Replace "About" page by a refreshed FAQ

[saivann]

This pull request can be previewed live here:
http://bitcoinfaq.us.to/en/faq

A FAQ or "Common myths" page has been asked a while ago.

I've reworked the most relevant parts of the existing press FAQ and Wiki FAQ/Myths and tried to keep the best arguments in a concice and objective way.

Some of these questions are controversial and there is a lot of texts. A good review will be useful for accuracy, potential ambiguous assertions, unrelevant texts, incorrect english and typos.

This pull request also refresh the press FAQ and allows the FAQ to be translated.

[saivann]

I think these texts are good enough now. They have been reviewed by 4 different persons and received a lot of fixes and improvements. I should merge this pull request in 4 days on september 12th . Last minute reviews are welcome and if you wish to ask for more time to review, please leave a comment.

[luke-jr]

I would change the first sentence (What is Bitcoin?) to deemphasise Bitcoin as a mere payment network:

Bitcoin is a consensus network that enables a new, completely digital money. It also refers to the "block chain" protocol which is the first decentralized peer-to-peer payment network with no central authority or middlemen. From a user perspective, Bitcoin is pretty much like cash for the Internet. Bitcoin can also be seen as the most prominent triple entry bookkeeping system in existence.

"Who created Bitcoin?"
Bitcoin isn't merely one of the first implementations, it is the first implementation. IIRC,

"Is Bitcoin really used by people?"
Do we have permission to use the map image?

"What are the advantages of Bitcoin?"
I'd deemphasize "zero fees" by removing it from the bold. The mention in elaboration is sufficient.

"What are the disadvantages of Bitcoin?"
Seems like a good place to mention the "beta" status of virtually all Bitcoin software. It's not just that new tools are being added, but that the fundamental tools are not complete yet.

"Is Bitcoin fully virtual and immaterial?"
It might be best to avoid referring directly to Casascius's coins by name, considering current case law that would suggest that are illegal in the USA. I'd suggest linking BitBill since they came up with this concept originally, but they seem to have stopped production in favour of becoming a patent troll. :/

"What happens when bitcoins are lost?"
I don't think the phrase "This can be seen as a global redistribution of wealth through deflation." makes sense here, and the way it is phrased is likely to invoke political reactions from people ("that sounds communist!" etc).

"Is Bitcoin useful for illegal activities?"
Cash, credit cards, banking, Bitcoin, etc don't finance crime; they are merely used by people to finance crime.
"However, these features already exist with cash and wire transfer, which are useful and perfectly legal." implies Bitcoin is not legal. Perhaps "However, these features already exist with cash and wire transfer, which are widely used and well-established."

"Can Bitcoin be regulated?"
The first paragraph is almost entirely wrong. Governments could regulate Bitcoin users to choose specific software or virtual currencies. They can also trivially control the block chain itself by investing a tiny fraction of their budgets (today).

"How are bitcoins created?"
Suggest changing paragraph 2 sentence 1 to:

The Bitcoin protocol is designed in such a way that new bitcoins are created at a fixed rate.

"Why do bitcoins have value?"
The first sentence attributes Bitcoin's value to scarcity alone. Probably best to combine it with the second sentence, as all of those features contribute to its value. But more importantly, it should be noted that (as with all currency) Bitcoin's value comes only and directly from people willing to accept them as payment.

"What if someone creates a better digital currency?"
Might be worth mentioning that Bitcoin could conceivably adopt most improvements, thus even a new currency with them is unlikely to overtake it unless it is successful for fundamental economic reasons that cannot be changed in Bitcoin (such as the 21mil cap).

"Why do I have to wait 10 minutes?"
This section seems to imply a single block is itself confirmation of consensus. It should probably be rephrased. Maybe:

Receiving a payment is almost instant with Bitcoin. However, there is a 10 minutes delay on average before the network begins to confirm (finalise) your transaction by including it in a block. A confirmation means that there is a consensus on the network that the bitcoins you received haven't been sent to anyone else and are considered your property. Once your transaction has been included in one block, it will continue to be buried under every block after it, which will exponentially consolidate this consensus and decrease the risk of a reversed transaction. Every user is free to determine at what point they consider a transaction confirmed, but 6 blocks is generally considered to be approximately as safe as waiting 6 months on a credit card transaction.

"How much will the transaction fee be?"
First paragraph, last sentence should change to:

Your Bitcoin client will usually try to estimate an appropriate fee when required.

Second paragraph could read:

Transaction fees are used for two purposes: 1) as an "anti-spam" protection against users sending transactions to overload the network, and 2) to incentivise miners to include the transaction in a block sooner. The precise manner in which fees work is still being developed and will change over time. Because the fee is often related to the amount of data in the transaction and not to the amount of bitcoins being sent, it may in some cases seem extremely low (0.0005 BTC for a 1,000 BTC transfer) or unfairly high (0.004 BTC for a 0.02 BTC payment). If you are receiving a large number of tiny amounts, then fees for sending a single large payment will be higher. Such payments are comparable to paying a restaurant bill using only pennies. On the other hand, if you receive only a single large payment, you may incur fees more often if you spend small fractions of it rapidly. If your activity follows the pattern of conventional transactions, the fees should remain very low.

"What if I receive a bitcoin when my computer is powered off?"

This works fine. The bitcoins will appear the next time you start your wallet application. Bitcoins are not actively received by the software on your computer, they are appended to a public ledger that is shared between all the devices on the network. If you are sent coins when your client program is not running and you later launch the it, it will download blocks and catch up with any transactions it did not already know about, and the coins will eventually appear as if they were just received in realtime. Your wallet is only needed when you wish to view or use it.

"Hasn't Bitcoin been hacked in the past?"
This makes false claims: CVE-2010-5139 was undeniably a security breach in Bitcoin itself.

"Could users collude against Bitcoin?"
It might be noted that an economic majority is capable of changing some rules, and that a consensus among all users can change any rule. The final paragraph's talk about legitimate purposes, while some might debatably exist, gives a wrong example. The March 2013 chain fork was a case of miners accidentally creating an invalid block chain that did not conform to the network rules at the time - there was no collusion involved in the fix, merely those miners going back to the legit block chain.

"Can Bitcoin be cracked or shutdown?"
This is mostly false. Bitcoin could be easily shutdown by any decent-sized country right now.

[mikehearn]

I think these comments are all valid, though I'm very wary of "perfect is the enemy of the good". As Saivann says, the current document is the rest of lots of edits already. At some point we have to just ship it.

Going through them, I'll only comment on some. The rest I can be assumed to agree with. How important they are - I leave to Saivann to decide.

Cascacius coins. I am not aware of them being illegal in the USA, that's a new one to me. But even if they were illegal under some rather unknown or vague law, they probably aren't illegal in many other places. They're well known and used in almost all press stories about Bitcoins, so I don't think we should hesitate to discuss them. If they are illegal for some perverse reason, that's a problem Mike will have to deal with.

Regulation. Yes at some level "regulation" simply means "making people do something by throwing them in jail if they refuse" and obviously that's a powerful and general tool. The point the FAQ is trying to get across is that if, e.g. Qatar decided to "regulate" Bitcoin that wouldn't impact other users because the protocol is a global, international thing. There might be a way to make that clearer or to explicitly note that an entity that's willing to use force to get its own way can do pretty much anything.

Collusion. I agree that the current answer is a bit misleading. It could mention the notion of "economic majority" that can effectively force changes on everyone through superior weight of trading power, perhaps. Perhaps the first sentence can just change "with" to "without" - it's not possible to change Bitcoin without a majority of users and miners being on board with the changes.

Can it be cracked/shut down. I suppose if you include state-sponsored cyber warfare then yes it can be shut down. I'd agree that this answer doesn't seem to add much to the FAQ and could be left out.

[saivann]

Thanks Mike and Luke-Jr, I'll work on this later today.

[saivann]

Image permission: We have permission from the website owner, and this image follows the attribution guidelines from Google Maps, http://www.google.com/permissions/geoguidelines/attr-guide.html . The content provider used by GMaps in this image is MapLink and there is no special legal notice about them : http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/legalnotices_maps.html

Regardless, Google Maps Terms and Conditions seem to disengage from each content provider right to claim their copyright rights : http://www.google.com/intl/en-US/help/terms_maps.html . Additionally, I've asked a law student his opinion on this subject and if this image could reasonably be used under the "fair use" law but didn't get an answer yet.

However, due to the very restricted, non-commercial use we have, I doubt that this could be a problem. If anyone is really concerned about this, we can hide the image until I get more answers.

Edit: Just got a confirmation that we have nothing to be scared about.

[saivann]

@luke-jr @mikehearn : I have just updated the texts to better address your comments. Your opinion on the new ones are welcome. ( And your proofreading for typos / improvements )

Links to each updated text:
http://bitcoinfaq.us.to/en/faq#what-is-bitcoin
http://bitcoinfaq.us.to/en/faq#what-are-the-disadvantages-of-bitcoin
http://bitcoinfaq.us.to/en/faq#what-happens-when-bitcoins-are-lost
http://bitcoinfaq.us.to/en/faq#is-bitcoin-useful-for-illegal-activities
http://bitcoinfaq.us.to/en/faq#can-bitcoin-be-regulated
http://bitcoinfaq.us.to/en/faq#why-do-bitcoins-have-value
http://bitcoinfaq.us.to/en/faq#what-if-someone-creates-a-better-digital-currency
http://bitcoinfaq.us.to/en/faq#why-do-i-have-to-wait-10-minutes
http://bitcoinfaq.us.to/en/faq#how-much-will-the-transaction-fee-be
http://bitcoinfaq.us.to/en/faq#what-if-i-receive-a-bitcoin-when-my-computer-is-powered-off
http://bitcoinfaq.us.to/en/faq#could-users-collude-against-bitcoin

Concerning CVE-2010-5139 in "Hasn't Bitcoin been hacked in the past?", my understanding of this specific case is that the protocol was right, but the implementation was wrong ( never the protocol did mention that billions of bitcoins could be created out of thin air, the fundamental rules of the protocol didn't change that day ) . Perhaps this can be said differently, in which case some suggestions would be appreciated.

[luke-jr]

@saivann Even today, there is no distinction between the protocol and the Satoshi implementation. An exploit in the implementation is an exploit in the protocol. Hopefully that will change in the future, but it is what it is, and we shouldn't try to hide that or beat around the bush.

[saivann]

@luke-jr: I just updated the text, hope it's less subject to interpretation now. Of course I agree with not hiding anything. The complete CVE list is already linked from the answer. I just want to avoid other kind of misunderstanding like "Bitcoin protocol is flawed and some people are still able to cheat the system".

[Michagogo]

Slight typo in en.yml, line 295: "The rules of the protocol and the cryptography used for Bitcoin are is still working years after its inception..."

[Michagogo]

In "Can Bitcoin be regulated?", "since this requires to invest as much than all other miners in the world" seems a bit off, as does "This process involves that individuals are rewarded by the network for their services." in "How are bitcoins created?"

Also, in "What does "synchronizing" mean and why does it take so long?", "For Bitcoin to remain secure, enough people should keep using full node clients because they perform the task of validating and relaying transactions." seems kinda weird to me -- what does "enough people" mean?

In "How does Bitcoin mining work?", it's more on the order of quadrillions, not just millions -- unless I've miscalculated, it takes nearly half an exahash to find a block. Also in that section, in the second to last paragraph, it may be a good idea to mention that miners will work on whatever block they saw first, and that whichever block the miner who finds the next block finds first will be in the longest chain -- at the moment, it's unclear what happens with the fact that there are 2 blocks in the longest chain, just saying that when the next block is found miners will switch to the longest chain.

[luke-jr]

@Michagogo "seems a bit off" is pretty vague. What specifically is "off"?

[Michagogo]

@luke-jr The structure feels wrong -- "this requires to invest as much than" sounds like the kind of thing that's either written by someone/something that doesn't speak English natively, or possible the result of a string having different words swapped in and out, without adjusting the rest of the words around it to make sense.

[saivann]

@Michagogo Any idea of a better English sentence to replace those you think are a bit weird?

Millions : While it's true that million calculations per second is conservative, it always hold true with the average miners (all of them at least do millions calculations, not all of them do trillion calculations). Thus I think that the point is just to give a general idea and don't update this text constantly has the hash rate changes. That said, I changed it for billions and mentionned that it's "by second" for more clarity.

Chain fork : Sounds good, I've included your suggestion. Please comment if you find anything wrong with this change.