Bitcoin Forum

This quote is often attributed to Albert Einstein, but Business Insider seems to think that it is a misattribution -
http://www.businessinsider.com/misattributed-quotes-2013-10?IR=T

Whoever said it was correct to a certain extent, and it is true of the quest for merits. If your posting habits are largely repetitive, and after 100+ posts, you still haven't received any merit, then reflect on that quotation. It really is time to learn and research so that you can change the direction of your posting.

I believe Bernard M. Baruch (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bernard_Baruch)

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I still have not found who actually said this LOL

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update:
In quora (https://www.quora.com/Did-Einstein-really-define-insanity-as-doing-the-same-thing-over-and-over-again-and-expecting-different-results) I see there are some healthy discussions but not satisfactory conclusion though.

"When you change the way you look at things the things you look at change"
                                                                                                           -Wayne dyer

The problem is  that many members have a negative  look  or view on the Merit system, that's why they  do not get some points , and always complain, unfortunately, this issue is pervasive in many of them.

You must adapt to all situations, and  the most essential thing is how to accept the truth and try to deal with it in a smart way, and if you will achieve that , then  it is certain that  you will get what you want.

The reason why many members (including myself) do same thing over and over again is because of :
1. Laziness - One of the greatest enemy of success. Simply because some members are so lazy to research, to read, to acquire knowledge. One of the reasons why they tend to do things over and over again.

I saw your thread that you need help to award merit, I suggest what if you create something like "Trivia Questions" the one who can answer the question correctly and satisfy you will be rewarded by merit. By doing that they will do research and read to answer your question.

That's really against my merit policy. I don't want people to suggest meritable posts to me, and I don't want to start using merits for competition rewards. I think merits should be given as part of the normal flow of the boards.

And yet those members are the ones complaining about the merit system, ranting about how hard and complicated  it is to earn a single merit where in fact they know what they should be doing right now to earn themselves enough merit to rank up.
Change should always start in yourself.

I see. People have different point of views. The reason why I suggest that is because I saw TMAN doing that. Merit is very valuable nowadays that is why many users do the best they can to receive some.

While I enjoy the quote and have had it be relevant, enough times in my life for it to hold truth with me.

Did we really need another Merit thread?

I get that you have sound advice for those out there still trying and caring; but could you not have posted this in 1 even 2 of the more active Merit or Merit guidance threads? I can also understand wanting people to see that advice, but after the first page, the only people who will read that are going to quote it and write something that isn't relevant.

I don't want to compete with TMAN, we all have to approach merit awarding in a responsible, but individualistic fashion, that ensures that we can maintain the richness in the variety of good posting.

I try to avoid the merit hunters, and I often put them on ignore. Merit is an award for the immersion and support of the forum, and not for self-gratification as a result of sycophantic posting.

I reflected on that before starting the thread, and I decided that this topic is not directly about merit. It is about the clogging of threads and boards, and the obfuscation of decent posts. Today's mission is to try to reduce the worthless spam posts by making the posters aware of the damage that they do to their own prospects, and the prospects of their peers.

I've always heard it was Einstein who coined that phrase--and we use it a LOT in the recovery community, because it's exactly what drug addicts experience when they've learned that they can't use substances safely and yet keep trying to do just that.

As far as merits go, yep there's a little bit of this going on.  Some people have figured it out, but the ones who are apparently incapable of learning keep trying the same thing, and they're the ones who keep complaining that they're not earning merits.  I suspect they'll eventually either try to make better posts or give up trying to earn merits.  Nobody can go on forever and not learn that kind of lesson.  But another problem is the newcomer to bitcointalk who's not familiar with the merit system--they're going to have to learn this from scratch, and there's no way of really telling who's new here and who's an alt account. 

However, remember that the merit system is still only about 4 months old.  That's pretty young in the grand scheme of things.  Maybe after a year or so, it'll become common knowledge that you won't be earning merits from shitty posts.  Maybe.  Hopefully.

I want to discuss that a bit on blab if you get a chance to look in. I think we could tune the awarding of merits for everybody's benefit, and improve board quality at the same time. I think that Theymos is keen for good posters to improve their ranking, and maybe we can help in this. Hence this series of threads by me.

Well I'm not as optimistic that e.g. a year with the merit system will change the way the newbie spammers post here... (and it won't change the bots at all...)
As long as youtube and the social sites encourage people to join here to earn money without any knowledge (they give them some posting examples and encourage them to join bounty campaigns), newbies won't care a shit about the backgound, the blockchain, the bitcoin, the ethereum, or anything important stuff but only the shitcoins and the shady exchanges where they can sell them after a successfull bounty campaign, in order to send the USD back to their home... and the sad thing is that for those newbie spammers this forum and the whole crypto world is just a kind of 'tool' to make some money...
And for the future, the youtube, steemit and other paid per click guys won't let these poor newbie spammers know that the merit system has come in and f.cked up their easy money system they promote, because people won't click on their youtube channel anymore and they won't get their money, so it's easier to them to just be quiet and let the poor guys experience the merit system on their own...

Insanity is nailing a piece of wood into a pipe in order to fix a leak (merit system - to the - spam problem).

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There is no visible slowdown of total spam, and the beggars are getting creative with new methods of spamming (one of which was discovered by us today  - "spam and quick delete bumping").

Really you don't think so?

You think the whole merit system is a flop then?

I think the merit system is starting to work well, It does seem to have changed the character of the spam though, or maybe it is more obvious because of the merit and mod changes. There seems to have been an increase in newbie and junior spam, and it may be that they will have to be restricted to new member boards. Necro-bumps seem to be a bit more common as well, and it may be time to lock any thread that hasn't received a reply for 3 months. If new info on the topic becomes news, then you can always link to the old thread in the first post.

You realize that: a) Account sales. b) Account farming, are still not bannable offenses, right? Whatever the reduction of higher ranking spam is, it has been supplemented by lower member spam because of the flawed policies of this place.

Is it still very profitable to sig spam with less than 10 merits?

I don't think it's going to be all that easy to just find 10 merits and farmers are going to hit a brick wall coming up against that..

Being so focused on the spammers themselves is sort of like treating the symptoms of the disease and not the root cause.
It's all about the sig spam overflowing to the rest of the forum from the alt coins section..

The root cause is all the fly by night icos and shitcoins of all sorts ATTRACTING the spammers to make a few satoshis.. They are the driving force..

I mean, you go through the altcoin section and wonder "are any of these legit?" NOT "I wonder if any of these are scams.."

You get like 5 new accounts pop onto the forum, have this master scheme and "team" that is going to "revolutionize" XXX industry, take fools money and encourage spam..

They hire a ranked account to post their ANN threads for them for gods sake, because of their noob posting limits they aren't even allowed to make the thread, and everyone just lets all these noob accounts run their master scheme ruining crypto for everyone and just wait until they scam..
I think it's shady AF to hire someone to post your ANN thread.. Crypto expert developer teams that are going to change the world don't have one decent btct acct among the entire team?


Remember when like, crypto coins used to me mined from their genesis blocks and they would trickle onto the exchange as the coins were mined out..
Oh man but darkcoin had an insta mine where so many coins were mined in the first xxx days "SCAM"!!
And now its just "We made these 11billion tokens out of thin air and will give you some to spam everywhere and you should want them because they are going to eradicate poverty and bring world peace and make you rich so spam spam and get some"

They all just use some ETH token so they don't even have to make a crypto themselves anymore..

I just scrolled through btc discussion looking at sigs in a big thread and it was ico ico ico ico casino ico ico ico ico ico yobit ico ico ico
It's bad when you run across a casino and think "atleast they aren't all 100% scams, see here this casino is only 50% scam and yobit is only for scamcoins and it isn't itself a scam, yet.."


So you can be worried about the spammers all you want but their are some shady mofos out there PAYING the spammers to spam with their created out of thin air scheme scam tokens, making all of crypto look like shit.. Not to mention sucking the value out of my precious BTCs..

You think the spam is bad here look at what those bounties are doing to FB and twatter lmfao take that you big data bastards..


I think the merit system will take another 3-6 months to really take effect, when they realize how unprofitable they are without merits, I hope..

Keep swatting the bees but some day ya might have to go after the hive...

The positive spin on the whole thing is that youtube and other social media bounty campaigns resulted in fewer, localized posts. At lease all those accounts will be posting across the forum to collect their payments.

You have no idea what is going on in this place. The rest of your post is irrelevant. Spamming this place is very profitable and you don't need a sig. campaign nor merit.

I disagree..

Well, I guess keep doing the same thing over and over again, keep swatting the bees..

I think the bee analogy is particularly bad. Bees are extremely industrious and beneficial, and, in fact, without the activities of bees and other pollinators, there would be virtually no food for us to eat.

It's a bit different when they are in your house..

Although, I agree. It does make me think of this:

Forum right now:
https://78.media.tumblr.com/3506f1ae2d4e7f1699b2e2fb28c44b49/tumblr_n6rc1kubpE1qd2oxvo6_250.gif

You can disagree all you want, that won't change the facts. Both data and consistent anecdotal evidence prove my claims. If it didn't, we wouldn't have any kind of bumping services let alone specialized ones.

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Do you think this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3196486.0) reached 684 pages in 2 months naturally when you are supposed to be applying via forms? Hundreds/thousands of farmed jr. member accounts, but yeah "disagree" with me.  ::)

Who cares about the bounties section?
Keep them all right there where they belong.. It's just people claiming free dust and yeah dirty tricks like bumping perpetrated by the companies themselves..
The bounties section isn't designed to be good reading and good conversation no more than a telephone book is.. 

The problem is sig spam in places like bitcoin discussion where they spam their ico sigs all over the place in THOSE megathreads for postcount and all over all threads.. Even the BTC sig campaigns can get harry at times..

The sig spam leaks from the altcoins section across the entire forum, stop that first and then work on the dirty dealers in the altcoins section..

You'd think that the people from the few legit altcoins would get pissed at all the crapcoins cheating their way to the top and want to do something to moderate it themselves..

Compared to the sig spam thread bumping in the bounties board is just not that big of a factor..

I agree with you here. It's no big deal to put the altcoins bounties board on ignore, but the pollution spilling out to the rest of the forum is very annoying. I assume that when theymos changed Jr. Members signatures to not include links a few days before introducing Merit it was with the intention of locking them out of signature campaigns. That, unfortunately, hasn't worked as the print your own token campaigns have just carried on with text signatures. That just means they need more Jr. Member alt accounts to spam with to make the same money that one higher ranked account would get. I think the only solution to that is to remove signatures completely for below Member rank.

Maybe you dont, but a lot of people do. Dont generalize yourself as the face of the public.

Your first point is debatable. But that is a topic another day.

Its not "dirty tricks" its "Unethical" for the managers to not control the spam or to promote the spamming by pseduo-blanketed rules such as to keep all queries in bounty and reporting in bounty thread to make sure the thread remains on top. Just another method of black marketing if you ask me.

The uses of a telephone book and Bounties section are totally differnet. I dont know how you are getting this analogy even for the sake of argument.

Bad policies of the forum? Merit is not going to stop this spam.

Shills dont care. They are only interested in their own crapcoin and this has been having a good effect on the traffic to the site. They are doing a rat race trying to stay on top.

Truely speaking I dont even read the Bitcoin Discussion threads any more. They are all spam mega threads in within 2weeks.

I tend to agree with this as time goes by... but it will encourage the account sell, because anyone who wants to earn bounty, needs to buy member account, because it's easier and quicker and even cheaper than gathering the merits to rank up...

But I think I've found the holy grail :) I know it's hard to code it, but maybe it worths the time...

Let's restrict the users enrolled into bounty campaigns and altcoin signature campaigns to only spam post in the altcoin thread/boards... The bitcoin section would be free from bounty spam...
Anyway, bounties and altcoin signature campagins have nothing to do with bitcoin and those who wants to advertise their altcoins need people interested in shitaltcoins instead of bitcoin...
Those, who are enrolled in bitcoin sig campaigns won't have any restriction...
I know that this is not democratic, but I started not to care about democracy in connection with spamming bots recently...

Or even take that one step further and split the forum in two. Make a new separate altcoin forum....

And the spammers (who call themselves "bounty hunters") collecting tokens don't have to install a wallet anymore. They collect all made-up tokens in their "MEW" as they call it. I'm about to say Ethereum and everything it stands for is one of the worst things that has ever happened to cryptocurrencies, but people keep joining because it pays off!

If you put it this way, I like it :D
I've seen brand new Twitter accounts collect thousands of followers within a few weeks, spamming massive amounts of ICO spam, all following their circle of "fellow bounty hunters".

Merit takes care of real people with real posts, and eventually maybe signature spam. Bounty spammers don't need merit, they just create more accounts and spam more. The next step is to just automate it, and use bots to spam. Free money everywhere!

When enough people join the spam, the earnings per person get low enough to make it not worth to join anymore. But I expect this forum to be lost in spam long before that happens.

Agree, bounties are infested with alts, impose the minimal rank member is a great solution now that we have merit but you know, it will probably never happen.