Quote from: LoyceV on Today at 09:11:49 AM

Quote from: dkbit98 on January 01, 2024, 09:28:02 PM

I am not even sure most of the people would enjoy non-censored bitcointalk forum, and they wouldn't like to live in world without any censorship, it's just a pipe dream.

I think it doesn't scale well. Spammers will be unlimited, and even if there's a system in place to vote out spammers, new users will never get through if spammers create millions of new accounts per day. If you accept users on invite-only basis, new users have the same problem.

I disbelieve in this. As I said in my post, moderation in line with rules that are governed in a decentralized way will enable a clean, compliant and censorship-free forum. There is a difference between following rules and censoring the right to freedom of speech. If there was no difference, then we are censoring all discussion not related to the boards that are within this forum. I believe mixing censorship, spam prevention and rule compliance is not the way to look at things if decentralizing bitcointalk becomes a goal.

Quote from: LoyceV on Today at 09:11:49 AM

Quote from: joker_josue on January 01, 2024, 09:56:22 PM

And I'm not even going to talk about hosting... because in the end there always has to be someone behind the scenes managing the server.

A truely decentralized forum won't have any centralized hosting. There could be nodes, but each user would keep their own copy, and broadcast it to other users like bittorrent.

The method you're talking about reminds me of zeronet, an outdated solution. Bittorrent also dated and not a viable way to run a forum in a decentralized way. There are modern solutions out there in web3, and while using those technologies might not be in line with Bitcoin, one could argue that a centralized forum isn't either (if anything, it's worse than employing non-bitcoin technologies).

Quote from: LoyceV on Today at 09:11:49 AM

Quote from: BlackHatCoiner on January 03, 2024, 08:59:10 PM

- There has never been a truly decentralized protocol where each user can have equal voting power.

Bitcoin tried, by basing voting power on CPU power. That didn't last very long. And even if there would be a magical protocol that gives one human one vote, votes would simply get sold.

Votes or governance being sold is unfortunately, a part of life. If people care about the forum, they will not sell their voting power. If people were incentivized to keep their power, they will. There are solutions to prevent power being sold. In addition, if forum governance is value (which it inevitably would be since we're talking about bitcointalk here, the biggest bitcoin forum there is) then the appreciation of that value is an incentive in itself to keep governance power.

I don't think many would sell all of their governance power, especially since it represents the forum which Satoshi himself resided on.

Quote from: LoyceV on Today at 09:11:49 AM

Quote from: cryptosize on January 03, 2024, 10:51:04 PM

I'm afraid you don't understand the fact that a forum has WAY MORE traffic compared to a decentralized payment system exchanging a few numbers here and there.

So no, it's not going to be more lightweight, quite the contrary!

After the IFD (Initial Forum Download), all each user needs to do is download all new posts. That's currently only 4 posts per minute. And each user (on average) will have to upload each post to another user (in a decentralized way, like bittorrent). That's actually the beauty of a decentralized system: bandwidth scales very well. If one person shares 1 GB on a server, each download consumes 1 GB bandwidth. But if he shares the same file through bittorrent, he doesn't have to spend much bandwidth anymore because every downloader starts uploading too.

I think you're analyzing too hard. At least in my view, beating the current centralized SMF forum and adding decentralized components that removes liability from administration, enables accessibility for all, creates decentralized governance, while delivering content efficiently, are some of the goals that would prove more viable than "complete decentralization that is even better than Bitcoin". We don't need to beat Bitcoin's decentralization to do better than the current structure, in fact it's probably best not to look at it this way for the sake of keeping the forum as usable as it currently is.