text:
Why is Bitcoin SE still in beta?
What is holding bitcoin SE back from becoming a fully accepted SE page? It's been in beta 1500+ days. Looking at the area51 page, it seems like it meets at least OK and above on the metrics. Are there specific requirements a SE site must meet before progressing from the beta stage?

There are a few reasons for that, but the #1 thing I want to emphasize is this:

90 days is a minimum length. Most sites will take much longer. Longer-running betas are not in some sort of failure mode, nor are they "trapped."

(Source.)
In fact, there are many sites that are still in Beta that are actually older than Bitcoin SE. http://stackexchange.com/sites#oldest
Site graduation out of beta represents a judgement by the StackExchange team that the site is self-sustaining and self-governing, and doesn't really need any further micromanagement to succeed. Several different things kick in at that point: moderator elections, a custom theme for the site, and a footer link to Bitcoin at the bottom of every StackExchange page. In terms of day-to-day operations, though, very little changes.
There is no hard-line test for graduation readiness. However, I can think of some factors that would undermine a request to graduate if we went for it right now:

There was a period of about a month about twenty two months back where no flags were being cleared, which meant that Community Managers (people paid by StackExchange) had to clear them for us. There's always some number of issues that need to be escalated to a CM, but bothering them with every spammer that comes on the site is not good.

We need more questions per day, but I think that's something that we're working toward organically.

So, gloom aside:
We're in a good position right now, because we have three engaged moderators, (Murch, Stephen, and myself) and questions consistently get good answers, from users like yourself, Bitcoin, Pieter Wiulle, and a whole bunch of others that I don't have space to thank. We've got consistent week-to-week pageviews, mostly referred from search engines, meaning that we already have a valuable reference.
So, I'm optimistic about our odds if we went for that down the line. ;) I'm actually interested in hearing about how other members of the community feel about graduation.

How sites are supposed to graduate:

In reality, 90 days is a minimum length a site is expected to to remain in beta. The blog post, When will my site graduate?, explains that a site can stay in beta as long as necessary to reach critical mass. As long as the questions represent real problems and consistently receive great answers, the site isn't going to get closed down. "It takes as long as it takes."
[...]
The Area 51 summary does not represent some sort of "report card" filled with pass/fail grades. If you're expecting someone to show up on the 90th days and say "Sorry, times up. It's time to go home," it doesn't really work that way.

(Source.)

How is the landscape now that some time has passed since your answer? We're now almost the only community in the situation of being this long in Beta with 100% Okay or Excellent scores. (The other 3 are Software QA, German language and Gardening.) Granted, we still lack an awesome bitcoiny theme, but otherwise this community looks pretty grown up to me. What do you think?

I hadn't looked at Area51 recently, and there's 10 questions/day now, which does change things. (The custom theme is because of graduation, not as a prereq.)

Adding to Nick's answer:
A few months ago I've talked to our Community Manager contact about the requirements for exiting the beta. My understanding was that our site has been making a lot of good progress in the past year, but they're waiting for the activity to pick up some more for us to graduate from Beta.
From other threads on meta.stackexchange, I got the impression that consistently getting more than 10 questions daily is perhaps a lower boundary to get scheduled for exiting beta. More answers per question would also be a metric that could be better.
So, please help getting more good questions and answers on our site! :)


text:
Is there a bug on the Area 51 stats?
On the Area 51 stats for Bitcoin Stack Exchange it says there are zero 'avid users.'  I know that that is completely wrong because by their definition there are more than enough 'avid users.' This may be a temporary glitch, but what is going on?

There was an outage of the site earlier today, perhaps it also messed up the stats on Area51.
Now, the stats show 481 avid users.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
Take another run at tagging on Bitcoin.SE?
There is still a bunch of tags left that need work from the Weeding out bad tags initiative 2014. I’d be willing to invest some time to go through the tags once more and pre-select some to work on. Also, we have whole swamps of duplicates many of which have no useful answers or some of which could be merged to collect good answers in one place.
I can’t do it by myself though, so I’m wondering how we could organize the work to collaborate without wasting time by looking at everything several times, e.g. if we take a crack at big tags such as alternatives.
Any thoughts?

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


text:
Meet at 32C3 in Hamburg
I'm at the Chaos Computer Congress in Hamburg right now. If someone wants to meet, I come by the Bitcoin Assembly frequently. ;)
We have a Satoshi Square at 3pm every day there.


text:
Top Tags requiring a tag wiki
Tag wikis give a short overview detailing what kind of questions a tag collects. Tag wiki excerpts are shown on hover, and even more importantly, when users tag a question post.
There are currently 392 tags without even a tag excerpt.
If you have sufficient reputation, please contribute in tags that you have upvotes for. Even before you can edit tags yourself, you can submit suggested edits!
Please write original texts, and don’t copy from other sites.
Let’s start by taking on the top fifty!

The following are the top fifty tags without an excerpt

Whenever you add a tag wiki, please remove the corresponding tag from the list here.
  Please use the dictionary method for the excerpt: Don’t repeat the name of the tag, unless the tag abbreviates it.

server (77)
php (72)
services (60)
python (48)
sending (46)
error (45)
database (43)
verification (42)
offline (42)
address-generation (41)
merchants (39)
contracts (37)
proof-of-stake (36)
market (36)
passphrase (35)
receiving (32)
stratum (32)
peers (31)
money (31)
multi-sig (30)
connection (29)
hacking (29)
import (29)
message (29)
tor (29)
theory (29)
regtest (28)
theft (27)
payment-processors (27)
lost-bitcoins (27)
nonce (26)
trade (26)
performance (26)
storage (26)
conversion (24)
p2sh (24)

Done

raw-transaction (95)
hash (61)
proof-of-work (53)
coldstorage (53)
multi-sig-addresses (48)
android (48)
unconfirmed-transactions (47)
hashpower (45)
privacy (44)
asicminer (42)
transaction-malleability (42)
transaction-verification (39)
taxes (33)
compiling (26)


text:
Which tags would be a more suitable replacement for the tag "server"?
I’ve been having a look at server.
It is failing to define a proper category: It’s meaningless by itself, has no definition, and unlikely to be used correctly just based on its name. It’s being used all over the place, as a stand-in for bitcoind, for miners hosted not at home, for api, for rpc, and others.
It should probably be removed from most questions it is on, and perhaps be replaced by a couple more specific tags. Which tags would be a more suitable replacement for server?


text:
Mining is on more than 10% of the questions, how can we structure that content better?
Mining is a central topic to Bitcoin, yet we lump everything even remotely related to it into one tag, mining. Tags lose a lot of their usefulness when they are applied to too many questions.
Therefore I would like to suggest that we deprecate the usage of mining altogether (perhaps by eventually blacklisting it as we have done with bitcoin), and replace it with a number of other tags.

This topic aims to collect tags that should replace mining on questions. Such tags can be new or already exist.
Please propose one tag per answer, and add support by describing what topic it would collect. Please upvote answers that you find useful, and downvote tags that you don’t. Use comments on answers to discuss viability or edit the answers directly to improve them.
Once we have concluded this discussion, another post will follow to suggest how to implement it and what to watch for while retagging mining.

related: http://meta.bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/575/5406

miner-configuration
Collects questions about configuration of mining hardware, and optimizing the software settings of mining rigs.

Should mining-setup be different? About physical setup procedures, not software configuration.

@fredsbend: Good point. If we have enough questions for both topics yes. If they are too few, they should be merged, I think.

mining-hardware
Collects questions about mining rigs, cpus, gpus, fpgas, and asicminers, as well as the production, and producers of such.

My concern is that people will use this tag for all mining questions, sorta like people use bitcoind as a surrogate for the restricted bitcoin tag.

@NickODell Do you have a suggestion how we can alleviate it? Else I would say, we should just stick to it, and then finetune once we see the issues.

mining-concept mining-theory
Questions about the function, the reason for, and the underlying concepts of mining.
Closely related to proof-of-work.

Not happy with this tag yet, I’d welcome a better suggestion.

Maybe mining theory?

pool-payout-methods
Questions about sharing revenue in mining pools.

gpu-mining
Questions about using GPUs for mining.
Although mostly of historical use, gpu collects 112 questions, but essentially only collects questions about using gpus for mining.

cpu-mining
Questions about using CPUs for mining.
Although mostly of historical use, cpu collects 63 questions, but essentially only collects questions about using CPUs for mining.

I think this should be used for the plethora of 'mining just for fun' questions.

Finally, any tag that collects questions about a specific mining hardware product or producer, e.g. antminer, bitmain, or butterfly-labs, which can be applied to at least five (better ten) questions.

shares
Shares refers to a method for accounting mining pool contributions. It does not cover company shares.

mining-profitability
Collects questions about the economics of mining operations.

Apply to: Any questions that currently have both mining and profitability, and other questions closely related.

This tag seems a bit too specific. We need like one question with this tag, and that's how to calculate profitability from energy cost, hashrate, and difficulty. This seems like it would be used for 'if I mine with this hardware, will I make money?' questions, which we should probably close as being time sensitive.

Yeah, we probably could do with about five. Yet, we do have 46 questions on that topic. ;) And having them all on one tag might help us get fewer new ones. :)

mining-pools
Questions about organizing groups to collaboratively work on block creation.

When people think of a tag, 'pool' or 'pools' probably comes to mind before 'mining-pools'. So, I would opt for 'pool-mining', just to have 'pool' be first in the tag name. A similar argument could probably be made for other proposed tags here as well.

I’m not sure I follow. When I type "pool" in the tags box, mining-pools shows up as the first choice.

I knew I should have double checked to see if SE is smart enough to search tag by contains rather than startswith. 'mining-pools' sounds good to me then.

I think there's a difference between mining pools and pooled mining.

What about solo mining? Is that even a topic often discussed here?

@fredsbend: I'm just re-reading this. How would you distinguishbetween mining-pools and pooled-mining? [tag:solo-mining] exists and is in use.

Pooled mining is what you do. Mining pools are entities like slush and eligius. That said, it's probably better if a question is tagged slush pool or eligius pool rather than miming pools.

@fredsbend: Yeah, questions asking about specific pools could easily have specific tags, but then I'd not see how to cleanly separate pooled-mining and mining-pools thereafter. I'd expect that the bulk of the question would be tagged with both. Maybe if one got rid of tag mining-pools altogether, and replaced it with pooled-mining, pool-payout-methods, pool-work-distribution, and a few more.

@fredsbend: I just rediscovered your answer on a related topic, where you argued that mining-pools and pooled-mining should be merged. Just thought it was funny. :)

@Murch lol. I didn't know as much then as I do now. I've commented on that answer to that effect.

scrypt-mining
Questions specific to mining any altcoin using the Scrypt hash algorithm.

I don't like this one because it opens the door for many more tags, e.g. X11-mining, Keccak-mining, etc. If their question is about mining, the algorithm usually isn't the focus. If the algorithm is the focus, it probably doesn't belong on this SE, since we're not dedicated to knowing the ins-and-outs of hash functions.

@StephenM347 Hm. If we just create only tags that would be on at least 10 questions, Scrypt should be the only one. However, at the moment we have more than 200 questions that have "scrypt" in the text and are tagged with [tag:mining]. You are right though, they may not be a collection of a consistent topic.

I agree with @Stephen that this tag doesn't make sense. The algorithm is not really part of the mining process. No more than gasoline is part of the engine. Questions about scrypt are about cryptography not mining.


text:
Merge [anonymity] into [privacy]
I think that anonymity and privacy collect the same topic of questions and should be merged. Privacy seems to be the more accurate term, therefore I would make anonymity a synonym of privacy.
What do you think?

Sounds good to me.

Went ahead with the merge in agreement with Nick and Stephen, and added a new tag excerpt in the same go.


text:
Need Help: Retag of [mining]
What's happening?
mining has been deprecated and all questions where it appears are getting retagged.
Why?
Mining is a central topic in cryptocurrencies. It deserves more than one tag. By separating different aspects of mining into their own collections users will be able to find related content more easily.
Who?
Anyone can help! If you can't edit yourself, you can suggest edits! Each suggested edit gives you +2 reputation when accepted.
How?

Find any questions tagged with mining.
Read questions and answers to figure out what the topic is.
Replace mining with tags from the following list.

Bonus: Where appropriate vote, edit for quality, add answers, or flag. Questions that are edited are bumped to the front. That's a great time to fix 'em up.
(Likely) Targets

miner-configuration
Collects questions about configuration of mining hardware, and optimizing the software settings of mining rigs.
mining-hardware
Collects questions about mining rigs, cpus, gpus, fpgas, and asic miners, as well as the production, and producers of such.
mining-pools
Questions about organizing groups to collaboratively work on block creation.
mining-profitability
Collects questions about the economics of mining operations.
mining-theory
Questions about the function, the reason for, and the underlying concepts of mining.
cpu-mining
Questions about using CPUs for mining.
gpu-mining
Collects questions about mining setups on basis of GPUs.
pool-payout-methods
Questions about sharing revenue in mining pools.
shares
Shares refers to a method for accounting mining pool contributions. It does not cover company shares.
solo-mining
refers to mining by yourself, not organized in a mining-pool
mining-software
General questions about mining software.
mining-setup
Is used for questions concerned with the physical setup of mining hardware.
miner-configuration
Collects questions about configuring and optimizing the software settings on mining rigs.
mining-technical-details
Is used for questions on the technical process of building a block header, and what gets hashed in mining.

When?
Starting now, until there are no questions left with the tag mining. :)

this is a hell of task. is this really needed?

@5chdn: Needed? I'm not sure. Worth it? Maybe. An improvement? Very likely.

Progress report!

2016-01-20: I've retagged 56 questions that had mining and profitability on them. → 1347 questions left. ;)
2016-01-21: Some more retagging done. → 1314 left. Review of hashrate vs hashpower initiated.
2016-01-22: Retagged merged-mining. → 1284 left.
2016-01-23: Merged build into compiling, added a few tag excerpts, started retagging cpu+mining. → 1274 left.
2016-01-27: 1257 left.
2016-02-01: 1243 left.
2016-02-02: Revised tag wikis of stale-block and orphaned-blocks. Added empty-blocks, transaction-propagation. → 1216 left.
2016-02-04: 1197 left.
2016-02-08: 1156 left.
2016-02-12: 1132 left.
2016-02-15: 1120 left.
2016-02-17: 1107 left.
2016-02-21: 1049 left.
2016-03-06: 993 left.
2016-03-09: 958 left.
2016-03-10: 904 left.
2016-03-11: 876 left.
2016-03-14: 850 left.
2016-03-15: 822 left.
2016-03-16: 751 left.
2016-03-17: 719 left.
2016-03-18: 708 left.
2016-03-31: 616 left. Woohoo, more than half finished.
2016-04-02: 559 left.
2016-04-09: 517 left.
2016-04-10: 444 left.
2016-04-10: 368 left.
2016-04-24: 278 left.
2016-04-25: 102 left.
2016-04-28: 0 left. Will be requesting mining to be blacklisted.


text:
hashrate vs hashpower, which tag is better?
We currently have both

hashrate
The hash rate is the measuring unit of the processing power of the Bitcoin network.
hashpower
(no description)

Additionally we have

hash
(no description)
hashing
A hash is a mathematically reproducible but irreversible process which takes one value as an input and predictably produces a derived value as an output. Hashing is central to Bitcoin mining as well as the generation of Bitcoin addresses.

Not only is the hashrate not "processing power" because more doesn't increase the amount of transaction processing that is done, but at least the first two seem to be duplicates of one another.
Which one should we keep?

We should merge hashing into hash, because the latter looks nicer, and merge hashrate into hashpower, because the latter is more popular.
We should also fix the description on hashrate
Edit: Done.


text:
mining-setup vs miner-configuration vs mining-software
What is the best tag to describe the questions dealing with the configuration and software of miners? Should this tag also collect building your own miners (although this is mostly a historical topic)?
We currently have:

mining-setup
[Mining-Setup] is used for questions concerned with the setup and configuration of mining hardware.
miner-configuration
Collects questions about configuration of mining hardware, and optimizing the software settings of mining rigs.
mining-software
No description yet.


text:
Three tags for Multi-signature: multi-sig, multi-sig-address and multi-sig-transaction
Does it make sense to have different tags for multi-signature addresses and transactions? Aren't those intimately linked?

I just noticed that we have multi-sig, multi-sig-address, and multi-sig-transaction and was starting to write a meta post to suggest that we combine them into a single tag. Then this topic by past-Murch popped up as a potential duplicate.
It looks like past-Murch and me agree already. Could y'all please upvote this answer if you're in support of merging the three tags? If you disagree, please downvote and add another answer with your proposal how to handle it.

Went ahead and merged the three tags, after some additional support was offered in chat.

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


text:
Common Bitcoin Dos and Don'ts for this Site/Community
Could anyone provide me a list of all comments which would scrutinize what a person may do incorrectly in asking a question on this site/community?
If are there common mistakes you would typically see that you answer with a specific comment, please provide these as an answer in a list that is bullet pointed perhaps.
I am looking for items specific to the non-Meta Bitcoin Q&A site. I'm not sure if there would be common misconception or common comments someone would post to educate, criticize, etc.

Well, I assume you have seen the "Ask about…" and "Don't ask about…" in the tour.
We sometimes get programming questions that happen to be for a cryptocurrency related piece of software, but the issue is not specific to cryptocurrency. Those should rather be asked to Stackoverflow.
Often we get questions about investing in cryptocurrencies or mining thereof. We've declared that off-topic because those questions' answers tend to be localized in time.
We currently have two custom off-topic reasons:

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 reviews are off-topic because they tend to attract subjective, low-quality, and spam answers. On the other hand, offerings in the Bitcoin space are still evolving rapidly which often renders answers outdated quickly.

I'm not aware of a list of "canned comments" beside the auto-comments that get applied by flagging. Maybe we should start one. :)

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


text:
PSA: Waves of useless suggested edits on Bitcoin.SE
Please be aware that we have had and may continue to have huge surges of suggested edits on the site.
An anonymous user apparently is using a script to replace special characters with differently encoded equivalent symbols or their html representation. These edits usually have meaningless description messages, and especially in the areas of preformatted text, the html representations are detrimental to the readability.
What to do:
If you see a suggested edit on one of your posts, please check whether it is an actual improvement. Please reject suggested edits that don't improve the post.
Thank you.


text:
Why is there a new Ethereum site on SE?
Ethereum is about Bitcoin trading, right? And this site incorporates, or could incorporate Ethereum as a topic. So why is there a separate site for it, instead of making those questions part of this site?

Related: Ethereum questions are welcome on Bitcoin.Stackexchange

Ethereum doesn't have anything to do with Bitcoin or "Bitcoin trading" other than the fact that the only way to buy Ether is with Bitcoin.
Ethereum is a completely new and independent system, not even a fork of Bitcoin. It has its own specific community. It only makes sense to keep that separate. Bitcoin.SE can already be confusing because of the supported bitcoin forks.


text:
Is it okay to ask for Bitcoin in our chatroom?
Suppose someone asks for Bitcoin in our chatroom, for the purpose of testing a Bitcoin checkout application.
We've got a policy about doing that in an answer for compensation, but not one about asking in chat.
I've thought of four general approaches to this:

Remove all requests in chat.
Remove it or don't, use your discretion. (What factors should we weigh?)
Only remove it if someone complains.
Allow all requests in chat.

I'm open to other suggestions, though. Thoughts?

I dunno, it sounds a bit like online panhandling.

I'd opt for "use your discretion". As long as it happens about once per year as now, we don't need a fixed rule. If it happens more often, or in a spammy manner, I might consider suspending the user from chat besides removing it.


text:
PSA: Mining retagged and blacklisted. Use these tags instead
mining has been eradicated from the site.

In the future please use the following tags instead:


text:
Why does BitcoinSE attract particularly low quality posts?
I've never posted in Meta before, and I rarely use SE. So this question may be considered rude, unfair, or "too meta". I genuinely don't know, but I want to ask anyway. This is the closest thing I could find to what I want to address.
I found three posts on the front page that made me more than a little confused. I don't come around here often--we'll say once every other month. But every time I come to see if there are any interesting questions, there (usually) aren't.
For some examples:

So a computer is now called a "Miner" and is creating currency?
Mining my own blockchain?
How do I write a Litecoin mining client?

Now. I don't mean to embarrass anyone here. But these questions show a fundamental misunderstanding with the entire atmosphere of StackExchange. There's no effort put into research. Question 1 isn't necessarily about Bitcoin. It's just an economics question. An economics question that can be easily answered by Googling things like intrinsic value and deflation. Question 2 is just a complete and blatant misunderstanding of how bitcoin as a protocol functions. And the answer to question 3 is "you don't". I mean honestly. If you come to any forum asking, "How do I make this thing? I've put no effort in at all. Just tell me." then you just shouldn't make the thing in question.
I'm not trying to be divisive. I just picked 3 random posts off of the front page from today. And if I come back in two months, I could probably find a very similar 3 posts again.

Preparing to be downvoted to oblivion.

"Preparing to be downvoted to oblivion." I think you must be confusing us with reddit. ;)

My opinion is that it's the nature of the topic. A bunch of people hear about it somewhere, think they can make a quick buck, then just try and slop their way there.

TL;DR: We have bad content because bad content isn't being culled and good content isn't being added. If you want to see better content, try sorting the front page by hot instead of active. If you want to help that we have better content: 1) Vote more, 2) flag more, 3) add interesting questions yourself.

I like your question actually. I'll try to give an encompassing answer, though, so I hope you don't mind if this will be a bit longer.

Why does BitcoinSE attract particularly low quality posts?

I don't think it does. All sites attract bad content. The question is what happens with it.
On an SE its community decides what is a good question or a bad question. And our mechanism to cull questions isn't working. On most SE, there are a bunch of active users. New questions quickly get some small touch-ups, and then some votes by the user-base. The front-page is very responsive to voting and edits. Except, on Bitcoin.SE we have very few people that edit questions or vote.
E.g. today is Friday (6th day in the week): I'm the only user that has more than five edits this week and I'm the only user that has voted more than 10 times this week. It looks slightly better when you look at the month: Four users have more than 5 edits, eleven users have voted 10 or more times.
However, it gets even worse if you think about this: Three of those 11 have not cast a single downvote, the others cast roughly five to fifteen upvotes per downvote. Nick and I are roughly at 3 to 1.
Ergo, the problem isn't that we attract bad content, but that it isn't being culled. As a moderator, I have two options. I can downvote (which I already do), or delete. I don't like to unilaterally delete content, so I only do that on real crap. Regular users have a bit of an "advantage" here, it takes several delete votes to remove content, so they can vote to delete at their heart's desire…
Often a single downvote will be enough! Questions that are more than 30 days old, have -1 score or worse and have no answers, get deleted automatically. If you want bad content to disappear more quickly, downvote more, and flag appropriately.

Now, this week is a bit of a special case, because I had been eradicating the tag "mining". Over the course of the last few months, I've edited more than a thousand questions to that end. I went through them mostly sorted by votes, so the last batch had a few really bad ones. I've downvoted (and even deleted) some of them when editing, but my edit still pushed them to the front.

So, SE is community run. If you want better content, it's in your power to help shape it.

This makes since. And I don't want you or Nick (or any of the moderators) to think I'm placing blame on you. I realise that it's community dependent, and the mods are only to regulate the community. I have flagged questions. But I feel like if I actually flagged every question that I thought was poor or anything else, it would end up making me look pretentious and probably give all of the mods a complex.

@KJO: It might take a few hours a day sometimes, but we do handle every flag we get! Usually, we follow the recommended action of the flagger (but not always). We just don't have time to look at all content ourselves, or even if we do, most things we do immediately take effect, so getting a cue from other users is much appreciated. So, if you want to try flagging some more, feel free. :)

I think it's worth noting that all three of those things were posts bumped during the Great Retagging. There's a correlation between a question being poorly tagged, and a question being poorly researched.

And the answer to question 3 is "you don't". I mean honestly. If you come to any forum asking, "How do I make this thing? I've put no effort in at all. Just tell me." then you just shouldn't make the thing in question.

I don't agree. Let's say that someone asks "I'm trying to build a jet aircraft. How do I do this?" The most helpful thing we can do is explain the enormous scope of the project they're undertaking, and suggest what fields of study the asker needs to understand before starting the project. Even if that's an unsatisfying answer, it's still useful.

Preparing to be downvoted to oblivion.

I hope that people don't downvote you. I don't think that your question is rude - it's how you feel, y'know? I think that you have some valid points. I'd like to see more technical questions on the frontpage too.
You're not powerless here, though. You have the power to shape the content of this SE by posting your own questions. I hope this SE becomes a place where you enjoy spending time.

I do enjoy spending time here. I come back once every few months because there are compelling questions asked in those time frames. But there aren't compelling questions asked on a daily basis. And that probably has more to do with size than anything else.
If I didn't enjoy this place, I wouldn't have posted on its Meta :)


text:
FYI: On the topic of the Monero StackExchange proposal:)
Just in case anyone is interested, the Monero StackExchange proposal is at the Commitment phase, and we'd appreciate and welcome any committers from the Bitcoin Stack:)
You may also note a number of new participants in the Bitcoin Stack. This is because one of the requirements of passing the commitment phase is that 100 of the committers have 200+ rep on another Stack. There has been a lot of discussion about this on IRC, and people have been linking to answers they've provided on the Bitcoin Stack, but we have been doing our best to prevent vote brigading and to encourage genuine participation.
Of course, some people have already realised that the fastest way to earn rep is to be the fastest to correctly answer a question, so you'll have to excuse us if we're trying to madly bash at the keyboard faster than everyone else here;)

I was on vacation while this happened, but what I've seen from going through the posts of the last month is that 25+ new accounts tripled total voting and doubled posts on the site for about two weeks.
The majority of those added votes went to other members of your group, and vote-brigading is an accurate description of what happened: You've by-passed our review process, completely ignored the culture of the site, and I'm afraid that most of those "new users genuinely participating" will not contribute a dot after reaching two hundred rep.
In the aftermath, we're left with a large number of posts that have upvote levels which usually only are reached by the best or most interesting content here – a few of which are great, while others are mediocre, duplicates, and off-topic. We're looking at about two or three weeks of clean-up work.
Until the Monero.SE gets up and running, feel free to add to our tag monero.

If you want the new users to hang around after they hit 200+ rep then give them reasons to, unless you want this place to end up as fractured and broken as the Bitcoin community on Reddit. Additionally, note that large swathes of the Monero community have been involved in Bitcoin for a significantly longer period of time than you, but were previously disinterested in StackExchange. Finally, it's in the interests of this Stack to build up a good relationship so that, in future, relevant questions are directed here.

Also I'd love some examples of answers that are "mediocre, duplicates, and off-topic", because in my examination I've only seen well-written, often quite long answers that are correct in the answer they give. In fact, the answers I've looked at from Monero community members have been significantly better in quality than most of the answers on this Stack.

Hello fluffyponyza, you're right, there were some good and a few great contributions there, too. But there also were a bunch of service review questions, some content that was completely unrelated to cryptocurrencies, and a lot of completely subjective topics, all of which is off-topic. Very few questions are tagged correctly (which usually happens during review). Very few posts would have gotten anywhere near as many upvotes organically as they did. I've invested hundreds of hours curating content on this site, you're in no position to call me an "entitled douchenozzle moderator".

Then the solution, given the circumstance, is to come up with a canned message you can send to all those that are flagged, encouraging them to remove their clustered votes and to instead participate on the site in a broader manner. That way you won't need to spend weeks doing clean-up, the users themselves will self-correct, and you can take action with those that have not. This reduces your moderation burden, and turns those mediocre participants into good participants.

I have some doubts that requesting people to change their past voting would have broad success, but the idea has some merit. Thank you by the way for helping us understand what was happening. I had been approached a few times since I've been back about weird upvotes, but hadn't discovered the pattern at that point yet.

@fluffyponyza The point of the normal review process is that new users are gradually onboarded, and learn the informal rules and etiquette that make the site run smoothly. If moderators are human exception handlers, what you're doing is the equivalent of On Error Resume Next. WRT fragmention: that's a very real concern. I'd like to move forward to a situation where we have a critical mass of users on the [tag:monero] tag. I don't know whether we can do that without the introduction of a new SE, but I certainly intend to try.

@murch Just found this thread. The Monero community likely has many users with a vested interest in the success of Bitcoin (probably more so than most alt coin communities). Clearly many people did build stackexchange reputation here, but I think they can be motivated to continue to participate in this Stack  going forward. We want the Monero and Bitcoin stacks exchange sites to remain on good terms.

@Murch as a follow up to my last comment I also posted on Reddit. I think  the Monero community will be willing to respond by becoming more active here. The great majority of us are Bitcoin users too https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/4xi25e/remaining_on_good_terms_with_bitcoin_se_if_you/

@GameChanger Thank you for reaching out. To be honest, I was a bit too annoyed when I wrote the post above. Especially since, a few people already pop up with some answers every once in a while that came in through the Monero beta. So, I guess in the end it's alright. :)


text:
Questions that should be directed to customer service of service providers should be off topic
Questions like these:
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/45969/lost-my-blockchain-wallet-id-and-my-email-account-has-been-hacked-i-do-not-have
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/45945/trouble-with-kraken-exchange
should be closed and marked as off-topic. However, there is no selectable off-topic reason for questions like these. The closest one is :
"Questions seeking product or service reviews are off-topic because they tend to attract subjective, low-quality, and spam answers. On the other hand, offerings in the Bitcoin space are still evolving rapidly which often renders answers outdated quickly"
Not sure how exactly it should be phrased but there should be a selectable off topic reason that states that questions that are better directed at customer service representatives of service providers should not be posted here.

The proper term would be "too localized." They are already off-topic, in my opinion, but no one is voting to close them.

I'd love to declare these types of posts as off-topic, but they are really not that much different than questions like "How do I set value X in wallet Y?".  When the problem is password/account recovery, then I agree they should be off-topic.  But when the problem is about how to use software, whether web based or app based, I feel they have a place here.

I agree with Jestin , and I think Murch a good solution that will not include "how to use" types of questions as off topic

That's a great suggestion.
How about:

Questions seeking help for restoring user accounts or other matters concerning your customer relationship with a company should be directed at the respective customer service.
  Please understand that we have no insights into such matters and therefore consider them as off-topic.

Improvement suggestions welcome. :)

This is now live.


text:
Redundant phrase on Tour page
The current description on the Tour page reads:

Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies is a question and answer site for cryptocurrency enthusiasts. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about Cryptocurrencies such as e.g. Bitcoin, Namecoin, Litecoin, Ripple, Zerocoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, and NXT.

[emphasis added]
One of the definitions of e.g. is "such as", so this phrase is redundant.
My vote is to drop the "e.g.". The description would then read:

Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies is a question and answer site for cryptocurrency enthusiasts. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Namecoin, Litecoin, Ripple, Zerocoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, and NXT.

I've deleted the extraneous "e.g.". Thanks!

Well spotted. I agree, dropping the e.g. would make sense.

Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies is a question and answer site for cryptocurrency enthusiasts. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Namecoin, Litecoin, Ripple, Zerocoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, and NXT.


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Engage the community with Topic Weeks? Suggest topics!
Here is an idea I've been toying around with for a while.
Topic Weeks.
The concept would be this:

Every week Once a month for a week, we select one tag
The tag wiki gets fleshed out in advance
The tag gets an introduction post on meta, requesting questions about tag
The introduction post is promoted on Bitcoin communities
At the end of the week we tally up the questions that got asked

The idea would be to focus on topics that are popular in the community but so far have gotten little attention on Bitcoin.SE. Via the promotion the questions would get more attention than usually and hopefully better answers. We'd help develop understanding in the community about the topic. We might attract a few new users and improve meta activity.
What are your thoughts on this? What topics do you think would do well?

related: How do weekly topic challenges work?

I like the idea. What are some ideas you have for future weekly topics?

@2quick4u: Don't know exactly yet. SegWit could be interesting with the upcoming 0.13.1. Mimblewimble would be nice to hear more about. I don't think it would be particularly hard to find a few topics, but the echo was rather lukewarm, especially since I had featured this question on the main site for almost a month.

I would be interested in learning more about mimblewimble. Unfortunately I do not know if the most "interesting" topics will always correlate with a large number of questions.  However even with low question volume the weekly focus would seem to increase the chances of high quality answers which was one of your goals

@2quick4u: It seems obvious that our taste would differ from that of the broader audience. It would be good to switch off with less arcane tags. – I'd love to have an accomplice for this. Would you be interested in collaborating to introduce this? Perhaps in parallel to Monero.SE and Bitcoin.SE?

I would love to collaborate on sometime. Let me think about how we can best mutually benefit from this and talk to the Monero SE community. Can I get back to you in a few days to discuss more specifics?

@2quick4u: Sure, I'm not going anywhere.

So, one topic that comes up on Reddit a lot lately is the lightning-network. There is some confusion about it, and some honest differences in opinion how it would work out.
We currently have 17 questions about it.
A lot of people have some sense of what it is, but I imagine that there are quite a few open questions.

We're got a lot of good ground covered on that tag, but we don't have a general intro/"What is lightning?" question

@NickODell: I'm on it: What is the Lightning Network proposal? What problem is it trying to solve?


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The transaction tag is too unspecific. Should we split it up?
transactions is on a huge number of questions. Transactions are such a central element of Bitcoin that it would make sense to better structure those questions. We had a similar issue with mining. Which was burninated earlier this year.
Would it make sense to split up transactions? Which existing and new tags would be valuable in replacing it?

Please propose one tag per answer, and add support by describing what topic it would collect. Please upvote answers that you find useful, and downvote tags that you don’t. Use comments on answers to discuss viability or edit the answers directly to improve them.
Once we have concluded this discussion, another post will follow to suggest how to implement it and what to watch for while retagging transactions.

coinbase-transaction
The "coinbase transaction" is the transaction inside a block that pays the miner his block reward.
Use this tag when asking questions referring only to the coinbase transaction.

transaction-malleability
A property of Bitcoin transactions that allows them to be replicated with another transaction id before they are included in a block.

confirmations
Confirmations correspond to the number of blocks that are dependent on a given transaction. This includes the block containing that transaction and all blocks after it in the blockchain. The more confirmations a transaction has, the more likely is it that it will remain in the blockchain permanently.
Use this tag instead of transactions when a question asks about the nature of confirmations, how transactions gain confirmations, or deals the number of confirmations a transaction has.

utxo
Unspent transaction outputs are created by transactions and allow the owner of an associated address to spent a specific amount.
Use when the topic is about spendable balances.

transaction-fees
Related to transaction fees in the Bitcoin network.
Use this tag when asking about how transaction fees work. For questions that ask about discovering the right amount of fees use fee-estimation. For questions that relate to the mechanics that drive fee levels use fee-market.

fee-estimation
Questions about deriving the right amount of fees to add to your transaction.
Use this tag when requesting guidance about implementing fee-estimation or asking questions about current approaches of fee-estimation.

multi-sig-transactions
With multi-signature transactions you can add up to 3 different bitcoin addresses as recipients. In order to be able to spend the funds, approval is required from a chosen number of those recipients.
Use this tag when inquiring about m-of-n transactions and other multisignature schemes.

We also have [tag:multi-sig] and [tag:multi-sig-address]. Perhaps those three tags could be combined to one tag?

raw-transaction
Raw transactions are bitcoin transactions that have been serialized for network transmission, or for use in Bitcoin Core's RPC interface.
Use this tag for questions about crafting your own transactions without relying on a wallet.

unconfirmed-transactions
Transactions that have not been included in a block yet.
The inevitable tag for stuck transactions, transactions that spend unconfirmed outputs, transactions without fees, and other lost brethren.

Not sure we need a tag for 0-confirmations and unconfirmed-transactions. Also, it might be good to put all these in that one larger answer and delete the individual answers.

@StephenM347: Zero-Confirmation deals with accepting transactions before they are confirmed for which a whole industry branch has sprung up, while unconfirmed transactions refers to stuck transactions. I'd say they have distinct focuses. Although I agree that we could merge quite a few of the almost 90 "unconfirmed-transactions" questions.

0-confirmation
Collects questions concerned with the practice of accepting transactions before they reach their first confirmation, i.e. "zero-confirmation".

transaction-verification
Refers to the process of checking the validity of transactions.

Sorry, I realized that the number of answers were exploding, so I'm rather collecting my remaining proposals here. For discussion feel free to add more answer posts.
transaction-selection – Questions about what criteria influence the selection of unconfirmed transactions for block inclusion.
transaction-id – The unique identifier of a transaction corresponding to the sha256d hash of the transaction.
non-standard-transaction – Transactions which deviate from the standard transactions created by BitcoinCore yet are valid. Non-standard transactions can have other redemption scripts than transactions to a public key, e.g. redeemable by password, multi-signature, any signature, checking external states, and more.
reverse-transaction – Questions relating to how particular transactions can be undone or replaced.
transaction-propagation – Questions about the manner, speed and incentives of relaying transactions in the Bitcoin network.
transaction-input – Questions about the mechanics of redeeming a UTXO in an input script.
offline-transactions – Questions about transmitting bitcoins without the wallet being connected to the Bitcoin network.
script – Within the context of Bitcoin, scripts are a set of instructions on how to complete a transaction. The default send/receive actions are scripts but the protocol can be extended through the creation of new scripts, such as the DNS replacement abilities of NameCoin.
output ← This still needs a wiki excerpt, perhaps should be merged into another tag.
mempool ← Needs a wiki excerpt.

non-standard transaction tag is somewhat vague. Does a standard transaction refer to a transaction that passes the IsStandard test in Core? Otherwise, a standard transaction is not properly defined as per the Bitcoin Specification.

@renlord: Yeah, I guess it is a tag that applies only to questions about general behavior of transactions that don't pass the "isStandard()". Maybe that's one to axe.


text:
What tag should we use for brick and mortar store payments?
We just had another inquiry about accepting payments in a physical store: How would a restaurant accept Bitcoin?
We have a few of them already:

What is necessary for a Hotel to accept Bitcoin as a payment method?
Is Bitcoin suitable for fast transactions, eg in shops?
How do I accept bitcoin payments at a real world store?
How do BTC payments work at real-world shops?

But they are hard to find because they don't have a common tag. What would be the best tag for payments in a brick and mortar store?

Keep it simple.

face-to-face

Covering all situations where two people meet in person and have a cryptocurrency transaction.

Thanks, I was thinking about a lot of different ways of putting it, but this one got me on the right track. I went with [tag:face-to-face-payment].


text:
Technology vs Business site category
Bitcoin is categorized as a business site
Monero and Ethereum are both categorized as technology sites
I can see the rational for both categories. How did Bitcoin compare the relative advantages of using one over the other?
I asked the same question in the Monero meta and am hoping an answer here can help guide us. Thank you!

No clue why it's "business", but it was even questioned already on Area51 in 2011.

Based on the prompting here and from the Bitcoin mods, we've gone ahead and changed the category to be Technology.  Not sure why it was categorized that way in the first place, but it's been updated.

Thanks for the help!


text:
Somebody is wrong on the internet…
I'm currently at Scaling Bitcoin in the "Scaling Community Workshop".
One of the points that has come up as a potential solution for improving online discourse is "Fact-Checking".
Do you think that Bitcoin.Stackexchange.com could be a good platform for this sort of information?
Discuss!

Fact checking on what exactly?

Evidence people are sourcing for their discussion contributions.

I think it's fine to ask questions like "Is it true that...?", if you want evidence to confirm or refute some claim.  But with the usual caveats:

Volume: Please try not to ask a gigantic number of questions in a short time.  Prioritize those that are of broad interest, or have unusual features that need specific expertise; don't just ask a question for every single thing that anyone says.
Justification: Give some explanation as to why the question is interesting, and/or who claimed it was true.
Research effort: Make a reasonable attempt to answer the question for yourself first.  If you don't find the answer, then you can ask here, but include a summary of what you already tried, to save time for potential answerers.  (If you do find the answer, then you could post a question with answer, if you think it is something that will be of interest to others.)
Standards: Try to make it clear what kind of evidence you would like answers to include.  An expert's opinion?  Blog posts?  Peer-reviewed articles?  References to source code?  This will avoid answerers being frustrated when they work hard on something that isn't what you were looking for.


text:
What is the meaning of the bitcore tag?
Is the bitcore tag supposed to be for questions about the Bitcore project?  It seems that some people use it (perhaps mistakenly) to talk about the unrelated Bitcoin Core software.
The bitcore tag currently has no description or wiki.  When we figure out what it means, it should get one (possibly including a "not to be confused with..." note).

bitcore means the software developed by BitPay.
Bitcoin Core questions should be tagged with bitcoin-core.

It seems that Nick also edited the tag summary to include that information.


text:
Monthly Topic Challenge – Propose and vote for topics here!
This is a quick way to expand the scope of the site and generate new questions and answers.
How it works: One topic will be designated each week starting Friday 0:00 and ending Thursday 23:59 (CET). The current topic is listed below.
How to enter:
In order to participate, simply ask a question about the topic and tag your question with the topic's tag.
The winning question will be determined by the amount of upvotes the question garners. In the case of a tie, view count will be used. Your question must not be closed and/or deleted in order to qualify. Your question must be asked within the promotion week.
This is all well and good, but what do I get from this? - Honestly, at the moment, nothing.  There are no prizes as we are a Beta site and do not have the financial backing of StackExchange at all for contests.  This is purely maintained by the moderators with user input as to what the topics should be.  That doesn't mean, however, that this is all for naught.  As stated, this is an effort to improve the traffic, visibility, and overall quality of the site.
Choosing the topic of the week: If you have suggestions for a future topic, please leave them as answers to this post. Topics must be trackable with a tag, meaning that specific events, software, proposals, services, concepts, and altcoins are encouraged. Basically anything that currently has a tag is probably fair game. Topics will be chosen based on either their timely and increased notoriety or to expand the Bitcoin.SE's content and scope.

Next topic:

TBD

Previous topics:

lightning-dev-kit 2023-01-04 – 2022-01-10 – No questions or answers posted
replace-by-fee 2022-12-08 – 2022-12-14 – Two questions asked, five answers received, 20+ posts edited
scalability 2016-12-02 – 2016-12-08 – No questions survived.
tumblebit 2016-11-25 – 2016-12-01 – One question asked!
version-bits 2016-11-18 – 2016-11-24: No questions asked!
mimblewimble 2016-11-11 – 2016-11-17: Two questions asked!
replace-by-fee 2016-11-04 – 2016-11-10: One question asked!
zcash 2016-10-28 – 2016-11-03: Three questions asked!
segregated-witness 2016-10-21 – 2016-10-27: Five questions asked!

[Credit to Brett White and Movies.SE from whose templates I have shamelessly copied.]

I really like asking zcash questions. Should I hold them back till next week? :-)

@5chdn: Well, since there is nothing to be won in the challenge except eternal glory, you really don't have to. ;) … but either way you could help by starting to add content to the tag-wiki. ;)

Maybe, changing this to a monthly topic challenge is a good idea as more questions about the chosen topic can be accumulated and the chosen topics are higher-quality as fewer have to be found.

@UTF-8: Monthly seems pretty long, but perhaps fortnightly would be better. However, I've discontinued posing new challenges of the week, because a) either the topics I've picked were not interesting, or b) the challenge is of little interest in general, and c) no additional topics were proposed. –– I.e. if you have some ideas, drop a note! :)

Segregated Witness will deliver the last prerequisite for beta versions of lightning-network to go live on the mainnet. Perhaps now would be a good time to ask and learn more about it.

zcash is launching on Oct-28, so I'm totally supporting the weekly challenge for Zcash for next week.

Yeah, that was my reason that I had put it directly on the list.

Yes good timing. I predict a lot of people with Zcash questions next week!

@2quick4u: Less than I thought. ;)

I'd be happy to try to answer lightning-development-kit questions as they arise.

By the way, how do I make something a link to a non-meta tag?

You can make a link using [tag:<tagname>]

Aiming to use this for the topic week in January 2023

Tumblebit seems to be an interesting concept that has gotten some attention since Scaling Bitcoin. It might make an interesting topic of the week.

The development of username/password-less accounts seem to be the next big thing in terms of account security, developers ease of integration, and end-user ease-of-use.
We should discuss this topic as a community to help further develop specifications, especially as related to Token Controlled Access (referred to as TCA).
I myself am working on a Bitcoin implementation, named Authparty at its core with the ability for Counterparty users to deploy custom identity tokens. This open source service acts as a broker, or passport, to TCA services base on one proof of address ownership.

Hey, thanks for proposing a topic. Could you please propose a tag for this challenge? I've also not seen this topic discussed lately, what makes you think it's the next big thing?


text:
Weekly Topic Challenge: Let's ask about Segregated Witness? [Finished]
Segregated Witness (BIP141, BIP 143, BIP 144, BIP145) is about to be released with Bitcoin Core v0.13.1.
Currently, we have 21 questions, and there has been a lot of discussion about SegWit already, but I'm sure that there are more questions to be answered.
Please use segregated-witness to tag your questions, and consider asking any questions about benefits, down-sides, implementation details, or whatever else you want to know about it.
This weekly topic challenge runs until 2016-10-27. Happy posting!

There were five questions asked about Segregated Witness during the challenge with a total of four answers:

Using segwit and creating Pay-To-Witness (P2WPKH) addresses – m1xolyd1an [+2]
How was the 95% miner adoption threshold determined? – 2quick 4u [+2]
How is the transaction's nVersion field changed with segregated witness? – StephenM347 [+2]
How do you tell if witness data has been tampered with? – Nick ODell [+5]
What new peer services do segregated witness nodes need to implement? – Nick ODell [+1]

Thanks for posting!


text:
Weekly Topic Challenge: Let's ask about Zcash‽
Zcash is about to be released today. It's a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency implementing the Zerocash scheme. It promises complete transactional confidentiality.
A bold claim, will it stand up to scrutiny? ;)
Currently, we have 5 questions, and surely the imminent launch will generate more this week.
Please use zcash to tag your questions, and consider asking any questions about development, launch, implementation, new vocabulary, security, mining, privacy properties, or whatever else you want to know about it.
This weekly topic challenge runs until 2016-11-03. Happy posting!

Challenge accepted!

Yay, interrobang. – I like it!

I was late to participate but just asked by 1st question

This week, three questions were asked about Zcash with a total of three answers:

Zcash proposal to use checkpoints to verify monetary supply – 2quick 4u [+2]
Is equihash/scrypt suitable for pooled mining? – fiction [+4]
How to generate a zcash vanity address? –   5chdn [+3]

Thanks for posting!


text:
Weekly Topic Challenge: Let's ask about Replace-by-Fee‽
Replace-by-Fee (RBF) is a flag that marks transactions as replaceable until they are confirmed.
Currently, we have eight questions about Replace-by-Fee, let's ask and learn!
Please use replace-by-fee to tag your questions, and consider asking any questions about behavior, effect, implementation, benefits, criticism, or whatever else you want to know about it.
This weekly topic challenge runs until 2016-11-10. Happy posting!

So far, one question has been asked about Replace-by-Fee:

What restrictions are there to the application of opt-in RBF?


text:
Weekly Topic Challenge: Let's ask about Mimblewimble‽
Mimblewimble has been bestowed on us by Tom Elvis Jedusor, and translated by Andrew Poelstra.
To me, it sounds like some marvelous stuff, and we definitely haven't covered it adequately here yet.
Currently, we have only one question about Mimblewimble, let's ask and learn!
Please use mimblewimble to tag your questions, and consider asking any questions about its scalability, script-affinity, privacy, footprint or whatever else you want to know about it.
This weekly topic challenge runs until 2016-11-17. Happy posting!

This week, two questions were asked about Mimblewimble with a total of one answer (perhaps you can add another?):

How does Mimblewimble's security model compare to Bitcoin's? – nate [+6]
How does MimbleWimble avoid transaction graph leaks? – Nick ODell [+5]

Thanks for posting!


text:
Weekly Topic Challenge: Let's ask about Version Bits (BIP9)‽
This week signaling for Segregated Witness will commence. The activation process for soft forks follows the rules set in BIP9: Version Bits.
There has been some confusion about the activation process, the exact date when signaling begins, and other details of BIP9.
Currently, we have seven questions about Version Bits, let's ask and learn!
Please use version-bits to tag your questions, and consider asking any questions about the activation process, the timeframe, what happens when multiple proposals are open, or whatever else you want to know about it.
This weekly topic challenge runs until 2016-11-24. Happy posting!

This week, no questions were asked about Version Bits. :(


text:
Weekly Topic Challenge: Let's ask about TumbleBit‽
TumbleBit is a second layer protocol that allows payment hubs to offer trustless anonymous payments to their users.
Currently, we have three questions about TumbleBit, let's ask and learn!
Please use tumblebit to tag your questions, and consider asking any questions about the anonymity promises, trustlessness, the Scaling Bitcoin presentation of Ethan and Leen, the TumbleBit paper, TumbleBits compatibility, implementation, or whatever else you want to know about it.
This weekly topic challenge runs until 2016-12-01. Happy posting!

This week, one question was asked about Tumblebit with a total of one answer:

Would it be visible that someone moved bitcoins to or from tumblebit? – urza.cc [+1]

Thanks for posting!


text:
Weekly Topic Challenge: Let's ask about Scalability‽
Scalability has been a hot topic in the Bitcoin community for some months, and we've got it covered somewhat already with 60 questions tagged on the site.
Please use scalability to tag your questions, and consider asking any questions about Bitcoin's capacity to grow, current scalability proposals, and scaling challenges.
Please also check out the previous work, add more answers where they are missing, improve content where it should be, and vote on what's there!
This weekly topic challenge runs until 2016-12-08. Happy posting!

There was one questions asked about scalability which was unfortunately put on hold for being unclear.


text:
Is Bitcoin.SE ever going to get out of beta?
It feels like Bitcoin.SE's been in beta forever considering Bitcoin itself is coming up 7 years old now. What's keeping this from launching out of beta? Even Blender.SE is out of beta.

What's keeping this from launching out of beta? http://meta.bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/708/why-is-bitcoin-se-still-in-beta

Thank you, somehow the search wasn't showing it. Must not have picked the right keywords


text:
Are the tags [hd-wallet] and [deterministic] different in scope?
The two tags hd-wallet and deterministic appear to be encompassing the same scope. Does it make sense to keep both, or should they be merged? If they are different, how?

They're describing different things. Deterministic wallets derive all keys from a seed. Hierarchical deterministic wallets derive subkeys from a seed, and generate subkeys from those. That allows you to share part of a wallet with someone else, which isn't possible with deterministic wallets.
All hd-wallet questions are deterministic questions, but not all deterministic questions are hd-wallet questions.

I get the feeling that the current tagging doesn't reflect this difference though. :/

Are there there currently any deterministic wallets that are not HD?  I thought those were something that died out when HD came along.


text:
Unconfirmed transaction? >> Read this! <<
If you're experiencing trouble getting your transaction to confirm, please read

Why is my transaction not getting confirmed and what can I do about it?

before asking a new question.
Thank you.


text:
Are questions specific to a potential BTU hard fork on topic?
There have been a lot of recent questions about a BTU hard fork, but many of them are really just about hard forks in general.  Should we encourage users to generalize these questions?

At the moment, I'd say that BTU is a central topic in the Bitcoin community, and especially due to much information/discussion about it being only available on Reddit, Twitter or private forums, not one easy to research.
I assume that quite a few people land here when researching Bitcoin Unlimited, and it's beneficial to have some of the information easily findable.
So, for the above reasons, and since we also cover altcoins here anyway, I'd leave it be at the moment. We can reconsider merging the Bitcoin Unlimited tag into hardfork if/when the topic cools down.


text:
Disclosure announcement: I've joined BitGo
I'm happy to announce that I've joined BitGo, Inc. as a software engineer. I don't think that this will influence my contributions here, but if the case should ever arise that a moderation task would present a conflict of interest I'll ask my moderator colleagues to take care of it.
Cheers,
Murch

Congratulations!

Congratulations indeed, BitGo is awesome!


text:
Should "hardware" only pertain to "mining hardware" or should this include payment kiosks?
In the spectrum of hardware that does, or could exist with Bitcoin, should hardware be an all encompassing tag, or should there be some kind of separation between

mining
hardware wallets / 2FA
merchant/payment kiosks

I didn't realize that was a tag. Kill it. Kill it with fire.
Retag hardware questions like so:

mining hardware becomes mining-hardware
hardware wallet becomes hardware-wallet
ATM becomes bitcoin-atm
Point of sales systems/kiosks become point-of-sale
"How much hardware do I need to run a Bitcoin node?" gets no hardware tag at all.

I've already started. Tag is gone.

for the fourth: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/point-of-sale? ;)


text:
Should we create a canonical question answer pair on how to buy bitcoins with credit cards?
Over the years we've got quite a bit spam on how to buy bitcoins with credit cards.
I'd like to have a more permanent solution in place instead of a clutter of different questions and answers, and this coming up every now and then, e.g. Buy bitcoins with my regular AMEX (american express card)
Suggestions:
1)
Should we have and maintain a list of services that allow such a thing in form of a canonical question and answer pair?
2) Should we close such questions as off-topic under the "product and service recommendation policy"?

The nearest we have to this (that I can easily find) is
How can I buy Bitcoin via a Credit Card or Paypal?
Problems:

The Q is horribly dated, it talks enthusiastically about MtGox and seeks answers for MtGox.
There are 28 answers. I have no idea whether the services mentioned in various answers are still useful or have gone out of business.

This question comes up so often (Can I get bitcoin with melli bank account) that it would be useful to have a canonical Q&A.
I'm very tempted to try and clean up How can I buy Bitcoin via a Credit Card or Paypal? to remove MtGox from the question and maybe superficially check some of the suggested sites in answers.


text:
Why does commenting on Bitcoin Beta Stack Exchange requires higher reputation?
Why does commenting on Bitcoin Beta Stack Exchange require higher reputation?
How does that help on SE on Bitcoin beta? Newbies' questions go unanswered and just merged to questions related prior to the questions without guide to refer to previous questions ..... and so forth?
Just asking, nothing to undermine admins or reputations superiority.
cheers

You don't need any reputation to write an answer, however, you do need reputation to add comments to posts. You can always post comments on your own posts or answers to one of your questions.
Comments are meant for transient information such as improvement suggestions, clarification, or minuscule information. This also means that comments will be removed when the relevant information was incorporated into the posts in order to declutter the Q&A. As such, the privilege to create comments is only extended to members of the Stack Exchange, whereas it is a privilege earned very early.
If you wish to answer questions, please post an answer.
If you have a new question, please create another topic. Should it be closely related to another topic, please link to the previous question if it helps to provide context and also explain why the linked question doesn't solve your problem.

In your specific case, you posted an answer requesting additional information from an asker. This answer was turned into a comment by a moderator as it wasn't answering the question but requesting clarification. However, the asker never returned to provide more information and the question was purged by the system after nine days of abandonment.
By purging abandoned content the system helps the site to improve signal-to-noise ratio and improve content quality. The creators of Stack Exchange explained their reasoning here: Optimizing For Pearls, Not Sand
To put it crudely, our site aims to provide rather a small number of great questions and answers that are relevant to many users than an endless stream of low-quality content relevant to few.
If you have specific ideas where we can improve our content, please feel free to provide input—we could definitely use more help.


text:
I've burninated a few tags, sorry for the mess on the frontpage
I've manually burninated the following tags:

control: Multiple topics, so I replaced it with governance, ownership, coin-control
speed: Multiple topics, replaced with hashrate, transaction-capacity, block-interval
support: Replaced with adoption, specific service name, or just removed.

And merged

export -> private-key-export
restore -> wallet-recovery
2fa -> two-factor-authentication


text:
Potential privacy breach due to question rate limit from IP addresses

You can only post once every 40 minutes.

I got this response from bitcoin forum while trying to ask a question, strangely I had not asked anything in last 40 minutes, In fact, that was my first question in the forum. I assumed someone from my IP, Perhaps my office might have asked a question in the same period. As I checked the newest questions in the forum there had been only one question for 40 minutes, It was by a user who has not revealed his identity. But now I have a clue about his IP and I went through the questions from his other SO profiles. Apparently, he is from my office. I did not try further to establish this fact. However, is this not a privacy breach?

Was this other post also on Bitcoin SE, or did he post on another site on StackExchange? In other words, is this a per-site ratelimit, or a ratelimit across the entire StackExchange network?

Other post was on Bitcoin SE.

No, I mean did your coworker post to Bitcoin SE, or to another StackExchange site?

That was on bitcoin SE.

This should probably be migrated to meta.se.

@DavidPostill Agree , asked the question there - https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/297568/potential-privacy-breach-due-to-question-rate-limit-from-ip-addresses

I'm voting to close this question as it has been asked on meta.stackexchange.com instead.


text:
How can we get Bitcoin to graduate?
Recently, I was asked about whether or not Bitcoin was ready to graduate, after looking at the site statistics it looks like it's ready, but there are some things holding the site back which I'd like to address.
When we review the health of a site, in terms of graduation, one of the first things we check is questions per day.  Over the past six months, Bitcoin has been at or above the 10 question per day average we want to see.

That means the site is generating the number of questions we want for a healthy site, but looking closer it doesn't appear that it could support graduating.
A few things happen when a site graduates, the privilege levels increase and a moderator election takes place.  At this time, I'm not sure Bitcoin could support either of these.
Raising the privilege levels means users will need more reputation in order to do things like access review queues, edit posts immediately, and cast close and reopen votes. The community currently has about 57 users with 2k+ reputation, of these users, only about half of them have been active on the site over the past 30 days. Not having enough users to help with keeping the site clean of the cruft means that it falls squarely on the shoulders of the few who remain and are active, which could be a large burden to bear.
In the past, we've learned that sites without a bigger middle class users suffer and cannot support elections.  We don't want to prematurely graduate Bitcoin only to have it not be able to succeed.
As a result, we are delaying the graduation of Bitcoin until there are more potential moderator candidates and voters.  We will review the site statistics every few so often to see if it can support graduation.  In the meantime, there are a few things that you, the active user base, can do to help move this along:

Encourage users to participate. Whether that means you invite knowledgeable people to join the site and contribute.  As I mentioned, Bitcoin is getting a lot of questions per day, and those questions are getting answered.  This site needs users who are invested and want to continue to contribute. If you see a good question that needs an answer, and you know someone who can answer it, encourage them to sign up or ask them to answer.
Vote. Voting is important because it helps users earn privileges, but please continue to vote on the basis of content. This is just a reminder that useful posts should be upvoted.

What else can we do to get this site ready to graduate?

I have no idea about what bitcoin is, but I saw the area51 proposal, and it is mostly either Excellent or Good in the stats there. I think it's already ready.

I have one idea: There are a bunch of tags for companies or projects which have a bunch of unanswered questions.
I'll be trying to reach out in the next few days to see whether any of those companies' support teams or project contributors would like to subscribe to these tags and start answering them.

Looking at "trezor" questions, seems that there are none. Either we have too little customers, or we make good products. :D Cannot decide which is more likely. humblebrag

@KarelBílek: Yeah, seems like most are answered. You can feel free to adopt another tag though. ;)

Oh, I searched by mistake on meta, not on the main site! That makes sense now

One of the issues the site faces is the lack of reviewers, demonstrated by the clogged First Posts queue, where posts only need a decision by 1 reviewer with 350+ reputation points.
Some sites tried promoting the participation in review by means of community ads... unfortunately those are not available for beta sites. But mentioning the review queues in some of the featured posts on meta (which appear here regularly) might help.

Thanks, mentioning it in featured meta posts was surprisingly effective. :)


text:
Hey! Welcome to new users, find us in chat if you have questions!
I've been seeing some new names popping up on answers. Welcome to Bitcoin.SE! Welcome back, if you're returning. :)
I've seen a few flags on obsolete comments, thanks for that as well.
If you need advice what to do about a post, e.g.

what tags to put on them
whether to edit, flag or close,
or generally would like to chat with others on the Bitcoin.SE,

feel free to join us in our chat room: mempool.
Cheers,
Murch


text:
Do we have a canonical question for "How to sell bitcoins?"?
After encountering yet another question about "How to sell bitcoins for fiat?" today (what things may I need to start withdrawal of bitcoins), I was looking for a canonical question akin to the corresponding
How do you obtain bitcoins? on side of "How do you buy bitcoins?". It seems strange that we don't have a canonical question for that yet.
I found:

How do I convert Bitcoin to cash at my bank via Mt. Gox?
Good way to sell Bitcoins online?
How can I sell bitcoins and transfer the funds to bank my account?
How to sell bitcoins for cash?
How can I withdraw my bitcoins from my blockchain wallet and convert them into cash?
Sell bitcoin for 0% fee
Do all Banks and Credit Unions in the U.S. accept Bitcoin?
Buying bitcoin is easy, but how do you get it back?

And about 70 unanswered, or closed as duplicate questions.
Am I missing a question that is more popular and has a great answer to that question? Otherwise, I'd suggest that we'd polish and promote the third (emphasized) question to consolidate all the answers of the duplicates there.

Since I didn't get any feedback in ten days, I went ahead and merged a few questions into the proposed. I've linked a few more, so that the proposed canonical question should be very easy to find.
I would appreciate if more people take a look at the question in order to help prioritize the useful answers and/or provide additional answers.

How can I sell bitcoins and transfer the funds to bank my account?


text:
Any plans for bitcoin documentation?
I am new to this site and wanted to get some knowledge about bitcoins and was wondering if there is any plan for a wiki for this website? just like there is one on stackoverflow.

welcome to Bitcoin.Stackexchange.com.
I'm not familiar with the "wiki on Stackoverflow". Are you referring to the tag wikis? On Bitcoin.SE, there are a few tag wikis, but unfortunately, at this time the community of the Bitcoin Stackexchange is probably not numerous enough to broadly fill those quickly.
You can find a lot of technical information in the Bitcoin developer reference, and there is a (terribly outdated!) on bitcoin.it.

Hi, i was talking about the documentation that is available on stackoverflow for different technologies. That is really really helpful for new users.

@viCky: Could you link me to an example? I'm puzzled.

sure: https://stackoverflow.com/documentation

I wouldn't mind an example either.  I'm not sure what you are talking about.

@viCky: I'm afraid this is the first time I hear about this, and we've not been notified of pending changes like that to our site. Since it is labeled "beta" on Stackoverflow, I would presume that it is still being tried out, before it will be evaluated further and perhaps rolled out to other stackexchange sites.

Great. Thanks for your time. I hope we soon get documents on all websites.

This won't happen, at least not in the near future. Yesterday, Stack Overflow (the company) has announced that they will phase out Stack Overflow Documentation. So it's highly unlikely it's coming to Bitcoin Stack Exchange.


text:
What do we do with answers consisting of dead links?
Today, I answered a question about altcoin price charts from 2011. Most of the original answers were outdated, of course. Four answers contained broken links, and given the nature of the question, the links were the only relevant information.
I was going to comment 'deceased link' four times (because 'dead link' is too short), but is that useful? Should a moderator delete outdated answers?

Should a moderator delete outdated answers?

Yep. Done.


text:
Please help on First Post Reviews
Good news! We have lots of new users asking questions on Bitcoin.Stackexchange.com.
However, that means that we currently get about 20-30 new reviews every day. Especially, Badr Bellaj, Jestin, and Andrew Chow have been a great help this past month. I'm also trying to do at least ten reviews per day, yet our queues still grow faster than we work through them.
My goal is to help Bitcoin.SE to graduate from the Beta. To that end, I'm striving to attract a few more regular users which seems more likely to happen if we provide a good first impression by quickly addressing their posts. We could use your help! Even one review per day would be splendid!
Especially on the First Post queue please check:

if the title describes the topic
the tags fit the question
for duplicates

Please also feel free to vote early and often, including downvoting bad questions. Upvoting and downvoting increases/decreases visibility of content on our landing page. Bad questions are cleaned automatically after a while.
Thank you for your help!


text:
Influx of Trezor questions
TL;DR:
Please mark Trezor's "customer support" questions as off-topic. We don't care whether packages have been sent, how to apply for a refund or whom to talk to regarding faulty hardware.
Please help provide canonical answers to topics of more general interest such as hierarchical deterministic key derivation, how wallets/addresses/transactions work, or how to recover coins sent to an address of another currency. As usually, please close as duplicates if a new question already has a comprehensive answer on our site.

We've been having a huge influx of Trezor related questions lately. Some of them are interesting, a bunch of them off-topic unfortunately. I would like to explain how that came to pass, how we can perhaps improve the situation.
As you may have read already, I'm trying to push for more users on Bitcoin.SE in order to get the site to graduate. I've been spurred to do that because 1. I think that Bitcoin.SE has the potential to be the go-to Q&A site for cryptocurrencies, 2. a SE site can disencumber experts by being much more time effective in providing easily retrievable information, 3. Ethereum recently graduated and I'd like us to follow suit, and because 4. it's frustrating to me that I'm doing about 350+ reviews per month and we still have a backlog— I'm hoping a bigger active community would help with that.
To that end, I've been trying to get in touch with a number of people from the Bitcoin community suggesting that they take ownership of tags related to their project. My idea here is that we don't need the experts necessarily to maintain the site, but that answers provided by them  on their topics specifically will make the site more valuable to users that have more time to do the maintenance work, and the community in general.
Anyway, I had been chatting a bit with a developer from Trezor. I showed him that there were a few unanswered questions about Trezor on our site, pointing out that they could perhaps have a look.
As Bitcoin.StackExchange.com shows up pretty early in search results (other than reddit where they answer community questions) I told him that it would probably be beneficial to them and the Bitcoin community if they wrote some good answers to the Trezor questions here.
Obviously, we were in agreement that the Bitcoin.SE community has no insight into customer support topics, and that only technical questions were on topic. What I meant was, HD key derivation, questions about the security, or perhaps about the open source software they are using. What might not have been completely clear is whether questions such as how to recover a wallet or how to use certain features of the Trezor would be on-topic. I think they could be, but it would help a lot if some Trezor experts came in to provide the respective answers, so that we could close duplicates towards these canonical Q&A pairs. Generally, we can only answer questions that aim for public knowledge.
So, what I thought was that we would be handling questions about Trezor much like we will answer questions about e.g. Bitcoin Core, Blockchain.info, Coinbase, MultiBit, or Mycelium when they come up.
Anyway, apparently someone from Trezor linked to Bitcoin.SE with the link titled "Ask the Experts". I'm trying to get in touch with them about better communicating that their customer support questions will not get an answer here, but so far I've been unable to reach my contact again.

I understand your frustration. We don't have the capacity to educate people what kind of questions should be asked on which forum (they are not really good at reading text tbh), therefore we removed the Bitcoin.SE link from our site completely.

@PavolRusnak: Thank you for your understanding.

I am the contact from Trezor team you mention in the text.
Just to offer an explanation:

Right now, we have a huge influx of new users, overwhelming our user support.
I noticed this post, which lead me to think it would be a good idea to link the users from our support page to Stack Exchange:

it would ease the load for our user support
it would move the questions to more easily discoverable place
our user support team could answer the questions, since they would have more time for it
it would make this SE more active

It seemed like a win-win for both us and this SE
However, linking of this site to the user support page did not significantly eased the load to our user support, so we couldn't spend the time answering question, plus it flooded this SE with crap questions

So the experiment turned out badly. I will still try to help with Trezor questions when I have time, but we really can't help with our customer support right now, sorry.

Yeah, sorry about how it turned out. Maybe we can try again later, when we're both better prepared for it. :) I assume that there are currently lots of people getting Hardware wallets because of the BS debate?

I am not entirely sure why, but there is a lot of new people buying HW wallets, which started with the recent price rally but never stopped after the rally stopped. The people asking question are usually people that have no clue about the BS debate, they are confused by even the facts that the bitcoin price actually moves up/down, etc.

Some of the popular newbie guides must be advising to get a hardware wallet or something.