia)
Namecoin (Tagged Questions) (Official site) (Wikipedia)
Centralized
Ripple (Tagged Questions) (Official site) (Wikipedia)

Now there's only one question left: Should this be on meta or the main site? I'm in favor of the main site simply because it will get more exposure. Community wiki avoids the rep problem and invites new users to add new coins we don't know about.
Any takers to get us started?

Ripple started out centralized but has made their server software open-source by now. While it is still less decentralized than most altcoins, I don't think that it really fits under a "centralized" caption.

I don't think it would be reasonable to keep an accurate list of altcoins, as there are many forks with the only difference being popularity of the coin. Maybe categories and along with it simple explanations and an example?

Although it would be possible to create such an altcoin list here on Bitcoin.SE, I think that it would be destined to become merely another incomplete list of some altcoins. Further, I think that it wouldn't serve the purpose for which it was created:

For people who come to ask, "I heard about FooCoin, where can I find more information about it?" such a list probably wouldn't help because they wouldn't have found the list anyway.
For people who ask questions like What are some of the different takes on proof of work, such a list could help answer the question but the answers would consist of little more than a link to the page with the info.

A proper wiki (eg. https://bitcoin.it) is probably a better place because Mediawiki has actual support for tables, with sorting and filtering. The current List of alternative cryptocurrencies page seems rather incomplete and out of date, and also doesn't use the Mediawiki table features. Certainly room for improvement there.
The current most canonical list appears to be this forum thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0 which as we all know is a terrible place to keep information. (Who would ever read all 67 pages of that thread?)

I saw a circular tree that showed all altcoins based on what were forked ("branched") from. You could mouse over each node to see the coin's parameters too, found it:
http://www.mapofcoins.com/

Absolutely amazing resource. If only the descriptions gave some sort of indication to how healthy the economy for a particular coin is.

@fredsbend is it the right answer

Since there is no way to create a table on Stackexchange I am afraid, that it would not be feasible to put a lot of different columns in it and keep it readable. We would have to select the most important information.
It might work as a community wiki question on the main site, however, it would need quite a bit of work to get it started and then also maintenance to keep it useful.
At least to start out, we should keep it constrained to altcoins that have questions tagged on this page as that should make it much more manageable.
I am not sure whether the wikipedia pages are really the most important information for crypto currencies. I'd propose to format in such a way:
SHA-256d based

Namecoin – namecoin – namecoin.info
Peercoin – ppcoin – peercoin.net
Mastercoin – mastercoin – Official Site

Scrypt based

Litecoin – litecoin – litecoin.org
Dogecoin – dogecoin – dogecoin.com

Other Hashing Algorithm

Quarkcoin – quarkcoin – Official Site – Multiple hashing algorithm
Maxcoin – maxcoin – maxcoin.co.uk – Keccak (SHA-3)
Primecoin...
Datacoin...

Other cryptocurrencies

Ripple – ripple – ripplelabs.com

No clue
Solidcoin, yacoin, zerocoin, vertcoin, Freicoin

Is there a single tag where this would work in a tag wiki?

We have an "altcoin"-tag that would lend itself to it. But aren't tag-wikis pretty much invisible unless you specifically search for them?

coinmarketcap has a frequently updated list of at the time of posting 138 coins, sortable by various factors

This is nice, but does not have the technical details about the coin, such as scrypt or SHA framework


text:
Could we implement a spam filter?
We've been seeing a lot of spam like this lately. I've been flagging all of them, but it's still annoying to see them on the front page. Is there some way to put in regex filters to combat this sort of thing?

We have one implemented, and we've adjusted the black list accordingly. The issue is that this is coming from a vast number of large networks, so it's taking a while to stop.
I'm going to be modifying Bitcoin's setting in our global spam shield so that your flags (and moderators destroying these obvious spammers) block these even faster. I raised it a bit before the weekend, but I can take it a bit higher comfortably.
Now, FAIR WARNING ... (for all)
If someone leaves an answer like this:

The best I've seen is FooCoin (http://foocoin.com)

... that consists of barely more than a link, it's probably going to be deleted very quickly. If you're a new user leaving such answers, you might find your account removed.
Additionally, questions that seek recommendations for third-party tools or services that do not provide a very narrow criteria that limits the number of answers are probably going to be closed very quickly, because those are precisely the kinds of answers that they attract.
This is exactly the kind of thing that attracts this sort of spam, so we need our default quality to be much higher than what the spammers want to contribute in order for it to stand out.


text:
Are GPU-specific hardware questions on topic?
This question appears to be about building a mining rig and installing a bunch of GPU cards. Something goes wrong, and the OP has a question.
Arguments for on-topic:

Installing a bunch of GPUs is something that ordinary users are unlikely to do (but there are certainly other computing activities that might need multiple GPUs)
The user's purpose for doing this is clearly to build a mining rig, something that other site users are likely to have done

Arguments for off-topic:

None of the immediate content of the question has anything to do with Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrency)
Superuser is a well-established site where hardware questions like this are specifically on-topic

I suggest that if a consensus is reached on this point (or generally on hardware-specific questions), that the decision is added to the on-topic help center page (in whichever section is decided). Right now there is no guidance for topicality of purely hardware/OS questions.

I'd say that this is mainly off-topic because it simply concerns hardware more than crypto currencies. The fact that he plans to mine a cryptocurrency is irrelevant in this question and not important. There is no mention of mining as well...

I don't like to really consider other sites and overlap when talking about what's on-topic during a beta. Well, I consider them, but I don't like ruling out questions purely because another site would accept them.
A resounding theme here is, pure hardware might be interesting to people into crypto currencies, but if the question has nothing to do with Bitcoin (or others), then they're asking in hopes of getting access to this sort of niche knowledge that they presume folks here would have. That's not what we're here for, we're here to talk about Bitcoin.
Hard to set a blanket rule because I think we'll see our fair share of exceptions, but this is a good acid test:

Are they here to basically pick our brains by just tacking on Bitcoin in context?

... then you're probably in the off-topic range of things. Or:

Is this question basically the same if we take Bitcoin out of its context?

... again, pretty square in off-topic I'd say, most of the time.
I can probably come up with a better litmus test after a few more cups of coffee, but that's where I'm thinking it would land.

I like that test, "Could the same question be asked if the context of Bitcoin were omitted?". Perhaps we should put that in our topic guidance.


text:
Are "Where is x in the source code" questions beneficial?
A user recently asked Where is the code that receives blocks that miners have just solved. I see these kind of questions often and the answer can be found by just using Github's code search feature most of the time on the Bitcoin repo and even alt coin repos. Are these kind of questions useful on stack exchange or are they off-topic?

I think so, why not?

I would suggest that for a user unfamiliar with C++, and even with the codebase in question, it is kind of a stretch to ask them to use code search to find something when they don't have any idea what the code might look like.
But I also question the user's motives in asking this - if the user is not a programmer, what problem are they actually trying to solve? Is this an XY problem? Is it just an attempted learning exercise where the user dives headlong into the nearest interesting open source codebase?
I am actually leaning toward on-topic here. The question:

is relevant to Bitcoin
is objective
has a correct answer
could certainly be useful to a skilled programmer intending to modify the code in some way

If such questions are repeated frequently, they are of course ripe for collection into a duplicate graph.


text:
Why is it bitcoin.SE instead of cryptocurrencies.SE
With all of the altcoin rage and the random loss/gain of trust in bitcoin recently, why is this stackexchange named "bitcoin" instead of "cryptocurrencies"? I mean, it seems like most of the question are over the bitcoin protocol, which encompasses bitcoin and most altcoins, but some are specific to altcoins and some are specific to bitcoin.

related: This site should be renamed

When the Bitcoin.SE site was launched in August 2011, the only viable cryptocurrency was Bitcoin. Even Litecoin wasn't released until October 2011. Namecoin had only existed for a couple of months (and arguably isn't really a cryptocurrency itself).
That's the reason why. Perhaps this site should be renamed to something more general, but that's a different question.

Actually, I read somewhere that the proposal started out named "Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies", which was shortened by SE staff to just "Bitcoin" when the site started into the beta. Source: In the comments here: http://meta.bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/345/5406


text:
Amsterdam: Are any Bitcoin.SE users going to Bitcoin2014?
Who's going to http://bitcoin2014.com in Amsterdam, NL this year?
For people like me, that were previously put off by the price tag:
They are now offering a student ticket for 75€ (normally 350€), and also are looking for volunteers (15+ hours of work for free admission).
The conference is going to be on May 15th-17th. They are already sporting a broad range of speakers, but unfortunately no conference schedule has been posted yet.
Update:
Meanwhile a schedule has been posted.

If I lived in the area I would certainly go. But I am the NW USA. A bit too far to justify the travel expense.

I am finally convinced that this is not only on my computer. :D

So it's too late now, but I just remembered that you can get SE to reimburse for things like this if you can prove that it will benefit the community. Next year, I guess.

Yeah, I only really decided to go about a week in advance, as far as I remember they require such applications at least a month in advance. Next time I will probably decide earlier.

I am still considering. It seems affordable, but I am not sure what exactly I'd will be doing there. ;)
It might be exciting to see a few people from the Bitcoin space live, and I think it would be nice to meet a few of them/you. I guess, I'll sleep yet another night on it. ;)

Update: I just registered for the conference, will make travel arrangements tomorrow or so. I will see you there, I guess. :D

Thursday evening at Conference update:
Arrived in Amsterdam at 3pm. I am finally convinced that this is not only on my computer. :D
Today I met some people from bitcoin space: Met Jeff Garzik and Pieter Wuille, talked to David Schwartz, Ron Gross, and Alakani Itireleng, had a beer with Stephen Gornick, I saw Brian Armstrong, Gavin Andresen, Erik Voorhees, Tony Gallippi, and Meni Rosenfeld. I visited a bunch of booths and talked to people from Ripple, NXT, iceVault, GoCoin, BitPay,... ;)
I am excited for tomorrow, hope the presentations will be interesting.

After Conference update (@fredsbend)
There were four different tracks, which (with exceptions) were running in parallel at all times. The recording looked very professional and as far as I've understood all sessions will be made available online. There were about 1200 participants at the conference from some 50 countries. There were maybe forty or fifty booths: Payment-Processors, Exchanges, Mining Equipment Manufacturers, ATM Manufacturers, Ripple Labs, Altcoin-Projects, Bitcoin Merchandise, ...
I met quite a few members of the Bitcoin.SE community and also was able to point out some use-cases where Bitcoin.SE offered advantages over forum-based communication a few times. Altogether, I think I talked to maybe 100 people. I took a lot of inspiration and food for brain out of the conference.
Some of my favorite sessions were:
- The interview with Alakani Itireleng
- The Panel on the Economic behind Bitcoin (not much new to me, but interesting to hear some economists pick it apart)
Other impressions:

Terrible male/female ratio ;)
The entrepreneurial spirit was tangible in the air
On the other hand, the community is still so small that everyone is able to talk to all the "big-shots": For example I've talked to Gavin Andresen, Mark Woods, David Schwartz, Jodie Brady, Peter Vessenes, Ron Gross. I met Roger Ver, Brian Armstrong, Jon Matonis, Jeff Garzik, Pieter Wuille, Meni Rosenfeld
The whole thing is growing rapidly, I was offered several jobs and approached about being funded a few times (unfortunately I didn't have a project). ;)
Amsterdam has a very interesting atmosphere, I thoroughly enjoyed exploring it
It was terrible not to have a business card!

Two new Bitcoin Foundation Affiliates were announced during the conference: Germany and (I think) Mexico. We had a meeting of the Bitcoin Foundation (which I joined at the conference) after the conference ended on Saturday. My impression was that quite a few grievances were addressed and I got the feeling that the parties concerned understood that everyone is trying to do the best they can, but that the whole space is changing and growing very rapidly.
The Bitcoin Foundation announced that they would be working on separating their local efforts in the US from the international efforts, and that they would soon be opening an office in London for the international portion of the Bitcoin Foundation.
Gotta run, have a lecture now. ;)

Thanks for the updates. Looks like a bit of an erratic program. Mostly panels and quite a few concurrent sessions. Combined with the very late delivery of the schedule and the location (I personally would have picked West coast USA or Asia) I would guess that the show is not as well attended as it should be. I record conferences for a living, so I get a feel for these kinds of things. I could be wrong, though. About how many attendees are there? How would you rate the quality of the content being delivered? Are there recordings being offered?

I will be there. I will be speaking. I believe a schedule hasn't been posted yet because it's still being worked on.

Nice talking to you today. :)

I will be there too. I won't be speaking this year, though.

wave Nice meeting you. ;)

I'd like to go, but the getting there is expensive.....

I'll be there. Pieter Wuille, can we meet?


text:
Are bitcoin-related tax questions considered offtopic?
For example, would the question "Does the IRS bitcoin policy double-tax miners?" be considered off-topic and should it be posted instead on money.stackexchange?

related: How do we handle legal advice / questions on legality?

It really concerns the Bitcoin niche a lot more than just finance. You'd need to have experience with Bitcoin to know the answer to this question, you wouldn't have to be a financial pro. The people at money.SE wouldn't know the answer to the question unless they know what Bitcoin is or the question explains it well.

I think this goes for bitcoin-related anything, at least for the foreseeable future, as not many professionals have the fundamental understanding of BC or crypto currencies in general to be able to help. That said, folks should try their best to explain their situation to finance professionals, but that doesn't make it off-topic here.


text:
Implementing LaTeX?
Quite often, I find the need to include mathematical expressions, and currently it is very awkward to typeset them. (I typically use fixed-width mode for that since is looks a bit better.) Could we enable LaTeX?

I just asked around a bit, apparently MathJax is enabled on a per site basis per request.
Unfortunately, it also has significant impact on page load and display times, though, so we'll have to look into it some more.
Until then, I found that there are some websites that convert Latex to images, which one can then add to a post. The SE engine allows for upload to and linking from imgur.com. It is not quite as convenient, but does the job quite well. I have been using codecogs:eqneditor for this purpose.
example:

This is basically it, show us a hand full (like 10+) posts where having it would have saved a significant amount of work for the contributor, and we'll probably enable it.

I would have liked it in my answer here. But I think Murchs website was a good replacement, although I didn't think of it at the time.

This is declined, for now - but we're happy to revisit the idea if you're able to show us a decently-sized group of posts that would have been significantly better if it had been enabled. If you've got a chunk (say 10 - 12 +) where you're trying to bend ascii and images into shapes they just weren't intended to form, and MathJax could alleviate that problem, we're happy to take a look.
It's a non-trivial performance hit (most with fast connections won't realize it), and once it's on, it's nearly impossible to turn off, as you'd have to go back through every single use of it and make it work otherwise.
Feel free to just add another answer to this if the need clearly arises, and we'll have a look.


text:
"I made my own altcoin"
The Bitcoin source is easy to fork, and people can make their own altcoins with relative ease.  This site regularly sees questions from people who are having trouble with their custom coins, such as https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/21731/my-scrypt-altcoin-has-no-mainnet-hashrate.
My feeling is that such questions should be closed, as they are effectively asking the community to debug code that they can't see.  I don't see how anyone could answer except to make wild guesses about what might be wrong, or to just say "Fire up gdb".  But I'd like to see if there's a community consensus on this.  If so, this meta question could become the canonical place to point posters of such questions, to explain why their question is being closed.
Edit:  If nothing else, I propose a tag for such questions.  Perhaps altcoin-development?

What exactly do you mean by community consensus? I agree with you and Tim Post, but this question received 12 views (and that includes me and you two) in 9 days. Trying to reach to a community consensus on a hardly active meta seems impossible, especially because there are lots of active people not participating in the meta.

You have enough rep to make the tag. Find a question or two like this, then edit them for the retag. There are badge rewards for this too. It is encouraged. I think that is a perfect suggestion, by the way.

These are a bit like the finance questions, professional accountants are probably not going to understand the currency sufficiently to be of use. I say that in most cases, because you can go out of your way to make the ramifications of your question clear, without the reader needing deep knowledge of how crypto currencies work. Analogies are great for this, but I digress.
I closed the question you linked as unclear, because it is. There's not nearly enough information there to answer it. Any time debuggers / lints / segfaults / etc come in to play, one might immediately think of Stack Overflow but .. like accountants, do experts there understand the currency enough to sufficiently answer a well asked programming question?
I'd say, if answerable, and obvious that a deep understanding of the currency sets the stage for the kind of expert that could answer it, they're probably okay here. But I think that would be rare - 'go find your debugger' is a strong indication of a poor question both here and on Stack Overflow.

To expand on what Tim said, building an altcurrency and debugging the code is a very big part of this new industry called cryptocurrency. Therefore, the questions about the code itself are certainly on topic.
However, there should be rules.

A question about code should indicate the asker's effort at resolving the issue before posting here. "It's broke, fix it, please," is not a good or future useful question.
A question about code should include excerpts of the code that the asker thinks might be the problem. There exceptions, but mostly, I think not.
Answers on questions about code should be more than "I fixed it, here you go." They should explain why it was broken and why what they did fixed it.


text:
What tags could we introduce to better distinguish topics concerned with different areas of mining?
We have over 1000 questions concerned with the topic of mining, yet the number of tags that further distinguish questions in that realm is pretty small:

mining, mining-pools, cgminer, miner, bfgminer, asicminer, pooled-mining, solo, diablominer, webminer, primeminer, mining-pool

A while back, there was a proposal for a "mining-related" stackexchange, which argued that our SE does not cater to that topic well enough.
Further related tags such as
litecoin, gpu, asic, hashing, profitability, scrypt, and cpu essentially act as meta-tags for mining in those questions.
What do you think about introducing tags such as:

scrypt-mining
sha256d-mining
mining-performance
cpu-mining
asic-mining
mining-profitability

Would they be beneficial for users to properly distinguish mining related topics to follow?
What other terms are commonly used on Bitcoin related platforms to talk about questions on mining?
What tags should we introduce in order to better cater to the miners?

Also, some of the already existing tags should be merged.

I'm open to suggestions, make it an answer! ;)

Of these already existing tags:

mining, mining-pools, cgminer, miner, bfgminer, asicminer, pooled-mining, solo, diablominer, webminer, primeminer, mining-pool

I suggest merging mining-pools, mining-pool, and pooled-mining.
They seem like exactly the same things to me.
As for suggesting other tags, I will have to do some research and make an edit later.

I no longer think "mining-pools" and "pooled-mining" are the same thing. Pooled mining is what you do, while mining pools is where you do it.


text:
Is anyone planning on attending or speaking at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Chicago, 2014?
There is another Bitcoin conference event in Chicago this July. It looks like it is going to be a big event, and similar to how Murch asked if any community members were considering attending the conference in Amsterdam, I am asking if any are considering this one?
Personally, I want to go. I live only a short plane ride away.

On a related note, I may request that SE reimburse me for the conference, unless a more qualified member is willing to go through the process.

Looking back, Bitcoin2014 was well worth it for me, but I have no information how big this is going to be in comparison and I am afraid that for a couple of days a plane ticket to the US is not within my budget. Also, there is no student rebate. ;)

I read that the previous one in Miami had 1200 attendees, so it was probably about 1500 to 2000 once you add in faculty and exhibitors.

I live in Chicago and thought about going but there is no way I'm going to pay $275 to listen to people ramble on about Bitcoin for 2 days. Lollapalooza is 3 days long and is still cheaper. If you look thru their documentation they're asking for sponsors to pay 5 figure sums as well. God only knows where all this money is going, or why it is being held somewhere as large as the McCormick place when their previous event only had 1,200 people show up. If they have this many people show up, they'll take in about half a million, and im sure this could have been done for a lot less.

I record conferences for a living and the prices you mention are reasonable and within the range of what I have seen. I don't think you realize how expensive it is to put on a conference. $500K for 1200 with a full exhibit hall is only a little more than it costs to have the conference in the first place.

Also, Chicago is one of the more expensive cities.

I'm sure it isnt cheap to throw one, but take for instance the DEFCON conference, probably the largest hacking conference out there, in 2010 they had over 10k people attend. The cost for this year is $220 for 4 days, and I know there would be talks I would be interested in, without even looking at who is speaking about what. With the bitcoin conference they dont say what is actually going to be talked about, only who might be speaking, so god only knows if this would be a waste of my time and money or not. And the cost is still more than DEFCON for half the time.

I agree, the Bitcoin conferences seem to be lax in getting their schedules together in a timely fashion, but Murch enjoyed the Amsterdam conference a few weeks ago. The cost difference are likely related to the AV requirements and food being supplied. The Bitcoin conferences are going to feed you both days. Further, there are probably going to be quite a few concurrent sessions, like in Amsterdam, which adds significantly to the AV bill. All I mean to say is that they are not gouging. They are covering costs and making enough to cover overhead until the next conference and maybe a little more.

I dunno, personally I'd prefer to figure out my own lunch and the value just isnt there for me, but for others I can understand the appeal to not having to leave and being able to network over lunch. Anyways good luck trying to talk SE in to sponsoring you.


text:
Edits must be at least 6 characters. What about essential 1 character edits?
I don't know if this can be changed specifically for the Bitcoin Stack Exchange site, or whether it needs to be changed for Stack Exchange as a whole. Even if there is individual site fine grained control over this, I don't know if Bitcoin can have this changed while still in beta. I'm interested in hearing people's reasons for and against this policy, and whether there are ways of overriding it in specific instances such as the example I give below.
I've just suggested an edit to an answer which only required a single digit number to be changed from 2 to 3. In most cases a single character edit would be trivial and would not affect understanding of the answer, so editing would be discouraged. However, in this case the answer's example scenario already included a valid amount of 2BTC and another valid amount of 3BTC, so the typo accidentally referred to the other amount and gave a completely different impression of what was going on. The fact that 3BTC was intended and that 2BTC is just a typo would be obvious to someone who understands how transactions work, but the answer is explaining for the benefit of people who do not yet understand how transactions work, so the correction of the typo is essential.
Due to the automated ban of edits of less than 6 characters, I've had to go in and make other trivial edits in order to bring the total up to 6 characters. This is increasing the number of trivial edits being made and taking time away from useful changes that could be made elsewhere. I also expect that some people feel discouraged from contributing to the editing process. I'd like to hear from anyone who is.
I understand that it is useful to have methods to discourage trivial edits, but I do not believe that the importance of an edit can be judged based only on its length. Rather than an automated rejection, could there be an automated message that says

"This edit is likely to be rejected due to being less than 6 characters. Do you want to make further changes? Click here to submit anyway if you are certain it is not trivial"

The first thing to note, edits are posted immediately (no review necessary) after you reach a certain rep threshold. On a graduated site, which Bitcoin.SE currently is not, I think that rep amount is 2000. On a non-graduated site I think the amount is 500 rep. You currently only have 356 rep, so you cannot yet enjoy this privilege. (On a side note, once the site graduates, your privileges will be reassessed and there is a likelihood that you will loose some of them).
In light of this, you may not think there is a problem anymore, but in case you do, here's the argument against allowing less than 6 character edits for low rep users:

It first protects the content from vandalism and invalid edits. Even with the review queue, these edits use users' time; the offending edits still have to be rejected.
It prevents trivial edits from low rep users that don't understand the site yet. I've spent a good deal of time on quite a few SE sites and can tell you that each site is quite different. You might have it down pat how they do it on one site, but that means nothing concerning another.
It encourages complete edits. You currently have to change six characters to put an edit in the review queue. Since you only found the one, what you should do is look for others. I noticed at least two other characters that made for poor grammar. I personally think a few of the sentences could be reworded to omit unneeded words and clear up confusion as well.

So right now, if you see a post that needs a single character edit, go ahead and make it, but proof the entire post and make all beneficial changes. You will always be able to find 6 characters.
Once you reach the rep threshold for your edits to post immediately, still proof the entire post. It will build you a reputation as a good proofer and as a valuable asset to the site, and it will not seem trivial to all the users who will see the post at the top of the active page.


text:
Is the community here tolerant of polling questions?
I came across this question yesterday: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25658/should-i-buy-place-on-altcoindesk-tk
I figured that it would be closed because it is a simple polling question about a specific site and their services. I know that SE discourages polling questions across the board and I tend to agree with their assessment.
I would vote to close that question myself as opinion based because it is, but what does the community at large want to do?

According to our community guidelines those questions are off-topic. I feel that it clearly falls into the "subjective" category. I routinely close such questions as off-topic under the "service recommendation" reason.
On a related note, perhaps we should update that explanation to include "service reviews".

"perhaps we should update that explanation to include 'service reviews.'" Yes, probably. Service reviews are fully opinion based. Using and having a specific close reason is even better; it shows that it has already been thought about and is not really open for discussion.


text:
How could our "Off-Topic close reasons" be improved? What would be another useful one?
We currently have three Off-Topic Close Reasons:

This question does not appear to be about Bitcoin within the scope defined in the help center. (Default Off-Topic Close Reason)

Questions on current market values, energy costs or service provider availability are off-topic as the answers are changing too frequently to be useful to others.

Questions seeking product or service recommentadations are off-topic because they tend to become obsolete quickly. Instead, describe your situation and the specific problem you're trying to solve.

We can have three Custom Close Reasons, so there would be room for one more. Moderators can edit these, so if you have some ideas how they could be improved, I'd be interested in hearing suggestions.
One thing that I might want to fold into the third one, the one banning recommendations, would be that "requesting service reviews" is off-topic as well. What do you think about that?

I have suggested improving

Questions seeking product or service recommentadations are off-topic because they tend to become obsolete quickly. Instead, describe your situation and the specific problem you're trying to solve.

to

Questions seeking product recommendations or service reviews are off-topic because they tend to become outdated quickly. Instead, describe your situation and the specific problem you're trying to solve.

but it is waiting for another moderator to confirm it.

Is there enough space for?:

Questions regarding the legal side of the use of Bitcoin are off-topic as the answers depending on the local jurisdiction are unlikely to be helpful to others

Law question come very often.

We'd have to axe one of the other custom reasons to make room. It might be a good time to improve them, though.

I created a new discussion here: https://bitcoin.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1059/5406

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


text:
E-cash P2P instead Bitcoin?
I suggest change this Stack Exchange name from Bitcoin to Electronic Cash P2P or something like that. There are a lot of altcoins question already.

How does doing this improve the community at all? Few people are going to intuitively associate Electronic Cash P2P with bitcoin. Anyone who is in to a altcoin is going to associate it with bitcoin, as they are all derived from it. And the only way I see altcoins being utilized currently is as highly speculative instruments in exchanges. Bitcoin is barely adopted by vendors, there are only a handful which accept it here in Chicago, I doubt there are any businesses which accept .

My idea is transform this StackExchange in something more general. The inovation is on e-cash, not on Bitcoin per se. But for me is OK to keep Bitcoin, it was just a suggestion.

We've had renaming suggested at least twice already. :) See: • This site should be renamed, • Why is it bitcoin.SE instead of cryptocurrencies.SE, • the comments on this answer on Should this SE also cover questions about Ripple? and • Enlarge the scope to “cryptocurrency”, not just Bitcoin.

I think your suggestion would be a valid answer for This site should be renamed, though.

I don't think that "E-cash P2P" is particularly catchy, and find that Bitcoin is a pretty good descriptor for the main source of questions discussed on this SE.
I wouldn't mind it being more inclusive though, such as "Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies" or similar.


text:
The North American Bitcoin Conference, Chicago, 2014 - Sponsorship Proposal
I would like to attend The North American Bitcoin Conference, Chicago, 2014 and promote Stack Exchange and specifically Bitcoin.StackExchange.com and the community there.

Who - The North American Bitcoin Conference is one of the most attended Bitcoin events in the world and the upcoming Chicago conference will be the most attended Bitcoin event in America to date. Approximately 1500 attendees will gather to hear leaders and titan in the industry. Persons involved with Blockchain.info, Ripple Labs, Bitpay, Litecoin, Ethereum, and more are slotted to give lectures or sit on discussion panels.
What - The conference is The North American Bitcoin Conference.
When - The conference takes place on July 19th and 20th, 2014.
Where - The conference will be held at the McCormick Place South Building in Chicago, Illinois, USA.
Why - I will commit to serve the community and Bitcoin.SE in the following ways:

The first immediate thing I can commit to is questions. I will surely have many, and quite a few will be right at home as a post here on Bitcoin.SE.
I can also commit to an added ability to make top notch answers. Great site content is always in demand.
I can also commit to getting answers from specific persons or lectures. If approved for sponsorship, I will make another meta post with the conference schedule and will attend sessions based on user input and attempt to get answers for any burning questions.
I will also write a summary and review of every lecture/panel I attend and post it to meta.
The community here would benefit from added expert users. This conference is going to be packed full of experts and I will do everything I can to make them users. I will pitch Bitcoin.StackExchange as the go to place for expert questions and answers to everyone I meet. In time, I too will become one of these experts and this conference is a great place to gain valuable knowledge that is unavailable elsewhere. In turn, that knowledge will be posted to Stack Exchange first. In my opinion, this is the most valuable thing the community can gain by supporting my sponsorship.

This post is formatted according to the suggestions to formally request for Stack Exchange sponsorship.

Get in touch with us with a link to this, and we can go from there. We do sometimes help really engaged members of communities attend events, and we'll give you a bunch of SE swag to give away while you're there.
The site could definitely use some users that are past the 'less than beginner' experience level asking questions, so if you think there'd be an opportunity to get some here, I'd be willing to push for getting you there to do it.
There may or may not be some tax matters to talk about, as well as other monetary details that are probably left best to email ;)

I have just submitted the information requested in the MSE post through the contact form. I eagerly await your response.

I have contacted SE, but have not received a reply. I know it is still early, but I just want to make sure they have received it.

@fredsbend That form is processed every week, so you should hear from us by Friday :)


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Should questions tagged with "bitcoin-protocol" also be tagged as "protocol"?
The [protocol] tag:

For questions relating to the protocols by which crypto-currencies are
  transferred.

The [bitcoin-protocol] tag:

For questions relating to the protocol by which specifically bitcoins
  are transferred. Also see protocol.

I've got a question which is related to "bitcoin mining pools" and "bitcoin target". But it could also be related to "mining pools" and "targets in general".
As such, do I tag it as both [protocol] and [bitcoin-protocol]?
Or are questions tagged with [bitcoin-protocol] automatically assumed to be under [protocol] tag?

As it is, I would assume that questions tagged with bitcoin-protocol are a subset of protocol.
I think it that I created the bitcoin-protocol in March, but today I am not sure if that made sense: While in the long run the protocols might further distinguish and it would make sense to have a bitcoin-protocol to cater to issues that specifically refer to bitcoin, at this point, the protocols are probably still too similar to have different tags for the bitcoin-protocol and other protocols.
Perhaps bitcoin-protocol should be merged back into protocol. What do you think?

Yea, I think merging would be great. For example, if someone wants to find out about darkcoin protocol, he could filter by the combined tags [darkcoin] and [protocol].

I want to wait a little bit, in case somebody else also wants to add something. Otherwise I am going to go ahead tomorrow and merge it back into [protocol]


text:
Reminder: Please DON’T answer "bad" questions
If you find a poorly phrased question (see bottom), please don't waste your time on writing a good answer. Rather use one of the following approaches:

Improve the question to an acceptable level, only then answer it.
Downvote and leave a comment to explain to the asker why his question needs improvement
Downvote and vote to close or flag "very low quality"

If your answer is good enough, it makes it hard for us to get rid of the terrible question, as we don't like to destroy your effort. On the other hand, we really don't want to keep the bad question either. It makes for hard decisions and by following the community guideline to rather keep something when in doubt, you are essentially protecting bad content that way, or create work for others to edit it into shape.

What are "bad" questions?

half a dozen jumbled questions in one post
illegible texts full of slang, abbreviations, half-sentences and half-thoughts
hard to discern what is being asked

This is very good advice.

Note we have a badge to encourage editing what you answer going out soon.

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


text:
A guideline to evaluating Link-Only anwers
I've just run into a few link-only answers again. This time I found a useful guideline to decide whether they are worth keeping or not.
good example:

Shog9 wrote a longer explanation on meta.stackexchange titled "Your answer is in another castle: when is an answer not an answer?"

bad example:

Have a look here

TL;DR: Ask yourself, is the answer still useful if the link were not working?

Yes, the answer still helps without the link: It may be short, but is an answer!
No, the answer would be useless without the underlying link: It is very low quality and should be improved or removed.

Still, though: We'd much rather have an answer with a proper explanation and some background.

On this particular site, answers with barely more than a link really compound the broken windows problem, since so much of the spam that we see actually looks like a legit answer recommending some web site or service.
If you see these in the form of some kind of testimonial, first - have a hard look at the question itself to see if it lacks enough scope to invite more narrowed, thorough answers. If it does, then encourage answers to be more along the lines of what Software Recommendations SE expects. You don't have to be as strict, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to ask for the following when offering up a link:

Why? What good is this? Why do you suggest it?
What's there? What will I find if I click this?
Is there something I can take away without clicking it? Put it here, just in case.

If you would be really frustrated if you were searching for something, found the answer and were then extremely disappointed, then it's probably something we should get rid of. Otherwise, well, just give it whatever love you can :)

This is a very good list of questions to ask.


text:
Why can't I retag this question?
The question debug window of wallets needs to be retagged since it has the irrelevant mining-pools tag.  I have 3714 rep but for some reason the "edit tags" button does not appear when I hover.
I also tried via the "edit" button, which currently says "edit (1)" because there is an edit pending approval.  I get a popup showing me the edit and telling me I have already approved it (which I have), but no apparent way to make further edits.
Other questions seem to work normally.

I think I encountered this problem previously as well: If you approve an edit, but it needs more approvals before the edit review is completed you cannot make any further changes. If you see a mistake just after you approved the edit, you are out of luck. ;)
Apparently there is no mid-ground between, choosing to improve the edit immediately, and waiting for the edit review to complete.
I believe it should be possible for you to edit now, as the suggested edit has been processed?

When a post has a pending suggested edit (an edit by an anonymous user or one without edit privileges), it needs to be approved before further edits can be made to the post.
This includes retags, as they are classed as edits to the post.


text:
Why can't I choose from more SE sites?
This question just popped up, and I thought it belonged on another site in the SE environment, as it is more about programming an application, instead of bitcoin. I wanted to flag it, but I could just choose the Meta site, instead of something else. Am I doing something wrong? I added two screenshots, one from the attempted flag, and one of the question, in case it gets deleted or rigorously edited.

There are 123 sites on the network (currently), which ones, in the 5 available slots (4, since meta is one) do you think are good candidates and why?

I didn't knew there were limited slots. I would like to nominate StackOverflow because some questions are more about programming, then bitcoin itself. I think the linked question is an example of this. Some others are this one and this one. I'm not sure where we should draw the line between bitcoin.SE and SO, but I think that SO has the highest chance to be a better site for some questions

Also there are quite a lot of questions (some of mine) which ask about error codes while compiling or executing a bitcoin program (not specifically miners). Those could be better sometimes on SuperUser.SE (I don't use that one much, so I don't know exactly if that is right)

The process for adding to migration slots involved the site moderators and Stack Exchange community managers - we require that the site shows a significant amount of migrations to a site and that a good percentage of these migrations end well (i.e. not closed on the other end). This is information that is available to the moderators.

Up to this day, we've had only ten migrations away from Bitcoin.SE. Six were to our own Meta, two to Cryptography, one to Databases, and one to Unix&Linux. I don't think we qualify for "significant amount". ;)

That aren't significant numbers indeed. I will flag it with other (needs ♦ moderator attention) if something like this happens again

I think the UI and limited slots is a deficiency of stack exchange (that has probably been discussed elsewhere). The current UI flow is bad when someone wants to indicate something should be moved to a non-listed site. The sane thing to do would be for SE to change the migration UI to have the list and an "Other" entry (that it could turn into a regular "flag for moderator attention" if that's all they want to implement).

To summarize all the comments on the question: There are only a five slots available to set Migration Target Sites.
None of them currently are set, as we haven't had a significant number of Migrations yet.
If you feel something should be migrated, please just flag other (needs ♦ moderator attention) and explain your proposition.


text:
Let's get critical: Aug 2014 Site Self-Evaluation
We all love Bitcoin Stack Exchange, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from Google, what will their first impression be? Let's try to look at this site through the eyes of someone who's never seen it before, and see how we stack up against the rest of the 'Net.
The Site Self-Evaluation review queue is open and populated with 10 questions that were asked and answered in the last quarter.
Run a few Google searches to see how easy they are to find and compare the answers we have with the information available on other sites.
Rating the questions is only a part of the puzzle, though. Do you see a pattern of questions that should have been closed but are not? Questions or answers that could use an edit? Anything that's going really well? Post an answer below to share your thoughts and discuss these questions and the site's health with your fellow users!

Final Results

Inv message structure

Net Score: 4 (Excellent: 4, Satisfactory: 1, Needs Improvement: 0)

Restarting Vanitygen

Net Score: 2 (Excellent: 3, Satisfactory: 0, Needs Improvement: 1)

What prevents miners in a pool from retaining the reward?

Net Score: 1 (Excellent: 3, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 2)

Why do you need to send a transaction out with NXT to secure your address?

Net Score: 1 (Excellent: 3, Satisfactory: 0, Needs Improvement: 2)

How would the OpenBazaar or NXT decentralized marketplace / eBay / Craigslist work?

Net Score: 1 (Excellent: 2, Satisfactory: 1, Needs Improvement: 1)

Satoshi's final statement

Net Score: 1 (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 0)

Does GHashIO already have above 51% hashrate?

Net Score: 0 (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 1)

Is there a service that let's me "send" bitcoins via email and doesn't require any account creation/login?

Net Score: 0 (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 1)

What is the equivalent of cold storage or paper wallet for NXT?

Net Score: -1 (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 1, Needs Improvement: 2)

Is this a safe method for cold storage?

Net Score: -3 (Excellent: 0, Satisfactory: 1, Needs Improvement: 3)


text:
Should we have an official policy on referrals?
This question has a referral ID in a link in the question, meaning that the user gets a kickback whenever someone visits through that link and buys something.
I think that this ought to be against the rules of the site, and that the questions should either be flagged as spam, or have the referral part of the link edited out. I'm leaning toward editing the referral out.
Thoughts?

related: Affiliate links (Amazon and others) on meta.stackexchange.com

Note about edit: 'affiliate' might be more correct, but referral is more common. (and easier to spell)

I usually handle it case-by-case:

If I get the feeling that the post solely exists in order to transport the referral, I flag it as spam.
If the post seems useful to me, I remove the referral, leaving the link without it.

Putting referral links into posts definitely casts doubt on a user's reason to post. I couldn't find an official rule, yet, but it is along the same line as posting your Bitcoin address for tips in posts. We forbid that, and other signatures, except in your personal profile. I'd say, let us put it in our rules officially.

To add some reasons (Update on 16th of December):

I'd consider it bad manners to put something in a post in order to profit financially, while the whole site is based on community effort.
Many if not most answers that include referral links are solely posted to present said link, therefore it lowers the perceived quality of a post when I discover a referral link in one.
"When I (significantly) improve a post with a referral link, should I change the link to my own referral link? Why should another profit financially from the improvements I made to his post?" -> Allowing referral links opens a can of worms.

To clarify, if a referral link is useful, I don't suggest removing the link, just the referral.

OK so currently (officially) it is not against the rules.
I find using a referral link different from mentioning a bitcoin tip address.
Can I turn your question around and ask: if the link is relevant to the question, why not allow it?
You fail to mention any arguments for your preposition.


text:
What should we do about the tags "attack", "weaknesses", "vulnerability", "security", and "resilience"?
attack, resilience, weaknesses, security, and vulnerability all seem to be covering roughly the same topic.
Which should we keep, which should we merge, and why?

I agree that the current tags are confusing. I don't think we should just merge them though. It seems like there are a couple distinct categories represented.
We should have three tags, weaknesses, security, wallet-security. Questions with attack, resilience, and vulnerability should be retagged or closed:

weaknesses would cover problems with Bitcoin that are not security related.
Is Bitcoin inherently dependent on electricity?
security would cover problems with the Bitcoin (and altcoins!) client itself, and the Bitcoin protocol.
What can an attacker with 51% of hash power do?
wallet-security would cover how to keep your wallet secure (i.e. encryption)
How secure is an encrypted wallet?
Questions about how secure specific services are would be closed.
How is Coinbase any different than Mt Gox?
Some of those questions wouldn't have any of those tags.
Do any of the Bitcoin exchanges implement trading curbs?
What is the role of bitcoin wallets?

Thoughts?
Edit: It looks like nobody has any objections, so I'm going to go ahead and start retagging.
Still TODO:

Retag attack, ~65
Look at security questions, possibly retag, ~291
Look at weaknesses questions, possibly retag, ~30
Check security tag wiki
Check weaknesses tag wiki

DONE:

Retag resilience, ~2
Retag vulnerability, ~15
Synonym resilience -> weaknesses
Synonym vulnerability -> security
Check wallet-security tag wiki

Thanks. I like the idea for the distinction of weaknesses and security, although I am not sure they can always be clearly distinguished (which is not a problem though). I am not sure about "service-security" that seems to be scratching the topic of service reviews. So, what would you do with [tag:attack], [tag:resilience], and [tag:vulnerability] though?

@Murch I am not sure about "service-security" I'm not sure about that either. The other options would be to 1) ignore those questions, or 2) close them as off-topic. So, what would you do with attack, resilience, and vulnerability Merge them into one of the categories I mentioned. So the two resilience questions would go into [tag:weaknesses]

@Murch I've edited my post.

@Murch What should we do if we don't receive any more input?

The same thing we do every day: We do, what we think is best. ;)  If I understand that figure correctly, this question has  been seen by 28 people, so at least nobody disagreed vehemently enough to express disagreement. I think the latest version of your proposition would be a significant improvement to the current state, and I support running with it.

Apparently somebody already took care of the resilience tag wiki. I think blacklisting of tags can only be done by community managers, at least I couldn't find an option to do so anywhere. We could create a synonym so that it would automatically be changed to one of the remaining tags instead though.

What is the status of this endeavour? Do you need help, or is it finished? Is there anything left that we can automatically retag from one tag to another?


text:
Suggestion: Merge nxtcoin into nxt
nxtcoin and nxt discuss the same thing. nxt has slightly more questions, and already has a tag wiki; we should keep that one, and merge nxtcoin into it.

Good catch, I merged nxtcoin into nxt.


text:
Suggestion: rename [tag:solo] to [tag:solo-mining]
I think that solo should be renamed to solo-mining because that is more self-explanatory. Afaik there are no other things that are related to solo with bitcoin, so it is not because of that (google bitcoin solo and the only thing that pops up except solo mining is the Hashlet Solo) but it improves the readability a lot in my opinion.
When it is approved, I have no aversion to edit all 48 (at the moment) question myself, so no-one else should have any workload.
PS. I'm not sure if this is a good Meta question. I could also have asked it in chat or answer/comment in the "Weeding out bad tags initiative 2014" but this gets probably more attention.

Seems like a good suggestion. I agree that you should've asked it as a comment in bad tags initiative or in the chat room.

This is a very good suggestion, and exactly what meta is for.
I think you are right, and I would suggest that we merge solo into solo-mining, which users can suggest and mods can do by themselves. That way, it is only a few clicks and  we don't have to manually edit questions whatsoever. :)

Actually, since I think it is very straightforward, I just enacted it immediately.


text:
Are questions about websites central to the community on topic?
Today, someboday asked a question about a feature on Bitcointalk.org: Why can't some members vote on bitcointalk.org?
I am not sure if there is a consensus here, whether such questions about web-communities such as Bitcointalk or /r/bitcoin are on-topic, and I would like to read what you think: Arguments for and against welcome.

One thing this opens up is a debate about which sites are relevant enough to be supported.  If we say we allow questions about features about bitcointalk.org, who decides that bitcointalk.org is allowed, but mycoolbitcoinwebsite.com isn't?  That to me is the biggest risk of going down this road.
And in the end, I think the person asking the question wants to find the best answer to their question.  Isn't it more likely that they'll find a bitcointalk expert on bitcointalk.org rather than bitcoin.stackexchange.com, no matter how good it is?

Is it on topic?

Maybe. The topic page is unclear on this point.

Should it be on topic?

No. There are a huge number of questions that could be asked about external websites, most of which have support contacts or a discussion area. It's difficult to keep those questions up to date when said websites change their policies.
Lastly, more than anything, I don't want to read questions/debates about the policy of website X.

Love it or hate it, BitcoinTalk has always acted as an early surrogate of Bitcoin SE. We often link to posts there and the knowledge therein can be invaluable.
I have no issue with making exceptions for BCT if and only if:

Website policy is not the majority of questions
Altcoin queries are kept to a minimum
We go on a case by case basis for other sites (exchanges, tools etc)

"Is this a common query" needs to be front of mind.

What do you mean with "Altcoin queries are kept to a minimum"? Altcoins are on-topic on Bitcoin.SE.

@Murch I'm aware altcoins aren't off-topic as I check the altcoin tag from time to time. I was referring more to questions like "why do my BCT Altcoin posts get deleted from (self-moderated) topics?" and "is XXXcoin a scam?". There's a huge divide in quality at BCT between the Bitcoin and Altcoin sub-forums' posts and community motivations.

Ah, I mistook your post to mean that questions about the Altcoin area of BCT would be kept to a minimum on our side. Now it makes sense to me.