I have been trying to understand why Stack Exchange has opted to have several different Cryptocurrency sites instead of a single site for a long time. In December of 2015 a question was asked on MSE about making a single cryptocurrency site to rule them all:
In an answer there, I posted a quote from a comment from Murch (one of the Bitcoin mods) on a related question here on A51:
To get back to you guys about my above suggestions. I had talked with SE staff about potentially changing the name of bitcoin.se already a while ago but encountered staunch opposition. I was told that name changes had been tried before and the sites in previous attempts lost great amounts of traffic and users, all but destroying the sites. It seems that a name change will be unlikely, but you are still welcome to ask questions about Ethereum there, until you get your own site.
So, it seems that the site that should have been "Cryptocurrencies" (or perhaps "Cryptocurrencies & Blockchain"?) was named "Bitcoin" because that was the first technology in the pack and - from the beginning - they accepted questions about others... and, in fact, still do:
- a cryptocurrency or technology derived directly from Bitcoin such as Namecoin or Litecoin
- distributed cryptocurrencies not derived directly from Bitcoin such as Ripple, Ethereum or NXT
Because there has been a general disinclination to rename sites for branding/traffic purposes (though they have since renamed at least two sites including Cognitive Sciences) it seems that Bitcoin kept the name despite a broadening of the scope and the world of cryptocurrencies to dozens of similar or related technologies.
Now that there are several different sites, I think that it may be too late to go back... I don't know... There are a couple of options that I can think of but I don't know what's actually possible:
- Stop making new sites, rename "Bitcoin" to a more general site name as requested by Murch years ago and close all future site suggestions as duplicates of that. Leave existing sites alone.
- Stop making new sites, rename "Bitcoin" to a more general site name and merge all of the other sites into it (with much stamping of feet and gnashing of teeth).
- Keep going as it is, slowly doing with cryptocurrencies what Stack Exchange has refused to do with programming languages on Stack Overflow for years - separate site scope by technology.
There may be other options.
Option 1 would probably be the easiest because it doesn't require that avid users of sites that already have been established move to another site - even if all of the content they'd created already was moved. It'd be easiest on the staff, too, as they wouldn't have to figure out how to migrate stuff, merge accounts, reputation, allocating diamonds, etc.
My primary concern with having so many sites that do the same thing is that - well... cryptocurrencies may the be future of money... or they may be Pogs. And even if one of them turns out to be the central standard for money in 100 years, many of them will be the LaserDisc to someone else's BluRay or the Zune to everyone else's iPod.
If each of these currencies has its own site, Stack Exchange runs the risk of having to close down many sites in the rise and fall of the cryptocurrency battle of supremacy. When the sites are closed down, the content is lost(ish)... all of the work and time and history is... in some sense, wasted.
If there's a single site, the ebb and flow of individual currencies is irrelevant. If Iota dies and is replaced by Omega, the questions for Iota can still have a place and be archived and questions about Omega already have a place without having to go through the Area 51 process...
Yes, the technology is different... but so is Fortran different from Java and Python... but we have them all on Stack Overflow.
Please, let's stop making new Cryptocurrency sites!