Quote from: ottodv on June 05, 2011, 03:36:20 PM

This community will be doomed if it doesn't welcome newcomers. How else can a community grow?
Newcomers don't know all and ask questions, what's the problem?

There's been discussion on maintaining the minting of new Bitcoins before, there will be in the future.

As I understand it if the largest mining pools decided together to continue to mint 50 new BTC beyond 2012, there isn't much the non-mining bitcoin community can do to stop them. Correct me if I am wrong.

(Not that I want that to happen btw)

We welcome noobs whole heartedly. How would we expect bitcoin to become a global economy if we didn't want as many new people as we could get?

The issue WE as a community are having, however, is twofold:

1) The lack of research that goes into a post like this. MANY MANY of these posts are about issues that have been discussed ad nauseam before.
2) The posts are worded from a condescending stance, in which the original poster KNOWS the flaw is there, and the entire community of people who have been here for two years is too stupid to have seen it. It's also accompanied by ad hominem attacks on the people ("only an idiot couldn't see this", etc.)

Compounding both of these issues is a general pattern of poor communication skills, both in portraying their opinion (this thread, for example) and in comprehending the rebuttles that the community has offered. THIS is the kind of new community member that we find frustrating, because some of us have been dealing with it for 2 years now.

For comparison, see how the original post of this thread could have been worded:

Quote

I just found out about bitcoin, and I realize this has probably already been brought up before, but as I understand it competition between miners for transaction fees could create an issue for sustainability. Miners with lower profit margins could allow lower-fee transactions, and the majority of people would be willing to accept this in return for a slightly longer confirmation time. Can someone point me to some previous discussion on this, or maybe explain how the system deals with this? If this is really the case, It seems to me that a viable solution would be to continue to incentivize miners with bitcoin generation. What potential pitfalls would this have?

The community would have reacted MUCH better to this kind of post, pointing out that there's no inherent competition between miners for transactions: A transaction can be worked on by multiple miners at once, and as a miner, lowering your transaction fee doesn't bring you any benefit: It doesn't "bring you more customers" than other miners, and it doesn't make the block easier to solve. Instead, we saw someone with very little understanding of the bitcoin system approaching us with an arrogant, flippant attitude (either intentionally or unintentionally). The same kind of reaction happens in mathematics, a well known one being the problem of trisecting the angle, the millenium problems, or perpetual motion. Many people who are introduced to the problem automatically assume they have a clever way of circumventing it, not realizing that for thousands of years people who are very likely much smarter than them have worked tirelessly on these problems, and it'll take a bit more effort on their part to make any true progress (if any progress at all is possible).