text:
What can we do to better support questions about other cryptocurrencies?
Apparently, there still is the sentiment that Bitcoin.SE is only for Bitcoin related questions. As the community has discussed a long time before, we would like to be a platform for questions about all cryptocurrencies.
There are already a few tags such as namecoin, ppcoin, zerocoin, dogecoin, litecoin, and ripple, which have accumulated some questions. There is also alternatives, which I feel is in dire need of an overhaul.
I think it is a problem if people perceive that Bitcoin.SE is not the place to ask their questions about other cryptos.

What can we do to better support other cryptocurrencies?
What can we do to change the perception that Bitcoin.SE is only for Bitcoin questions?

Sorry I'm a bit late to the party. Maybe add a straight altcoin tag? Is there a way to make a note at the top that bitcoin.SE is for all coins. I run an altcoin pool so if there can be some consensus on what should be changed, I'm willing to go through and change it. Maybe add tags for other altcoins? An announcement maybe? (I'm just giving out ideas here so if some of these are discussed already my apologies). What about making bitcoin.SE synonymous with a new cryptocurrency.SE or altcoin.SE?

The linked discussion in my first sentence actually shows that Bitcoin.SE started out as "Cryptocurrency.SE". We do have an [tag:altcoin] tag; it has 105 questions currently. It is also written in several areas of help, that questions about altcoins are on-topic, but it becomes more and more apparent that it is too subtle.

To be specific, the tags respective to altcoins we have are: litecoin, altcoin, auroracoin, blackcoin, namecoin, dogecoin, ppcoin, peercoin, mastercoin, quarkcoin, primecoin, maxcoin, datacoin, luckycoin, digitalcoin, trucoin, zerocoin, and vertcoin; ethereum, nxt, and ripple. I probably missed some.

Thanks for the info @Murch. Would ti be possible to add the tag freicoin ? I know it is a smaller alt, but it is established and has community backing. I do think that maybe broadening the SE by rebranding it as cryptocurrency.SE again might help (although I would bet there will be backlash). I'll go through over the next few days to try to find what I can answer of the altcoin tags as well as the mining tags. This question actually i feel might be valid again to discuss http://meta.bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/302/being-strict-or-kind-about-newbie-questions?rq=1 (cont)

I think as time permits answering newbie questions might be good to get multiple perspectives. I do think that closing as a dupe after attempting to answer might be good. Also, I have in the past seen people replying to very old questions. Maybe a month of "overhauling" old questions to be relevant again would help out too?

@JoeWhite Just checked quickly, but it seems to me that we only have answers mentioning Freicoin. Since there are no question directly about Freicoin, there wouldn't be a tag. If someone asks a question about Freicoin, I will gladly add the tag to his question. The problem is though, that tags disappear after a while if there aren't more questions that use them. I think the minimum is two or three.


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Lots of anonymous edits that just alter punctuation
The review queue for suggested edits has a lot of edits "by an anonymous user" that don't seem to make any substantive changes, but replace various punctuation characters by HTML entity versions of themselves.  Each one has "555-555-0199@example.com" as its comment.
Example:

It appears that the only change is to replace a ' character by '.
Is this some sort of weird spam, or what?  I have been rejecting them as "vandalism".

A similar thing showed up on security.SE. They suggested it might be an automated vulnerability scanner.

Link???????????? of the review?

@Braiam: I already reviewed the edit so it's no longer in my queue. I don't know how to get a link for it anymore. Do you?

@NateEldredge http://i.stack.imgur.com/712Jn.png

@Braiam http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/19195

@bjb568: Thanks, I never noticed that was there.

@bjb568 I can't seem to link it, but if you click the markdown button, you can see what was actually changed.

Related: really strange post edit: maybe a spammer's test?. Another incident: https://security.stackexchange.com/posts/2264/revisions. The cause? Using Burpsite to spider the site which automatically submits forms.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Suggestion: Remove "Instead, describe your situation and the specific problem you're trying to solve."
This is one of our close reasons:

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.

Here's an example question closed with this reason:
How do you buy bitcoin using Perfect Money?

Is there anyone who is selling or buying bitcoin through perfect money?(A Russian money payment system) Please help me out and enlighten me on this.

The question is pretty clear. He wants to take money from e-commerce provider #47 and use it to buy Bitcoins. He's described his situation and the problem he's trying to solve.
However, it's such a specific question that it will probably not be answered. If it is, it will probably never be used again before it goes out of date.
So, I think the last sentence of that close reason should be removed. It's not helpful.
Thoughts?

relate: How could our “Off-Topic close reasons” be improved? What would be another useful one?

I have proposed the following close reason a while ago:

Questions seeking service reviews are off-topic, because they tend to attract subjective, low-quality, and spam answers, while on the other hand services in the Bitcoin space are still evolving rapidly, rendering answers outdated quickly. For more information see meta-discussion.

Unfortunately, it requires the approval of another moderator to become active.
Update:
The proposed close reason has been activated.

I'm going to ask for help from the community managers to see if someone could review it for me.

Why is this close reason different from the one in the post you linked?

I don't remember my thinking exactly, but I think the one I posted here was supposed to replace it. Unfortunately, I just learned that change proposals on these close reasons don't cause automatic notifications, but rather you have to talk to people directly.

@NickODell Or maybe I don't get what you mean. Could you elaborate?

The version that you posted in the other thread still has the part that says, describe your situation and the specific problem you're trying to solve. Why the difference between the two? Is there a distinction between editing a close reason, and replacing it?

BTW, I like this close reason a lot. Is there anything I can do to help chase down a Community Manager to help solve this?

@NickODell I've already talked shortly to Shog9 and TimPost today. Unfortunately, one Moderator can only deactivate a close reason by himself, but can't create or edit one without the approval of another. I think I created this one after I edited the old one to include service reviews, because I didn't like the part about "describing your situation", but I guess I never remembered to have it approved.

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


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Please help put tags on [Untagged] questions!
We have burninated almost thirty useless, terrible, or ambiguous tags today, and could use some help:
Pick a question that has the untagged tag and fix the whole question:

title
grammar errors
typos
formatting
add tags that should be on the question.

Unless it is beyond saving: Then flag for closing/deletion.
Anyone can suggest edits! Feel free to join us in the Bitcoin Lounge if you have questions or just want to chat. :)

Some were even useless, terrible AND ambiguous. You just don't know the horrors, I ended up destroying the very fabric of morality in the process.


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Bitcoin SE - Seeking Community Moderators To Help This Site Stay Awesome!
Your community moderators have been incredibly busy over the last few months. There's more discussion happening on meta, the overall quality of the site has come up considerably, and the reduction in the levels of spam and borderline spam has led search engines to give us an edge over similar sites for the topic in their results.
Take a look at the front page, it's a lot different than it was six months ago, and it's on track to keep getting more awesome as we steam ahead. This was a very difficult topic to nail down on our platform in a manner keeping with the kind of quality that we're very well known for, and it honestly feels like Bitcoin SE is well on its way to doing just that.
While it makes me a little sad to announce it, I'd like for everyone to take a moment to say thanks to the following super awesome people that helped us get to the point that we are today. As luck and life would have it, they don't have the time that they used to, and they want to step aside to let folks that can devote more time and energy to the site get into positions where they can be more effective:

I'm looking for a few folks from within this community that are interested in stepping up to take a stronger role on the site. You'll of course need a patient, even-handed and fair approach to solving problems, as well as a familiarity with our theory of moderation.
Bitcoin SE is at a very interesting, and critical part of its evolution, and it needs folks that are both willing to lead, and continue to push things in the right direction. This can include working with your fellow mods to adapt better custom close reasons that better explain the problems with some of the very open-ended recommendation questions that we see, curating some of your help center articles to be more relevant to folks that want to ask certain kinds of questions about Bitcoin, and working with us (Stack Exchange) as you call on our help to get things done - you'll have direct access to us.
Because the site sees such a high quantity of spam and extremely low quality posts, we ask that you be able to spend 30 - 40 minutes per day moderating the site, at least a few days a week.
Are you interested? Leave an answer below and some thoughts that you have regarding the site. Things are busier than ever, so I hope to have folks appointed by the end of the week.
Good luck to everyone, and a second round of thanks to those that are stepping down - you all have done a fantastic job!

Special thanks to Stephen and Nick for stepping up into their new roles. Please give them a warm welcome!

If nobody else wants it, I'll take a diamond.

A great thanks to the departing mods and everyone who put this great SE division together and turned it into an awesome forum. Thanks guys, you have been amazing.

Since I will be the only moderator to remain active after the others step down, feel free to pick my brain about the job in our chat channel Bitcoin Lounge. – I usually hang out there whenever I am home, but feel free to leave a message if I am not there, I'll probably get back to you within hours at most.

FYI: I've been in touch with @TimPost, he will be back next week.

I'm interested in joining the Bitcoin moderation team.
I joined nine months after the public beta started; I've been part of Bitcoin.SE for almost two years now. I'm mostly interested in the technical background of Bitcoin, but I also like questions about the social and economic aspects.
I'll be sorry to see these guys go. (Especially David Schwartz!) I hope they'll stick around as non-moderators, because they've made this community a better place.
I'm a full-time student, but I'll make time for moderation.
Pet Issues
We have a pretty low answer rate. (87%) Usually, that's just because there's no existing solution to the problem, though it's not impossible to accomplish. Sometimes the question isn't coherent. However, I'm guessing that about 10% of those questions are answerable questions that have slipped through the cracks.

Nick is a longtime contributor and I've seen him a lot helping out with moderation already: He has been reviewing, fixing tags, welcoming and guiding new users, flagging bad content, and was meanwhile answering tons of questions. – I'd be glad to have you on board as a mod, but I'd still be curious to hear more about your thoughts on Bitcoin.SE's state and what actions you might want to drive. :)

I'm a little late to the game here, as I tend to spend more time on the Bitcoin SE rather than the Bitcoin meta SE, but I would be interested in helping the Bitcoin SE community by being a moderator. Since discovering the Bitcoin SE, I have found it to be the most useful and structured place to get my questions answered, and I have answered many questions as well. If I can help with this in any way, I would be happy to.
How I can help:

I am a thorough person. I like getting and giving thorough answers.
I check my stack overflow many times a day, and will be able to flag/mark/respond promptly.
Have read many of many of the most searched Bitcoin SE questions, and will be able to refer users to related/duplicate questions.

Are there any issues in particular where you see room for improvement?

I think bitcoin can be such a confusing topic that many people who ask questions ask many questions at once. I think closely related questions are fine to go in the same SE question, but many questions need to broken up into more appropriate chunks.

How can we be sure that you will still feel committed to Bitcoin.SE for some time?

I am a Bitcoin enthusiast, and I deal with Bitcoin every day in my job. I'm working at a startup in New Hampshire called ziftr, where we are starting our own ziftrCOIN. I use the Bitcoin SE regularly as my goto way to get and give help. I have not been on the Bitcoin SE for as long as some others have, but I think I have already made a noticeable impact. For example, I am in the top 2% of reputation earners this month, mainly because I stay active and give thorough responses.

What do you think is the most important role of moderators on Bitcoin.SE?

I think the most important role of the moderator is to constantly watch the Bitcoin SE and make sure that questions are appropriately dealt with (flagged, marked as duplicate, broken up, etc) before others spend their valuable time giving answers. Like Nick said, we have a low answer rate, and I think we could improve that by moderators having a chance to 'preprocess' questions to make them suitable to be answered.

Thanks for your interest. Don't worry, this topic is still in the "looking for interested parties" stage. I've also got some questions for you, since I would be working with any successful applicants: I am glad that you find our site useful and structured. Are there any issues in particular where you see room for improvement? How can we be sure that you will still feel committed to Bitcoin.SE for some time? What do you think is the most important role of moderators on Bitcoin.SE?

Yeah, that definitely is an issue. It would probably be more readable if you edit your post to include it in your answer. :)

Yes, good idea. Done. :)

I would be willing to contribute in this manner. I'm new to this site, but I'm well-established on Stackoverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/users/291180/travis-webb. I also run a Bitcoin-related software company (https://github.com/hashware), so I have actual skin in the game; increasing community participation will ultimately benefit my business.
I'm happy to put my selfishness to work for the community.

Hi Travis, thanks for your interest. Since you are newish to our community, I hope you don't mind a few questions: Could you please elaborate on what you see as the current problems of this SE, what your focus would be as a moderator, and why you would be a good choice to moderate our community? How can we be sure that you will remain available to the community for more than a month? How come that you don't use the same accounts on Bitcoin.SE and SO?


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Suggestion: Closed-source cryptocurrencies should be off topic
I think that closed-source cryptocurrency questions should be declared off-topic, because they are usually impossible to answer. Example:

Here says

After having launched bootstrap Clearinghouses on all major continents, they are fully reconciling transfers in less than 400 ms with competition and 200 ms without.
    "Reconciliation" is confirmation?

My country cryptocurrency illegal. No can to try. Please help.

Even if they are answered by their developers, it's not possible for other members of the community to "cross-examine" their answers.
Arguments Against
This might prevent questions about cryptocurrencies that later become open source. For example, we had a number of good questions asked about Ripple that were answered by their developers.
We could lessen that by allowing questions about those currencies if their creators plan to make it open-source.
Note
This shouldn't be taken to mean that all software that is closed source is off-topic. For example, a question that asks about how to use blockchain.info's API would still be on-topic.
Close Reason
This question appears to be off-topic because it is about a closed-source cryptocurrency. http://meta.bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/629/suggestion-closed-source-cryptocurrencies-should-be-off-topic

Thoughts?

You mention the important point: We can't judge the quality of answers on write-ups we cannot check. Questions whose answers can't be cross-examined are a bad fit for Stackexchange.


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We should have a new "subjective/argumentative" post notice
While there are some questions on Bitcoin.SE that have objective answers, a lot of our questions are more subjective than that. In the early days of this SE they were met with close votes, yet, I do believe that there is a lot of constructive and informative expertise between pure fact and pure opinion.
However, these questions often attract a host of abysmal answers, e.g. statements of differing opinion, one-line answers without explanation and link-only answers.
I would like to propose the creation of a post-notice that could be applied to such questions by moderators with the following content:

This question does not have only one correct answer, it is subjective/argumentative: Constructive and informative answers focus on explaining "Why?" and "How?", and back up any opinions with arguments, facts, or references.
  Give long answers rather than short ones: Opinion by itself is noise and will be deleted.

What do you think: Is this a useful endeavor? Is there a better way of conveying the message than through a post notice? Do you have any ideas how to improve the proposed text of the post notice?

Examples where I think this post notice might be appropriate:

How can Bitcoin solve societal problems caused by capitalism?
Can the price of Bitcoin ever be stable to the USD?
Will we ever need smaller amounts of Bitcoin than a Satoshi?

Could you give examples of where this notice would be appropriate? For example, which of the following questions, if any, should get the tag? 1 2 3

@NickODell If any, then just on the first about quantum computers, the second doesn't have only one objective answer, but you can test the answers whether they work or not in short order. The third I don't find very speculative.


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Please post answers as answers, not as comments!
For the Stack Exchange system to work properly, we need answers to be posted as such. Lately, I have seen a lot of comments that contain at least a rough seed for an answer posted on questions.
While it is nice to have an encompassing answer, short answers are helpful, too! You or another user can always come back and improve your answer at a later time, if you think of more to say, or get requests for clarification.
Answers in comments discourage people from giving the same information as a full answer, but miss a lot of the benefits of answers! Comments clutter up the reading space, they don't reorder for votes, you cannot suggest edits on them, and voting is restricted to upvotes and flags.
Comments are supposed to be temporary notices to the author of the post, either for requests of clarification, constructive criticism or minor information such as a relevant link.

Check out privileges/comment for a full overview on comments (summarized below):

When should I comment

You should submit a comment if you want to:

Request clarification from the author;
Leave constructive criticism that guides the author in improving the post;
Add relevant but minor or transient information to a post (e.g. a link to a related question, or an alert to the author that the question has been updated).

Comments are not recommended for:

Answering a question (rather post an actual answer), Suggesting minor corrections, Compliments, Criticism without feedback, secondary discussion, discussion of site policies

Additionally:

Comments have virtually no quality assurance while answers underly feedback mechanisms.
Comments are not indexed by search engines.
Comment answers unfairly steal the top spot without having been voted there.
Comments cannot be migrated to answers.

The suggested way to handle "answers in comments" is to steal them and post them as an answer by the way.
If you're feeling bad about it, don't. You'll be rescuing information, or annoy them sufficiently that they post their answer themselves next time.
Feel free to cite the source if you want.

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


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How are our users "accelerating" unconfirmed transactions, and is it desirable?
As everyone knows, we get a huge number of duplicate questions saying "My transaction is unconfirmed, what do I do?"  I've sometimes noticed users responding with comments saying "accelerated".  Example.

What are these commenters actually doing?  To what extent does it help the asker get their transaction confirmed?
Is this is a desirable use of the site?  If the "acceleration" actually does anything, it seems to me that it encourages people to clutter the site with duplicate questions, whereas what we really want is for them to find our canonical question, and not need to ask in the first place.  In other words, I think the purpose of the site is to provide people with information, not with services.
If this is not desirable, what should we do to discourage it?

There are some mining pools that set aside a contingent of their blocks to "accelerate" low-fee transactions. You can post your transaction id to the mining pool and if you're among the first ~100 per hour, they'll include your transaction in their next block even if it is not among the top 1MB of transactions per feerate. These "accelerator" sites usually go hand in hand with some heavy advertisement for one blocksize increase or another. Basically, mining pools are taking a small loss to advertise their political position and offer a way to treat the symptoms intermittent mempool congestions or of people using outdated wallet software.
The canonical question has been found 150k times. I think it's very visible, people that still ask about unconfirmed transactions don't know that their question is too localized, usually because they are completely new to the site. Essentially, they are misusing the site due to not knowing better. "Accelerating" transactions helps resolve these users' immediate problem, but encourages this undesirable behavior.
Since arguing against providing the acceleration service would probably leave a bad impression with our new users, I suggest that these comments should just be flagged "no longer needed", and the questions themselves closed as duplicates of the canonical question.


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Canonical question for tracing IP address of transactions
Maybe it's just me, but I've noticed a several recent questions regarding trying to find the originating IP address of a transaction or Bitcoin address.  Perhaps this is due to the proliferation of ransomware, or perhaps some other factor.
Either way, it seems we should have a canonical question for Bitcoin's relationship to IP addresses.  Ideally, the answers would cover everything from how block explorers attempt to determine IP address, to running a node on TOR.
Do we already have a question like this, and if not, is there interest in creating one?

Great idea. I don't know one from the top of my mind, but if you can't find one, I can look later.


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When is it appropriate to redirect a question to Stack Overflow?
I was recently reviewing this question:
How to watch for the transactions over blockchain via nodejs?
It has been voted to be closed with the reason being "off-topic because belongs on stackoverflow".  While I agree that stackoverflow may result in the OP getting a better answer (and sooner), I have a hard time agreeing that this question is off topic.  After all, our tour lists the following as on-topic criteria:

Problems with developing applications specific to the cryptocurrency domain

We tend to get a lot of questions here regarding specific libraries and languages, and they seem to be tolerated (if not upvoted very much).  This is certainly a place to find experts in this domain, even though we are not coding-specific.  Do we have any established criteria for determining whether a question should be reposted on SO, and therefore closed on Bitcoin SE?

The focus of the linked question appears to be about using a Bitcoin specific library to solve a Bitcoin specific issue. It seems likely that a Bitcoin library can be pointed out that solves the asker's problem and I'd vote on keeping it.
If however, there is no library that solves this problem, and this becomes a "how do I implement this feature" it would probably fit better on SO, although that observation would also only be made here.


text:
What is the bch tag?
There is a tag called bch.  It looks like it is supposed to refer to bitcoin-cash, and maybe is mean to be BCC, but can anyone confirm?  I've been wrong about such things before.

Yeah, that looks right. Retagging.


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PSA: Warning about Electron Cash wallet
There have been multiple questions / reports now about the Electron Cash wallet stealing users BCC. There has been a official warning as well on the Electrum website:

The person who distributes the Electron Cash binaries has decided to
  remain anonymous, and uses the fake name "Jonald Fyookball" in order
  to sign Electron Cash binaries. Thus, if these binaries contain code
  that is designed to steal your bitcoins, the author of the theft will
  be anonymous and walk away safely with your funds.

Furthermore, the Electum Cash wallet is known to copy the wallet data from the official Electrum wallet, so there should even be more reason to be worried.
I suggest that we sticky a warning on the top of meta that users should not use this wallet or at least be very careful when doing so, knowing that it may empty their account.

I suggest that we sticky a warning on the top of meta that users should not use this wallet or at least be very careful when doing so, knowing that it may empty their account. I'm leery of passing along a message like this without having some kind of firsthand verification. How do we know that those users didn't have some kind of unrelated banking trojan on their computers?

I heard that that was a fake Electron Cash wallet.


text:
Why do you answer questions on the Bitcoin Stack Exchange?
Maybe this will be closed, but I think this is a valuable question even if it does skirt the rules and I think the answers to this question may help others who are asking "why isn't someone answering my question" or "why isn't someone answering my question the way I want them to" or even "why is someone asking such a question" or "how rude of that person to expect such a detailed and elaborate answer! I'm going to troll them!" If it must be closed, I accept, I'm not trying to cause problems. Though I would suggest the general answers to this from the bigger "dogs" on this forum could result in this being a great link to provide to people who ask questions that are out of context on this. Or a link to this question could be used to calm those who respond angrily to valid questions.
There is no "correct" answer to this question and there is no "incorrect" answer to this question and I have no intention of identifying any particular answer as the "correct" one. I'm sure some people will select which answers they "like" and I think that's acceptable, as I may do the same thing, but I would still put forth that no answer is "wrong" (unless it conflicts with the otherwise declared premise of this forum). The purpose of this question is to understand.
The real question is "why do you answer [or try to answer] questions on bitcoin stack exchange?"
I ask this because I find that the questions on this web site are frequently high on the google search list for the answers to questions I, and possibly others, have. The problem is that the average person doesn't understand the answers found on other websites and sometimes here. I usually seek very elaborate step by step instructions but I get that people are resistant to providing such answers as they are not only rather challenging, irritating, and may seem like a "waste" of time (because people think that the level of detail some may seek isn't reasonable, realistic and or otherwise justified in their desires).
"What do you mean you don't understand that? I just said you use the scriptsig from the previous output". Well, not everyone knows exactly what that is and if one other person used it incorrectly or didn't describe it perfectly in a previous question, a reasonable person who is trying to learn it may have misunderstood it. Then they might also mix it up with the scriptpubkey or other some such term as well, either due to a miscommunication in another question or some other minor variation. It happens.
I'm asking this question because I'm trying to understand, is it wrong of me to want elaborately detailed and step by step instructions for my questions? Or is it not wrong of me but is this the wrong forum? Its hard to tell based on people's reactions. Is this forum only for those who do understand those terms and can correlate them all back to each other easily without it being elaborately described several times in the answer to a single other question?
This answer to one of my questions was near perfect in every way, but who wants to go through that much trouble for a stranger and, likely, for more questions for other processes in bitcoin? That was just one small part of the programming and took quite some time. I greatly appreciate what was done, but was my desire for such a detailed and thorough answer unreasonable and or out of place in this forum? Was I rude to ask, expect, seek, and or to pursue such an elaborate and time consuming answer for such a small part of the bitcoin protocol? If I ask for more such elaborate answers to other parts of the bitcoin protocol, am I being even ruder and or even more imposing, or, in particular, within the boundaries of this forum?
This answer to a question is also rather well done, but still lacks some specificity on steps that could help to make it a lot easier for some people, but can you imagine having to do all that was done thus far and then being even more detailed each step of the way? I understand, that is quite the task. Is my preference reasonable within the boundaries of these forums?
I hope this question gives some people the opportunity (particularly those who answer questions) an opportunity to speak out without feeling like they're trolling a particular individual (though I admit some may inadvertently find a way to do so anyhow) but also to help myself and other, possibly labeled "n00bs" to better understand the context of this forum.
Thank you for your responses.

Why do you mention the links as being removed? If you're going to talk about them, shouldn't you link them? If you don't know which ones they were, they are still visible to me on your deleted post on the main page.

They were removed by someone else, I think a moderator or something, so I merely identified they were removed so people at least had some context in my statements regarding them.

According to the edit history of this question, they were never part of this post. I assume that you simply copied over the text from the main site and thus the links were not part of it. I've added them back.

That's REALLY weird as I know they were.  Interesting...iirc it was the same mod who pinned my post who removed the links.  Thank you for adding them back.  I assumed he had a reason like he didn't want me comparing posters or something.

Please don't misrepresent what happened: you deleted the post yourself on Aug 14th at 9:21pm, no mod interacted with it before then. At that point only a few regular community members had suggested that it should be closed as off-topic and moved to meta instead. If you had agreed with the off-topic flag instead of deleting the post, it would have been moved here automatically. — Instead you probably just copied it and reposted it here, which lost the links. Nick just edited the post here to add notices that there used to be links that were missing now.

You can check the latter by looking at the edit history of this post: https://bitcoin.meta.stackexchange.com/posts/857/revisions

! @Murch I did not misrepresent anything!Your description of the situation sounds reasonable, but I was totally unaware that the links even stood the possibility of being "erased" when I moved the post. I honestly, & truly, thought a mod had erased the links.  I had no idea they could have been missing! I thought a mod had intentionally removed the actual links for whatever reason and thought it would have been hostile of me to put them back in as a result. Obviously, I misunderstood. I'm not sure I fully understood the option of the system moving the post or thought I should do it myself, idr

In fact, I recently saw your post https://bitcoin.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/861/psa-please-dont-post-a-multitude-of-link-only-answers-with-url-shortener-links?cb=1, and thought, apparently mistakenly, "Oh, that must be why they removed the links on my post, because I had linked them in a small way and they were concerned I might be putting in inappropriate links".  Yes, I understand now, I was wrong. I had no malice whatsoever.

I'm sorry, maybe that was a bit to sharp. If you just mark and copy text on the site, links would not be copied. You'll have to go to "edit" your post and copy the content of the edit window, then you'd be able to copy the post including the links. :)

The url shorteners created by Stackexchange are fine, they will only ever link to our own content, so we always know that they are safe. URL shortener linking to external content obfuscate the destination, though, and especially since we are talking about money here, it would be an obvious attack vector to direct people at malware. That's why we prohibit them. The meta post was not about your posts. :)

I answer questions, when I'm interested in the topic, feel like I can provide a comprehensive answer in a reasonable amount of time, and the asker has made a reasonable effort to ask a comprehensible, specific question. Answering questions allows me to test and refine my understanding of the topic, provides a community service and is satisfying to me.
I usually don't answer questions:

wehn the asker doesntn evn spellhceck, or decent grammar
when the question is so broad that it's impossible for me to tell what facet of the described topic an asker is interested in
if I can't answer something in at most half an hour (although I sometimes misestimate, or even first research the topic when I'm really interested)
If an asker wants to do something that requires a lot of technical expertise within Bitcoin, but it's obvious that he has just discovered a topic and not done any research whatsoever yet, but already is requesting all sorts of unrelated details.
E.g. I want to build my own house, can you please give me detailed instructions on the different steps such as how to pick the stones for the wall, mix grout, and angle the beams for my roof to cope with a middle European amount of precipitation.
I'm generally put off by questions that are based on elaborate contrived scenarios, or provide a huge wall of text to present the asker's current understanding. If the asker needs to provide multiple paragraphs of text to explain their scenario, often that is a sign that they should first rather do more research or ask a few questions about the background content of their
question.

Addendum: Looking at your questions, it seems that you're very interested in the topic, but were eager to skip a few steps. If you want to get to the bottom of Bitcoin's technical concepts, you'll have to build up the vocabulary to talk about them. As an idea, you may want to consider three-fold:

Read! We already have several thousand questions on the site. There is a lot to discover and to learn. :)
When your questions get longer than ten sentences, take a step back and consider whether you can separate parts out of your question to ask separately. This may include statements you're making in your question that you don't confidently understand yet. Hereby, try to ask open questions, instead of making a statement and asking whether you've correctly understood. Smaller scoped open questions will be much easier for potential answerers to tackle. If you're tackling a complex topic, you might need to ask several questions in preparation before getting to the main topic of your interest.
When you're finding that answers throw up more new questions, consider asking specific follow-up questions to fill in the background instead of piling on comments.

That said, I see that you've been asking smaller and more focussed questions lately, so it seems you've already arrived at similar conclusions.

It's complicated.  If I write too small of questions, people don't answer them thoroughly or in a manner which I can I would argue, the average person, can understand them.  If I'm long winded, I tend to get more comprehensible answers.  That's why I ask them like that.  Why are people rewarding me with the details I seek when I'm more elaborate, but when I'm not, I'm punished with answers I can't work with?  Its why I'm asking people 'why' they post here and trying to correlate that to the "purpose" of these forums; so I can try to adjust but I'm not seeing a middle ground.

I enjoy answering the questions on here just because if I can help, I feel good for doing so. Its extremely educational as well, testing your own knowledge when explaining to others. But agree with Murch, I use similar guidelines myself, and I think the fourth point especially relates to your questions. I've noticed that your questions ask for a lot of technical details but then you don't seem to understand them, so I'm not sure what you expect from the "elaborately detailed and step by step instructions for my questions" if they aren't going to be technical. For example, I'm unsure why you would be seeking technical details of transaction signing if you don't yet understand the core concepts of scriptSigs and transaction outputs well.
There is nothing wrong with asking challenging and technical questions, but I would say that its quite important for questions to be straight to the point and specific. It makes our lives as answerers a lot easier to answer questions if they are clear and specific. If you write long paragraphs surrounding the actual question, it can be quite off-putting and difficult to answer, and same goes if you ask broad questions instead of specific ones, such as questions surrounding the entirety of transaction signing rather than specific aspects of it. Same goes for asking followup questions in the comments, its a lot easier for us if you separate them out into separate questions.

An example of asking questions in the comments is what you just did ;) the technicality of the answer is purely based on the technicality of the question

Well I believed your answer required more detail, that it lacked, either due to my improper asking of a question (to which you would accuse me of typing "too much" if I did do it properly), or due to you making a mistake; where else but in a comment should I address that? Asking supplemental or helpful questions in a comment to facilitate the addition or correction in a main answer to a question; I don't see what's wrong with that at all.  Prevents misleading everyone by adding it to the original question and gives the answer an opportunity to address it.

@Mine: I try to answer questions as simple as possible without misrepresenting the actual facts. Whether this will be comprehensible to the general audience depends on the topic and scope of the question. It is not reasonable to expect every topic to be accessible to any reader.

Do you seek to explain the topics such that they are "accessible" to just about every reader?  Or do you come here with a particular category in mind to whom you wish to explain such?  Whether it is comprehensible to the general audience is also dependent upon your goals and whether you achieve them or not.

@Mine: Generally, I aim to answer the question that it is accessible to what I perceive the asker's level of knowledge to be. The more complex a topic the more knowledge I expect. Otherwise, I'd have to write a book every time someone asks a non-trivial question. I do try to link to relevant background information, though, when I'm aware of some.

The problem you're having lies at the intersection of four different problems: complexity, empathy, length, and teaching.

Complexity: In Bitcoin, new concepts build on previous concepts. If each concept requires two previous concepts, then the length of the answer doubles for every additional level of simplification. If I want to say something without using jargon, I need to introduce a bunch of related concepts before I get to the meat of what I'm trying to tell you.
As an example, try to express "the second scriptPubKey of the transaction" without using the words scriptSig, scriptPubKey, input, or output. It's really hard.
Empathy: People who understand a system inside and out tend to assume that others have a similar level of understanding. In other words, they explain something as though they're explaining it to themselves.
Length: An answer can be too long. This is both because longer answers are hard to write, and because it's harder to find individual pieces of information. It's hard to link to a piece of information in the middle of an answer. It's hard for Google to point to a piece of information in the middle of an answer.
You rightly point out that a detailed explanation would be easier for people who don't understand Bitcoin jargon. However, some experienced Bitcoin developers use Bitcoin.SE as a reference, when they've forgotten some detail of how Bitcoin works. ("How is a P2PK output represented again?") A detailed explanation doesn't help them, because they're just looking for one piece of information.
One good way to reduce the size of an answer is to not describe a step, especially if that step is described elsewhere. (e.g. "Between step 4 and step 5, you must razzle your framastat, but that is out of the scope of this answer.")
Teaching: Here's an analogy.
You're trying to teach someone how to take a square root. They only know how to add together single-digit numbers. You can give them a purely mechanical procedure that tells them every step they need to do to take the square root. However, they won't understand why they're taking the square root, or what the purpose of the individual steps are, or how to sanity-check their result. If you ask them to extend the method to take a cube root, they will have no idea how.
In a similar sense, there's a completely mechanical set of steps to verify a signature. However, if I tell you that, you won't understand why only some fields are hashed, or how you might modify the procedure for an altcoin.

These are the four reasons why you're getting the answers that you're getting.
P.S: May I suggest the Bitcoin glossary? It's been helpful to me.

I think I may have inadvertently skewed my original post, I will look into it.  I'm getting some good answers, but it feels like I'm trying to pull teeth to get them.  Then I wonder if I'm aggravating people, but I correlate that back to the purpose of the forum and then considered "why" each of these people helps on here and wonder to what extent I'm contradicting that or the premise of the forum.  Then, to top it all off, I feel like, maybe I should stop asking questions due to how "resistant" people seem to providing them.

@Mine FWIW, I don't feel you're being aggravating.

Thank you, though there have been...comments...and such...and seems as though there's been "scoffing" when I ask follow up questions where I will say "you didn't say this" and they'll say they did, when they're completely ignoring the fact that they said "a therefore b" when I basically just said I don't know what those are.  Basically, I don't know their jargon, just pointed it out, and then they reference their jargon as the answer and basically force me to ask them, even more explicitly, through more comments, what that jargon actually means.

@Mine That sounds really frustrating. I'm not sure how to help, since the people answering the questions think they're being clear. To some extent, comments are not a great way to clarify a answer. You're asking a single person, who may not have the time, inclination, or actual knowledge to answer your follow-up questions. However, when you use Ask Question, you're asking the entire site. Some stuff still falls through the cracks (see: 85% answer rate.)

@Mine: I was just rereading this whole question. When you're asking for explanations of jargon, you've definitely found something that you can create another topic for.

@Murch Where should one draw the line on that though?  If its 1-2 lines, does it really need a whole additional question?  What if the explanation for something is already a bit big, but, combined therewith, would require 10 separate questions to answer all the jargon separately?  Is it truly expected on this forum to have to go through half a dozen or a dozen separate posts to understand one "thing"?  The better and more thorough the answer the more views and upvotes for the answer the answerer will receive as a reward, won't they?

I recently gave an answer to a question.  It turns out it wasn't what the guy asking was looking for, to be fair his question wasn't as clear as it could have been.  Either way I didn't really get credit for it as a result, which is fair enough.  I tried to make my answer understandable by just about anyone (as I claim I seek when I ask questions).  https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/58853/how-do-you-figure-out-the-r-and-s-out-of-a-signature-using-python/58862#58862

@Mine I recently gave an answer I think you and the accepted answer are saying the same thing. The accepted answer is just more certain about it. WRT jargon: it is hard to know how difficult something is to explain without asking for an explanation. There's no good solution for this, so just guess.


text:
PSA: Please don't post a multitude of link-only answers with url-shortener links
We recently had a new user post eight answers in a short amount of time. They all linked to a website obfuscated by the same shortener url, and didn't provide much explanation what they were linking to. We got multiple flags for these answers pointing these out as 'linking to malware'.
As I was at work, I was not about to click that shortened URL and instead put the link into a malware checker. It came up as malicious, so I deleted the user altogether.
Please note:

Link-only answers are low-quality.
Please include the gist of what you're linking to in your post. We collect questions and answers, not questions and links. Answers that don't include sufficient explanation get removed.
Linking to the same site eight times in a very brief time is a usual spammer pattern.
If your answer is applicable to multiple topics, please instead write one comprehensive answer and flag the other questions as duplicates.
URL-shorteners are highly deprecated.
Do not use URL shorteners on Bitcoin.SE. Use the actual link so that people can assess what they're being pointed at.


text:
Not sure what to do with this but here is a highranking question with the wrong answer that can have horrible results
Would seriously suggest removing this answer since it's ranking on google, is wrong and really risk fucking up somones backup... Not sure who should know about this...
Where can I view my HD wallet seed in bitcoin core 13.2

thanks for raising awareness.
I'm going to add a warning to both of these answers. If you already have the privilege to do so, downvoting the answers would be proper, too. (I've done so already.)
Optimally, someone would post the correct answer.

Somone already wrote a correct answer.

Why would you not just delete or remove the body of the answer rather than just leave a health warning?


text:
Please tell new users where to post questions!
Frequently, new users will post questions as an answer.
For example:

New users don't mean any harm - they just don't know that we want questions to be posted as their own separate question.
When you see this, do two things:

Flag as not an answer.
Leave a comment explaining what the user should do differently. Here's an example:

Hi $NewUser! Please use "Ask Question" to post questions, instead of posting an answer. This ensures that your question is shown on the front page, and keeps discussion focused.

But you can write anything, as long as it follows the rules Be Nice and Assume Good Faith.

A handy userscript for these kind of comments is AutoReviewComments. This will save you a lot of typing.


text:
Stepping down as moderator
I'm stepping down as moderator of Bitcoin StackExchange.
I find that I haven't been able to make the needed time commitment to the site.
Thanks to Murch, Stephen, and the StackExchange CM's. It's been a good run.

Thank you for your work and best wishes to you in your life

Sorry to see you go Nick, I've only been here for a little while but I've seen you round a lot and you've done a lot of good work for the site. Best of luck for whatever you're moving on to

Well, I am sorry to hear that. :-/
Thank you for all the work that you have put in.

Thank you, Nick, for all of the time you have put into helping Bitcoin.SE, and best of luck in your future endeavors.

I'm sad to see you go! Thanks for all your work.


text:
Usage of the off-topic reason "customer relationship"
I feel like the customer relationship close reason is perhaps getting a bit overused lately.
IIRC, it was originally meant for questions e.g. about customers not receiving a deposit on an account or trying to recover access to their account. In other words, questions about the state of internal proceedings of a company. Naturally, such topics cannot be answered by people that don't have insight into the company's internals, and thus they would be a bad fit for our site.
However, lately, I've seen some questions e.g. about configuring Bitcoin related software, interactions with APIs, or using services more generally get closed under the same reason. At least some of these questions were about publicly accessible information, might be of interest to more users, and could easily be answered by a more experienced user.
I'd therefore like to propose we do not use the customer relationship reason to close questions like this one: Do I put password for slushpool.com using GUIMiner?
What do you think?

I agree that closing the question you mention might have been stretching it. Maybe we could change the wording so that if the question is exclusively about the relationship between the author and a company that has some form of customer support, it is off-topic. That would make questions about interfacing open source software with a company API on-topic.

That seems like a good idea, and yes, I'd agree that interfacing with a company API should be on-topic as long as the issue is replicable for other users.

I agree with this. Questions that can really only be answered by customer support should be the only ones that are closed.

I agree to an extent, I think the questions like that are being closed because the knowledge is too specific to a single company and so is both hard to answer for most users with no experience with that particular company, and less useful for others in general because of its specificity. But yeah the example you linked is probably pushing that idea a little too far. If questions are left open though, there's a likelihood a lot of them will never be answered anyway I think, but that becomes less of a problem as bitcoin.SE grows

It's not a big issue if some questions remain unanswered for some time. We have automated processes that clean up questions that don't get attention. Otherwise they just remain available to be answered.


text:
Is this an appropriate site to ask "applications of blockchain" questions?
I have a question about the feasibility of using blockchain technology in a specific domain, which has nothing to do with crypto currency. Is this the appropriate site to ask such a question? If not, does there exist a stack exchange site I could as it?

Private blockchains and related questions are on-topic on our site. Please take care to show your previous research and ask a specific question, though, as we do close questions that are overly broad.


text:
Congratulations! Bitcoin is graduating!
You've been cleared for graduation by the Stack Exchange Community Team! Bitcoin met our threshold for graduation-worthy sites and after a review, the Community Team determined that you're good to go. Reaching 'mature community' status is a big milestone, and you should be very proud.
What does this mean exactly? Graduation works in two phases. Starting today, you'll receive the following benefits:

You will soon have an election for community-voted moderators - in light of the recent stepdown of Nick ODell as a moderator, these will actually be starting today.
You will no longer see the "beta" label attached to your site's name
You will become eligible for question migration paths with the rest of the network
You will soon be able to select your own community ads. We're very close to the new year and the new ad cycle, so we'll be holding those off until December.

The site will still receive a full design from one of our designers, which will be packaged with an increase in the amount of reputation needed to access each privilege. It's no secret that our backlog for site designs is long, so instead of making you wait to receive all the parts of graduation at once, we wanted to give you the things we could give you now. We think we've hammered out most of the bugs in the process, but there are still likely to be some left -  so if you come across anything out of place, please report it on Meta Stack Exchange using the [graduating-sites] tag.
This site has reached this point because of your generous contributions. Together, you've created a valuable resource that helps people. Congratulations on all you've accomplished.

Is the double comma after "we've hammered out most of the bugs in the process" one of those bugs?

In light of the pending design upgrade, I would like to encourage people to contribute to the discussion here: What should this site's name be when we get our new design?

Finally! Well deserved, Bitcoin.SE! Good work!

Congratulations all.  Note those of us who held $1000 in bitcoin when this SE began will now have $3,000,000 in bitcoin!  Well done all!

Congratulations Bitcoin.SE, @Murch, and the new moderators!


text:
2017 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection
Coinciding with your having just graduated, all y'all are scheduled for an election next week, October 16th.In connection with that, we will be holding a Q&A with the candidates.  This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.

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

Here's how it'll work:

Until the nomination phase, (so, until Monday, October 16th at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post one question per answer.
We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The first two will be guaranteed to be included, the latter ones are if the community doesn't supply enough questions. This will be done in a single post, unlike the prior instruction.
If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of [text](link), as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.
This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into at currently.
At the start of the nomination phase, the Community Team will select up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions.
Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, typically containing 10 questions in total.
This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&A.

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

Here is a set of general questions, gathered as very common questions asked every election. As mentioned in the instructions, the first two questions are guaranteed to show up in the Q&A, while the others are if there aren't enough questions (or, if you like one enough, you may split it off as a separate answer for review within the community's 8).

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

In your opinion, what do moderators do?
A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

What is the most pressing issue of the Bitcoin Stackexchange and how will you approach it if elected as a moderator?

Given the highly political nature of this space, how would you deal with questions/answers/comments which

Use derogatory terms like Bcash or BScore, SegwitCoin or
BizCoin?
Knowingly/Unknowingly promoting certain client software for bitcoin?

Personally, I would strike/narrow question 2. Nearly all posts promote a certain client. Examples: 1 2 3. Question 1 is very important to having civilized debate.

After looking at the answers of candidates, I think you were right. But, it's too late now

Moderators are called in when something is amiss. When you're elected, a noticeable portion of your time spent on Bitcoin.SE will be evaluating posts that other users flagged for your attention. You'll encounter junk on a daily basis, and on days when you're hard-pressed for time, it may be your only window into the site. Meanwhile, we're asking you to offer patient and diplomatic guidance to the users that tried to contribute. What's your motivation to run for such a job? Why is it important for you to be a moderator? What do you bring to the moderation team to complement your fellow moderators?

Two questions in the same theme:

How did you discover Bitcoin SE?
How can we make contributing to the site more approachable for new users?

I am afraid that the questionnaire was already posted: https://bitcoin.meta.stackexchange.com/q/888/5406

@Murch Whoops. Oh well.


text:
What should this site's name be when we get our new design?
Since this site started, one of the most frequent topics in our meta was this site's scope in regard to other cryptocurrencies. In fact, the site had originally been proposed as "Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies" in Area51, but then changed to just "Bitcoin" when the beta started.
Since we will be getting a new design sometime after graduation, I would like to discuss whether we want to take that as an opportunity to make the site's title inclusive of other cryptocurrencies. Previous discussion appears to indicate that people consider such topics to be on-topic:

Are questions about other crypto-currencies on-topic?
Should this SE also cover questions about Ripple?
This site should be renamed
Have the FAQ explicitly allow other crypto-currencies / bitcoin forks
What should our FAQ contain? Part 1 - "What kind of questions can I ask here?"
Are we willing to embrace other cryptocurrencies?
What can we do to better support questions about other cryptocurrencies?
Suggestion: Closed-source cryptocurrencies should be off topic
Why is it bitcoin.SE instead of cryptocurrencies.SE
Updating and Improving our Tour/About site

This topic has also come up in regard in Area51 with other stackexchange proposals:

Area51 Bitcoin Proposal: Enlarge the scope to “cryptocurrency”, not just Bitcoin.
Area51: Problem with the Crypocurrency community
Area51 Ethereum Proposal: Ethereum questions are welcome on Bitcoin.Stackexchange

There also were at least two attempts to start an encompassing "cryptocurrency" stackexchange which at were closed or didn't succeed at least partially because bitcoin.stackexchange.com considers other cryptocurrencies to be on-topic.
To be clear, the site's URL should stay the same. Changing the URL would break all links to our site and cause confusion to infrequent users. This post intends to discuss the name shown in the title and titlebar.

Here are three other examples from the Stackexchange network:
Personal Finance & Money — money.stackexchange.com:

Seasoned Advice — cooking.stackexchange.com:

Arqade — gaming.stackexchange.com:

The examples of Seasoned Advice and Arqade need some context: back then, the goal was to come up with a "clever" name that was available as a dotcom-domain (http://seasonedadvice.com and http://arqade.com). That is no longer happening, and the site names are expected to explicitly name the site's topic: anything like these two is out of the picture. (It's still true that the name need not be identical to the URL.)

@Desire: Thanks for providing context, I was not aware of that history. I assume that my example with "Personal Finance & Money" stands then, though?

Changing the URL is possible without breaking anything, just redirect the old domain to the new one, as was done when programmers changed to softwareengineering.

I understand that Bitcoin.SE has traditionally been inclusive of other cryptocurrencies, particularly those based off of the Bitcoin Core codebase such as Litecoin.  I've always accepted that was the policy here and have not complained about it.
But it would be nice if we could focus on just Bitcoin going forward.  If not, I would then suggest that we keep the title as "Bitcoin" alone.  It's possible that the next time someone tries starting a generic cryptocurrency SE, they'll succeed, and we won't continue having to scroll through altcoin questions in order to see Bitcoin questions.

It's hard to claim that we are all cryptos when Ethereum has their own stack exchange site.  By lumping Bitcoin in with everything else, it feels like it diminishes the importance of Bitcoin in the crypto world...which is not at all correct.  I honest don't know where alt-coins fit into SE.  The proliferation of so many coins has significantly muddied the waters since this site's creation.

Thank you for your reply, I appreciate the perspective. To clarify, could you please elaborate two points: 1. How do you suggest that we handle forkcoins such as segwit2x or Bitcoin Cash? 2. What do you suggest should happen with the altcoin-content that is already part of the site?

@Jestin: Also Monero has their own SE now. ;)

@Murch (1) I'd suggest that questions about forkcoins are on-topic for Bitcoin.SE until (if) the forkcoin gets an SE of its own. (2) A "grandfather" provision allowing historic altcoin content to stay and continue to be answered/edited until a more appropriate SE graduates that can accept the content in a migration.  E.g. we can migrate any ETH content to the now-graduated ETH.SE.  Of course, questions about altcoins from a Bitcoin perspective (e.g. "Could Monero's ring signatures be implemented on Bitcoin?") should continue being supported on Bitcoin.SE in perpetuity.

Nobody appears to have explored the implications of limiting the scope, so I added a complementary answer for balance.

One problem with any "rules" as to what to accept or not is that they'll be taken advantage of by someone creating an alt or fork right in the grey area, leeching off of the Bitcoin community's work until they get sent off and then whining about censorship.

You can hide tags.

@DavidA.Harding: Content can only be migrated up to 90 days after the question was asked. That's why we haven't migrated most of the Ethereum content. fredsbend has a good point that might not be clear to everyone. Just like you can favorite a tag, you can also add it to your ignore list (just as a fyi).

@Murch I didn't know that, thank you.  And thanks to fredsbend for the tip about ignoring tags; I may have to use that.  The inability to migrate altcoin content to a later SE dedicated to that altcoin sounds like a further good reason to make altcoin content offtopic on Bitcoin.SE.

Vote for this answer if you think the Bitcoin Stack Exchange site should keep the existing scope that encourages questions about alternative cryptocurrencies (except those which are more appropriately posted to their own dedicated graduated SE site, such as Ethereum).
There is no other Stack Exchange site relating to cryptocurrency (apart from maybe Ethereum) that is guaranteed to stick around. Proposals in Area 51 (eg the Blockchain Technology one) are of little use to people who want their questions answered until they at least reach public beta. Even sites in public beta (such as the Monero one) may not exist long term.
The choice of name for the graduated Bitcoin site should be made once a choice of scope has been finalised.
ps: If you see further implications of reducing the scope of the site, please edit them in to this answer...

To be fair, there's no "guarantees" for any site, but I think you get the general idea.

I think the distinction is often fuzzy, depending on how concrete the question is.
A question of the form "How do I use software package X to create a multisig address for currency Y" is very specific, and can clearly be about Bitcoin or not. However a question of the form "What are some interesting recent developments in cryptocurrency privacy approaches?" may apply to probably nearly every cryptocurrency.
My preference for focus of this site follows from this: question should be applicable to Bitcoin, but not necessarily about Bitcoin - in the understanding that Bitcoin could evolve to adopt successful technologies that originate elsewhere.
This is only a preference, and I'm quite happy to use and contribute this site if a less strict or stricter focus is chosen.

I agree with both David's and Jestin's opinions. It is hard though to decide what should happen with all the other cryptocurrency content.
On one hand, having a narrow focus can lead to better questions and answers, since is hard to have people who knows precisely about details concerning every Bitcoin based cryptocurrency that pops up.
On the other hand, some of the questions may share a similar / same answer in other currencies and Bitcoin. Moreover, there should be a place to address such questions, and maybe those currencies are not grown enough to start a SE, and grow a community of people who can provide right answers.

I think that we should just keep the name Bitcoin and restrict the scope to be just Bitcoin.
Regarding hard forked altcoins such as Bitcoin Cash and Segwit2x, I think that we should allow questions about them for a week or two after the fork as people are likely to have questions about them (particularly about splitting coins, replay protection, and wallet support) and then begin classifying them as off topic. This is what Bitcointalk did for the Bitcoin Cash fork and will do again for segwit2x.

Would we have to worry about decreased traffic if we restrict the scope?  I don't know how SE works in terms of demoting us once we are promoted.

@Jestin If by "promoted" means "graduated", then SE won't demote any graduated sites (relevant meta post: Can a site “degraduate”?)

@AndrewT.  Thanks.  I wasn't sure how that all worked.

I can't really weigh in about changing scope. My participation here has been minimal.
But the best name is "Bitcoin" simply for the recognition. Even if bitcoin dies and is replaced by something else, the word "Bitcoin" will long stand as the generic name for cryptocurrencies, much like Klenex is ubiquitously used to mean "tissue". And even if I'm wrong, I'm sure SE staff will see the value in a name change if it proved necessary because of industry changes/disruption. It would be in their interest.
If you're hoping for something pithy, like Seasoned Advice has, I'm afraid I'm not that clever at the moment and am not really convinced that's a good idea. The topic is quite technical, so quips and plays on words tend to confuse before they amuse.

I propose the name "Bitcoin & Other Cryptocurrencies". It sounds a mouthful but I'm sure the designer could make it look nice, just like with "Personal Finance & Money".


text:
2017 Community Moderator Election
The 2017 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
Community moderator elections have three phases:

Nomination phase
Primary phase
Election phase

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