it's still another barrier to account farmers and discourages spamming, there's no reason to do away with it, it just doesn't work as effectively as people thought it would, from what i've been able to glean off here in the past few hours.

along with theymos's stance on alt accounts, i dont think this will ever be a thing (especially since a lot of users might share ip addresses if they are using the same vpn server / tor node), although it would prove to be effective given that the point i put in the parentheses there was a nonfactor.

posting on a forum is work? ok dude.

thought this would be a thing when i read about the merit system being implemented a few weeks ago, havent really had time since then to be on the forum to see it happen though. of course, i don't know if these changes may already have been put into place, or if the system has changed, but implementing a cooldown on giving the same user merit per 24 hr period or applying diminishing returns for merit given multiple times in a given time period might prove effective to stopping this.

it's to be expected when there's money involved, especially when third world country users starting thinking that posting on a forum qualifies as actual employment. it's no different than people farming accounts for campaigns.

i've seen this line of thought thrown out here multiple times, but the spammers never really do stop do they? it's not going to be a problem that i think will ever get solved unless theymos starting putting down some really strict rules, which i dont believe he will do something that severe.

theymos decided to go with cloudflare as the ddos solution since his homebrew solution was no longer proving effective. he's said before in the thread announcing this change that he will gladly switch off of cloudflare if one could solve the problem.

can we limit some of the lower ranks to be unable to send pm's to multiple users (as well as adding users to the carbon copy recipient list) at once if that's not a thing already? honestly dunno if it is or not.

no.

fee or not, as long as the spammers can still net a profit from shitposting with their 100 accounts every day, they'll continue to do so. there wouldn't be any incentive here to make better posts, since they'd pay a fee anyways. they'd make a bit less, sure, but that's not what the goal is here.

i realize that for this idea to actually work well in practice, there would have to be a lot of other additions, such as better quality control of users (which could just translate into more staff), which i could see as the biggest issue with this. it's not a great idea, but it's not the worst either. if the issue of users copy pasting posts could be handled in the first place, this idea might seem a bit more viable, but there isnt a sure way of combating that without a script in the site's server checking every submitted post for that (and this would consume way too much resources for it to be practical).

i dont like this idea much personally, but maybe maintaining a staff - approved sig campaign manager list could be an effective measure. this would require both additional work from the staff (and probably occasional, regular monitoring of these approved users) and the staff essentially having a small link to the campaigns, which i suspect is something theymos does not want at all, but it would eliminate most spammers from even  being allowed into campaigns. i realize this isnt a great idea, or one that might even be considered, but im just throwing ideas out there.

more so than post quality, i think one of the major issues that need to be addressed first is the copy pasting; if solved, it could weed out a lot of the shitposters, and possibly make the issue of low post quality easier to solve. we really do need more mods tho.

if theymos could implement a script for determining something along the lines of 'merit points' asscoated with general post quality, i wouldn't be against the idea of signatures being linked to those points instead, it would provide an initial incentive for good post quality from the start an account is created, and provide a long term incentive for maintaining a good post quality. if theymos can also implement other factors in, suchas deleted posts for not following forum rules, it'll also push members towards following the general forum rules. maybe even diminishing returns on merit points (or whatever they're to be called) can be used for people with alt accounts, or accounts on the same ip.  just some rambling thoughts.

honestly, i quite like both the ideas you've come up with;

while the prize would give a nice incentive for post quality, i can't really picture in my head how this would work out in practice. assuming the voting would be done manually by actual people, and since merit points would have to be awarded for a large number of users (maybe the entire userbase?), id like to think some automated system would work better, with select individuals running quality checks every now and then. maybe even implement an increasing penalty to merit points for spam / off topic posts (with a 'cooldown' to reset the incremental penalties), with a temporary removal of signature privileges if they have their points go negative. not really worded that well, but just some rambling thoughts on the idea. if you could elaborate a bit how you plan to actually implement this merit points idea i'd appreciate it.

i'd wholeheartedly agree to the idea of having a 'disable signatures' idea for thread starters; it'd be a simple fix for people who want an actual discussion that would eliminate a lot of spammers. however, i feel these threads would be 'covered up' really quickly by threads that allow signatures, just from the fewer number of users that would post in those threads, and would just die out real quick. a 'serious discussion' section though, would eliminate this issue, although im not sure how many people would frequent those sections enough. in addition, how many of these sections would have to be created? maybe one for every main topic as seen on the index page (one for bitcoin serious discussions, one for mining, one for marketplace, etc), but wouldn't want to flood the forum with sections that may or may not be 'dead.'

just some rambling thoughts on the ideas you've presented, but ill try to think up of some well thought out ideas in the next few days and post them here later.

also, any consideration for an account related issues section (bans, locked / hacked accounts) in meta? it seems those threads have been flooding meta quite a bit lately.

ill be leaving the campaign, 30 good posts a week is a bit much on my current schedule.

well its at 17500 right now, and plenty of people said it wouldnt even  break 10k, no reason to think that it cant.

what makes you think there's some sort of barrier preventing bitcoin from reaching the 18000 mark? it's just a number, there's nothing special about it. nothing special about 10k, 11k, whatever. no need to celebrate every time bitcoin hits some imaginary barrier in your mind.

itll be there within a few days.

i dont think there's some sort of long term strategy you can apply to day trading, it's a simple, straightforward matter of buying some after feeling out a price hike, through general trends or whatever, then selling when the margin is profitable (fees may be associated with the exchange you use, whatever). on a day to day basis, you're not going to be looking at huge margins, maybe 1% at best over a few days on one item. however, without and reliable way to predict day to day trends, you're looking at a hefty amount of risk, which is why many people involved in day trading use carefully programmed bots to automatically sell when the margin is profitable for them.

i dont think this is really big, or indicative of anything for the matter. that's just the government liquidating valuable assets that they can't directly use. nothing to get hyped about really, in my opinion.

that's just one company, in an already bitcoin - friendly environment. and there was already a service that mediated this that existed in the states a while back, dunno if theyre still around. bitwage or something, it would allow users who opted in to get a portion of their wage from their workplace in bitcoin. don't really see any ground breaking news here, just stuff happening related to bitcoin.

i dont think that if bitcoin fails, it will be the result of people just losing interest; i think at this point it will take some catastrophic event to shut down bitcoin over a short period of time. and the mining won't end after the market cap is reached; the mining will continue in order to confirm blocks, and the miners will take the mining fees as a reward in place of the block reward. hopefully, by the time this comes about, bitcoin will have developed enough through numerous forks to accommodate enough transactions per block and keep the miners satisfied with the rewards.

its not just bitcoin's adoption that's in process, its what you could call a revolution of sorts. bitcoin is something extremely new, both in the time it has existed and as an idea. if bitcoin were to be accepted and went mainstream, it would mean the mainstream acceptance of the idea of bitcoin, and the success of bitcoin as an experiment, in my view at least. but the idea of bitcoin does go against a lot of the desires of the big banks, as they have some to lose if bitcoin were to go mainstream, and with their money, they do have a considerable amount of pull through lobbying efforts (in the US at least).

people said it would correct a lot a month or so ago when it was hovering around the 3000 usd mark, but here we are. and im not sure if it's apt to compare bitcoin to an 'overall economy' or whatever you were trying to say there, bitcoin is quite a special case as far as modern economics go; its unlike anything else we've had so far in history. there is a solid market cap, yet there will always be new coins introduced and in circulation as long as we don't hit that market cap. and the price rise does come from somewhere, it's called demand.

that's what anyone with common sense should be doing, no sense in leaving all your money in a single asset, diversify.

id think it does have a bit, especially if it is in a politician's best interests to have bitcoin quietly die out, and the politicians are the ones that have the say in what becomes law. however, bitcoin's position in the tax code is both a good and bad thing; if bitcoin becomes taxable, then it has been recognized by the government as as asset or currency. on the other hand, for it to be taxed, it much be reported for tax purposes, and we'll lose some of the anonymity by having our addresses associated with out income and real life identities.

the price shouldn't be seen from the perspective of the dollar amount (or whatever you use) that is used for the transaction, but the satoshi / byte fee for the transaction. with the volatile price of bitcoin relative to fiat, this is the standard that keeps consistency and a quantitative, consistent metric to rate fees. that being said, the current recommended fee for a transaction seems to range around 380 satoshi per byte (as viewed on https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ at the time of this post), which seems a tad higher than what i remember, not that i've really been keeping up with it. the fee will continually rise as the backlogged transactions increase, as people will place higher fees on their transaction to get them confirmed faster by the miners, who will prioritize transactions with higher fees (for obvious reasons, they get the reward for confirming them after all). it's a vicious cycle, and it won't really stop until the miners have had a chance to catch up to all the unconfirmed transactions on the network.

would this only include the bitcoin core client or any hard wallet with the entire chain downloaded? i've understood for a while on the basics of the subject, but didn't take the time to look into this question. in addition, how do the running nodes decide on which 'side' they would choose to follow, or do they have no say in the matter, and the 'voting' is left completely to the miners? my assumption is that the nodes would choose which fork to follow by manually adding the first block of the desired fork into the folder where their blockchain data is stored, and let the client run its course, but that seems too simplistic in my opinion.

negative stigmas always have the tenancy to have more of an impact and stick around longer compared to positive news. unfortunately, most people don't have the ability to see the biased mainstream media for what it is. not to mention, negative news tends to get much better ratings than positive news, with a few exceptions here and there.

i dont think that's the government's first worry, no matter what it is, if it has the potential to be used for crime, people will use it for crime. simple as that. it can be regulated, but you can never police bitcoin enough (or anything really) to stop all criminal activity associated with it.

thats some great bias in your statement there. another classic of the forum. you know what else is used for illegal activities? just about every currency in circulation in the world today, precious metals and gems, computers, you name it. it's probably been used for some sort of crime in one way or another. its not as if bitcoin is the sole object of value used in illegal transactions, people can just hand each other a suitcase full of bills, diamonds, gold, whatever.

exactly. as long it holds value to someone, it can be one of the objects in a trade, be it illegal or not.