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The discussed section contained the text: "It is illegal in at least nine countries: Bangladesh,[242] Bolivia,[243] Ecuador,[244] Iceland,[245] Inḋdonesia,[246] Kyrgyzstan,[247] Russia,[245] Thailand,[248] and Vietnam.[249]"
Having spotted that the "at least nine" text was not supported by any reliable source, I deleted it, below are the reasons why the deletion was necessary. I do not doubt that Fleetham can count, but the findings below prove that he did make serious errors when adding claims, influencing also the correctness of his count:
After I marked the unsupported claims, Fleetham deleted all tags I added stating: 'Removed failed verification tags as sources clearly state things like "making purchases with Bitcoin is illegal in country"' This is not what sources state, as I summed up above. Thus, instead of trying to discuss in here, Fleetham once again chose edit-warring as the method and deleted all the well-justified tags as demonstrated above. (Note that when I mark a claim as unsupported by the cited source, the onus is on Fleetham to prove the claim is correct, which is what he refused to do.) Ladislav Mecir ( talk) 16:36, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
@ Ladislav Mecir, your interpretation of the above term is a perfect example of what I stated previously about only a decided court case can be referenced regarding the interpretation of legal terms: I do not agree with your interpretation: thus, only an Indonesian court can decide the matter at hand - in the Indonesian case. Even a specific law is not the final say: only the interpretation of the courts of the stated law is the final say. Thus only decided court cases can be referenced. I agree with Chillum that it is better to avoid using the term "illegal" altogether. Kraainem ( talk) 22:49, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
Perhaps instead of trying to figure out what illegal means in each country we could use a more general statement like "Bitcoin is under some form of restriction in at least..." and thus skip the term illegal altogether. Chillum 21:46, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
@ Chillum, that is a good idea. Kraainem ( talk) 21:52, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
For Germany, the statement "A German court found bitcoin to be a unit of account.[34]:10" is not backed by the source.-- Andreas Linder ( talk) 13:16, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
To make it absolutely certain, here is a list of votes related to Fleetham's proposal to remove the tags and keep the sentence as is:
Looks like WP:SNOW. But the tagged claims should be sourced soon or removed. AlbinoFerret 13:25, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
Note 7: "There is no uniform convention for bitcoin capitalization. Some sources use Bitcoin, capitalized, to refer to the technology and network and bitcoin, lowercase, to refer to the unit of account.[16] The WSJ[17] and The Chronicle of Higher Education[18] advocate use of lowercase bitcoin in all cases. This article follows the latter convention."
I was going to add the WSJ and/or other source before I saw it here. Note only after my at [Cryptocurrency] I saw the "Chronicle of Higher Education[18] advocate use of lowercase bitcoin in all cases [..] This article follows the latter convention."
There are however exceptions: "this is accomplished with a provisional Bitcoin URI scheme" and "Bitcoin Core" (this would be an exception to the ruleexception).
The former could be fixed, or this article changed like I did the other.. Maybe that is not advised. Before people go ahead and revert my edit (most of it), is this for sure the better standard? comp.arch ( talk) 09:43, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
Plse don´t delete content that is presented from a reliable source according to WP:RS 666AngelOfDeath ( talk) 10:25, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
Google "bitcoin death spiral 2015" and there are 436 000 references. 666AngelOfDeath ( talk) 10:29, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
I tried twice to edit the sentence:
It has been estimated that the annual environmental impact due to bitcoin mining represents approximately 0.13% of the impact caused by fiat and gold-based monetary systems.
in order to avoid giving a false impression of the result to the reader. Ironically, the source (which, by the way, I doubt can be considered a reliable source by Wikipedia standards, but still provides interesting figures) states
It is important to note that whilst this can be construed as an apples-to-oranges comparison, it is equally important to get a frame of reference of the huge environmental impact of the banking industry, and to illustrate that we must ensure that we avoid having the same negative impact as we have in the past, should Bitcoin be successful and scale to the size of the existing system
So: OK to look at the order of magnitudes just for curiosity, but a comparison is apples-to-oranges.
In the first version of my edit, I did give a comparison (0.13% vs. several orders of magnitude for VISA) which can fall in (a very stretched definition) of "original research". I carefully avoided this now, only writing stuff which is clear from reading the original paper. Please avoid rolling back again, and discuss. -- Toobaz ( talk) 19:29, 21 April 2015 (UTC)
When reverting someone else's change because it contained "incorrect claims", basic courtesy requires that you specify what those claims were. – Smyth\ talk 11:12, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
Thanks, I didn't intend to introduce any new claims at all, only to explain the existing material more clearly. If I've misunderstood anything, please let me know. – Smyth\ talk 13:11, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
replacing it by a general cryptographic nonce cross link: The linked article also covers the alternative meaning, and the explanation makes it clear that not any random nonce would be accepted.
the cryptographic hash of the new block is not combined with the nonce: I intended this to be parsed as "a hash of (the new block combined with the nonce) produces a hash". I agree this should be reworded to remove both the ambiguity and the awkwardness.
for a secure cryptographic hash there is no simpler way how to find the nonce than to try different nonce values one after another: True, but I doubt that anyone actually uses the 1, 2, 3... sequence given in the previous explanation, otherwise the fastest miner would discover every block.
the network rules make sure that the changes of the difficulty target are not "too big": According to this, "The difficulty is set such that the previous 2016 blocks would have been found at the rate of one every 10 minutes". That does not appear to set any limit on the size of the change. – Smyth\ talk 11:13, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for correcting me about the difficulty adjustment. It doesn't contradict anything which I actually put in the article, but "adjusted" is a better word so I'll change it. – Smyth\ talk 23:55, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
For anyone else who was confused about why it's fine to use the 1, 2, 3, ... sequence of nonce values: the block reward transaction is paid to the miner themselves. Every miner is therefore trying to produce a block with a different set of transactions, so they will produce a different sequence of hashes even if they use the same sequence of nonces. – Smyth\ talk 14:26, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
I'm thinking of going ahead and removing the individual countries listed in the Legal status and regulation section simply because the information duplicates what's available on the "main" page for this topic, Legality of bitcoin by country. I don't really object to having small subsections about specific countries, but why are the specific countries currently on the page any more or less relevant than the host of others that can be found in the main article? Also, if sub-sections for countries should be kept, the one on the US should be cut down in size. Fleetham ( talk) 22:35, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
It appears that some people are expanding this section, when we have a septate article on it. It needs to go back to a simple summery with a link to the daughter page. AlbinoFerret 02:32, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
I've been reading conflicting definitions about that crypto/btc 'taint' is. Some say it relates the the link between the address and personal identifiable information, such as a previous address, a term blockchain.info uses. However many get pretty emotional when applying the term 'taint' to proposed black/whitelisting systems designed to (more?) actively trace e.g. heists, hacks because of the impact on fungability.
It seems the community has rejected the existence of the latter taint term, but the former is used, instead? It seems we have two ideas sharing a word. So, how is BTC 'taint' best described? Deku-shrub ( talk) 18:40, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
I oppose the proposed split of the "Block chain" section, because:
In my opinion, this formulation violates the WP:BALL policy. The source does confirm that a russian official promised such an event, but another official source, Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development, expressed a different, opposite opinion. Ladislav Mecir ( talk) 07:06, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
This has been discussed several times here. Seeing recent attempts to mark this specific source as unreliable, I am writing this to repeat the known facts establishing reliability of this specific source. The facts are:
Summary: 3 weeks later, the discussion at the WP:RSN is unchanged from day 1 and was archived - no uninvolved editor replied, it stayed between Ladislav and Andy the Grump. there was no clear yes or no in my opinion.-- Wuerzele ( talk) 17:52, 6 June 2015 (UTC)
I have brought this up before. Legal status has its own article. We should not be expanding this section. In fact it should be a summary of the other article per WP:DETAIL. Today Fleetham added two new countries Vietnam [1] and Thailand [2]. This section needs a major trim, with just the lede of the legal status page replacing all the specific countries. AlbinoFerret 23:28, 1 June 2015 (UTC)
There is now a merge template on the section, with no discussion section. I would be against any merger to the main article as it is presently 61k of prose and should have something split off, instead of additional info added in a merge. AlbinoFerret 17:24, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
The first sentence describes Bitcoin as a payment system, but this is a misleading term to describe Bitcoin, which is better described as a decentralized ledger.
I would like to know why my edit was reversed. Leotheleo ( talk) 08:57, 7 June 2015 (UTC)
To expand on why I think 'payment system' is a misleading term to use to give a high-level description of Bitcoin, please refer to the payment system page. The first sentence; "The payment system is an operational network - governed by laws, rules and standards - that links bank accounts and provides the functionality for monetary exchange using bank deposits" is wholly inapplicable to Bitcoin. A 'decentralized ledger' on the other hand while being a relatively new term, is less confusing because it doesn't bring in centralized concepts that exist in payment systems, most of which depend on fiat currencies and the banking network. Leotheleo ( talk) 08:57, 7 June 2015 (UTC)
Thanks! I'm sorry I'm new to editing Wikipedia pages - I have done some more reading. According to Jerry Brito, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, "at its core, Bitcoin is a completely decentralized ledger system". [1] According to Marc Andreessen, whose company, Andreessen Horowitz, has invested almost $50m in Bitcoin companies to date, "Bitcoin is an Internet-wide distributed ledger". [2] [3]
I think there should be a section on the bitcoin blocksize debate. The core developers of Bitcoin have realized there is a problem, the protocol calls for a limit of 1MB of transactions to be included to the blockchain every ~10 minutes. Thus the bottleneck of Bitcoin is that there can only be around 3-7 transactions per second. We're beginning to experience the limit in Bitcoin's blockchain. So, mainly the core developer [[Gavin Andresen] ]is proposing a hard fork(a split in the network) to a larger blocksize limit. Others push for blockchain to be the "Wire transfer" network where the fees would be great enough to prevent people from spamming the network with coffee purchases and other small purchases. Instead most of these transactions, much like the current financial system, would be done by a third party, where the Bitcoin protocol will only be used to settle balances and wire large amounts of bitcoin, or cold storage. I think we should add a section to Wikipedia for this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Justinba1010 ( talk • contribs) 19:45, 1 June 2015 (UTC)
Please allow conversations to last longer. It does no one any good to remove them too quickly. A much longer talk page won't hurt anyone. Tgm1024 ( talk) 16:55, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
Ladislav Mecir: regarding your revert of my revert, defending the sentence "In late November 2013, an estimated $100 million in bitcoins were allegedly stolen from the online illicit goods marketplace Sheep Marketplace, which immediately closed." Yes, per WP:ALLEGE one can use allege, I know. However the source does not allege in my reading (nor use the term obviously). So, please tell me where you think the guardian alleges. -- Wuerzele ( talk) 14:53, 18 June 2015 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Background The Legal status and regulation section was broken out to its own page Legality of bitcoin by country. The section in the main article has had specific countries added to it, but not all of the countries listed on the Legality of bitcoin by country article. It continues to have countries added.
Guideline The guideline that addresses this can be found here WP:DETAIL which is part of WP:SUMMARY. AlbinoFerret 15:53, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
Questions
Yes This is the common practice. Adding specific countries gives a skewed view of the daughter article. The daughter article exists for a full treatment of the topic, and adding countries to the main page defeats the purpose. AlbinoFerret 17:18, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
Yes Fleetham ( talk) 00:08, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
Yes a short summary, usually something like the lead of the main article, should be left in the parent article. A link to the daughter article should be there for those who want more detail. Darx9url ( talk) 04:24, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
Yes. The lede of the other article is quite sufficient as a summary. Details regarding particular countries do not belong in this article - there are far too many, and selecting specific ones is liable to create bias. AndyTheGrump ( talk) 05:01, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
No The addition of some of the conutries gives a partial and possibly skewed view of the daughter page. AlbinoFerret 17:00, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
Well, it looks like we've reached a consensus. I'll wait a short while before implementing the changes. Fleetham ( talk) 23:51, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
As mentioned, Fleetham is repeatedly trying to insert a wrong citation to the article. Mistakes are:
The referred edit was described to:
Therefore, I cannot agree with this unbalanced and essentially unsourced edit removing sourced informations. Ladislav Mecir ( talk) 12:57, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
Note that "consensus on Wikipedia does not mean unanimity (which, although an ideal result, is not always achievable)" according to Wikipedia:Consensus. I think the onus is on you to work towards getting the changes you want especially as the current consensus is in favor of keeping the material. I think Bosstopher's edit brought up legitimate concerns, and you haven't put forward any ideas that address those concerns. Instead, you've stated yours. I think it's best to suggest a compromise that speaks to both sets of concerns. Fleetham ( talk) 23:47, 26 June 2015 (UTC)
Bosstopher: "The supposedly better sourced thing I've removed is from Techcrunch" - while Techcrunch was cited in the specific case, there are many other sources cited in the article in addition to Techcrunch, like The Economist, Internation Business Times, and many others, who also mention the the use of bitcoin for retail and its growth. It is not a single-souced claim as you mistakenly propose. Ladislav Mecir ( talk) 07:43, 29 June 2015 (UTC)
Comment: I agree with Ladislav that Bosstophers edit is unbalanced (creating two paragraphs in the lead section for illicit activities and removing another sourced activity). We have had this discussion for a long time, and the consensus was to not allow illicit activities be stressed in that way. Fleetham was blocked for a month over this. Bosstopher please familiarize yourself with the arguments and check the archives.-- Wuerzele ( talk) 07:07, 29 June 2015 (UTC)
I've gone over your concerns with you and addressed them one by one. The only concerns you have that I am aware of are the fact you didn't like criminal activities being mentioned twice in the lead and the idea that you didn't want information from previously used sources to be deleted. I think I've fully addressed those concerns and have agreed with you on every point you've made. Are there any specific issues or problems I failed to address but that prevent you from endorsing a change here?
Also, while you may not realize it as English doesn't appear to be your native tongue, the phrase "has grown" indicates an action that started in the past and is continuing in the present. Fleetham ( talk) 12:25, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
@ Ladislav Mecir: Just to get the discussion back on track:
I'm sure you agree this should be rectified. In addition to adding a mention of popular uses for bitcoin, do you think the best way to address the issue at hand is to remove all mention of retail use from the lede or simply diminish the amount of space it's provided? Fleetham ( talk) 21:45, 6 July 2015 (UTC)
The edit #670802992 by Fleetham added a note to the caption together with supporting citation. The problems are:
Powerful Lomax replaced all occurrences of the "block chain" spelling by "blockchain", claiming that '"blockchain", as a single word, has become the de-facto spelling for the distributed ledger and its supporting technologies throughout the technical community, and in academic and commercial research into distributed concensus systems'. After examining the cited sources, I found out: the "blockchain" spelling is used in 6 cited sources, none of them being an academic research article, while the "block chain" spelling is used by 15 cited sources, including academic research articles. Taking the existing consensus into account (this is not the first time the spelling was discussed), I revert the unsubstantiated edits. Ladislav Mecir ( talk) 05:47, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
I've removed the Simpleshow video for now. I found it one-sided and possibly advertorial. I do support having more videos on Wikipedia, so this video is something of a "good try" but I think it is a bit off. Simpleshow is a for profit company who has worked with Wikimedia Austria, see http://simpleshow.com/us-en/explainer-video-workshop-wikipedia-2/ . There's a lot to discuss about this project - mostly good, but some possible problems.
Unfortunately, I'll be gone in an hour for the weekend. Please hold-off on reinserting this video until Monday at least. Smallbones( smalltalk) 14:10, 24 July 2015 (UTC)
Yesterday the Tokyo District Court published a decision that there are no proprietary rights in bitcoins. A user of the Mt. Gox exchange had sued the bankruptcy receiver, seeking the return of 458 coins he had in an account. But the court found that no proprietary rights existed in the bitcoins. I will write up a proper description if the case and possible implications, but am first seeking opinions on which section it belongs in. I think it lies somewhere between the "Ownership" subsection (1.3) and "Legal Status" section. The court did not talk about the legality of the system, only that no legal rights of exclusive control exist in the coins. AtHomeIn神戸 ( talk) 06:58, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 20 | ← | Archive 24 | Archive 25 | Archive 26 | Archive 27 | Archive 28 | → | Archive 30 |
The discussed section contained the text: "It is illegal in at least nine countries: Bangladesh,[242] Bolivia,[243] Ecuador,[244] Iceland,[245] Inḋdonesia,[246] Kyrgyzstan,[247] Russia,[245] Thailand,[248] and Vietnam.[249]"
Having spotted that the "at least nine" text was not supported by any reliable source, I deleted it, below are the reasons why the deletion was necessary. I do not doubt that Fleetham can count, but the findings below prove that he did make serious errors when adding claims, influencing also the correctness of his count:
After I marked the unsupported claims, Fleetham deleted all tags I added stating: 'Removed failed verification tags as sources clearly state things like "making purchases with Bitcoin is illegal in country"' This is not what sources state, as I summed up above. Thus, instead of trying to discuss in here, Fleetham once again chose edit-warring as the method and deleted all the well-justified tags as demonstrated above. (Note that when I mark a claim as unsupported by the cited source, the onus is on Fleetham to prove the claim is correct, which is what he refused to do.) Ladislav Mecir ( talk) 16:36, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
@ Ladislav Mecir, your interpretation of the above term is a perfect example of what I stated previously about only a decided court case can be referenced regarding the interpretation of legal terms: I do not agree with your interpretation: thus, only an Indonesian court can decide the matter at hand - in the Indonesian case. Even a specific law is not the final say: only the interpretation of the courts of the stated law is the final say. Thus only decided court cases can be referenced. I agree with Chillum that it is better to avoid using the term "illegal" altogether. Kraainem ( talk) 22:49, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
Perhaps instead of trying to figure out what illegal means in each country we could use a more general statement like "Bitcoin is under some form of restriction in at least..." and thus skip the term illegal altogether. Chillum 21:46, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
@ Chillum, that is a good idea. Kraainem ( talk) 21:52, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
For Germany, the statement "A German court found bitcoin to be a unit of account.[34]:10" is not backed by the source.-- Andreas Linder ( talk) 13:16, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
To make it absolutely certain, here is a list of votes related to Fleetham's proposal to remove the tags and keep the sentence as is:
Looks like WP:SNOW. But the tagged claims should be sourced soon or removed. AlbinoFerret 13:25, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
Note 7: "There is no uniform convention for bitcoin capitalization. Some sources use Bitcoin, capitalized, to refer to the technology and network and bitcoin, lowercase, to refer to the unit of account.[16] The WSJ[17] and The Chronicle of Higher Education[18] advocate use of lowercase bitcoin in all cases. This article follows the latter convention."
I was going to add the WSJ and/or other source before I saw it here. Note only after my at [Cryptocurrency] I saw the "Chronicle of Higher Education[18] advocate use of lowercase bitcoin in all cases [..] This article follows the latter convention."
There are however exceptions: "this is accomplished with a provisional Bitcoin URI scheme" and "Bitcoin Core" (this would be an exception to the ruleexception).
The former could be fixed, or this article changed like I did the other.. Maybe that is not advised. Before people go ahead and revert my edit (most of it), is this for sure the better standard? comp.arch ( talk) 09:43, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
Plse don´t delete content that is presented from a reliable source according to WP:RS 666AngelOfDeath ( talk) 10:25, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
Google "bitcoin death spiral 2015" and there are 436 000 references. 666AngelOfDeath ( talk) 10:29, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
I tried twice to edit the sentence:
It has been estimated that the annual environmental impact due to bitcoin mining represents approximately 0.13% of the impact caused by fiat and gold-based monetary systems.
in order to avoid giving a false impression of the result to the reader. Ironically, the source (which, by the way, I doubt can be considered a reliable source by Wikipedia standards, but still provides interesting figures) states
It is important to note that whilst this can be construed as an apples-to-oranges comparison, it is equally important to get a frame of reference of the huge environmental impact of the banking industry, and to illustrate that we must ensure that we avoid having the same negative impact as we have in the past, should Bitcoin be successful and scale to the size of the existing system
So: OK to look at the order of magnitudes just for curiosity, but a comparison is apples-to-oranges.
In the first version of my edit, I did give a comparison (0.13% vs. several orders of magnitude for VISA) which can fall in (a very stretched definition) of "original research". I carefully avoided this now, only writing stuff which is clear from reading the original paper. Please avoid rolling back again, and discuss. -- Toobaz ( talk) 19:29, 21 April 2015 (UTC)
When reverting someone else's change because it contained "incorrect claims", basic courtesy requires that you specify what those claims were. – Smyth\ talk 11:12, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
Thanks, I didn't intend to introduce any new claims at all, only to explain the existing material more clearly. If I've misunderstood anything, please let me know. – Smyth\ talk 13:11, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
replacing it by a general cryptographic nonce cross link: The linked article also covers the alternative meaning, and the explanation makes it clear that not any random nonce would be accepted.
the cryptographic hash of the new block is not combined with the nonce: I intended this to be parsed as "a hash of (the new block combined with the nonce) produces a hash". I agree this should be reworded to remove both the ambiguity and the awkwardness.
for a secure cryptographic hash there is no simpler way how to find the nonce than to try different nonce values one after another: True, but I doubt that anyone actually uses the 1, 2, 3... sequence given in the previous explanation, otherwise the fastest miner would discover every block.
the network rules make sure that the changes of the difficulty target are not "too big": According to this, "The difficulty is set such that the previous 2016 blocks would have been found at the rate of one every 10 minutes". That does not appear to set any limit on the size of the change. – Smyth\ talk 11:13, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for correcting me about the difficulty adjustment. It doesn't contradict anything which I actually put in the article, but "adjusted" is a better word so I'll change it. – Smyth\ talk 23:55, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
For anyone else who was confused about why it's fine to use the 1, 2, 3, ... sequence of nonce values: the block reward transaction is paid to the miner themselves. Every miner is therefore trying to produce a block with a different set of transactions, so they will produce a different sequence of hashes even if they use the same sequence of nonces. – Smyth\ talk 14:26, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
I'm thinking of going ahead and removing the individual countries listed in the Legal status and regulation section simply because the information duplicates what's available on the "main" page for this topic, Legality of bitcoin by country. I don't really object to having small subsections about specific countries, but why are the specific countries currently on the page any more or less relevant than the host of others that can be found in the main article? Also, if sub-sections for countries should be kept, the one on the US should be cut down in size. Fleetham ( talk) 22:35, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
It appears that some people are expanding this section, when we have a septate article on it. It needs to go back to a simple summery with a link to the daughter page. AlbinoFerret 02:32, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
I've been reading conflicting definitions about that crypto/btc 'taint' is. Some say it relates the the link between the address and personal identifiable information, such as a previous address, a term blockchain.info uses. However many get pretty emotional when applying the term 'taint' to proposed black/whitelisting systems designed to (more?) actively trace e.g. heists, hacks because of the impact on fungability.
It seems the community has rejected the existence of the latter taint term, but the former is used, instead? It seems we have two ideas sharing a word. So, how is BTC 'taint' best described? Deku-shrub ( talk) 18:40, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
I oppose the proposed split of the "Block chain" section, because:
In my opinion, this formulation violates the WP:BALL policy. The source does confirm that a russian official promised such an event, but another official source, Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development, expressed a different, opposite opinion. Ladislav Mecir ( talk) 07:06, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
This has been discussed several times here. Seeing recent attempts to mark this specific source as unreliable, I am writing this to repeat the known facts establishing reliability of this specific source. The facts are:
Summary: 3 weeks later, the discussion at the WP:RSN is unchanged from day 1 and was archived - no uninvolved editor replied, it stayed between Ladislav and Andy the Grump. there was no clear yes or no in my opinion.-- Wuerzele ( talk) 17:52, 6 June 2015 (UTC)
I have brought this up before. Legal status has its own article. We should not be expanding this section. In fact it should be a summary of the other article per WP:DETAIL. Today Fleetham added two new countries Vietnam [1] and Thailand [2]. This section needs a major trim, with just the lede of the legal status page replacing all the specific countries. AlbinoFerret 23:28, 1 June 2015 (UTC)
There is now a merge template on the section, with no discussion section. I would be against any merger to the main article as it is presently 61k of prose and should have something split off, instead of additional info added in a merge. AlbinoFerret 17:24, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
The first sentence describes Bitcoin as a payment system, but this is a misleading term to describe Bitcoin, which is better described as a decentralized ledger.
I would like to know why my edit was reversed. Leotheleo ( talk) 08:57, 7 June 2015 (UTC)
To expand on why I think 'payment system' is a misleading term to use to give a high-level description of Bitcoin, please refer to the payment system page. The first sentence; "The payment system is an operational network - governed by laws, rules and standards - that links bank accounts and provides the functionality for monetary exchange using bank deposits" is wholly inapplicable to Bitcoin. A 'decentralized ledger' on the other hand while being a relatively new term, is less confusing because it doesn't bring in centralized concepts that exist in payment systems, most of which depend on fiat currencies and the banking network. Leotheleo ( talk) 08:57, 7 June 2015 (UTC)
Thanks! I'm sorry I'm new to editing Wikipedia pages - I have done some more reading. According to Jerry Brito, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, "at its core, Bitcoin is a completely decentralized ledger system". [1] According to Marc Andreessen, whose company, Andreessen Horowitz, has invested almost $50m in Bitcoin companies to date, "Bitcoin is an Internet-wide distributed ledger". [2] [3]
I think there should be a section on the bitcoin blocksize debate. The core developers of Bitcoin have realized there is a problem, the protocol calls for a limit of 1MB of transactions to be included to the blockchain every ~10 minutes. Thus the bottleneck of Bitcoin is that there can only be around 3-7 transactions per second. We're beginning to experience the limit in Bitcoin's blockchain. So, mainly the core developer [[Gavin Andresen] ]is proposing a hard fork(a split in the network) to a larger blocksize limit. Others push for blockchain to be the "Wire transfer" network where the fees would be great enough to prevent people from spamming the network with coffee purchases and other small purchases. Instead most of these transactions, much like the current financial system, would be done by a third party, where the Bitcoin protocol will only be used to settle balances and wire large amounts of bitcoin, or cold storage. I think we should add a section to Wikipedia for this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Justinba1010 ( talk • contribs) 19:45, 1 June 2015 (UTC)
Please allow conversations to last longer. It does no one any good to remove them too quickly. A much longer talk page won't hurt anyone. Tgm1024 ( talk) 16:55, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
Ladislav Mecir: regarding your revert of my revert, defending the sentence "In late November 2013, an estimated $100 million in bitcoins were allegedly stolen from the online illicit goods marketplace Sheep Marketplace, which immediately closed." Yes, per WP:ALLEGE one can use allege, I know. However the source does not allege in my reading (nor use the term obviously). So, please tell me where you think the guardian alleges. -- Wuerzele ( talk) 14:53, 18 June 2015 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Background The Legal status and regulation section was broken out to its own page Legality of bitcoin by country. The section in the main article has had specific countries added to it, but not all of the countries listed on the Legality of bitcoin by country article. It continues to have countries added.
Guideline The guideline that addresses this can be found here WP:DETAIL which is part of WP:SUMMARY. AlbinoFerret 15:53, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
Questions
Yes This is the common practice. Adding specific countries gives a skewed view of the daughter article. The daughter article exists for a full treatment of the topic, and adding countries to the main page defeats the purpose. AlbinoFerret 17:18, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
Yes Fleetham ( talk) 00:08, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
Yes a short summary, usually something like the lead of the main article, should be left in the parent article. A link to the daughter article should be there for those who want more detail. Darx9url ( talk) 04:24, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
Yes. The lede of the other article is quite sufficient as a summary. Details regarding particular countries do not belong in this article - there are far too many, and selecting specific ones is liable to create bias. AndyTheGrump ( talk) 05:01, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
No The addition of some of the conutries gives a partial and possibly skewed view of the daughter page. AlbinoFerret 17:00, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
Well, it looks like we've reached a consensus. I'll wait a short while before implementing the changes. Fleetham ( talk) 23:51, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
As mentioned, Fleetham is repeatedly trying to insert a wrong citation to the article. Mistakes are:
The referred edit was described to:
Therefore, I cannot agree with this unbalanced and essentially unsourced edit removing sourced informations. Ladislav Mecir ( talk) 12:57, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
Note that "consensus on Wikipedia does not mean unanimity (which, although an ideal result, is not always achievable)" according to Wikipedia:Consensus. I think the onus is on you to work towards getting the changes you want especially as the current consensus is in favor of keeping the material. I think Bosstopher's edit brought up legitimate concerns, and you haven't put forward any ideas that address those concerns. Instead, you've stated yours. I think it's best to suggest a compromise that speaks to both sets of concerns. Fleetham ( talk) 23:47, 26 June 2015 (UTC)
Bosstopher: "The supposedly better sourced thing I've removed is from Techcrunch" - while Techcrunch was cited in the specific case, there are many other sources cited in the article in addition to Techcrunch, like The Economist, Internation Business Times, and many others, who also mention the the use of bitcoin for retail and its growth. It is not a single-souced claim as you mistakenly propose. Ladislav Mecir ( talk) 07:43, 29 June 2015 (UTC)
Comment: I agree with Ladislav that Bosstophers edit is unbalanced (creating two paragraphs in the lead section for illicit activities and removing another sourced activity). We have had this discussion for a long time, and the consensus was to not allow illicit activities be stressed in that way. Fleetham was blocked for a month over this. Bosstopher please familiarize yourself with the arguments and check the archives.-- Wuerzele ( talk) 07:07, 29 June 2015 (UTC)
I've gone over your concerns with you and addressed them one by one. The only concerns you have that I am aware of are the fact you didn't like criminal activities being mentioned twice in the lead and the idea that you didn't want information from previously used sources to be deleted. I think I've fully addressed those concerns and have agreed with you on every point you've made. Are there any specific issues or problems I failed to address but that prevent you from endorsing a change here?
Also, while you may not realize it as English doesn't appear to be your native tongue, the phrase "has grown" indicates an action that started in the past and is continuing in the present. Fleetham ( talk) 12:25, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
@ Ladislav Mecir: Just to get the discussion back on track:
I'm sure you agree this should be rectified. In addition to adding a mention of popular uses for bitcoin, do you think the best way to address the issue at hand is to remove all mention of retail use from the lede or simply diminish the amount of space it's provided? Fleetham ( talk) 21:45, 6 July 2015 (UTC)
The edit #670802992 by Fleetham added a note to the caption together with supporting citation. The problems are:
Powerful Lomax replaced all occurrences of the "block chain" spelling by "blockchain", claiming that '"blockchain", as a single word, has become the de-facto spelling for the distributed ledger and its supporting technologies throughout the technical community, and in academic and commercial research into distributed concensus systems'. After examining the cited sources, I found out: the "blockchain" spelling is used in 6 cited sources, none of them being an academic research article, while the "block chain" spelling is used by 15 cited sources, including academic research articles. Taking the existing consensus into account (this is not the first time the spelling was discussed), I revert the unsubstantiated edits. Ladislav Mecir ( talk) 05:47, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
I've removed the Simpleshow video for now. I found it one-sided and possibly advertorial. I do support having more videos on Wikipedia, so this video is something of a "good try" but I think it is a bit off. Simpleshow is a for profit company who has worked with Wikimedia Austria, see http://simpleshow.com/us-en/explainer-video-workshop-wikipedia-2/ . There's a lot to discuss about this project - mostly good, but some possible problems.
Unfortunately, I'll be gone in an hour for the weekend. Please hold-off on reinserting this video until Monday at least. Smallbones( smalltalk) 14:10, 24 July 2015 (UTC)
Yesterday the Tokyo District Court published a decision that there are no proprietary rights in bitcoins. A user of the Mt. Gox exchange had sued the bankruptcy receiver, seeking the return of 458 coins he had in an account. But the court found that no proprietary rights existed in the bitcoins. I will write up a proper description if the case and possible implications, but am first seeking opinions on which section it belongs in. I think it lies somewhere between the "Ownership" subsection (1.3) and "Legal Status" section. The court did not talk about the legality of the system, only that no legal rights of exclusive control exist in the coins. AtHomeIn神戸 ( talk) 06:58, 6 August 2015 (UTC)