Bitcoin Forum

I am member of the cryptotalk forum. Let me share some insights of their 1 BTC posting competition.
The beginning was by another member- https://cryptotalk.org/topic/16609-unusual-statistics-in-post-deletion
Later, I took some closer look onto this.
According to that stats, it's almost sure that the moderators are manipulating the contest. All the moderators are Russian and they are not deleting Russian Posts at all. You can check the stats there,

Aren't they spamming? Posting 100+ posts daily isn't easy, impossible in fact, and they are spamming, no doubts.

Here is stats of one user.
Topic created by Dimarrik- https://archive.is/FvASc
Most active topic(47 pages of reply)- https://archive.is/SLsWR
The topic title- Have you tried to bring friends to the crypto?
Topic translated into English, (google translator)-
This topic got 47 pages of reply, no spam there  :D

I am not saying that English section generating spam. Of course it does, but Russian section also generating a lot of spam while Russian spams are not getting deleted, English is being deleted all the times.
It's obvious that there forum moderation is in question. Moderators are manipulating the contest, probably for their self benefits, who knows.
I would post it in cryptotalk but it seems moderators and the new admin doesn't want discussion on it, may be because it help force them to delete the posts from Russian spammers.

I'm shocked that a forum paying 10 cents per post and giving a 1 BTC prize for most posts would have spam and cheating in it. Unthinkable. Wouldn't the greatest writers in history rise from their graves to fill that forum with masterpieces?

I dont normally responded to people crying when they dont use their main account like sissies. Not like anyone is going to care if you complain about cryptotalk contests on your main account t and retaliate against you.

Regardless, it's a contest offering a damn 9000$ prize. Of course there are going to be cheaters. I'm sure there are multiple groups with multiple accounts making useless posts hoping to win.

You shouldn't come here crying because posts in russian sections aren't being deleted. Report the posts if you feel like they're spam. Crying here wont change anything. The admins are Russians correct? I would assume they understand the russian posts and don't consider them spam.

Just an fyi did you read the contest rules? Only 30 posts per day count. The posts that have been deleted for other users were probably reported as spam. Maybe noone has reported russian posts.

LOL.  I could have predicted exactly what your sarcasm stated, because about two years ago there was someone who started a forum where members were paid to post, and it not only turned out to be a complete scam after it got started, but it basically skimmed the worst of the worst members from bitcointalk off the bottom of the crap-barrel and had only them for members.  Needless to say, there wasn't much discussion going on there except about getting paid.

I don't know if the scam accusation presented here is true or not, but it really wouldn't surprise me in the least.  I haven't visited that site and I don't plan to.  They're getting paid 10 cents per post?  That's pretty low, but I'm sure it attracted those people who are desperate for crypto gambling money.  Betcha it's a shit show so far, am I right?

Nobody is criticizing you for your campaign management, I don't think.  Keep givin' 'em hell, Yahoo62278.

There are a good chunk of crap topics but that is to be expected for the duration of this contest IMO.

Not saying there aren't some decent topics as well, but a good portion of the users seem to be only worried about getting paid and the contest.

The real test for that forum is going to be when they end the contest. Will they continue the pay per post campaign? Will the traffic die?

I have no issues with that forum but it would be good to see some real discussions happening.

Maybe some of you should have open minds and see if there is anything of value to add without being worried about money? After all, it is a forum and not illegal to be members on multiple forums

There is nothing to be shocked when it comes to Yobit in terms of money. When they can spend 10 Btc on this forum monthly , 1 Bitcoin is nothing for them.

I only wonder why they pay so low in their own forum as compare to the rates they pay here. But in any case they are spending BTC like water and I do not think this will help them in anyway in the long run.

Too much spam, lol. I just skimmed through their forum and it's 99% garbage. According to the stats panel, there are 239113 posts made in that forum.

Considering that it started 1 month ago, that's 7970 posts per day and their is rate of 0.00001/post, so they paid an average of 0.0797 BTC per day or 2.391 BTC per month. And that's with a payment of 0.00001 BTC/post. Imagine if that number was higher.

I can't see the forum surviving after the campaign is over. People are only there to spam and get paid.

Just for a comparison how many posts are done here on bitcointalk daily ?

LoyceV, as always will help us again on this stat.  :)

I can't blame you for being optimistic about your employer but I think Yobit is trying way too hard to fill their forum with worthless crap. Don't get me wrong, promoting the forum here is a shrewd idea. Cryptotalk has some rules that if enforced properly would appeal to a lot of Bitcointalk users who might be disappointed in the uber-anarchist nature of this forum:

https://cryptotalk.org/topic/207-general-rules-of-cryptotalkorg-forum-official/


But at the same they incentivize posts on that forum with the measly 10 cents per post (so obviously filled by farmers with zero value garbage) and moderation is spotty at best. Granted, idiotic rules like "Using multiple accounts is prohibited" are not enforceable, not without invasive KYC anyway. However they're not even trying to enforce the ones that they can. There are mountains of garbage that would make Bitcointalk signature spam look deep and insightful. Just a random example from the front-page:

https://cryptotalk.org/topic/12119-is-gamling-addiction/

I mean if I wanted to post in a place like this I could just go to the Gambling Discussion board here and immerse myself in that dumpster without having to create a new account.

Lol :P
I actually considered spending a month just to get their 1 BTC, but OP's accusation is exactly what I expected and why I didn't even bother.

Bitcointalk has just over 10,000 posts per day (http://loyce.club/active/) (it was under 10,000 per day before Yobit started it's campaign).
If they're close to the same number of posts just for their campaign, that can't be good for quality.

Being offensive is subjective, so anyone can claim anything is offensive and therefore against the rules? That's dumb, I'm offended by that rule!

By looking at some of the comments there and users observations, I can say there is a slit slip through for Russian spam posters there as they too are producing a hell lot of spam on this said to be HIGH PAYING FORUM and still getting off it.

I even don't support promoting it here as it is surely harming bitcointalk forum's health in one way or the other. ( no offence to the manager its just want I think )



If I get you correctly, it was ICOforums.net (https://icoforums.net/) and they had a bounty campaign here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4898414.0) which was surely a pain in ass due to its generated spam. Still even after spending large amount of ETH for the promotion they were just buried and ended up with no real and valuable discussion on the forum. I could see the same story here too.

No offense taken, you're allowed to have an opinion.

We will not create a forum with healthy discussions. If the main purpose of posting is to get paid, people will stop once the money is over.
Despite the activity of this forum, serious discussion boards did not contain much discussion.
I do not know any reason to pay 1BTC credibly, if they wanted to do so they would have chosen a reliable third party to lead the process.

I think they are betting on getting enough traffic to post the ads and thus continue the promotion.

Thanks to Bitcointalk forums free of speech rules.. Or else I just can't stop laughing by reading the rules on Cryptotalk.


WTF !  ??? ;D

I think it's a bit of a translation issue and it's meant to address the intent rather than what someone feels. Admins seem to be Russian, so this might be due to the difference between words like "ocкopблять" / "ocкopбить", or "oбижaть" / "oбидeть" , both of which Google translates as "offend" but the meaning is not the same. In other words, if I call someone a turd waffle it's probably going to break that rule even if the target of that expression doesn't feel offended. It should be reworded to something like "forbidden to attack other members of the forum", "or "insult" or whatever.

That's just my speculation though, because I don't really see those rules being consistently enforced there.

It still sounds a lot like Social Justice Warrior forum, I don't like it. I'm not usually going nuts at insulting people, but I love having the freedom do do so. What's left of a forum about crypto if you can't even have freedom of speech?

I've been on a biker forum (long story), name escapes me know, that had a similar rule of no insults towards one's person or their choice of transportation. Some people get their fix of "freedom" IRL and go online to escape from that I guess.

And why the fuck are you making me defend cryptotalk?!!!@#!#@

Your offensive language hurts my feelings @%&^(@#^)

Oh well, there goes my chance to win 1 BTC - now I'll never be accepted to Cryptotalk and it's all your fault ;D

^^ ^^
You two should get a room.

I think it is a ok to participate in more than one forum, ofc. I particularly participate now in Reddit and bitcointalk, and I am very active in both.(and I post for free in Reddit)
However, I didn't discover those forums like you are suggesting"let's see how this forum works. Does it have good discussions?"

I discovered both of them after being redirect from Google searches, then I learned that for many subjects the best source of information was bitcointalk (in bitcoin subjects) and Reddit (for piracy, altcoins, privacy and many other interesting subjects)

Cryptotalk forum discussions are interesting? Maybe some. But bitcointalk looks better. Maybe they should try other niches? Ethereum Technichal discussions for example lacks a good forum.

Paying spammers to spam there is a complete nonsense. Why didn't they hired some established members to post there? They could pay for 500 word posts for example, or for technical support answers, whatever...

It was nothing unexpected. Moderators are not much active in deleting spam and cleaning up the forum.
 I'm on the forum as well. I have posted 40 messages within this month, on the other hand, some users are posting more than 100 a day. All the forum is very much spammy. I couldn't find anything of interest there to reply. I don't know how people post a lot of messages per day.

Are they paying anyone?   Have they proved they even have the coin to pay?

Yes, they are surely paying users 0.00001 btc per post which is sent directly to the Yobit account of the participants. Max is 30 posts per day ! Even though they are spending funds, but its basically not the right way and not helping them in anyway to increase quality content on the forum.

They have the coins to pay, but I don't think this would go forever.

So far they have been paying almost instantly when it comes to their campaign on Bitcointalk.

If you look at their Ethereum wallet they have something like $9 million, I think that's enough money to pay for many years

https://etherscan.io/address/0xf5bec430576ff1b82e44ddb5a1c93f6f9d0884f3

At bitcoin's current price that's something like 1001BTC

Exchanges hold users' funds in their wallets, that doesn't meant all funds are theirs to spend on something else.

Even if we ignore hot wallets, Yobit still have huge reserves with them. They have paid over 10 BTC to signature participants here on bitcointalk and yet again refilled the wallet.
Not to ignore the fact, they are also paying per post on Cryptotalk. There are over 240K posts made on Cryptotalk in last 1 month or so. Even if we consider non-claiming rate to be 25%, it is still 240K*75%*0.1 = $18000 or 2 BTC.
I don't think they gonna ruin their whole reputation after spending around 15 BTC for the contest prizes worth just 2.3 BTC. Well the declaration day is just 3 days away, let's see how it goes.

I've spent a bit of time there and I do post there now and then.
The amount of spam, of worthless or repeating posts, of discussions just for the sake of it is overwhelming. But this happens when the numbers are the only thing that matter.

But they do pay. I did withdraw already. And I'm not telling about withdrawal from cryptotalk to yobit, I'm telling about the next step too: withdrawal from yobit into an external wallet.
So I can confirm that part.


About OP topic, I wonder who was thinking that such a contest can be 100% real and clean. But maybe I'm just too pessimistic  :D

Given all the scam accusations against YoBit, alongside their generally shady nature and terrible customer service, I'm not sure why anyone really expected their forum to be any different.

If they stop paying, they will die. Spammers like these have zero loyalty. They will go wherever they can make the most money, even if "the most money" is some useless tokens/altcoins worth a few cents. They've flooded to Cryptotalk since they can earn more there making the maximum number of posts than they can spamming a signature on here, with the added bonus that on Cryptotalk they get paid in bitcoin, which is actually worth something, rather than some made up token. As soon as they stop getting paid over there, they'll come back here.

It's a ridiculous rule, and it gives the mods the ability to delete any post they like with complete impunity. They can simply state "Another user PMed me and said they were offended by post x, so I deleted it." The cynic inside me says this was entirely premeditated to allowed them to rig their competition in the way OP is describing.

"ruin Yobit reputation" ...  :D how does it look his reputation.

Dont be so naive  ;D,
I dont doubt their fund reserves, but I think now a lot of funds are being used to buy useless rubbish here.
In my opinion, only 20-30% of yobit participants are good and helpful writers, the rest are spammers.

hmmmm, makes me laugh. ;D ;D

Why are we even talking about a contest in another forum here? Is this forum now policing every online forums?

I’d rather lick a dogs asshole than join that cess pool of a forum.

I wouldn't even put a high number like 20% to this forum's quality.

Roughly 2% of this forum contributes to substantial posting.
If we're talking about CryptoTalk, I'd put the number around 0.1%. Probably even less.

What about a Fox's? ;)

This seems ridiculous to most people, but in fact a lot of newcomers will cry later.
Most Russian people are very gambling and careless. If the owner of this cryptocurrency exchange spends $ 1 million on advertising, then he will then deceive the newcomers in the amount of 3, 5 or 10 times more. This is how a fraudulent business in Russia works.
And then thousands of cheated newcomers will scream that cryptocurrency is scam and fraud.

Don't be ridiculous; it only makes sense to compare that forum to undesirable things. :P

Well, I highly doubt they'll pay it and if they do, I'll go donate my kidneys (yeah, both) for free.  ;D
You're shocked, but I'm ridiculed by their 10 cents per post and people are posting shit there and none of the content is good. I don't think they're trying to create a better forum with healthy discussions over Bitcoins and everything that relates to crypto, but are rather into getting it filled with asses who just want to spam the hell out there while bumping their forum every minute (or even second) to gain those few cents. Can't believe my eyes that people here are advocating that if you just plagiarize your own content and post it there, then that's fine. Wtf? What's the meaning of a new forum when everything is just going to be a copy-paste? Is Cryptotalk fine to be called off as a copycat of Bitcointalk?


You've come to the right place - Cryptotalk, a place of ethnic herds having their brains filled with superpowers (oh sorry, such normal gays guys don't have it) to write down some immoral immortal content we may find nowhere in the world.

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Couldn't stop laughing my ass off over that comment. :D

Its because they are promoting their forum on bitcointalk. So this is quite reasonable to discuss on this forum. Not really this forum policing any other online forum, and will not. But as a forum member you may discuss about any crypto related thing on this forum. It doesn't mean forum itself policing any others. There won't competitor of bitcointalk like there is no competitor bitcoin. I have seen couple of forum advertised their forum on bitcointalk and they had paid for posting on their forum. But eventually they are ended up (fucked up) with zero result. If forum itself is paying for posting that means they are just encouraging more spam instead. And regarding 1BTC competition, most likely it would manipulate and this forum have no business with cryptotalk. So we can't take any action even there is happening pure manipulation.

Finally the spammers contest is over and cryptokram winning this by making 3902 posts in around a months time.

That forum is a heaven for the spammers.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of these are actually the same person or the brother/father/mother/wife of each other. In some places, 1 BTC is actually worth years of their salary. Spamming all day for this prize really pays off.

With 4000 posts in a month, I wouldn't be surprised if it's the exact opposite this time: the entire family uses the same account to spam. I'm glad Yobit wants them so badly, I hope they continue this contest to keep'm there :D

That's funny for you to say. :D

Is it fair to use group for posting, to reach top of the competition? (https://cryptotalk.org/topic/15736-is-it-fair-to-use-group-for-posting-to-reach-top-of-the-competition/)

cryptokram was the guy that won the 1 BTC, btw.

I mean, just look at his insightful and meaningful posts:


With such invaluable contributions as those, who wouldn't want to keep him around!?

This contest of highest post count is over but the promotion of 1000 sat per Post is still active. They will keep some form of incentive for posting to keep the forum alive forever and spammers happy.  :D

They have not yet paid to the 1 BTC contest to anyone and the site is down now. Is there any twist in the game ?

https://i.imgur.com/17F6PGz.png

It's back now. Downtime happens all the time. Wasn't BitcoinTalk also down 1-2 weeks ago?

I doubt they would scam like this while their signature campaign is running.

Yes, i also see the site is back up and running now.
You can't compare bitcointalk downtime with cryptotalk. Bitcointalk is there for 10 years and any downtime will not bring any scam issues in mind. But if the cryptotalk is down, then many possibility and fear come in the mind because the site is fairly new one.

My point is that downtime =/= scam. Specially if you say this a couple of hours after the website went down.

I can compare it because it's a downtime, that every website has. :)

Also, what would even be the point of paying 10 BTC for a month of signature campaign, plus ~2 BTC for their users to post, to then shutdown the website to not pay 1 BTC? lol

That's simply astounding. It averages out to about 10 posts per hour, 12 hours a day, every day for the month. I tried reading through their forum last week and was not shocked to discover its absolute trash. I wonder what their end goal is... somehow converting those users (or readers, if there are any) to yobit users?

The site is up so that clears all the confusions.

But its not about the money, its about the results which they want to achieve.
Do you think by spending 12 btc they have achieved all what is expected ? I doubt.  Every forum requires quality posting rather than the spam posters to be a successful one.

Yeah, I can't figure that out either.

Their entire business model at the moment seems to be to attract spammers. They pay the worst of the spammers on here to advertise, and they pay literally anyone to post anything over there, including non stop spamming in the competition. They are attracting spammers who are willing to "work" for 10 cents per post.

At some point they need to turn a profit, right? But what profit can they expect from their user base? People who are willing to spend several hours a day spamming posts for 2 or 3 dollars worth of bitcoin aren't exactly going to be trading large volumes, even if they did start using YoBit. Similarly, they could maybe charge for ad slots, but what kind of return are crypto companies going to see advertising to these users with very poor knowledge of crypto and only a few thousands satoshi to their name?

I can only think of website rankings: according to worthofweb.com (https://www.worthofweb.com/website-value/cryptotalk.org/), their value more than doubled in less than a month. I don't think it's working much though, it's now worth 5 times more than worthofweb.com/loyce.club (https://www.worthofweb.com/website-value/loyce.club/), while I didn't even try :P

This promotion is not just for crypto talk. The singature bounties from here as well the paybypost bounty in crypto talk forum goes into the wallet of yobit.net exchange. i.e. anyone participating in these bounties need to have a yobit.net account.

Comparing it with bitcointalk, https://www.worthofweb.com/website-value/bitcointalk.org/,  cryptotalk is 10 times less worth than bitcointalk.

Bitcointalk:

https://i.imgur.com/mtgZ6vT.png


Cryptotalk:

https://i.imgur.com/T4Wmmc8.png

At 3902 posts, I couldn't beat them if I tried. There wouldn't be enough topics for me to post bland trash -- I could probably average a quaint 20 to 30 posts/hr forcing me to dedicate a little over 8 days worth of posting (at most).

That's 26.2% of the month: nobody would be able to do that without going absolutely mad.

Didn't your little spam test put you close to 60 posts in an hour? That means you can do it in just 80 hours, which is just 2 working weeks, or part-time working only in the afternoon or evening. I think most people call that a good month for $9,000.

The best thing is: your posts would probably still be better than their current average :P

I would not be able to maintain it over 80 hours. My peak WPM might be in the 140s but I can only really average 110-120 over longer periods of time. I imagine the post quality will nosedive when it comes to day 3 because I'll have already repeated the same things over and over again for the umpteenth time.

The greatest things i see from the winner is their signature :


He makes a post with only 5 mins interval time, well since the moderator from cryptotalk also from the spammer. Not really surprise the winner also from the spammer user, honestly cryptotalk like ICOForum 2.0 went they stopped the contest / paid post the user will leave from the forum and they really wasting the budget like ICOForum who paid every user 1 ETH for 100 posts.

You can visit
Already no activity there.

You could not beat him because you are a human and he is a Robot  :D


You can practically write 30 posts max in one hour because after every post they have implemented a wait time for 2 minutes to avoid burst posting.  :D

Just read through this topic, and wow I was really expecting more data on actual manipulation. So it is in fact non existent?

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Since the topic here shifted to why they are doing what they are, I am going to give my opinion about this.
It's a fucking trolling contest.
Both campaigns, the one managed here by yahoo, and their local campaign are just 2 middlefingers raised in bitcointalk's face.

This is some kind of twisted revenge for bitcointalk's banning of the YoBit campaign.

They used the freedom of speech rule here on the forum to bypass the bann against YoShit signatures,  and to make a point. "We can attract a lot of posters/spammers/traffic to our own forum".

I don't believe their forum will ultimatively become a serious contender in the crypto world, it's just a way of fucking with our local community.

I wish them good luck tho, because it doesn't seem like this will make any difference, for them, or for us down here. They just got a few BTC's lighter :)

May be I am completely wrong but this is what I assume the main reason behind the astonishing campaigning from Yobit merely for a forum: Yobit conducts IEO (ICO) once or so every month. Currently Yobit intimates users about these through email. But to increase the success of these ICOs, YoBit needs higher community participation. Due to bad reputation on Bitcointalk, it is hard for YoBit to announce IEOs on Bitcointalk. Hence they developed Cryptotalk as an asset to increase participation in coin funding and to catalyst their pump/dump operations.

Spammers are usually short of money and therefore they can't invest in Yobit ICO. If there are no decent people on their forum, there is no way they can gain investors from their own forum.

When you have over 300K posts on your forum in a month, Google surely gonna crawl many of those and list these on Google Search. When you have organic crypto-oriented traffic coming to your site, even putting a broad header with 0.5% click-through rate can give you handsome number of investors.

"If you got big money, think of the bigger picture" - Yobit

Oh man, that is painful to read. If Bitcointalk ever gets that bad I will leave without hesitation.

I can't believe they'd willingly give $9000 to a total spammer, I assumed they'd be at least filtering to check for quality rather than just deciding to award it based on raw post count alone...also I still have no idea what their financial goal is as they are pumping so much money into their forum, and I don't see how it will pay off.

Sure, but I think the vast majority of people willing to waste hours of their lives spamming nonsense in return for literal cents don't exactly have much disposable income. Sure, they might be easy to trick in to "investing" in to some totally trash ICO/ITO/IEO/whatever, but if they are only going to spend 10 bucks, then what's the point. Unless they feel they can lure in thousands and thousands of people this way.

Good point, but I still question their target market. Anyone with any sense, already involved in crypto or not, is going to read posts like that - meaningless, vapid, broken English - and immediately be turned off.

Not that I'm complaining too much. If they want to pay spammers to relocate there and away from here, then all power to them.

Not possible to completely get spammers moved from here to cryptotalk. Spammers will go anywhere where they see the opportunity of making money. Also when we use the term Spammers, they are not only the individuals but the whole factory of farming accounts. Cryptotalk showing a total members around 9000 which I doubt are real numbers because there would be many with 10, 20 ,30 + plus accounts too.

They have a rule there that ban multiple account, so if you are going to create multiple account using one IP you are likely to get a ban and all your alt account, but I doubt if people here really have one account because members can use tor address to create another account, with over 9000 members I wonder if they really can monitor these huge number of accounts.
They should get moderators on every category, to monitor all of it.

Matching IP addresses does not mean all the accounts belong to the same person. Lots of people only connect to the internet via Tor or VPNs, especially people who are interested in bitcoin and anonymity or privacy. Knowing plenty of other forum users who use Tor or VPNs, I wouldn't be surprised if I've shared an IP with 100 other users on here at some point. Doesn't mean we are all alts and should be banned.

Matching IPs can be a useful piece of evidence to help confirm a link between accounts you already suspect, but you can't just say same IPs = alts.

I don't see why multiple account was the main issue there. The contest is base on the post count regardless of post quality. If a multiple user will participate in the contest there. The chance of winning for him was very low because his post count will be divided. The spam post is the main issue there and there is no such manipulation for the contest. The OP is just whining because he lose to spammers.  ;D

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Why this butthurt post about cryptotalk forum is still alive on bitcointalk forum.

The only way to stop the multiple accounts is by making the KYC compulsory.
There is no other way to truly control the creation of multiple accounts.

That's hardly true.

You can easily control people using the same setup/computer/browser.

Most browser fingerprints are close to unique.

You can check yours out here: https://amiunique.org/

No need to go through KYC. I mean you can still cheat, but it takes an increasing amount of energy to do so. And you only have to forget once to get caught.

Adding this to IP control, you can get a pretty good picture of who's who.

Beginning with the disclosure that while posting this I am wearing their sig.

I think that there are many reasons for why they are doing what they are doing in the way they are doing it.
Most have been stated in this thread more or less:


And


And


Along with a few other rankings (Alexa, and such) the higher you get the more you can demand for ads.



Possibly a tiny bit, but if you have 1000s and 1000s of BTC I can see them spending a bit.


And I am sure there are others.

What is also an interesting question is how deep their marketing and other data goes.
Do they know what BTC came in and what BTC went out and how much BTC was made due to people clicking on links in the sig.

That would be interesting to know.

-Dave