Quote from: LoyceV on October 30, 2024, 07:32:32 AM

Especially the part where he uses the word "regulatory" got me thinking. The forum's mission is to be as free as possible. That includes allowing people to hunt scammers, but it makes it very difficult for new users to have the freedom to do business here.

Probably this is getting (way) too off-topic here, but, yeah... I do like a lot of the points made by eddie13 in that post.

I (personally) place freedom above just about any other concern, so the forum's mission to reach for that ideal (within reason) resonates with me. I very much like the idea of a forum that can tolerate (and even encourage) the existence of many different attitudes about things. I really don't much like the idea of users settling their ideological differences by trying to "punish" one another. For example, Foxpup and BayAreaCoins evidently disagree on what constitutes appropriate use of testnet coins, but that's seriously not the kind of disagreement that should've spilled over onto BayAreaCoins' trust page. When I'm deciding on whether or not it's safe to transact directly with someone, I really don't need to know that their view on testnet coins is completely at odds with Foxpup's (and probably at odds with nearly every other technically-minded user, too, but that's not germane).

I like the point you're making about freedom cutting both ways: the freedom for people to do what they want, and the freedom for others to condemn them for it. What I don't think Bitcointalk does very well at the moment is provide an equally-hospitable home for both groups (I mean, the pro-police side has clearly found a foothold, and the other side is just hobbling along in the shadow of the first). It makes me think that maybe there should be a "wild west" mode that lets people opt-out of the trust system altogether (as in, allow users to fly completely blind: no trust feedback, no trust flags, no trust warnings). If that mode were available (even if it was a permanent account-wise choice), I'd likely go for it myself: I don't really care for all the forum-cop bullshit that I see, and I identify much more strongly with the set of users that have a live-and-let-live philosophy and that are comfortable taking their safety into their own hands (and, if I had the ability, at creation time, to mark my own topics such that they'd only be available to members from "my" side, then I'd occasionally do that, too: if a scaredy-cat user wants to see all of my stuff, then they'll need to don their big-boy pants and switch sides).

It'd be kind of cool to see how a lightly-moderated Bitcoin community without any reputational "weapons" would develop (I have to imagine that more people would try more things, both good and bad, probably like it was in the very early days). The nice thing about an environment like that (internally, at least; the pro-police side wouldn't be affected) is that the emphasis would have to shift from tagging/flagging (which would no longer be possible) to teaching (as in, user-to-user sharing of the techniques necessary to operate safely within a dangerous environment).