Sure, but I'm guessing OP just happens to want to access the forum on the most convenient device he has, which for most people nowadays is a smartphone.

And OP, this is a discussion topic that's sprung up dozens of times over the years at least, and I don't think Theymos is planning on creating a mobile-friendly version of the site.  Supposedly there's some new forum software in the works, but I could have written that 4 years ago....so I've got my doubts as to if the UI of bitcointalk is ever going to change (and it's fine with me if it doesn't).

It is indeed a pain in the ass to type out posts using a smartphone screen-keyboard.  I used to do it all the time, but my big fat thumbs made it a maddening experience.  I bought a mini-keyboard with a dongle that can plug into the phone, but it was still much slower than using a real keyboard with my PC.  I feel your pain, bro.

That may well be true, but there are some people who either don't want to or can't (because of time constraints or language issues) participate in sig campaigns, and if you've been here long enough you know that account sales are real--even Legendary ones with the potential to earn decent money.

But all that being said, who knows if this offer is a scam?  It could be, and even if it's legitimate I expect the prices shown were posted with the expectation that a potential buyer is going to try to negotiate a better deal.  $299 for a Legendary account seems incredible to me, but since the merit system basically makes it impossible for the average shitposting campaigner-wannabee to get to that rank, those accounts might actually sell for that much.

Crazy.

Ayyyy....I like your list a lot better (cuz I'm on it, lol).

OP, nice data crunching--and DdmrDdmr as well.  The merit:post statistic is probably the best indicator of who's consistently making quality posts, assuming the post count is relatively high.  Some members are new and make a few really excellent posts and that ratio can be off the charts, but for a member like o_e_l_e_o the number sums up how good he is very well.

I thought nullius would be on the list, as I remember he would consistently earn merits with nearly every post he made, but after checking his profile I guess I was mistaken.  Anyway, thanks for the analysis; I always like looking at merit stats.  I also think if anyone is looking to earn merits and can't figure out how, they ought to check the profiles of some of the top members on the lists here.

Yes, and this discussion has been had at least once over the years, and while everyone can voice their opinions about what they think is right nothing is going to change from the administrative end.  I've said before that I don't fault an escrow for ensuring a safe transaction even if it's between two motherfuckers exchanging bitcointalk accounts for money.

The merit system has eliminated a lot of account farmers.  There's no way it could have failed to do so, since it's made it orders of magnitude harder to rank up multiple accounts as was common in the pre-merit days.  This fucker referenced in the OP could have had those accounts for a long time or could have purchased them himself; it's not a fault of the merit system or of the forum.

By the way, I have the Digital Goods section on ignore.  If anyone sees an account that isn't a throwaway trying to buy or sell a bitcointalk account, shoot me a PM and I'll tag them with the trusty red paint gun. 

Foxpup's my boo.  Couldn't hep m'self, y'know.

Now as far as that link goes to the Russian immortality drug, it wasn't flagged by my browser when I visited it and I sure as hell didn't mean to link to a dangerous site, nor do I think it is dangerous unless it got changed.  But this is the internet.  Wear a helmet and a rubber when you venture out, lest you get a brick to the head or some infectiously nasty bugaboo that's probably resistant to every antibiotic known to man.

Yeah I'm lame, what can I tell you.

Oh my, I remember that debacle very well.  Even though it had nothing to do with me, I remember posting a few times in the big thread that was started up about it.  I hadn't been a member of the forum for all that long, so I was naive to all of the scamming taking place and still thought green trust meant you could really trust any member who had it.

I'm not buying the story julerz12 is trying to sell.  He has a lot of positive feedback, but having a large sum of money entrusted to you can be too tempting to some people--just like MasterP, just like those charity scammers, and probably more than a dozen additional examples that can probably be dug up from the bottom of the toilet whence these fuckers come from.  I'm reading a lot of posts in support of julerz12, and everyone is entitled to believe what they want of course, but it seems even YoMix thinks he scammed them.  I happen to agree with that.

Oh crap.  Did I violate this rule?  I was checking the OP to see when this contest was over with and the votes tallied when I stumbled across this--and no, I didn't read the rules at any time before this (oops).  My apologies if I merited anyone who nominated me, and I'm just too damn lazy to check. 

So in case I missed it, when will this be over?  If I'm seeing things correctly, the voting should have ended at some point in November.  All my brain fogginess aside, what am I missing here?

That seems like the complete opposite of the logical thing to do, because even the shittiest-paying job is better than whatever you could get from government assistance programs.  That said, I don't have a clue why people are quitting their jobs or what the real state of the economy is.  Usually when there's an economic downturn, unemployment is high and people hold onto their jobs for dear life.

What?  None of that makes any sense, especially that crap I bolded.  Sure, some people quit jobs without having anything else lined up, but that's a stupid move and not one most people make.  It'd be nice if the data released broke down the types of positions being quit.  McDonald's never seems to have a shortage of employees, by the way.  That's a transient job for most, so I doubt that's what this news is all about.

It seems to have been, but then again I don't know how many members have requested their usernames be changed and how many requests have been denied.  From what Theymos told me, all I had to do to get mine changed was to be persistent and remind him periodically--I don't know if that applies to everyone or not, but I'm guessing it's probably easier to get a name change than one would think.

Had Igebotz not just sent me a PM I wouldn't have known he was igehhh previously--so thank you OP for creating this thread.  I wasn't aware of the other name changes at all except my own. 

Maybe Cyrus would weigh in, but I doubt Theymos is going to.  And I think it's the latter who's making decisions as far as name changes go.  Also, I don't think it's that big of a deal since Cryptovator got his changed twice in a fairly short period of time.

KoGuan is a Chinese-American, but Jesus he writes like a texting troll.  You'd think if he was writing things from the perspective of a major Tesla shareholder he'd be a little more eloquent.

Tesla stock might have been valued at over $1 trillion and lost 65% of its value, but if the data I'm looking at is correct, it currently has a P/E of 34.83.  That's high, even if Tesla is a growth stock--so all that lost market cap was probably inevitable, just an overdue correction.  Why this guy is screaming his brains out because his investment tanked is beyond me.  Musk probably did make a mistake by delving so heavily into left-wing politics, since that's obviously tarnished his reputation, but as far as Tesla and their investors go....it's futile to whine about volatility.

If that's what you're suggesting, I'd say you're mistaken.  And why?  It's because of sig campaigns and bounties that this forum has a problem with so many low-quality posts to begin with, and the merit system is intended to ensure that only those members worthy enough have a chance to rank up and thus increase their signature space.  So it is kind of supposed to keep shitposters out of campaigns--and it'd be nice if every campaign manager would have some kind of weekly merit requirement, but that's not going to happen as far as I can tell.

And we've had this discussion many times since Jan. 2018.  It seems like a lot of old arguments are being brought back up, and unnecessarily I might add.

Yay.  2022 is over.  Yay.  Yay.

I wasn't duped, scammed, screwed over, or anything of the sort but I wouldn't call this past year a particularly fruitful one for me financially.  And a big part of that was the simple fact that inflation spiked and as far as I know is still rising.  Every time I go grocery shopping it seems like prices of things have gone up, and it's eaten a hole in my wallet so big that I could probably crawl through it.

Let's just hope bitcoin starts dancing upward again, and that the entire crypto space doesn't get regulated into oblivion.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Not sure what the value of their collective coffer is, but that might just be chump change for them.  And hey, they could just ask the Fed to print more money to cover the refund (lol).

Yeah, I heard this news as well.  Was it disclosed where the donation funds came from, i.e., was it from FTX's profits or did SBF use customer funds or something else? 

I hate the concept of lobbying; if you ever want a great example of centralized power, look no further than the big, big lobbyists, which would include everything from big pharma to the NRA.  If you've got enough money, you can easily get politicians in your pocket.  That's probably what SBF thought he was doing, and had he not been scamming the whole time he might have "influenced" politicians' views on crypto for the better (albeit in a corrupt way).

Whatta mess, eh?

Wait a sec.  I thought the money printing never stopped in the first place.  Are you saying the Fed actually took a breather?

Oh, if only I had the spare cash to buy bitcoin like it was 2015!  I don't know if the cause-and-effect relationship you described between the Fed's actions and bitcoin's price action is correct, but we've seen periods where bitcoin is completely stagnant for months and then breaks out like an olympic track runner, usually to the upside.  Right now it looks like bitcoin kinda-sorta wants to break past $17k; I think that regardless of what the Fed does, once people get over the FTX disaster (and the last few debacles like Terra) bitcoin's going to skyrocket.

Time frame:  Who knows?

Ah, that provides the motivation for posts like this, which seem very much out of place for a member who has presumably been here since 2014--even longer than I've been a member:

You would think someone who's been part of the community, even with an extended break, would know Lauda's been gone for over two years and wouldn't have just discovered that fact.  Has anyone checked to see if there was a significant change in posting habits in the years ltcrstrbrt's been here?  I may take a look for myself in a while, but if someone beats me to it, please alert me.  I have a suspicion that I'm not going to act on unless or until there's evidence.

You've got that right. 

I made a comment about ltcrstrbrt weighing in on the "Goodbye world" thread created by Lauda over two years ago, which ltcrstrbrt seems to have completely missed for some reason based on what he wrote.  Shortly thereafter he sent me a PM with a very long explanation, which I admit I didn't fully read.  Not sure why he did that, but I have a feeling something's up with that account.  In any case, he's not in a sig campaign or bounty (as of this writing), so I don't know what his motivations are.

Who are you talking about, the OP of this thread (Shasan) or ltcrstrbrt.  I'm assuming the latter.

Nah, no matter what I've posted about my position in this particular ranking, I don't--and never have--seen it as a competition.  In fact, I'm glad there are quite a few members who are regularly sending out more merits than I am.  If I was consistently leading the list, I think the merit system would be in trouble.

And I would add that many of them are obviously dedicated to their "job", which I find admirable.  Newer members might not understand why this system exists or how important it is or appreciate what merit sources (and all the other members who pay their earned sMerits forward) do for the health of the forum.  I think the system and everyone participating in it is crucial to keeping shitposting down, so I thank everyone who merits posts they think are good.

I bet you they wouldn't make a fuss at all if they knew the campaign manager got a temp ban.  I've seen campaign managers delay payments for weeks without much complaint (Lutpin and lightlord immediately come to mind).  And you know why?  They're afraid that if they make noise they'll be kicked out of the campaign, so they put up with whatever unreasonable amount of BS that's thrown their way.

But I digress.  OP, as other members have told you--correctly--there's nothing wrong with what Royse777 did here.  Evading a ban would be if he created an alt account and posted outside of a ban appeal thread.  The rules are that simple.  Having someone make announcements for you, especially if you've got obligations to members here, is the responsible thing to do.

And you're just posting this now, after this thread has been here for over two years?  You're not in a signature campaign, so I don't understand your motive.  It's hard to believe you missed this thread for that long.

But this guy:

If you've got nothing of substance to write, just don't write.  I know what your motives are, and if Lauda was here, he'd probably say the same thing. 

Theymos referred to Lauda once as "he" or "him" and since Lauda was a moderator at one point I have a feeling Lauda's a male.  Then again, he was always very scrupulous about maintaining his anonymity, so Theymos might not have known for sure.  Also, if Lauda were active on the forum under another username, there's no way he'd manage to not have such a loud and controversial voice and thus attract attention and scrutiny from the community.  So personally I have no doubt that Lauda is really gone (at least for now).

Hero of Good: Baphomet, Beelzebub, Shaitan, 'ol Scratch himself
Golden Feather: Barrack Obama
Bitcointalk Ninja: Satoshi
Bitcoin Geek: Sam Bankman Fried
Event of the Year:  FTX falling down from $32 billon mountain *doh*  I copy/pasted NotATether's list and forgot to modify this entry.
Fail of the Year: Me flipping over the handlebars of my bicycle whilst collecting cans and pretending to be homeless.  Just last night.
Discovery of the Year:  Russian scientists discover immortality drug.
Best SpamBuster: What spam?
Best ScamBuster: Pick one for me.
Craft Master: Da fuk does this even mean?
AntiHero: Black Adam
Miss Bitcointalk: Foxpup

One has to go against the grain in contests like these, especially when one has no idea who to vote for.  Call me a cranky contrarian if you like, but I'm sticking to my votes.