Bitcoin Forum

In my opinion, the marketplace subforum should be the most exclusive for the best interest of the community.

Call it selection bias, but I read more scam ads than not.  It seems every piece of high end technology is being sold by a user under 50 posts and then everyone wonders why they get scammed.

I propose a 200-post minimum limit be enforced before anyone can post in the marketplace.

Another option would be to have 2 marketplace forums:  1 forum for users with over 200 posts, another for users with under 200.  I can tell you if this were the case, I wouldn't even glance at the under-200 forum.  I'd have no need to...I'd never buy from anyone in there anyway regardless of how convincing they are.

This is BTC, it ain't fuckin' pringles. 

Number of post is a terrible proxy. Plus is gives incentives to make throw away posts.

I'm all for exclusivity in the marketplace, but not with some easy to game metric.

Maybe do people with 200 or more now and whitelist others manuall.

Also manual removal so that people who make Meta threads in the wrong place can't post here anymore.

I don't think it's a terrible proxy for 2 reasons.  1.)  It still takes time to make 200 posts.  200 posts will limit the number of joint accounts a scammer will have...it would simply not be as time-effective for them to go through making 200 posts for every 1 scam before they get banned.  2.)  You can still read their posts and decide for yourself if their posts contain value.

This isn't the wrong place for this thread.

You might be right, it would raise the cost of the scam, but it might make the payoff greater with a false sense of security.

This is not the right place for the thread. If talking about the rules of a forum is not Meta then what is?

Pertains to both.

As this thread pertains directly to the market subforum this is not a bad place for it, as far as posting things here post count should be avoided in favor of some kind of review system i've bought things from people with less than 200 posts and recived the goods as expected, perhaps the marketplace actually needs it's own moderator(not me i sell things and am therfore biased) to keep it clean

The problem I see is that it's easy to make multiple accounts and give yourself positive reviews.

not review system as in person x is good, review system as in ok we'll let person x in here

Yes, that's been a large problem recently. We recently took down a large false web of trust.

Whether Marketplace is restricted by post count or not, I don't believe it should be visible to guests at all.

Maybe people could treat trades in bitcoins just as they would treat any other financial transaction? It amazes me that people regularly send BTC's to anonymous newbies for deals that are 'too good to be true', then complain when their BTC's are 'stolen'.

Stop whining and just do your homework before you send any money.

Online/forum commerce is a tricky puzzle for sure.

I am new here and looking to start building rep for trade but 200 posts would be far to great of an obstacle and would certainly reduce traders.

Open markets have their risks, but also their rewards.

Guests shouldn't see the Marketplace

With all due respect, being new I'm not entirely sure how aware you are of how problematic scamming has become.  My impression is that 20% of the marketplace ads are scams.  I have no statistics on it, but that's my psychological impression.



+1 Theymos...guests shouldn't be able to see the marketplace.

Fair enough. I have been watching this forum for quite some time and have observed an interesting lot of activity, but have also witnessed good transactions as well.

It sounds like you are a more experienced online trader so you know the potential risks. If people dive to too quickly into buying/selling online, then there are risks. But if you can filter out the scammers and find good people to do deals with, then the benefits can be very good.

I'm not sure if I understand fully how preventing guests from seeing the marketplace would reduce scams. Would not being visible to guests make it less tempting for scammers? Or does that tie into post counts?

I am very much in favour of figuring out ways to help people's confidence in Bitcoin commerce :)

Well, my personal guess is that people don't simply join the forum, then look at the marketplace, then realize how easy scamming is, and then start to scam others.

My guess is that scammers first browse through the forum for some time and observe how scams are being performed, observe the lengths to which members try to track scammers, identify what types of items are prime for scamming, etc.  I think this would explain why the post count of so many scammers is so low. 

Ordinarily, I wouldn't expect a newbie who is truly fresh to the forum (e.g. they haven't scoped it out before becoming a member) to be confident enough to just immediately swing into the marketplace forum and start scamming.  Without the knowledge of how transactions on the forum operate, the risk would seem too great.  I didn't make my first transaction till about post 300 or so, and even then I had my doubts and still do.

I think if the marketplace wasn't visible, this would weed out a lot of potential scammers.  I think it would help ensure that people who join are those who are sincerely interested in Bitcoin and the Bitcoin community first.  Of course, there will still be those who realize how easy it is to scam after they join, but it may prevent those solely intent on scamming from the beginning from joining.

I still think the post count is important, though.  Or, as I suggested, a 'newb' marketplace sub-forum vs. a 'veteran' marketplace sub-forum.  Ultimately, I think post-count (i.e. the amount of time you invest in your scam) is the #1 correlating factor among scams.

That makes more sense to me now and could potentially work or at least help a little.

I also believe that there are people who are quality traders but may not post a lot on other topics or may only post in relation to the transactions they are doing.

It would be nice to have a feedback rating system. I have seen this on other forums with marketplace sections. My experience on other sites has been that feedback ratings (positive,negative,neutral) can be very helpful for deciding on whether to do business with someone.

Well, we have the "list of honest traders" thread, but unfortunately that doesn't stop people from making multiple accounts and then simply giving themselves positive feedback. 

The List of Honest Traders thread is okay, but still requires searching, etc.

With the feedback rating system you can quickly check someone's trading history and include that in your minimum qualifiers for trading. So if they have a minimum number of positive feedback ratings and no negatives then you might do business with them even if their post count is relatively low otherwise.

A person would have to set up a LOT of fake accounts to get anywhere fast. I have seen them typically tied into a person's profile.

How would the admins verify the proof?  Manipulating scanned images is absurdly easy.

I don't WANT other people's identity documents.

Asking people for their IDs to use a forum would be a serious deterrent for users of many types I think.

Rep-points as part of the profile, simple :)

There's no way that the forum administration will want to handle IDing people. However, outsourcing it to various companies to whom IDing people is the only thing they do might be a good idea. Then, we'd just have to decide which companies we trust to have done proper verification.  The only real problem with that is that it'd cost people quite a bit of money to do. However, it'd work really well.

Again, it is highly unlikely that we'd ever do the verification ourselves. Instead, the only practical solution is to pass the buck to the various certificate authorities out there.

Requiring an identification check really clashes with the fact that bitcoin has strength in anonymity. And background checks for someone is easy to get a hold of these days, containing the same information that the verification authority would be using.

This doesn't really work.  It won't cover those who only screw every 10th person they encounter... or those who are good for years, then suddenly screw someone over big.  I've been a user on ebay for over a decade and I've seen all kinds of crazy BS.  I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think anyone trusts anyone when it comes to blindly sending more than a handful of bitcoins to someone you don't really know.