Bitcoin Forum

As we all know that the world is not perfect, if one thing do not occur the other may be occur, also possible to be vice versa. The issue of accounts sales can be dangerous which some can lead to scam, that is why some people that propose account sales can be giving negative trust because scammers can buy account which others will not know. But to make this forum more transparent and to discourage account sales, it will be good if this forum admin are the one selling the account, the money generated can be used for helps on this forum.

Legendary: $500
Hero: $400
Sr member: $300

Won't this be good, we will be able to know that such accounts are new and should be considered new with not pregenerated smerits but only merits. If the member is serious, he will be able to build the account to be able to fit into the ones that makes quality posts and be good.

Is this a good idea? It will really discourage unknown bitcointalk account sales, we will be able to know new accounts with such rank.

Bad idea. Admin doesn't sell accounts, and the forum doesn't need money.

See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4419950.msg39398356#msg39398356

I do not mean the forum needs money. Okay while is copper membership? People will pay for it just to have some opportunities to be able to enjoy the forum that newbies like posting of images and fast time of posting range. While this also will help members that want to get to Sr, hero and legendary fast. I do not see it different from copper membership, not that the forum needs money but to help and to discourage unknown selling of accounts. But I may be wrong.

Seeing this lately, I never known this has being of a discussion in the past. All solved there can not be such as theymos says 'NO' to it.

What is your point? Seems you are encouraging account sales?
And why you think forums need more funds, There are already many other Valid resources from where the forum is getting its funds. I would really discourage this action.

The difference between Copper Members and Sr. Members is that they have differences in the signature restrictions.

There is no reason to rank up past the Copper Member benefits unless you are looking for a signature campaign or if you want to post extremely quickly. Neither of these are good reasons. And neither of those reasons would justify the forum adding in a "buy rank" option. I don't think we need to underscore the amount of spam that will start happening, but if we're currently in a cesspool, then the cessation of the pool will itself be trapped in a cesspool.

I’d really prefer if it wasn’t made easier or even acceptable for account sales to be a thing again. The spam & incoherent English on the forum is bad enough already without making it common place by encouraging account sales.

The merit system made it tough for shit posters to rank up & spam for signature campaign dust (the lower paid campaigns have lots of shit posters, let’s be honest).
I think it’s good that account sales are frowned upon & basically outlawed when you consider what happens to those accounts if people find out they’re involved in it (painted red).

I know you have good intentions OP but it’s a no from me, sorry.

It's highly unethical for forum admins to do such act lmao. Why would they do it?!

I think the best way would be to give neutral trust to an account which was bought/sold so that people might know that the account ownership has changed and they might not want to have any dealing with them on the basis of account reputation.

It's quite hard to notice if an account is sold/bought though, we can only see if the account's email/password has been changed (I can be wrong), and that doesn't prove the ownership has been changed.

You totally misunderstand thing here. First you need to know why anyone would buy a high rank account ? They will only buy it to join signature campaigns. There is no other use of those accounts. Bitcointalk is not directly related to those paying campaigns and neither it earns from them.
There are many other reason why people come on bitcointalk like advertising their services or getting knowledge and for these purposes no one needs the high rank account.

High ranks should only remain with those who deserve them and earn those ranks with their good hard work. Else we don't want rich shit posters getting high ranks only because they have more money than us  :(

Then this forum will have lots of High-rank accounts that spam. If accounts can be easily bought with money then this forum will be filled with people who really don't know how the forum works and even the ecosystem of cryptocurrencies. They will be no match for those who hardly earned their ranks through experience and helping people.

How will your proposal stop the sale of accounts on other sites? Did you set the prices for these ranks yourself? Very funny. Tell us why a person needs a big rank at once? If he can't do it on his own, what can he do with a higher rank? What do you think the legend will look like, which will also tell everyone that this is a purchased account? He will just say: "I bought, I have money, and no more" :P
OP, I'm sorry, but you are very overdoing in pursuit of your rank, regularly creating such topics.

No one selling accounts here wants to donate $ to the forum, most of them are greedy for themselves.

From which the proceeds from the sale of the account can be obtained at this amount.
While the average account that is sold is not as high as the price you mention, what a joke.

Your idea is very unreasonable, the forum does not require money from selling accounts, your idea can undermine the dignity of this bitcointalk forum, how this bad idea can get out of your head.
What the world said, bitcointalk forum revenue, the world's greatest forum, the funds were raised from account sales, did you realize your idea was bad.

Also, if the admins sell the accounts, wouldn't that be an anti-thesis to the rules of the forum about selling accounts. I do not get you OP, the forum is free, the maintenance is not that pricey and veteran members can donate money whenever the forum needs some help. Your modest proposal will only help in tolerating this account sellers.

Are you not aware OP of exploitative users?  There are users out there who after they establish or build up their account, gain trust will also lead to scams in the end?  There are already a few issues in the Lending section.  Especially maybe if it was just from the account they bought.  Even if we say they bought it from the admin there is still no guarantee that it will not do anything unacceptable.  Sorry, but in my own opinion, I am also not willing to take such actions on the purchase or sale of the account and it should not be allowed here.

Rank has some meaning to many, be it due to a sense of achievement or else.
If you can buy ranks of the shelf, you’re basically creating a comparative grievance to all existing accounts with those same ranks, stating that one can simply buy a fast track ticket to skip the queue from the forum itself.

It still would not diminish the possibility of those accounts turning into scammers (which can happen at any level by the way), and I can’t see any overall global benefit coming clean from the proposal. It also would not deter account sales – just establish a max. market price.

Too bad for us that make some of our account grow from being a Jr. Member then became a newbie from the new changes of the rank system then here I am now ranking as Sr. Member and I can only see it's being sold at $300 without any effort being made. Well, that might be expensive for some countries but doing it was breaking the rules set from the start on the Unofficial forum rules. The forum doesn't need help, AFAIK there's a budget from that from the ads generated especially the one you see on Auctions board (have a look).

Totally bad idea and the forum will never tolerate such. To discourage those account sales at least act like reporting it or making a topic discouraging it. Imagine a known scammer hiding from an unknown identity tries to bought a huge amount of accounts and sooner or later he just scam once again, totally bad on forum's reputation.

It's the worst idea ever suggested on the forum. It wouldn't possible on this forum since the admin strongly discourages account sales.

Here you can see admin thought negative feedback for account sales are appropriate. In this situation how are you suggesting account sales by admin? Isn't copper membership enough for posting on this forum and participate in any discussions? How do you think accounts wouldn't use for a scam if it's sold by admin? Doesn't matter what is the price, but it would destroy the forum structure. Because peoples will simply buy an account and start spam. No one will encourage them to contribute since they don't need to build an account here since they would buy it.

The idea would be slightly better if it's changed to "Create silver and gold version of Copper membership", where the one who bought it get similar benefit compared with Hero/Legendary user, except signature part.

I would say No and let me explain why, IMO

• It will create unfairness between people who have money to invest in one account (higher rank) and people who don't have money to do so.
• Bought accounts are mostly used to join campaigns, bounties or more seriously: to scam others on the forum.

You could argue that Copper membership is a bought title with some privileges, I agree but I think up to that level is fair enough. More privileges with higher than Member ranks will cause controversy. As other gave you info, the forum does not need more money and especially no if it relates to selling accounts.

Nowadays, years after the merit system birthday, bought accounts are almost be used for bounties. As bought accounts can not be accepted in good campaigns paid in BTC with good rates. You know how bounties are bad in spam (not all participants in bounties are spammers but most of them are).

If one member believe (s)he is a good poster, ok, let's make good posts and rank up with the merit system. It is possible! :)

I don't understand why we would want to add any legitimacy to account sales.  The general view within the community is that we don't want to encourage that kind of behaviour.  It's better for the overall health of the forum if buying and selling accounts is considered a dishonourable act.  

Clearly your concern is for the safety and security of the people who are buying accounts, which I guess is noble in a way.  But, to be blunt, there should be risks for engaging in shady or illegitimate conduct.  Some of us would prefer it if you weren't doing that at all, which also happens to be a good way of avoiding the dangers of getting ripped off.  Don't do it and you'll be perfectly safe.

I don't think the forum should sell accounts or even the Member rank titles, but as I've suggested before I think it would be a good idea to offer more donator privileges that come with some of the benefits of higher ranked accounts along with some other additional perks. We already have Copper Member so Silver and Gold ones which could come with the signature sizes of Senior and Hero respectively would essentially kill account farming and sales because it would be largely pointless if you can purchase the benefits directly. You would still be a Newbie or whatever but you would just have the title like you do with the current copper titling system. Theymos has said in the past that the forum doesn't need the money but it could always be used to hire more mods or so something good with it like give it to charity and I think it would actually earn a decent chunk of change and maybe even more than the ad slots.


IF we were to offer the ranks it should be done like the current Copper one is. You could be a Copper/Silver/Gold Member but still a Newbie with zero merit and that would still speak volumes. I'm sure many campaigns still wouldn't accept people without merit.

The real problem is that people do not buy BTT account solely to achieve the benefits of certain ranks, they are already doing it for completely different reasons, and we all know what these accounts are used for. But this is something that unfortunately cannot be prevented, even if the forum bans the sale of accounts and permanently bans those who do that - they would do it through other forums and social networks, as has always been the case. Some even have sites like this (https://bitcointalkaccounts.com/).

Given how difficult it is for the average user to reach even the Full Member rank, Hero and Legendary accounts have become even more sought after goods after the introduction of the merit system.

Indeed.  And I don't think there are any ideas one could come up with that would make account sales legitimate, whether they benefited the forum financially or not, because in the end it's always the forum that loses when accounts are sold.  Buyers are either scammers looking to buy an account with a trusted reputation or shitposters looking for the easiest way to gain access to a high-ranked account for sig campaigns. 

And I'm sure there are lots of other arguments against it that we've been through over and over throughout the years.  Account selling has been a problem since at least 2015 or so.  I don't follow the Accounts & Invites section anymore, so I don't know what the market is doing anymore.  Are accounts even being sold that much?

Yes, money can't buy a reputation ... It seems to me that people who want to present their project to the public on the forum first of all think about buying an account.. This happens only because they are simply not aware of the unofficial community policy regarding the sale of accounts, not to mention the fact that the percentage of such people is negligible, (and I guess Theymos added Copper Member just to meet the needs of this group of people). Otherwise, you are right, although the prices discussed here seem to me too high.

Selling of account i think it's nice to sell account without making it so obvious to the forum than to announced it like what will yield positively to the community, I have seen your perspective, but is totally not ideals by forum admin to partake in selling of account because forum wants to generate capital's  fund's, no it's not really encouraging because forum has been existing since without selling management individuals account, that does not mean that community lacks finance to run the community and besides such finance is too little to community, and it's very obvious that if forum implement such many people will not sell their account and selling of accounts will take place in other social platforms, such Telegram, Twitter, Instagram and finally Facebook without awareness of the community.

I would say it’s the best way to fight account sellers. It’s the approach that the US is now using to fight drug dealers. Sure, the majority is against people using drugs, but legalization is ultimately the best way to put drug dealers out of business and make sure the profits from operations are used for schools and not funding terrorism.

Just like drug dealers oppose legalization, I can promise you account sellers are against the forum selling accounts. There would be no better way to stop the profiting from account sales and that is why the most vehemently opposed to the idea are those who would be most hurt by it (account sellers followed by insecure power hungry individuals who think a useless forum title carries importance).

Of course the accounts are still being sold, although I can’t say if it’s on a larger or smaller scale than a few years ago. The question is how many of these members actually sell accounts, and how many are just trying to scam some naive beginner who wants to become instant Senior or Hero member.

I checked the first 3 pages and found 5 members selling accounts :

- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5296436.0
- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5310530.0
- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5284255.0
- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5284137.0
- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5126522.0

Some, as you can see, have started a real business from this - $1000 for the Legendary account is a nice amount, but there are still those who are willing to pay it.

Just ban all account sales, and freeze any accounts that are known to have  been purchased.

Ban all such accounts? But as I showed in one of the previous posts the sale of BTT accounts goes much further than this forum, and I guess most of such sales are made outside the forum. And as for freezing all purchased accounts, what about those that were purchased before the whole thing was put in the gray zone? Because if I'm not mistaken, it was completely legal and without any sanctions before 2015.

One day you buy a BTT account without any problems, the next day someone red tags you for the same thing because the rules changed overnight...

If the issue was solely that people are profiting from selling accounts, then perhaps you'd have a point.  What about the other half of the problem, where we don't want people buying accounts either?  All you're doing is shifting the balance and making it easier for people to buy accounts.  That doesn't solve anything.

It would be great if before anything like that happened, people were made aware that any forum reputation or rank is not symbolic of trustworthiness - Newbies still get scammed from mid to high-ranking members. Now where's that welcome message (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5036308)?

I still think that with account sales, they are equivalent to buying reputation and/or trust - in buying an account, one aims to take on the history of the previous account owner. Now, if theymos wanted to create an alternative for signature requirements (i.e. this idea) then you might see a slight decrease in the usefulness of account sales, but with the new DT system there are much more opportunities to capture "trusted" accounts.

Presumably, this +4 green trust member (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=139132;dt) changed hands according to some users.

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Few other things that might be relevant to the intolerance of account sales but these are the first ones that come to mind.

What reasons do people buy accounts other for their signature benefits? That's probably 99% of their use/value.


This would be incredibly difficult to enforce and since the forum doesn't police scams they almost certainly won't do this. I think it would be a futile endeavour to even try and people would just sell them off site as they already do. I would prefer a solution where it effectively kills the market like the op has suggested. Adding more donator ranks is nothing but a win-win in my opinion and has multiple benefits.

It can take me 2 years to move to Sr. member as I am bad to earn merit. If I can spend $300 to get the Sr. member rank. I will take it but it is very easy and a good offer.

With Sr. member rank, I can join a good campaign and receive from $40 to $50 each week. After one or two months, I will get the $300 back. I can get it back faster if I use the bought Sr. member account to scam bigger than $300.

 ???

This is the mistake most people are making, unlike me I can not buy a ranked membership account because it will still take some little extra work to build the account to fit into joining campaigns. If you see bought ranked account, you will likely know them, they are accounts that most likely havong no merit history in 120 days, and will not be able to join a campaign, they will need to still build the account to have merits very well before the account can join a campaign. This is the mistake people that bought bitcointalk account are making, they will buy it, not able to have merit, and will not be able to join campaign. But, they will think after buying account, they will just join a campaign which is not like that.

For the purpose of scam someone. If I'm not mistaken, that was perhaps the main reason that the forum's policy towards such sales has changed. Of course, most of them just want the opportunity to start earning money through campaign signatures as soon as possible, but if they are given the opportunity to scam someone for a larger amount, they will certainly not hesitate to do so.


The only way to keep account sales to a minimum is to completely ban signature/bounty campaigns - although even that move does not guarantee that some people would still not be interested in buying a high ranked account - it's still a lot easier than building your own.

Aside from that I agree with others' comments above, this part kinda eliminates the purpose of merit system as well. Your merit along with the post/activity count tells your experience here in the forum.

You don't buy experience. You make it.

When I see a higher ranking member here, I pretty much think sometimes that they have plenty of knowledge since they've been here for a long time already along with how much merit they earned already.

I think the amount of people buying accounts to scam will be very very low, next to zero in fact. It's probably not even worth it. Most scams get called out and get negative feedback for even doing anything remotely sketchy so you're more likely to just waste a load of money buying an account just to try scam.


Actually, I think that would probably boost both account sales and people buying them to scam. If accounts become worthless to earn from everyone who is here to only earn via signature campaigns would then likely offload their account(s) as they have no need for them anymore, so people likely would try buy them cheaply to scam.


Well that's why we shouldn't sell the current Member titles but new donator ones that don't effect your rank but just come with some of the benefits of them. So you could still be a Newbie or Junior or whatever but also a Copper/Silver/Gold Member etc and without merit that will still say a lot about the account. I dare say some campaigns still won't accept a Copper/Silver/Gold Member without some merit.

You make it sound like account sales make up a significant share of the forum economy ... I am not even talking about the absurdity of the comparison with the drug business. And your words make me think that this theoretical "legalization" can somehow hinder your business or the fact that within the walls of the forum there are related groups that are engaged in this business on an ongoing basis, (Except for cases dated 2015).

Sales of account won't promote hard work especially when ranked up accounts come with some benefits. It would be a direct antagonist to the merit system and sooner than later merit says might come to play, all of which would not be helpful to the forum. I think it's best this way, there are other titles and positions that are acquired by the forum and the price or bitcoin to be donated us relatively high to ensure only the matured minds and not money hungry or scam minded persons get them together with some scrutiny that I ain't aware of but hope that to be the case. That alone is by far generating enough money for the forum along with using of some certain boards for certain activities and probably from traffic, I'm not sure of that too.

But then, the forum is relatively fair and should transactions like sales of account be discovered, DT have there ways to solving the matter.

How can that discourage people when BCT itself will be selling the accounts? Now you made the account sellers have the ability to undercut the prices that BCT admins will be selling in this scenario. This won't stop anything and actually give more negative effect to Bitcointalk. How? If they sell accounts there will be no point in the merit system at all which will also lead to affecting the post quality being subpar because they know there is another easier alternative to obtain such accounts. Just reporting them and catching them as well as tagging the accounts they are selling would be enough and I think if people will participate in this kind of activity we will see less and less people selling accounts.

This is still bad idea because, how does the admin judge a potential scammer from a legit buyer? Even if it is the admin that would be the one selling the account it doesn't stop the approaches you're trying to terminate. The best solution is to lessen the required merits to rank up to lower numbers  as everyone is hoping to get high ranking accounts. But in a way the harder is to rank up the more sacred the upper levels feel.
It is best been as it is for now, the whole Idea behind account marketing should even be discouraged not even supported for an admin to act as a merchant, it means the forum admin can grow handful of accounts to desired ranks and lay them off on a yearly or monthly basis depending on their availability and demands.

Bitcointalk profile rank is an indicator of a user's contribution level towards the forum. You can buy Copper member status if you want to have access to the forum's all posting features.