Bitcoin Forum

For some days or weeks now, there's a thread in reputation board - PytagoraZ & komisariatku are alts (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5489102.msg63812890#msg63812890). I followed up the thread to the extent that I believed that PytagoraZ is a different person from Komisariatku, but I didn't air my opinion. But on visiting the thread again, I discovered that everything was bursted.

What prompted this thread is this;

• It is allowed to own alts.
• How many alts will one own and it will become a farm?
• Is farm accounts without merit sharing, cheating campaigns or contests allowed?

I will need some experience users to give an answer.
  

In as much as you said you need experience users to explain to you, I will give my one scent to how I understand the whole alt and account farming of a thing and how it could lead to being seen as something bad. 
 
As far as I know, the forum permits alt accounts, but having too many accounts does not do the forum any good, and where the accounts can be classified as account farming is if you are sharing merit between the alt accounts, like sending from account A to account B and down to how many alts you have and also reverse, and also using all the accounts to fish for merit on threads where you see that easy merits are coming out, like some of the big art, baking, and caving contests in the forum. 
 
Another one is also using accounts against campaign rules, like participating in the same contest or campaign where other accounts are not allowed.

Yes, as many as you want

This is just enirely my opinion. I think more than two but it's not just about how many accounts will one own but its also about how the accounts is going to be used. I mean, If the accounts is going to be used for nefarious reason like cheating campaigns, giveaways, bounties, etc... then people will consider it as account farming and if not, then I don't think they will.

Yeah, that is basically just owning alt accounts, it can only become a problem if you use your alt accounts to abuse signature campaign, contests, giveaways, etc...

According to my understanding, having alt accounts for your personal use is allowed. And this is acceptable by the community as long as there is no form of abuse, such as merit abuse, bounty or contest cheating, and so on.

Alt account farming is a process of creating and using multiple accounts in a forum to gain an advantage that wouldn't be possible with a single account. This advantage can come in many forms, like using them in forum contests, manipulating polls, or cheating in bounties. Account farming was likely more popular before the merit system, as forum ranks were solely based on activity back then. This ultimately led to the reselling of alt accounts to third parties for participation in signature campaigns.

Yes alt accounts are allowed as long as they are not used to cheat the merit system, signature campaigns and contests.

This is subjective. For me, having three or more accounts is too much and can be considered a farm because it’s obvious you’re creating these accounts for financial gain either to join signature campaigns, collect loans or just good old fashion account selling business.

Technically, they would be allowed and will be only be given a neutral tag to show that the accounts are connected. But in my experience, account farms usually do something stupid that will cost them their reputation like using AI to make posts, plagiarism or replying themselves in a thread.

Do you really not know about something like that? You are a hero. Having an alt is something that is allowed and loycev also has an alt. If you want to discuss my past mistakes, you can post them on the reputation board. I've also explained a lot of things there.

If you're posting this for merit or to chase your weekly posting target, then keep going, it's a good effort and good luck

Cheating contests, sig camps and merit sharing are obviously no good practices but there is one more thing:

People with many alts can create fake discussions, fake debates, support each other’s opinions and affect other people’s opinions that way. This is way worse than abusing sig camps imo.

You don’t have to declare your alts publicly and you can have as many alts as you want. You won’t get into trouble unless you do the unethical stuff I mentioned above.

Sometimes people create alts just to voice their unpopular opinion but they don’t want their main account to be labeled with any negative/neutral trust ratings. That’s a good and ethical reason to create an anonymous alt account.

Dude, if you read Op well, you will discover that this post is not about you. I'm sorry about your fate, I don't have the power to save you, I would have.

Wow!
I haven't thought of it from this angle. So, one with alts can create a poll and use their alts to influence the poll result. It is a bad thing and as you mentioned can in some cases be worse than cheating signature campaigns.

If you're farming alts don't be surprised if you start getting negative trust feed-backs (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=3375107;dt) and negative DT trusts (https://loyce.club/profile.html?id=3375107) from numerous other users.

Why are so many alternative accounts created? There will be no questions about two or three accounts. Work, home, mobile. And often, such accounts do not hide themselves. But it is very, very rare that more than four alternative accounts will be created without participating in the same bounty or signature companies and without sending merits to each other. Even if such a thing exists, such a number of posts is simply incredible work, and it is doubtful that a person will create good posts.
Therefore, it is correct what Timelord2067 says: the greed of people raising farms on the forum leads to a bad ending.

Why me? A much better example would be a Global Moderator (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=397737) and Administrator (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=349090) with alts.

What is meant by having alt accounts for personal use. Do people have alt accounts for general or public use? Please clarify...

Yea, I have read somewhere that a reputable member of this forum said that, if the energy people use to create alts is channelled to one account, the account could be exceptional, can join any signature campaign with high pay.

I think he meant to someone who want to create alt accounts, but he claimed his alts to be a different person e.g. project. Unfortunately I can't find the thread even though I already search the user topics history.

It's basically like this, I want to create a new account for my project named Bitcointalk. If Bitcointalk fails and the project can't repay the investors money, this will make the account received negative feedback. Then the next question will my personal account i.e. Plaguedeath receive a same punishment too? Most users say yes, so if you want to create an alt account regardless with any reason, it's belong to same person and risking the same reputation.

I think there's nothing wrong with having different accounts. People may have them for various reasons, and those reasons may be pretty legit. But, of course, participating in contests/challenges with several of your alts at the same time is unfair. Merit sharing between your alts is also a shameful practice.

It's heroic of you to speak up in my opinion and I won't pretend that I never saw that accusing thread but I just skipped it because it is none of my business and having alts can't be an automatic sin for breaking the rules of the forum. But let those who have the alts limit it and I do not know the reason why anyone would have more than one alt for crying out loud, if they ever had, it could be annoying and suspicious.

I've seen a reputable member of the forum having an alt and even joined campaigns with both accounts without anyone saying a word. "What is good for the goose is good for the gander," everyone is bound under the forum rules.

As for the case of @komisariatku and @PytagoraZ, it was never proven beyond a reasonable doubt as far as I am concerned, and if it is still within the limit of the two, it doesn't call for any attention.

I guessed because of your high standing on the forum especially with your many tools set and guide While many don't know or remember Theymos has an alt especially since he last use it December 2021 while Hilarious is not well known to some members of the forum especially those who might have little or no knowledge about the forum or haven't noticed it on his profile/forum position.

Yes, it is. Many reputable forum members have alternative accounts for different purposes. So as long as you are not using them for bad practices, you should be good. It's even better if you declare that you have an alt account so that everyone can see how you use the other account.


The term "farming accounts" refers to the act of creating and growing multiple accounts preferably for the purpose of joining multiple signature or bounty campaigns to earn more money than you can earn while having just one account enrolled. So it doesn't refer to the amount but the act being done. You are farming accounts even if you have just one alt that you are growing with your main account and will get it enrolled in a signature campaign later when it's ready.


You mean alt accounts, right? Yes, you are allowed to have alt accounts if you are not farming them to cheat campaigns or contests making them have different identities and hiding from the community that it is you behind those alt.

I have 3 or 4 alts

I do not post with them or do signatures with them.

I don't know why people keep answering the one when it wasn't a question. It was just a statement while the other two are questions. Yet they are scared of giving explicit answers for number 2 and 3.

This is not a crime. In some cases, making the community know you are the person behind the account defeats the purpose of having the alt account.

I am not really sure about this but you can probably join signature campaigns with them. If you inform the manager about that alt account which belongs to you, he still may let you join. I don't think there is any rule against this. Or is there?

It is unethical when you don't inform the manager about your alts and join the same campaign with multiple accounts.

Let's say your main is posting in sig camp x.
You go to camp y with your alt and got accepted. (because you won't get accepted in the same campaign with 2 accs)

Then you can post both with your main and your alt and get paid twice. As long as people know what you are doing, there shouldn't be any problems.

such a case is very possible. in fact, it corresponds to what was shown in the case referred to by the OP.
If the alt account ownership is self-published and does not join the same campaign the manager may still be able to accept it and of course, it does not violate the campaign rules.

which becomes a problem when alt account owners become greedy by joining campaigns or contests with many of their accounts. The main goal is of course to get more income. it violates campaign and contest rules.

ownership of an alt account should not be a problem because as we know it is not prohibited on forums. But the greed of users is the problem.

I will try to answer as best I can and as simply as possible for you:

1. Each user is allowed to have an alt.

2. This depends on your goal of having multiple alts. If you created more than two accounts just to sign up for a signature campaign - perhaps you are already worth considering as account farming. Some users created a lot of alts in the past to sell to other users - this was before the merit system was introduced, but now I'm not sure if this kind of thing still happens.

3. This may be acceptable ^{[I'm not really sure about my answer]} - but rest assured, the more accounts you have, the more likely you are to generate more spam than positive contributions.

Having alts on this forum is not the problem here the problem is having alts and hiding it. It simply means you are faking a second identity here and you probably have a bad intent in mind. If having alts was the problem then most reputable members won't. If you observe closely many members who have alts disclose them openly this makes it impossible to cheat in contests campaigns and even bounties.

Account farming is a different case. Just like the name farming  implies growing for a purpose (probably sale), Account farming simply means creating accounts to gather merits and activity to rank up and then probably auction them for sale. Having an alt account which the forum is aware of is not an offence and also obviously not a case of account farming.

For forum rules, as far as I know there isn't a rule that prohibits entering your alt account on signature campaigns, as for signature campaign rules, it might differ from campaign to campaign or the manager that manages the campaign.

 ;D

What I meant was to have an alt account to participate in specific discussions anonymously (maybe you're shy about a particular topic and don't want to expose your main account, as theymos mentioned somewhere) or to play around with a different persona (harmless fun, as long as it's within forum rules), or use alt accounts to access from different devices (for example a "mobile" account, as some members have).

In my personal opinion, all comes down to the intention someone could give to their alternative accounts. Some would use an alternative account to say things which would be politically incorrect for most of the forum members, others will use alternative accounts to throw scam accusations or open threads in the reputation section, without dragging the drama to their main accounts. I do not have much of a problem which those cases, though it is very different when someone use their Alts in order to cheat campaigns, sell accounts or evade bans imposed on them by our moderators.
There are very well known members here in our forum who have known alternative accounts and since they don't truly do anything wrong with those, then there is no problem.
If one wants to have several accounts and keep some level of transparency, the first step would be to disclose those accounts and their control by the same individual on a thread in the reputation section of the forum.

Those are just my two sats, by the way.

Also, on a side note. Anyone who wished to avoid drama and very heated discussion among members, then step into the Reputation section of the forum carefully.  :P

I think I have explicitly answered the questions you asked. What are you confused about?


It might not be a crime but it's unethical to have multiple alt accounts, have different identities for all of them, and use different Bitcoin addresses and other details to join signature campaigns, and since all your alts would have different identities, you can possibly join the same campaign with all of them and no one would even know about it. You may say that isn't a crime as well, but that is considered cheating, unethical, and not allowed. Apart from all these points, you can do a bunch of unethical stuff such as scamming people, taking loans and not repaying them, etc., and have no fingers pointed at you being the original account holder because all your alts are undeclared and unknown so no one can blame you for any of that.

So, these are all possibilities of having multiple accounts with different identities which you say is not a crime.  :)

This is true.

LoyceV has five or six alts in total - the majority of which are bots and he's also confessed he forgot he had an obscure bot alt at one point.

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To respond to the OP - signature campaign managers will stipulate you can't use an alt in the same campaign - essentially, when caught you loose that week's worth of earnings and are usually slapped with red tags for "breaking the rules"

I'll answer:
2. The word "farm" is used for people who rank up many accounts for earning money. I don't think there's a hard limit: 2 accounts isn't a farm, 20 is. Somewhere in between is a gray area. It was a much bigger problem before the introduction of the Merit system, when shitposting in Off-topic was enough to reach Legendary status.
3. Yes. From the forum rules' perspective, I've never seen anyone banned just for owning many accounts. But if one of them gets banned, the rest is guilty of ban evasion. Scams aren't moderated, so Merit sharing and cheating won't get you banned. You could say it's "allowed" from the forum's perspective. But that's where the "alt farm hunters" come in with the red tags.

Allow me to (again) quote theymos on this:

I've used "throw away accounts" just to test something. Create, test, forget. Or this one:
I don't think anyone considers this an alt account, let alone a farm.

People are not scared to answer these questions. There are certain questions that simply don't have clear-cut or explicit answers because it can depend on other factors and circumstances. For example: Can 5-6 alt accounts be considered a farm? If they were created and used for the purpose of merit abusing, cheating in campaigns and contests, etc., then yes, that would be an account farm.  However, it's not necessarily a definitive sign of a farm. Some members may have a bunch of inactive alt accounts, or use them only for specific needs. So, it depends on a case-by-case basis, and context and usage matter more than the mere number of accounts.

You know, for a long time, there were sites that paid pretty decent money for completing certain registrations, surveys, and other tasks. But according to the site's requirements, it was believed that it was necessary to be a unique individual. That is, you must have everything different, including an IP address, browser, device, and, of course, address and name. If all conditions were met, the site paid for each new person on a new device. But this was quite difficult to implement since the site saw all the slightest trackers, including the computer processor and video cards. Nevertheless, people managed to engage in multi-accounts. The browser anti-detect was created for similar purposes, but at that time it cost good money.

I wrote all this as an example of what you are asking about today. Multi-accounts are allowed on the forum, and only detectives who find connections through social networks, transactions, and similar matches are involved in catching them.

I agree that not a single experienced cheater will come and admit how many accounts he has. As long as the forum allows it, you can create hundreds of alternative accounts.

But if the ban is at the hardware level, so that registration is prohibited by matching trackers, the number of accounts will be reduced to one account per device. It's simple. But here we must choose either freedom or uniqueness.

I was just thinking about this quote when I was reading the thread. Originally theymos' quote was referring to that, for example, if you want to express your political ideas and you don't want to do it with your account. This has been generally tolerated for other purposes, if you want to have two or three accounts and you are able to make money with them as long as you don't break the rules is fine, but it was not the original meaning theymos gave it. Anyway I don't remember anyone getting caught with two or more undeclared alts and not breaking the rules in some way.

I wasn't around in 2012, but I guess farming accounts for selling or signatures wasn't a thing back then.

"Getting caught" implies you did something bad. If someone finds your alt (or any other personal information about you), and you're not doing anything wrong, there's no reason to expose your alts.

Thanks LoyceV for this. When I said experienced users to answer me, I wasn't wrong.

Another bold answer and I believe that the wise will learn from this. While the foolish will not. I believe that the forum has no much threads explaining these rules but many people are available to punish offenders.

seriously? Cus I thought anyone that joined a campaign with two different accounts ( even in different campaigns) would automatically be tagged a bounty cheater...
what makes it wrong is not creating an awareness about it, But the act isn't condemned still? Make that make sense!!

No, you will not be tagged if you don't broken any rules. And if an account already has a red tag, we can still use it, we just can't join the campaign.

Regarding tagged accounts not being able to join signature campaigns. you can still join a signature campaign even if you have a red tag but it will be entirely depend on the signature campaign rule and the campaign manager, there are campaign managers that consider and still hire accounts even if it has a red tag(I think the severity of the reason for the red tag matters a lot when they hire accounts with red tag).

In a perfect world, yes you can still join but the problem is that we've ostracized and we made it a taboo for alts and users with alts to join a signature campaign and the other thing is that most campaign managers really don't like the idea of someone having another account and they see those people as cheaters that are taking advantage of other people that are honest, I mean that's how I see it. So even if you were to tell the campaign manager that you've got an alt, I still don't think that they've got some reason to let you in on the campaign and I don't think they might even appreciate your honesty.
I wouldn't say that it's unethical to not inform them but it's unethical if you don't inform them and abuse that advantage to your favor, I think that's the more unethical thing, what you've mentioned could be a neutral in terms of ethics. I don't agree that getting paid twice is going to sit right with the people that know that those two accounts have the same person, it's unfair and that position that's got an alt on it could've been a place for someone that's honest and only has one account. No way to justify having two accounts on a campaign even if they're different, it will always be unfair and unethical.

Well, most signature campaigns I've joined forbid participating with an alt account. But, there have been a few that allowed it.

Having broken the forum rules isn't a prerequisite. This example (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3534730) is a user who has not broken the rules (or at least isn't tagged for that reason), but is still red tagged nonetheless. Sending negative feedback means you're publicly stating that the person is not trustworthy and / or likely to scam.

It's generally frowned upon if you have Alt accounts (unless you explicitly state that you do have an alt account like LoyceV does) but the forum doesn't impose any form of restrictions towards having multiple accounts here, as long as it's used within the confines of the forum rules and healthily. Farm accounts which are alternate accounts that people use to farm engagement or in the forum's case, merits and post counts, are illegal and could be a bannable offense if I'm not mistaken, especially if you're using these farm accounts to cycle Smerits to each other and climb the ranks artificially.

There's no particular amount of accounts that will determine whether you're a farmer or not, but in my opinion, the moment you send merits towards yourself from an alt account, even if it's just a single merit, you're already considered a farmer and if reported, could face getting banned from the forum. And yes, even if you don't use it to share merit, or to cheat on campaigns by joining more of your accounts in one go, long as you're considered a farmer here there's no way for you to regain the trust and cred you will lose in the forum.

You overstate. For one given merit, there will be no punishment, except that you will seem pathetic in front of the community. This is what people look like who cannot receive merit on their own on all their accounts, but are engaged in transferring merits purchased or obtained with such difficulty. Otherwise, why would you throw away something that you can get for nothing?
Owning multiple accounts, if we remove the normal reason of convenience for different devices, will also be an indicator of the greed of people who cannot be satisfied with bonuses from one account. But often we see that greed makes a person even poorer; it destroys the personality, making him angry and hostile.

Only reason why I believe so is because a lot of people will start with 1 merit to see if they'll get noticed, and from there, they'd either buy merits from other people or farm shit from their other accounts to commence their artificial rank up missions. So in a sense, what I'm just trying to suppose is that it's hard to either prove or just stop with 1 merit, and yes, you're right, they do look pathetic lol.

In any case, I only meant to make this statement to discourage people from creating alts for any reason besides device convenience. You go out there creating 4 different accounts so you have higher chances of getting merited, and in turn getting into signature campaigns when you can pretty much just combine the efforts you make for those accounts into a single one and not sacrifice the quality of your posts or better yet, be able to provide more constructive content to the forum.

So even though I may have overstated to some, I still believe that I said the right thing here, and I'd die on this hill if I have to LOL. ;D ;D ;D