Bitcoin Forum

i really think about selling Bitcointalk accounts shouldn't be allowed ..  these kind of deals encourage scams , spam signatures, etc..
from a while now we can see marketplace section of the forum spamed with these kinds of offers, and i think this desserve Bitcointalk comunity...

once again , it's just a personal feeling , but i'm pretty sure i'm not the only one thinking in this way ..
sure, selling accounts is allowed by the forum rules.. but at my humble opinion, it shouldn't.

I totally agree.
Mostly all of the sold accounts are either used for sig spamming or scams.

Trade of bitcointalk.org forum accounts will never be 'banned', it's not about 'should not be allowed' ... it's about that the staff isn't a police station and it's work is moderate the forum content.

I also don't like accounts getting sold but whatever we do or say, it will continue as it's not against the forum rules.

I personally can't understand that some one is really willing to sell an account for very cheap as it cost so much time to build it up.

Well, we can't do anything about it. Just don't spend much attention to it when you see account sale threads. Just skip them.

This topic is brought up way too often and the conclusion is that admins/mods can't stop the black market trade of these accounts.

That point does stand, however the situation would be different. When you think about it, right now there is nothing stopping you from involving in these trades (there are no 'risks', apart from possibly getting scammed by either the buyer or seller). In the case where account sales were disallowed (a bannable offense) there would be no more sales on the forum (they'd have to try to engage in these trades somewhere else) and now a certain risk factor would be present (anyone who gets caught doing account sales would be permanently banned). This would reduce the amount of trades by a noticeable amount.

ofc it should be allowed. people need high ranked accounts for sig money making.
don't cry op baby. jest deal.

yeah ... good exemple !  : that's precisely against this kind of trolls ( like you ), than sales of account  shouldn't be allowed ...  you're a great ( perfect ) exemple what  i want say..
thank you  ;)

  yeah Lauda.. this make sense.. indeed.

The real question is why a topic like this is not closed and merged with the others that are currently active!
Seems to be what is done on other topics in the forum or we driving a optic campaign to make it appear like a issue is more dire?

The flawed thinking is one begots the other when it comes to selling of accounts,signature spam and scamming.

I'm sorry, did that really make sense to you?  Lol

Fuck account sales.  It should be a permaban offense.  In lieu of that, buyers and sellers should get painted by DT members.

I do agree that there are quite the number of threads on this subject already. Report it and see what happens.

Why would it not make sense? Should I clarify once more? Here: Currently there is no risk when you are engaging in account trades as you are free to do so. You might get marked by a DT member if you get caught, but that is all. In the case where account sales are bannable, anyone who engages in trades risks getting a permanent ban. It's as simple as that?

I wouldn't mind that.

I've never bothered to make extra accounts, but the thought did cross my mind.
This forum is an interesting experiment in free markets, and the results are not always pretty.
"Let the children play"

There should be a mechanism that resets (deletes) the positive trust only, when password and email for the account are changed during 24h window.
This simple gimmick would help to solve scam possibility problem. Of course to some extent but still.
However I don't see anything wrong in dealing with accounts. Those higher level ones are really hard to score so they have to be worth something.
And as to spamming, this eventually is spotted and eradicated by campaign managers, and sometimes by users themselves as some campaigns offer bounty for reporting spammers.
Point out the luck in my logic if you care :)   

Badbear has said that pushing the account trades outside the forum would be more apt to scamming. You would reduce seeing account trades on the forum but I don't think that would stop account sales or minimize it that much.

This would also have a lot of unintended consequences.

It would cause the prices of accounts to fall dramatically, which you will say is a good thing, but you will fail to consider the fact that this will make it cheaper for a scammer to attempt to scam with a purchased account and will lower the threshold that a scammer will need to steal before buying an account will be NPV positive for a scammer.

If a purchased account is going to get banned once it is found out that it is purchased then it will quickly have zero value. The problem with this is that this will encourage people to scam with a purchased account because if they are caught trying to scam, then the negative trust they will receive will likely have zero effect on the value of the sold account. As it stands now, if you buy an account, use it for whatever honest purpose then you can potentially resell it for something of value, and if the account gets negative trust then it will lose that value.

It will cause people to become more complacent and trusting of established accounts, which would make it easier for scammers into tricking people into sending btc/things of value without taking any kind of precautions.

All of the above will also encourage people to scam via buying accounts, which will only exaggerate the above problems. 

Typical loggorhea from quickscammer.  By this logic there would be less monetary incentive to farm accounts, and that is a good thing.  But we don't really know until it happens, do we?  And until then, as I have argued before,  account buyers and sellers should be negged till it hurts.

I would prefer accounts not be sold or transferred as well.
Realizing that accounts can be sold, changed the way I viewed the forum.

There's no way around it either way,so it's not worth discussing.Account selling will always be an active topic and there will be people buying and selling accounts,either here or somewhere else.That's the current state.

even if the mods could make the sale of an account extremely difficult. That would just hike up the price of the accounts and make them far more sought after.

Yeah :(



which will reduce sales and bring the cost up for scammers. I say, yeah :D

why do you think prices would go up?

As it stands now, most sold accounts are used for non-scamming purposes, and if the sale of accounts were disallowed then the buyers who buy accounts for non-scamming purposes would no longer wish to buy accounts, but the number of accounts for sale would remain the same. Basic economics would imply that the price would go down, reducing the costs to potential scammers

I actually have no problem with that. People will try to scam either way. It isn't even hard to avoid scammers, and it is quite rare that someone that is 'trusted' engages in such behavior. The spam is the primary problem in this situation, not the scams.

Not doing anything exaggerates the problems the most.

No. The opposite would happen as it would be risky to engage in account trades. Read QS's post.

anything sold illegally has a higher price, thats the point of the black market. guns and drugs are sold at high prices because oft he risk involved

Do you state this from your first hand involvement in Account trading?
What are "non scamming" purposes? Presumably they involve a financial benefit, so are you referring to signature campaign income?

 
Which would mean that "the non-scamming purpose" market would shrink, or need to be opened up to newbies.


No it wouldn't, it would mean that account farming would be much less attractive because of the danger of all the accounts belonging to the farmer being rendered worthless.


No, because above: supply would drastically reduce.
Unless you're talking about the $10 loan market, does the cost of an account really figure in the number of scams pulled? Imo, no, IYO, probably yes.

Tl,dr:

Pros

More difficult for scammers
Less sig spam
Account farming made unprofitable

Cons

None.

But nothing will change.

If the forum just bans account sales, there will be less people who will go ahead and buy an account. There will be less people trying to sell accounts openly. Less accounts going as collateral for loans. Less spam. Less scams.

That is, the entire market for account sales will shrink (demand and supply, though I can't say which will be more or less).

The only problem I see with that is, as you pointed out there will still be trades going on outside the forum which will be risky (very probable that an escrow will not be used and much more likely to be scammed).
Well the only reason why accounts are being bought and sold are, directly or indirectly, to make useless posts for a campaign or to scam. So why not?

Suggestion: Ban account sales from 10th June to 10th August and see how it goes?

Couldn't have said it better myself.   The bottom line for me is that both parties in an account sale cannot be trusted, much like the people who come on this forum to offer prescription medications for sale cannot be trusted.

I'm on the receiving end of a lot of butthurt because of my negative trust that I'm leaving lately.   Well, that's our trust system.   You can scream bloody murder until your uvula explodes, but I'm not deleting any of it. 

1. Accounts are sold because the Signature Ads they can run pay more.

2. People post meaningless drivel to get paid for their Signature Ads.

3. More people posting more meaningless drivel means more hits on the site.

4. More hits on the site means Theymos can rake in more income from his own site ads.

5. After taking in millions of $ worth of BTC "donations" from old timers, well, Theymos just needs to suck a little bit more out of this "community".

6. Use raised funds to pay "moderators" who help steer Bitcoin development in the direction his friends at Blockstream want/need it to go.

7. Sleep like a baby, content that you have been an excellent steward of this decentralized and trustless system.

Yes this is true. Account are sold to newcomers to this forum, and for a fee they don't have to be branded newbies.
I agree with you on this point. Look at the economics section, and you'll see pointless drivel posted over and over again
Not necessarily, most search engines are designed to filter out spam/irrelevant content, though this site has a high pagerank.
I do not agree with you on these last points. there is nothing wrong with Theymos having millions of dollars off of Bitcoin. Your suggestion that he is using the donations and the extra money from his own ads to pay the moderators and Bitcoin developers is complete nonsense. this may be a big forum, but there is a Bitcoin community beyond this forum. Sure, the develops post here, but your accusation is just a conspiracy theory.

As time goes on, the value of accounts go down. More and more farmers will rank up and flood the market. There's no way you can stop account sales. People even sell other forum accounts even here!

Yes as well as my observations of what are clearly sold accounts.

As of a little over a year ago, when I stopped dealing in accounts, virtually none (probably less then 5%) of sold accounts would be used in scam attempts. I think this number might have increased somewhat recently as prices seems to have fallen by a decent amount (making it cheaper to attempt to scam), but I still think the number of sold accounts used in a scam attempt (not necessarily a successful one) is very low. I also suspect that many of the accounts used in scam attempts were controlled by a very small number of people at the time of their scam attempts.
This might be true, I am not sure.

I would think of it this way: The forum is not going to ever limit the number of accounts that someone can have, this is simply against it's political beliefs. If for example someone were to start selling accounts on another forum and/or on reddit, then whenever one of their accounts would show up to the admins as belonging to someone else then the seller could simply claim that they were hacked to avoid all of their accounts getting banned. On the other hand, the one sold account could potentially end up getting banned, which would turn off potential legit buyers.


It used to be that hero accounts without any kind of trust/reputation (or even an avatar) would sell for well over $1,500, however the cost has since come down significantly due to increased supply of hero accounts, and legendary accounts (as well as all other ranks of accounts) have seen similar declines in prices -- at least from what I have seen. When an account has negative trust, it's value tends to go to nearly zero.

I would ask you this; how many people on here would you the average user, trust with $750 (half of what the cost of hero account used to cost)? How many people would you trust with $130 (the selling price on this (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1492296.0;all) auction for a hero account)? If the value of an account goes to nearly zero after a scam attempt is made public, then a potential scammer will both have to risk a higher amount and need to steal a higher amount in order to potentially profit off of an expensive account. Also if someone has a more expensive account, and people know such account is very valuable, then maybe more people will trust the expensive account with $130, however the owner of this account might be able to make $10 off of this trade, and if they repeat this enough times then maybe they will be able to make back the cost of their account.

I am curious to know why you think banning the sale of accounts will make it more difficult for scammers. The banning of accounts will simply move the sale of accounts to other forums and/or reddit. Both of these places will have trusted members within their communities who can act as an escrow service. I really don't think that creating a reddit account and/or an account on some other trading forum is all that difficult.

I pointed out above that legit buyers of accounts would potentially get banned if the sale of accounts were to get banned, while the seller of accounts could claim that they got hacked. The forum will generally will not take action unless there is (very) solid evidence, so I believe that the seller would probably get the benefit of the doubt, while the buyer really will not have any explanation as to what they are doing with someone else's account.

 
Why do you think this? There are escrows on forum.bitcoin.com, there are escrows on reddit, and I assume that there are escrows on other marketplace-like forums. The forum administration of bitcointalk has zero influence on what is allowed on other forums, and influential members of the community here likely has a diminished level of influence of influence within other communities that are separate from bitcointalk.

Maybe BadBear and/or theymos and/or another mod can comment on this, however from what I can tell, the account farmers (eg sellers) are worse with the spam then the people buying accounts for signature campaign purposes.


One other point that I forgot to mention previously, is that if someone is in need of money (who is not in the business of farming accounts) can potentially raise some money via the sale of their account. If this person does not have this option then, if they are desperate enough they may decide to attempt to pull off a scam to raise the money they need.

Suggestion: Ban account sales from 10th June to 10th August and see how it goes?
[/quote]

I mean, you do have first hand experience with this point as well. Good to see that whole "I hate signature campaigns and I'm not joining one again" is going well for you too, child.

It's simpler than that. More people that are here spamming bullshit, more people are giving traffic to the site spamming bullshit. It has nothing to do with search engines.
That, and I highly doubt that a search engine will not index any page on this forum because it sees it as spam.

Moderators are rewarded monetarily for the work they do on the forum by theymos. I don't think you know what you're talking about.

In reply to this, I believe you're half right. All up until you started trying to shove an unrelated agenda into your point.

How about we make it a policy that the original owner of the account is the true owner and can always claim the account back.
That way if an account is sold the buyer would have the risk of the seller claiming it back, making it too risky for people to buy accounts. I think if that policy were enacted then the amount of sold accounts would plummet. There would be no need to ban sales threads or whatever as it would simply be too risky to buy an account, much like it is too risky to buy a steam account. Those are rarely sold and when they are usually the buyer ends up out of pocket.

Wow. a personal attack. you sure are good at debating here. I'm not going to respond to the rest of your post since it;s just a personal attack. Your the child. adults don't call people names.

Which discourages buying ;D
(though I didn't think all that. Well if we are implementing a ban, it should be done gradually, so most will be aware of the rules when the rules get strict.)

I assume the buyer in the case will most likely be a newbie anyway, who wants to "earn" from posting and well.. he just broke a rule. It won't be very easy for the seller to claim and convince others his account was hacked.


 

Well I am not familiar with forum.bitcoin.com, and that is just my opinion. My point is, if someone Google's it (ignoring the bitcointalk.org results) the next ones may not be one in which the person is active at or familiar with, naturally he will not be aware of the escrow providers there (and the seller may not be very encouraging), and I am sure not many will take some time and do the research.
May be the seller can even claim the account was "hacked" with better chance of success.

Either way, the chances of getting scammed outside the forum are high.




I agree though it may not be correct in all cases. Sometimes the buyer become the seller later.
Banning account sales will mean less account farming for selling.




To be honest, if I need some money, I would just do something in the RL..
Selling my account wouldn't get me a "lot" of money anyway lol


Suggestion: Ban account sales from 10th June to 10th August and see how it goes?

Completely correct.

You just did.

Imagine it this way: All that accounts (and users that have tried to sell/buy them) that have been traded so far are permanently banned. Would it not have a positive affect?

Exactly. That's a pointless argument (do people sell their e.g. 'FB accounts' when they need money? Hint: No.).

I don't think that we can draw to a conclusion from such a specific and small amount of data. In addition to that, this is pointless without permanent bans (IMO).

There was any debate? I just thought I should point out how hypocritical you're being, maybe hoping you won't pull the same shit for the third time in a month or two. I apologize if I said it harshly.

Apart from, if you read it, I pretty much agreed with you for the rest of my post (apart from I corrected you in a few places you were wrong).

Neither do they change their mind like the weather on their paid signature, coincidentally only when they get punished for spamming.
Adults do read people's posts and reply to their points, regardless of whether said points hurt their feelings or not.

I accept your apology. This hasn't been the first time you called me names. In one thread a while back you called me a "cunt". I can only interpret your posts to be constructed deliberately hurt my feelings. But as I said I accept your apology. Have a good day/night whenever you read this.

For what I believe is a good reason. You were looking to develop/get help with something that severely damages a business that I have helped others with for years. Regardless, this is not on topic so let's not discuss it here.

You too.

While I do agree with you, this is a moot point since it has happened on the forum in the past (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1427606.0).

I can't vote? because I'm noob?  ???  :D

People who farm FB accounts sell them. There is a significant market for FB accounts, especially FB pages that have lots of likes.

example:
https://buyaccs.com/en/buy-bulk-facebook-accounts.php

Just like they sell bitcointalk accounts. There is a huge difference there.
People buy and sell FB accounts, bct accounts, and just about everything.

The argument is, do they sell it because they need money? (Money in the sense an urgent need of cash) If I know anything, it is done sort of as a "business". Farming activity here = getting likes on FB, then selling it.

None of my friends in RL have ever considered selling their FB accounts lol. Would you sell your personal fb account?

You both got it wrong. Read:
There is a huge difference between selling your personal Facebook account and farming up likes and whatnot (e.g. accounts with a few thousand "friends") and selling pages. I was referring to the first one. Do you just go out there and sell your personal FB account when you need cash? You don't.

Perhaps Facebook isn't the best example, because FB has a real name policy and also if you sold your personal FB account then your friends would obviously know it was sold and the account would not be worth much, also if it was reported there is a high chance of the account being banned and you may not want your real name associated with the account after it was sold. But people sell their personal accounts on social media websites where they primarily interact with people they don't know in real life, Twitter is a prime example.

Facebook accepts "Baggins" as a last name and even doesn't allow some real names (unless they verify their names iirc). :D
Anyway guess why that policy is there?

The suggestion is whether bitcointalk should take a similar policy to discourage all these farming and selling. (different policy because bct is not a RL social media website rather a bitcoin forum).

I don't see why Facebook is not a good comparison in this respect. Facebook may take action against buying/selling, proposing that bitcointalk can consider the same.



Same as what we expect an ideal bitcointalk member to answer.

But its one way of making money,, maybe there are other questions is, Must transactors involve should have a link on there facebook or other social media accounts. That way we can see if its honest and serious it is more secured and more trust-able that people font want to risk there info with simple scams. Accounts must be at least 1 year old. With many friends. And i think there should be a special way to make an account for dealers. So its easy to identify if its legit or not.

Thats just my opinion. We all know people call always "bend" the rules.

Maybe one per account. Its true but i can just copy a pic from someones fb then use it as mine. Its easy now to fake many things. Even the transac history can sometimes be faked.. mine only is that we should just trade with people who got positives trust but i think rare to see them selling accounts. Maybe one per account

Once enough people report you (for anything, not just having a fake name), then you will be asked to provide Facebook your ID. It has happened to me countless times. It is a Facebook policy that you use your real legal name. https://www.facebook.com/help/112146705538576

If you're having trouble entering a name, change your country, language to one that uses that name and then change it back afterwards. That works most of the time.



Well for one, all of this is in vain as FB accounts are still farmed/bought/sold. And the other is facebook is a RL social media as you call it, very different situation to bitcointalk where a lot of people are anonymous and an identity could change hands without many noticing. People would notice if you sold your FB account right?

It is. So is identity theft. Should that be allowed as well?

Not to mention how easy it is to buy a Facebook Account with many friends (it was discussed literally 3 posts before yours), what if a member doesn't use social media? Would they have to sign up for it, gain a lot of friends/follows and wait for a year before they could perform any transactions on this forum? If they didn't want to do this, what would stop them posting some random Facebook user's account and pretending it was them?
In addition to this, one of Bitcoin's main principles is that it is anonymous. This is then ruined if everyone has to post all of their personal information just to do something as simple as transact using it.

The account being legit doesn't necessarily mean the user posting it being legit. I am this Facebook user (https://en-gb.facebook.com/zuck), can I transact now and be trusted?

You obviously didn't think it through very well. Hope you enjoy your signature payment!

You should just trade with people you trust after looking at their history on the forum and evaluating their behavior/trade history. Relying on any other factor to make a judgement for you has the possibility to go very wrong (even with personal evaluation it can still go very wrong, see Master-P).

If you're talking about people selling accounts with positive trust, it happens more than you would expect. It is disgusting.

It would depend on how well you went about hiding you buying it.

That is right. I agree with everything. I don't say bitcointalk.org should do that and allow people to use only their legal names lol. ;D

Just suggesting if FB is doing something to prevent it, bitcointalk can too. Granted it won't be 100% effective. But it gives a better impression on the forum.
Two years ago, I was genuinely surprised when I found that account sales aren't officially restricted. To anyone new, it could give a message that it is accepted in the community^[1].

Similarly, there could be additional measures like allowing users to be reported (if there is sufficient reason to believe that the account is purchased/sold, or the owner has undergone a rather sudden change of personality) and even displaying 'the password has been changed recently warning' in a more visible place.



^[1] I agree that not restricting does not mean encouraging, but the difference is when you expect something to be restricted and when you realize it is not being restricted and there are no rules against the same, it gives the impression of being a completely ordinary and 'okay to do' activity.

Right now, if an activity farmer gets away with it, the sale is almost guaranteed.

Disclaimer: I don't have first hand experience in trading accounts. This is just what I think and my opinion. As an ex-campaign manager, I have a reasonable idea on how buying/selling accounts affect spam.

---

Trading accounts is discouraged. I think we could go one more step.