But if we revoke all merits which came from airdropped sMerit, then what do we do with all the sMerit that came from those merits? Do we revoke them too? If we follow this line of reasoning, then all merit other than that from merit source's monthly allocations would be removed. And is there really much difference between sMerit which was given freely to all forum users at the start and sMerit which is given freely to merit sources? As you say, it becomes too messy a change.

Decay airdropped merit over time, leave all sMerits and earned merits alone, leave all ranks alone. Perhaps further down the line we can then consider linking signature privileges to earned merit rather than ranks.

I'd tend to agree. There is no wallet in the world which can be 100% safe from user error. You can have your bitcoins stored in a wallet generated by flipping a coin on an airgapped machine inside a faraday cage inside a safe inside a nuclear bunker. None of that matters if you are going to type your seed phrase in to some random website promising to airdrop you some useless token. Suggesting this is a flaw specifically of hardware wallets, rather than all wallets, is inaccurate at best.

It's worth pointing out that no wallet is 100% immune to being hacked. Every wallet has its own unique vulnerabilities, and the best way to be safe is to learn about and appreciate the different vulnerabilities and take steps to mitigate them.

This is terrible advice, and the exact opposite of what you should do.

Google frequently links to phishing, malicious, or otherwise fake sites. Scammers often purchase ads and so their fake links appear at the top of search results. One of the most common ways to be scammed is by using a search engine to find the site. The best way to be sure you are landing on the correct page is to type it in the address bar, and double check your spelling.

Using bookmarks is better, but still not 100% foolproof. There was a post I read a while ago about a mixing service which had shutdown, and a scammer then purchased the expired URL. Anyone who followed their previous bookmark would now land on a scam site and lose their coins.

I'll have you know I didn't edit my post, I was just borrowing Foxpup's time machine.

The "eklectrum" redirection site also shares the same registrar and was also created 3 days ago. You can report them both to the email address above, and you can also report them to Google's Safe Browsing feature. They will get taken down rapidly, but it makes little difference as new ones will have popped up within the hour. It's an endless game of cat-and-mouse. We will never win by chasing them around scam page after scam page. Better just to end the game altogether by teaching everyone to verify their downloads.

I'm praying to be back on my couch about now.

It must be right under our noses.

Blast! I totally forgot about nullius! I'll get back to working on my newt cure immediately.

Correct, but that doesn't mean there is 1.7 trillion USD in the market.

Think of it like this. I create a coin that has a supply of 10 million. I then sell a single coin to my friend for $10. My coin's marketcap would now be $100 million, despite the fact that only $10 has changed hands. This is an extreme example, but the same principle applies.

Only a small amount of the bitcoins in circulation are currently being traded or locked up in various orders. Looking at Coinbase Pro right now, the price is $7,156. There are buy orders for 200 bitcoins between that price and $7,058. Lets say sell 200 bitcoins to fulfill all those buy orders. I would take about $1.4 million out of the market. The marketcap (if calculated solely from Coinbase Pro), however, would drop by (18 million * (7156-7058)) = $1.7 billion, so over 1000x as much.

On a standard English QWERTY keyboard, a simple slip when pressing the "L" button could quite easily type "KL" instead.

In addition to the advice above about host files and double checking URLs (which is obviously good advice), this is why the Electrum website tells you to verify your downloads, we all go on and on about verifying your downloads, and multiple guides have been created to show you how to verify your downloads. 30 seconds spent to verify your download prior to installing completely negates the risk of visiting fake sites or downloading a malicious copy of Electrum.

Editing your host file is useful for sites like the fake bitcointalk forum which doesn't change its URL, but for sites like fake Electrum sites it is next to useless. By the time you've added one URL to your hosts file, the scammers have already moved on to another URL. You can add these sites to your hosts file for the rest of time and never be completely safe.

Verify your downloads!

I'd say bones261 meriting Welsh on Meta.

There are two potential posts from around a year ago which fit that criteria, one about censorship and one about voting. Is it cheating that I found these two posts using BPIP?

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You want something weird with it, like pickles?

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I missed the bit on the first page where you said the post was only merited by a single user, so I change my guess to this one: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5095556.msg49160405#msg49160405

Yeah, as pointed out by TheUltraElite above, this is exactly how scams and Ponzis operate. If they just stole the money of the first couple of people to deposit, they would make a tiny amount and those users would warn everyone else that it is a scam. So instead they pay out as advertised, enticing users to both deposit larger and larger amounts whilst also referring their friends and advertising this great service. Once they have much larger amounts being deposited, that's when they disappear.

Why would a random crypto start up be able to offer guaranteed returns far higher than what the world's biggest banks and financial institutions can offer?

Unfortunately the merit system will always have an element of chance in it, depending on who reads which threads and how many sMerits they have available at the time, which is why there are initiatives like the one I linked to before to try to identify and rectify any posts which are un- or under-merited.

Merit decay will have no effect on this though. Regardless of whether or not airdropped merit is decayed, there would be the same amount of sMerit available and the same amount of merit being circulated, and I wouldn't propose to introduce decay for sMerit. It's up to regular users not to hoard their sMerit and distribute it.

The logical cut off is probably around 26 weeks, for a number of reasons.

Amniocentesis can't be performed until around 14-16 weeks, meaning we struggle to detect many genetic defects (many of which are not compatible with life) before that.

The anomaly scan is performed around 20-22 weeks, and this may be the first time we discover many congenital malformations, again many of which are not compatible with life.

The limit of viability is around 24-26 weeks, where a fetus has a 50% chance of survival (albeit often with major disabilities).

That's not unique to you - Bitcoin Discussion is a mess, that's why. The last data I saw showed it has the lowest merit per post ratio of any of the non-altcoin boards. Most threads turn in to spamfests, and no one with any sense is reading past the 3rd page or so. Any replies on threads like that aren't even going to get seen, let alone merited.

Totally disagree with you here. There are plenty of legendary members which just spam one or two line nonsense. I went to Altcoin Discussion, clicked on the first megathread I saw (this one https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5165503.0), and Ctrl+F for "legendary". Here are some of the profiles I came across in the space of a few pages:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=407887
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=162975
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=22145
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=358450
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=148225
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=101432

They are all spammers. It took me a total of under a minute to find these 6 profiles. There are plenty more.

I think you misunderstand. Merit and sMerit are totally separate. Your merit score will never decrease because of sending sMerit to other people.

Almost everyone (theymos included) has agreed that while airdropped merit could/should decay, ranks should not.

I usually just use either https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ or https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/.

What you have done is make an instant buy order via Coinbase, which is subjected to high fees of 0.5% plus $3: https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/2109597-coinbase-pricing-fees-disclosures.

What you want to do is make a market order via Coinbase Pro, which will be subject to much lower fees of just 0.5%: https://pro.coinbase.com/fees

You can transfer your funds from Coinbase to Coinbase Pro free and instantly by following the instructions here: https://support.pro.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/2945332-how-to-transfer-funds-between-your-coinbase-pro-and-coinbase-accounts

Bear in mind that Coinbase Pro, as the name suggest, is more complicated than just clicking on "buy", as you would on Coinbase. Even if you just want to place an order at current market value, you will need to spend some time learning to understand the interface. Platforms such as this is how traders trade to avoid paying large fees as you have done, and if you look at the second link above, you'll see that the more they trade, the less percentage they pay in fees.

Their Terms of Service is plagiarized from various sources, including https://blockfi.com/terms/ and https://app.reinno.io/REINNO_EARN_TAC.pdf.

Their Privacy Policy is plagiarized almost completely from https://www.circlesway.com/privacy.

Also, somewhat concerning statement from their "Customer Service" portal once you open an account:
I had absolutely no problem finding a bitcoin address to deposit to, however, with absolutely zero mention of KYC. So they will happily take my deposit, and then hold it hostage until I complete KYC.

Untrustworthy at best, but I agree with all the above comments that this is most likely a Ponzi.

But all that becomes irrelevant whenever an update is published. Taking the example that I discussed in a previous post, the Copay wallet is open source and has been on GitHub for 5 years. It has 75 contributors and over 16 thousands commits. Even then, malicious code managed to be introduced without people noticing for a short period of time.

Precisely, but you need to apply that same logic to all updates of existing software, and not just new software. Open source is only good if you ensure the code you are downloading matches the code that is published, and the code that is published is thoroughly vetted prior to you downloading it. Allowing automatic updates of anything that is pushed defeats the whole point.

That's a false equivalence. No one is performing abortions at 8.5 months.

If you are seeing constructive replies which are going unmerited, please post them in this thread: [self-moderated] Report unmerited good posts to Merit Source.

Only airdropped merit would decay under theymos' proposal above, not earned merit.

I don't think that's true.

When theymos introduced the "1 merit for Junior Member" (and therefore a signature) requirement, there was a noticeable and measurable reduction in spam over the following weeks: The new rule (1 Merit for Jr. Member) is already reducing spam. This is despite all the merit selling and awarding to alt accounts that went on. There would be presumably be less merit selling and alt accounts now, since a lot of accounts involved in this will have used up much of their airdropped sMerits, without earning any more.

Probably less.

For starters, an exchange is almost certainly going to release a custodial web wallet as opposed to a non-custodial wallet, so it's an immediately fail for me on that front.

However, assuming we are talking about it releasing a non-custodial wallet similar to Mycelium or Electrum, my answer is still probably less, for the exact reasons you have stated in your previous post. Release a genuine wallet, have the auditors examine it and state that it's all clear, become evil, keep updating as normal for a while, maybe have a second all clear audit performed to build even more trust, release a malicious update, steal coins.

I appreciate the above is also possible if you auto-update open source wallets without checking the code first, but at least with open source, checking the code is possible.

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I'll consider that sometime, but there's no big secret to it. There are more and more on ramps for fiat now than ever before - P2P trading locally, P2P on this forum, decentralized exchanges (I generally use BISQ), ATMs, and so forth. I have little interest in most altcoins, but the couple that I do buy, again I simply trade peer-to-peer. There are also plenty of centralized exchanges such as Binance which will let you trade altcoins without KYC.