But copies of the forum already exist! He gave the example of the TryNinja website,
that's not a very user friendly webiste.
and even LoyceV does the same.
only thing i see on Loyce.club is various links to statistics about the forum but not the actual forum. loyce seems all about statistics. but those are some crazy statistics. people who are members on this forum, loyce is going to have so much data on them that he can pin down exactly where they live at some point!
if you thought bitcoin wasn't anonymous then thank's to loyce's various statistics he can tell you anything about anyone. scary world we live in!
And I think anyone can do the same. I remember seeing that someone had a mirror forum, where it was visually the same but you couldn't post.
that's the one thing i haven't seen. a backup read only copy of the forum.
I believe the OP meant the "decentralized storage" as a backup solution, not as an actual proposal to move Bitcointalk entirely to a decentralized platform.
yes as a backup from which the original forum could be reconstructed if the main site ever went missing in action.
But even if this was the case, there were already models for on-chain stored "forums" or "social media" that worked. I had discussed that here on the Meta subforum in this thread (
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5481514.msg64087445#msg64087445). In my case I have had a bit of experiences with Steem(it) (
https://steemit.com), and it worked reasonably well. Of course it has centralization problems but these are not directly related to the fact that it's stored on a blockchain.
In the case Bitcointalk is moved to a Steemit-like platform completely, viewing content and also posting could be provided by independent websites which access the blockchain with a full node. The software needed is a combination of a block explorer (to view the content) and an online wallet (to post yourself). Every forum user would need to create at least one account/address/key pair for the blockchain to post, but that can be hidden (so in fact all what you have to do is to "register" on one of the "node websites"). As Steemit showed, there were basically no differences in reaction time and availability to a centralized forum. The node websites could run ads and sponsor the transaction fees for posting, like it occurred on Steemit basically (although there the model was a bit more complex).
the should be trying to move bitcointalk to a steemit-like platform so that continuity is transparent and it has some degree of decentraliztion. i guess though some people go by the "if it aint broke then don't fix it" methodology. but that can end up being challenged if something happens like a site gets hacked and usernames/logins get compromised.
i dont think there's much more to discuss at the moment about this topic since i think another thread also touched on this issue. but centralized forums are not ideal. even something like reddit, they are centralized. they will need to move to blockchain eventually or be overtaken.