Bitcoin Forum

Is there an official reason why? Seems silly that it's allowed or even tolerated.

They can't control it so there is no point of even trying to ban it. It would take a lot of time to look for alt accounts and you can quite easily disguise an alt account using things such as vpns.

So I can understand if it's done privately, but creating a thread and publicly asking to buy accounts...
A bit starnge don't you think?  ???

Whether it's allowed or not people will still want to do it, and there's nothing mods/admins can do to prevent it from occurring outside the forums, so at least by allowing it we raise awareness and people aren't lulled into a false sense of security.

Sure. 25,000$ and a notice that my account has been sold ;)

I agree with this.


I agree you can't stop it, but it shouldn’t be able to be freely advertised. You could argue that you can't stop the sale of other illegal items / services too, so allow it. Moderators should just lock threads or ban people who openly sell accounts. Not doing so is almost condoning it and 9/10 accounts are used to scam people, and it looks bad on this site in my opinion. It's already incredibly difficult to trust people without having to wonder if somebody has just sold their account.

That seems to be his point, no? That since anyone could sell their account even if it wasn't openly tolerated here, that it should be difficult to trust people, so they might as well put it in plain view?

Guys, I think we all have the same views about this, but as mentioned above, it's too hard for the Mods to control.
I doubt a highly reputable member would sell their account before notifying anyone about it beforehand...

I disagree. I'd feel safer roaming a country that has bans on guns as opposed to one that lets anyone have one and buy them openly. I just don't think this forum should throw their hands up in the air about this and would be better if they banned the sale of accounts, but each to their own an' all that.


Well, not really. There have been so called reputable members who have turned out to be scammers. What's to stop you or I building up some rep and a year or twos worth of posting, deciding we've had enough then selling out to the highest bidder. We shouldn’t be allowed to sell our accounts and we definitely shouldn’t be allowed to advertise the fact, but again, just my opinion.

Even if you knew that whether there was a 'ban' or not, people would continue buying and selling guns, but it would just be 'criminals' doing so 'illegally', and you wouldn't actually be any more protected, you would just feel like you were? Hmm...

That's good, trust no one, use multisig or SSSS-based escrows, ask for collateral (IDs aren't worth much) and always be a little paranoid.

Banning guns doesn't stop killings, it only means the desperate ones will use different tools (vide UK gun laws and knife legislation) and the determined ones will acquire them illegally. Same with disallowing people from trading accounts, they will just do it elsewhere.

Not really. That was my point. Compare gun crime in the US to the UK. Of course there's a possibility that you can get shot in the UK, but the chance is very slim and doesn't compare to the chance in the states. Name me a school shooting that's happened over here? And of course banning something doesn't eradicate the sale or use, but it'll cut it down and make it more difficult to sell, but not doing anything about the sale is almost condoning / sanctioning it.

In my opinion letting sales be public will promote more selling of accounts, but obviously there's never going to be any figures or stats to prove either way, but it's my opinion that it would.

Shall we turn this place into a black market and sell drugs, weapons and porn as well since bans and prohibition don't work and people can just make these purchases here privately?

All of these are OK provided that it's legal in the seller's and the buyer's countries.

Why was the thread split?

It was going Off-topic and Meta is the right section for discussing forum rules, moderation, etc.

Probably because it went off-topic. The discussion whether or not it should be allowed, how to prevent it, etc should be kept in meta. The topic itself was for buying an account, which got de-railed and thus split up.
edit: got ninja'd by malevolent

But perhaps he would feel safer roaming a country that has bans on these things as well?

This, account sales and having multiple accounts* are allowed because banning them wouldn't do anything. People that understand the techical nature of Bitcoin, aren't going to have any trouble using proper tools that will allow them to stay uncaught. On a Hello Kitty fansite forum, they can probably have the TOS say that the sale of accounts is forbidden. The majority of their userbase isn't going to know how to use proxies, tor, and the other anonomizing tools that the users of this forum use on a regular basis. The forums have 184576 registered accounts at the time of me posting this. If you think that the admins/staff could stop even a fraction of that many people from selling accounts secretly, you would have to be crazy.

* Multiple accounts are also allowed so that people may post unpopular ideas without jeopardizing their professional standings

I have different e-mail addresses for different business objectives, and this is no different than someone who wants separate bitcointalk accounts.  Do you really want your customers clicking on your last posts to learn about your personal life, or your political views?  Maybe your geographical location is more evident with your primary account.  Building up a respectable post count can be tedious too, and so maybe you don't want to start as a newb again.  These are just examples, and most are for privacy protection..  but jumping to the conclusion that the only intent is to scam is just wrong.  

Actually it is pretty annoying.
Was about to lend a trusted user some BTC.
However, I was informed he hasn't been active for a couple of months and had weird activity recently after some type of scam.
Guess his account was bought/hacked.
Almost went through and would have lost my BTC. I'm thankful to the member who stopped me, but I think a list is needed of all the accounts that people have sold.
I think if that were to happen, it would discourage people from selling their accounts.

Would you feel safer roaming the streets if people were openly trying to sell you and your children drugs and guns and the authorities did nothing about it?

Do you feel unsafe if people roaming the streets are selling masks, wigs, and makeup?

No. I don't know what country has bans or restrictions on those things.

And how is it possible for such a list to exist? Also as someone said before trust noone and you should be fine  :P

I already fundamentally don't trust people, but I'm afraid you have to a little if you want to do business one way or another on this site. There's no way you can 100% guarantee yourself against problems/scams, but obviously there's ways to minimise the risk, but publically allowing or tolerating the sale of accounts doesn't help this at all.