Nestled amongst the chatter of online bitcoin tribes abound, one camp has made a clear statement that they are determined to rally us together in a meeting of titans involving that digital currency we’ve come to know and love. With the announcement on reddit yesterday, came the confirmation of a MASSIVE list of speakers for us to engage with, I for one am excited to see what lies ahead for us as we dial into these Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions, to be hosted on Bitcoin.com. Let’s dive right in:
Background: Bitcoin.com
Thought the original acquisition of the site is confusing? If you take a gander at the trusty internet archive, you can see that the domain was initially bought and used as a forwarding domain to someone who went out of business around mid 2000s. Then, around July 2009 an update shows a simple looking stock webpage that seems to adequately describe bitcoin! It remains this way for a very long time, until September 7th, 2011 – with which it has been sold out to become an email marketing list funnel for Tradehill.
Skip through to January 2013 and it does this funny trick – The domain redirects to bitcoin.co, but then that fails and it redirects again to bitcoin.org, which, in a funny manner looks super weird compared to today, (that’s another story; QT 0.7.2 for you software nostalgia nuts out there). So I scroll through and eventually get to September 2013, which was the screen I remember seeing when verifying the distinction of that site and it existing:
From there, continued a flurry of updates to the site over every few months. Some of those updates caused backlash among some, ridiculing the look and feel, claiming that the site looked ‘scammy’. Though, within perhaps 3 weeks (from my direct observations), they updated the look of the site to a reasonable improvement.
When I saw the latest changes to their homepage (not expecting them), admittedly i was impressed by those Homepage sliders. Great job, it looks crisp! I really like the parallax effect with the combination of the moving background – feels like a living sort of portal. I almost wish they could incorporate that into an unobtrusive mechanism while reading and browsing throughout the forum. Which brings me to my next topic:
Their Forum
There’s supposed to be an AMA – so there’s a forum, no surprise there. Though I’m curious as to what the format is or how it will be proposed. The issue I see (that others on reddit point out as well), is how do you consistently present the best or community awarded (colloquially like or upvote). As of right now there are 1408 users with me included – the initial announcement certainly bumped the figures; I registered after the announcement 😆
Mildly interesting, is the trashcan folder which gives the public the ability to see removed posts that have been rejected and sent off to the spam folder. Beyond that, let’s dive into the forum pages themselves…but first, I went into the markets page. May as well promote my current fundraiser and try out posting a my 1st topic ever in the same go – wh wu what’s this???:
Forum rules
If you post an offering in this forum, and are using an ID that previously was in use on BitcoinTalk, you MUST digitally sign a message on both venues verifying your identity as being the same.If you are unable, or unwilling to do this, you may still use this forum, but you must choose a unique user name.
Please post your verification in https://forum.bitcoin.com/the-suggestion-box/signed-message-verification-t440.html?hilit=signature.
Well that’s a ridiculously level hard mode. [/sarcasm] Okay let’s see: done. Looking at the tools they’ve got at the ready:
Take note, those 7 buttons on the right but to the left of the emojis – I had to mouse over them to read their features but, yes, that orange link is a SoundCloud embeddable snippet – meaning direct built-in letstalkbitcoin podcasting! Also had cool stuff like hidden text from guests, spoiler alert text that remains hidden until hovered over with a mouse pointer. The sad thing will be that many of these features will be ignored or left out by users by the pareto principle – but should not be!
Well now that I’ve gotten my thread listed, so now that we’ve given the site a test-drive, let’s go on ahead and discuss the speculation and review the speaker list. There are two months worth of prospective AMAs listed there to pour through and the first eye-sore that sticks out to me is the overwhelming number of CEOs doing AMAS, 35 of the 57 total speakers to be precise (as of 10/28/2015). Taking a closer look we also observe many mining pool operators and exchange personnel participating in the event. Why is this a big deal? Well, these are CEOs and Mining pool operators and Exchange operators. Together they all have a better collective bargaining position if arguing viewpoints that align with their interests at the expense of ours. How, might you ask? Is it any coincidence that many of the same companies are involved with the Blockchain Alliance Project? Though internal collusion these companies can potentially fleece us in favor of preferential treatment from the Government and we would have no clue as they are considered collaborators through this initiative. Finally, these different speakers are leaders, speakers, persons who went through great efforts to persuade others at one point in their career. With regard to the mining operators, they literally hold Bitcoin’s ability to process transactions and while it is vital that we need their equipment to run and expertise to keep it running, Is it unreasonable to question that perhaps they would be driven by their own motives to ‘further the bottom line in the pursuit of more profit’? Now, I’m not trying to engage us in paranoia or tin foil hattery, I’m just expressing my concerns based on the prospective list (which appears more like a dump of Angel.co) For instance, I would appreciate AMAs from personalities such as: Jason King, Moe Levine, Martti Malmi, MK_Lords, Jerry AKA EndWorldSuck (I love that guy, wished he didn’t leave), {Midnightmagic, nkutter, or even phantomcircuit > these guys are there on IRC nearly everyday} – those are the true unsung heroes I’d like us to all listen to. Finally, I’d like SmokesTooMuch of Bitcointalk to do an AMA, he is the first person ever to suggest publicly to do GPU mining (and he’s still around!)
Some of my picks to be on the lookout for include:
I found those different projects to be interesting while also not well known. This was not meant to take away from anyone who I didn’t reference, it may be perhaps that I have already heard of your organization or that I looked into your organization and saw that it was a typical BTC fee based company such as an exchange or Mining operation. Again, DON’T GET OFFENDED! Two prominent names not present that I would like to hear speak and ask questions to are: John Mcafee and also Sir Richard Branson. I have already reached them for comment, urging that they participate with us. Were there other heavy hitters not listed that I should also consider reaching out to? Two more names that come to mind include Nick Szabo and also Paul Vernon (also known as BigVern of Cryptsy). {those four people are wish-list picks and I would presume they are too busy to be bothered, though they SHOULD make time to join us.} Or, if you are offended, discuss why below in the comments – let’s hash this out! Remember to Join us again on November 2nd to kick off the largest Bitcoin AMA in history.
