Bitcoin Forum

we all know forum accounts are sold and bought here frequently and we all have differnt opinions on it.Some of us are in favour of it and some completly oppose it while others have neutral views.
I have a suggestion that might go well with everyone.Disallow selling of account below Sr.Member.This will reduce the number of creating multiple accounts for account farming to aome extent.Whats your thoughts?

And why not ban all account sales?  Never mind,  don't answer that.  It's been brought up before and answered ad nauseam.   I wouldn't be opposed to your suggestion at all.  I just think it doesn't go far enough.   And high-ranked accounts are even more of a problem because those are the ones you can scam better with.

This suggestion is all well and good, but how would this be enforced?
How would you prove that a lower ranked account had been sold? You couldn't go from IPs, since people browse this forum through Proxies or TOR. This means that not only would be IPs be essentially untraceable, but anyone else using the same Proxy network or TOR could be punished due to their account being 'sold'. You couldn't go from signing a staked message, since very often addresses are not staked or private keys to staked addresses are transferred with the sale of the account.
In addition to this, what would happen if the account was found to be sold? Banning wouldn't be too great, since any false positives due to the reasons above would mean innocent people would be affected. Restoring the account back to the original owner could be problematic as not only does it take a lot of time and effort to do so, but the original owner would have to be verified as being the legitimate owner. Otherwise, hacked accounts could simply be sold and restored back to the hacker to sell again.

It is very nice coming up with 'solutions' like these, but you have to think about it from a logical point of view.

The most and recent accounts being sold at auctions are or potencial senior or senior and hero, this makes the things even more harder, today i saw one green trust account being auctioned, soo the question is how to be safe and secure dealing with high ranks accounts that can be purchased from any scammer, i would trust into green trust user some extra coins if he ask me a loan. But those is past already, currently im afraid to deal with big accounts as the market to dump accounts at lendings is growing or atleast these will happen soon or later.

i always think that banning or restricting btctalk accounts sales isn't a solution, people could buy it from any other place and it is gonna be too hard to figure it then.
the only effective solution i found is to continue banning spammers or maybe tagging farmed accounts with a red +/- neutral trust since it would affect its price

The problem is with implementation.
The reason that account sales (senior, junior, whatever) is not explicitly banned is that it would be difficult to implement. Account sales would just move outside the forum if you try to police it too much.

Why not ban signature campaign so that people like you stop creating nonsense and redundant threads.

Wouldn't help at all. Imagine that the whole issue is a tree. Yeah, a tree. And OP basically suggests that we have to cut a branch of a tree. If you want the issue to be fixed, why not disallow the whole thing? Anyway, people would just use another place to buy/sell their accounts. I think the major problem in this is the spam that is being created. If only some campaigns out there would stop accepting spammers, then the spammers would somehow stop spamming. They only post here to get paid anyway.

Redundant ? Please link me to a thread where the same suggestion was posted ? I can't seem to recall it.
For a newbie you do know a lot about signature campaigns,don't you ? Ahh...I forgot you have other 10 shill accounts scamming the shit out of this forum.Does the post bother you ? Maybe it ruins your selling "accounts business".

Lol. It wont stop anything. People would just farm them up to Senior which most will do anyway. Besides, even if we banned all account sales that wouldn't stop anything just move it off site so banning the sale of ranks under Senior is even more pointless.


Of course it's redundant because his suggestion would do nothing and is even a worse idea than all the other "ban account sale" threads that pop up every month.

The selling/buying of accounts is "legal" because it cannot be stopped. If they will not sell here, they'll sell on another place/forum.
Now, with this in mind, I don't see how your idea could be enforced....

That would be a very poor financial move for the forum. Signature campaigns increase traffic to the website, and in turn, the number of impressions that are seen by ads. Removing campaigns would result in a drop in traffic as well as a drop in ad revenue for the forum.

There's a balance to found in there somewhere. If every single poster is posting junk in search of dust, that's not going to make the advertisers any money. The more committed users will become disenchanted and shop elsewhere.

U're totally right. This "traffic" is useful to no one.
Both account sales (multi accounting included),and campaigns should be straight out forbidden. Quality over quantity. Until then, it's wild west.

Not true. When theymos runs auctions for ad spaces on the website, he also includes data as to how many impressions previous ads have seen. (https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adstats) Removing signature campaigns would decrease the impressions that ads see, and in turn, the amount of money brought in from ads for the forum.

I agree with you on the possibility of banning account sales. I think that would do good around here to cut down on the number of signature spammers there are going around posting absolute trash and cluttering up topics. The problem with banning account sales is that you're banning the sale of Bitcointalk accounts on this forum. There's nothing stopping these dealings from going on elsewhere, and accounts still changing hands.

I don't agree with you on banning signature campaigns. Although there are lots of users simply spamming for satoshis, there are plenty of users who actively contribute valuable content to the website and who wear paid signatures too. It makes sense to me - if you're already going to be posting on this website, why not get paid a little bit for doing what you're already doing?

After skimming through the data, it seemed that the only times that the past was competing with current impressions is back when the price skyrocketed during 2013, and unique ips were triple what we have right now (300k!)

However, I would like to state that logged-in users make up about 12.5% of the total impressions, and perhaps ~40% of those are in signature campaigns? (Hard to tell.) That would not cut off too much traffic relatively, though it would be noticeable.

I think you're wrong. That's why i also said "quality over quantity" ;  While it's true that paid posting increases the number of impressions, it's also true that most of the users
in such campaigns are not interested in the ads themselves. (They are not part of the targeted audience)

I would like to see something like a test period of let's say 3 months where all signatures would be disabled, and only forum ads were left alive. - That would show the correct path to follow.

Banning account trading isn't enforceable. As have been mentioned throughout the thread, there is no 100% verifiable way to prove original ownership of an account, nor any way to stop anyone from transferring over "ownership" of an account to another. Unless you can provide us a means to employ fingerprint verification, retinal scanning, DNA verification, or a combination thereof as a way to access the accounts, then your suggestion is pretty much meaningless.

If you're still having trouble understanding, then consider the case of MMORPGs. High value accounts are sold everyday despite the various efforts made by large (and medium-sized) companies to hinder the act. If account trading in general can be stopped in an efficient and non-disruptive way, then it would have been done a long time ago.

You are not wearing signature because you are a newbie and not many campaigns available for your rank.I am sure you would also join some campaign if accepted.
Dont blame it on my signature.I created it because I thought that would help remove some trash

How? Bitcointalk does not know when an account is sold.

Bro this can only increase the spams and farming even more. Higher rank needs more posts and more time. More time to wait for an account to rank up, more time for them to use it in farming.

Yes, I do agree. It has some more bad effects too. I think if this offer can be done vice versa it may be better. I mean disallow selling accounts higher than Sr. Member. Since Sr. members and higher accounts are more prone to be trusted and do scam.

While we may be able to enforce a signature campaign ban (at least to a reasonable degree), I don't see how we could enforce a ban on account sales. We could however, make it bannable and thus more risky for the people who engage in these trades (issue a permanent ban for both the seller and buyer).

The best that one can do is determine whether it is probable that an account changed hands.

A common misconception by ignorant users. There is zero reason for one to trust an account by default just based on their rank.

Providing that work is done on the quality of posts here, I can't say I would see the need for this to come into place. While account trading is inherently untrustworthy, and should by no means be supported by anyone, providing that an account follows the rules of the forum and has no prior reputation (E.G Positive trust/DT etc) I do not see a problem with it changing hands.
In addition, I feel that it may simply be useless work for Staff members; if the seller has any sense he will sell the account using an anonymous Newbie account. Banning this will do nothing but waste the time of Staff.

The fact that this misconception exists however shows that it is a problem, regardless of the stupidity of it.

Yes and unfortunately members with positive feedback and specially the old members can do more scams if they want to. At least selling some accounts must be restricted or publicly announced. I do not know why this rule does not modified.

It's not really a misconception. From experience, I see that those of higher ranks write more constructive posts than lower ranking members.

If it is not good,why are campaign owners spending their precious coins on it? I learnt one of the campaign has been running continuously since 2 years and has spent over 300 btc till now.Are the fool to spend such a huge amount for nothing?

Constructive posts are not te basis if someone can be trusted or not neither.
High ranks or not, this forum is flooded with spammers.

I don't see the need for it either, but I wouldn't mind going either ways at this point. There aren't that many 'real reasons' for which one would need to engage in account sales.

Indeed. It may end up being a lot more work than its worth it. In any case, I don't see the forum policy shifting towards that direction.

We can't educate everyone on how to avoid scams on time.

I'd say because it is near impossible to enforce properly and may not do that much good either.

That's not a general thumb rule. I've seen users of high ranks write posts of very poor quality.

That's not completely true. If you improve the quality of the posts, and of the active members, then the advertising becomes more valuable. Constantly advertising gambling sites, ponzi schemes, and other low end concepts, not only debases Bitcoin, but it also reflects badly on the forum.

I'm sure there is a balance to be met there. I think it's fair to say that signature campaigns do generate a good deal of traffic. The forum also has an interest in not appearing to be overrun by spammers.

To the OP's idea, I'm guessing buyers/sellers would just take matters to PM. Everyone has got a price. :-\

That's true as well, but those sorts of sites (and the odd exchange as well) seem to be the only websites that can afford to spend thousands of dollars advertising on their website or service. If the forum wanted to show ads from interesting bitcoin startups with a lack of cash, they could consider opening a few more ad slots for auction, as that would drive down the price per slot, making it more affordable for startups. However, that's a completely different topic from this, so I'll just stop it there to prevent this thread from getting derailed.