Crypto

[Poetlister]

Almost a decade after the introduction of Bitcoin, there is a lot of hype about the blockchain technology on which cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are based. Some claim the technology will revolutionise commerce; others are more critical in their predictions. But the technology behind blockchain remains a mystery to many people.

A blockchain is a decentralised, distributed and open public ledger made up of a sequence of “blocks” that are “chained” via a cryptographic hash. If that still sounds like gibberish to you, there is a popular application that shares the philosophy of the blockchain technology that can help you understand how it works: Wikipedia.

The Conversation

[Poetlister]

It is evident the ongoing spat between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash supporters is escalating. While Bitcoin Cash is a successful altcoin, it cannot be officially labeled as the actual Bitcoin. Political differences aside, Bitcoin is still Bitcoin, whereas Bitcoin Cash is a forked currency off of that project. That doesn’t make BCH less legitimate by any means, but calling it the “original Bitcoin” has always been controversial.

There is another development taking place as far as this discussion is concerned. Recent activity on Bitcoin’s Wikipedia page indicates an attempt to remove one of the block explorers linked to on the page. That is always a controversial decision, even though it seems to make a lot of sense. Said block explorer is associated with Bitcoin Cash, and not Bitcoin itself. This is a direct result of the “Bitcoin Cash is the real Bitcoin” mindset, but it also creates a lot of confusion.

Merkle

[Poetlister]

Bitcoin.com has been delisted as a relevant site on the Wikipedia bitcoin page. The move is unlikely to have been carried out by Wikipedia staff - editing is usually carried out by community members, and it is likely that the change is related to the ongoing disagreement between the supporters of each side of last year’s Bitcoin hard fork.

Cryptoglobe.com

[Poetlister]

The largest digital multilingual free-content information platform Wikipedia has updated its policy to add digital currency to the section titled conflict of interest. It states that the conflict of interest may arise, among other things, when a crypto trader edits a page devoted to this financial technology.

“Any external relationship—personal, religious, political, academic, legal, or financial (including holding a cryptocurrency)—can trigger a COI. How close the relationship needs to be before it becomes a concern on Wikipedia is governed by common sense. For example, an article about a band should not be written by the band’s manager, and a biography should not be an autobiography or written by the subject’s spouse,” the latest policy update says.

Being a logically justified statement, it also contains a paradox. There is no surprise that people, who own and trade it on the cryptocurrency market, have a better knowledge of the fintech trends. Furthermore, it is ridiculous to talk about biased attitude in the cases of bitcoin, ethereum, or litecoin. Nevertheless, the new update seems useful while considering small virtual coins like stellar and verge, as biases can directly affect people’s opinions.

Coinidol.com

[MadManz]

From what I've seen, most of Wikipedia is extremely anti-Bitcoin and even more anti-Bitcoin Cash. Basically anyone that isn't against both is called a cultist. Lol

[Poetlister]

To be fair, they're in good company, Warren Buffet has had some harsh things to say.

[Bezdomni]

Here is a recent article about how all edits to Baidu Baike are apparently going to be made traceable through the use of blockchain versioning. As this is apparently already to a large degree finished, they will have stolen Everipedia's thunder.

The article leads to another about a Baidu knock-off of Cryptokitties called Leci Gou.

SJ (former WMF trustee) recently interviewed Dieter Shirley (CEO) & Alex Shih (CFO) about Cryptokitties (an Axiom Zen project) at the Berkman-Klein Center. Maybe Alex Shih will comment about the inspiration the Chinese seem to be taking from the project.

[Bezdomni]

I hope you'll pardon me for bumping this thread which Poetlister buried as soon as it was posted with his motherlode of "Wikipedia in the News" stories.

As it turns out, apparently, Cryptokitties has gone catatonic. Perhaps a patent lawsuit will be the only way for the investors to recover their outlays?

[Midsize Jake]

Maybe I'm not understanding this correctly, but if they're encrypting the revisions, that means they've implemented a setup whereby only people who have the necessary token and/or passphrase get to see the revision histories, right? And since it's China, we can probably assume that the people entrusted with those keys are all working for the Chinese government in some capacity?

Based on the article(s) it looks like we don't yet know if the tokens are global (i.e., the same key unlocks everything) or specific to particular articles or classes thereof... or have I missed it?

Also, this sort of thing makes me wonder if Wikipediocracy itself would be more successful if we changed it from just "Wikipedia criticism" to "Wikipedia criticism now featuring Blockchain technology!"

[Bezdomni]

Yes, such traceability doesn't sound all that benign wherever there are 50 cent brigades. At least outside of China, such brigades don't appear to lead anyone dissenting to the workcamps.

With regard to Blockchain, I just report on the Berkman-Klein luncheon series from time to time... (last time was admittedly when K. Maher was there).

[Midsize Jake]

Well... at the risk of offending any pro-government readers we might have in China (which I suspect is a vanishingly low number), it's hard for me to come to any conclusion here other than that they're going to hide the revision histories from pretty much everybody - and then say they're doing it to "protect the identities of editors," when in fact the real purpose is to prevent anyone from knowing that a particular revision (i.e., the current one) was put there by the government itself.

I guess I was just curious as to whether they're going to do it for all the articles or just the ones they care about. As for my previous question about global vs. limited (article-specific) decryption keys, my guess is they'll have both, and that non-government users can earn "trusted status" after a while and be given limited keys as long as the article(s) in question aren't important enough for the government to lock them down completely.

It's also important to note that they're not doing this on a new, empty wiki site, as they've already got millions of articles and most of the subjects that the general population would care about are already fleshed out. I don't think you could do this on an empty wiki and have anyone stick around for more than a couple of weeks - if you can't at least make an educated guess as to a rival user's (or disputant's) possible agenda, much less whether or not that user is "established," it would just be waaay too frustrating. (And in a country that monitors and controls internet activity as much as China does, I assume it would also be too scary, at least for subjects the government might actually be interested in.)

[Dysklyver]

I think Everipedia has taken way to long to deliver on their promises, indeed I predict that they have died before even getting started.

At some point the world went nuts and now copies Willy on Wheels. Only the wheels have been reinvented and are now encrypted blocks that cause rampant global warming through needing more power than a small city to make.

Perhaps it's obvious I don't like the blockchain, but then Global Warming is good, so maybe. But regardless, I just see:

Everipedia = Wikipedia ON THE BLOCKCHAIN
Bitcoin = Money ON THE BLOCKHAIN
CoinDesk = Russian bloc ON teh BLOChain
Potcoin = http://trove.wikia.com/wiki/Cheese_Blockchain

Eventually you get https://www.wired.com/story/we-put-the- ... u-can-too/

hmm... I wonder if there's an edit filter to stop people moving pages to "[article]ON THE BLOCKCHAIN" ?

[Poetlister]

Ladislav Mecir is a 57-year-old computer programmer who lives in the small town of Jičín outside Prague in the Czech Republic. He has two grandsons and a granddaughter due next month. Even-keeled and soft-spoken, Mecir is not the stereotypical “Bitcoin Bro,” but he is the most prolific contributor to the subject's Wikipedia page. Despite Bitcoin's popularity in his home country, Mecir has never personally mined for it. In fact, he owns no Bitcoin whatsoever.

The Outline

[Dysklyver]

Nice.

The guy seems to be in hot water over perceived OWNership of the article.

Cryptocurrency on wikipedia is a pot of complete garbage brought in by all the newest cultists that have been recruited into the cryptobubble, but not yet indefinitely banned from Wikipedia for mindless edit warring and adding dubious pseudo-facts all over the place, even on articles which have nothing to do bitcoin whatsoever. So it's controversial as it gets, bar perhaps Trump and Syria, and Racism.

This is a favorite topic of mine, I would probably jump right in and support this general sanctions thing, but my IP address seems to be globally locked right now and I need to wait for it to change again.

[Johnny Au]

Good thing CGPGrey (T-C-L) isn't editing it, despite him being deeply obsessed with it as mentioned in his numerous videos.

[Poetlister]

Wikipedia has been one of the biggest assets on the internet and one of the most popularly visited websites of all time. Scammers are now making use of fake Wikipedia banners to lure users towards donating in cryptocurrencies. However, if a user falls for it and donates to the wallet address that the fake banner provides, their donation reaches the scammer and not to Wikipedia.

Cryptoground

[Poetlister]

When it comes to getting a Wikipedia page, it’s hard being merely the 36th most valuable cryptocurrency.

A couple weeks ago, members of Decred, an increasingly popular, would-be Bitcoin competitor, had some issues with the performance of Ditto PR—the, yes, PR company that the decentralized coin has on retainer. What was the problem? Among other things, the $300,000 that the Decred community had paid for Ditto’s services hadn’t been enough to secure the project a Wikipedia page (despite this not falling under Ditto’s purview.)

https://decrypt.co/17371/we-found-the-n ... decrypt.co

[Dysklyver]

It's a common misunderstanding that the financial value of a company has anything to do with whether it merits a Wikipedia page. Regarding Crypto, it's almost universally scams or short lived over-hyped projects. Few Crypto related topics will have lasting significance.

[Poetlister]

It's a common misunderstanding that the financial value of a company has anything to do with whether it merits a Wikipedia page. Regarding Crypto, it's almost universally scams or short lived over-hyped projects. Few Crypto related topics will have lasting significance.

That's reminiscent of the Arch Coal (T-H-L) controversy which led to someone who was later a founder of this site getting into Jimbo's bad books. Said founder wrote the article because he argued that every large US company should have an article.

[Dysklyver]

I believe that currently extant policy suggests that all large companies publicly listed on major stock exchanges are inherently notable.

[Poetlister]

I believe that currently extant policy suggests that all large companies publicly listed on major stock exchanges are inherently notable.

I doubt it. The relevant notability guideline is WP:LISTED (T-H-L), which states

There has been considerable discussion over time whether publicly traded corporations, or at least publicly traded corporations listed on major stock exchanges such as the NYSE and other comparable international stock exchanges, are inherently notable. Consensus has been that notability is not automatic in this (or any other) case. However, sufficient independent sources almost always exist for such companies, so that notability can be established using the primary criterion discussed above.

In other words, no, they are not inherently notable although it is likely that there would be enough coverage for notability to be demonstrated in the usual way.

[Dysklyver]

Yeah sounds about right.

[Poetlister]

Bitcoin’s most vocal critic is also a Wikipedia editor who helped push through a ban on Wikipedia articles citing crypto news sites. Alongside economist Nouriel Roubini and goldbug Peter Schiff, David Gerard is one of the most vehement critics of Bitcoin and blockchain. The author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, Gerard has also been a Wikipedia editor since 2004. But he’s one with an axe to grind, stating baldly in his just released advice for editing Wikipedia article on cryptocurrencies: “I hate them”. He thinks “crypto is absolutely and thoroughly a field full of spammy cranks, who try it on at Wikipedia.”

micky.com.au

I don't know how they managed to get DG looking so respectable.

[Midsize Jake]

I don't know how they managed to get DG looking so respectable.

My sources tell me there's been a huge increase in fright-wig and clown-makeup thievery in the UK goth community lately.

[Vigilant]

I don't know how they managed to get DG looking so respectable.

My sources tell me there's been a huge increase in fright-wig and clown-makeup thievery in the UK goth community lately.

He looks like someone tried to whittle a penis out of a hotdog.

[Poetlister]

I don't know how they managed to get DG looking so respectable.

My sources tell me there's been a huge increase in fright-wig and clown-makeup thievery in the UK goth community lately.

Quite likely, but how did they force him to wear a suit and tie?

[Giraffe Stapler]

Quite likely, but how did they force him to wear a suit and tie?

David Gerard can't win. If he dresses as an aging goth, people make fun of him. If he shaves his head and wears a suit like a respectable pundit, people make fun of him.

[Poetlister]

Quite likely, but how did they force him to wear a suit and tie?

David Gerard can't win. If he dresses as an aging goth, people make fun of him. If he shaves his head and wears a suit like a respectable pundit, people make fun of him.

Who wants David Gerard to win?