This thread would be better off in Reputation. You can move it with the link in the lower left.

Trust ratings do not depend on a trade taking place:

Newbies who ask for a loan of any value without offering acceptable collateral receive a negative rating. This is quite clearly stated (in bright red lettering) in the stickied thread in the Lending Board entitled "The Rule of "No Collateral, No Loan" - IGNORE AT YOUR OWN RISK!", which I have no doubt you ignored:

You have a grand total of 28 posts, and several of them are simply you insulting other members. I would hardly call that "participated alot".* The thread you started is a spamfest and should be locked.

You can either read the rules and change your behavior accordingly, or you can leave. The choice is yours.

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* "alot" is not a word.

Yes and no. I don't think there should be a requirement to write in perfect English by any means. While it should be the goal for every user, good spelling and grammar is not an indication of the quality of the content of the post, and shouldn't be a major factor in the decision to award a post with merit or not. Having said that, a line needs to be drawn somewhere. You cannot place the onus for understanding solely on the reader. If you write a post which I can understand on my first read through, then I don't get too worried about some minor spelling or grammar mistakes. If, however, I've read the first line 4 times and I still don't understand your point, then I'm giving up and moving on.

Communication skills are not an indication of content, but they need to be sufficient to be understandable.

I'm totally with you on that one. Everyone dreaming of hitting $50-100k in the next year or two is in the wrong mindset, as far as I'm concerned. Another rise that quickly will be based on pure speculation, as the rise at the end of last year was. The fall out from that is loads of people losing their money and rage-quitting out of crypto altogether, a new article every day claiming that bitcoin is dead, and derision amongst the outside world - "I'm so glad I'm not invested in bitcoin! Look at the price drop!" etc.

It would be both more healthy and more sustainable for slow, steady growth based on increasing use and adoption of bitcoin worldwide.

The article states that the tokens can only be earned, and not bought, but also states that there will be an ICO in 2 years' time. It also makes no mention of how you can earn these tokens. It states that tokens will be become more valuable as time goes on, but also says that they will always have a fixed exchange rate of 1000 tokens to 1 dollar.

There are a lot of things that don't make sense about this token. I'd be very cautious.

This is a good first step, but ideally we should be reaching a stage where members with no earned merits aren't accepted at all. However, there are just too many bounty campaigns for trash projects that are more than happy to pay out their worthless token for any old barely-comprehensible spam, and short of making a forum-wide rule, this ideal situation will never happen.

It's also worth pointing out that the example you quoted comes from one of yahoo62278's campaigns. There is a handful of very good campaign managers on this forum that don't accept spammers regardless of merit earned, and he is one of them. Again, there is no way we can expect for all the trash managers to live up to this standard.

You've hit the nail on the head. But as with OP's post, this has been discussed several times before and we are no closer to a solution. Whether that's because we don't have a good solution yet, or because theymos doesn't want to implement anything yet, I don't know.

I would like to see harsher punishments for serial shitposters - at the moment, having one or two of their posts deleted is irrelevant when the can churn out a new one-liner in 2 minutes. Serial offenses should result in escalating lengths of ban. Similarly, there needs to be punishment for bounty managers who are paying these shitposters, again with serial offenders resulting in escalating bans, and the worst offending projects having their entire ANN threads removed.

I take a quick glance at the scores and see I scored second highest this week with 11 points. "Great", I think. "Be able to close the gap on first place a little." Until I see LFC_Bitcoin is tied with me for 11 points. Can you stop being so consistently good please.

United look like a different team under Solskjaer. If you haven't seen it yet, do yourself a favor and watch the lead up to United's first goal (https://streamable.com/viu1o). Rashford's play was absolutely disgusting. You've got to wonder how Mourinho screwed things up so badly. United might get a top 4 finish yet.

I don't think anyone is denying that there are shitposters at higher ranks too, who got there before merit was introduced and would have close to zero chance of getting there now. I, for one, think we should change the requirement for a signature to 10 earned merits, which would therefore encompass all the legendary spammers as well as the newbie ones.

Having said that, the newbie spammers are the biggest problem, because as you say, they are the most numerous by far. I would put your ratio of shitposters to "good" newbies at 100:1 or even more, but I'm against any blanket restrictions on newbies posting or opening topics for the exact reason that it unfairly punishes the <1% who are here for the right reasons.

In my opinion, an outright ban on newbies posting in the Altcoin boards would be a bad move. Yes, the Altcoin boards are a mess - they are a total spam-fest, there is almost zero real or genuine discussion going on, and most senior or sensible members don't even visit those boards, let alone post in them. However, banning newbies from posting in Altcoin boards isn't going to slow them down on their endless quest for that one elusive merit. Yes, it might force bounty managers to move to Google Forms for all their reporting, but I fear it would have the side effect of increasing the spam in other boards significantly.

As stated, theymos is generally against any more restrictions to new members posting, so you are unlikely to see any daily limits, longer delays or being unable to open their own topics. Some newbies sign up to the forum to ask a specific question or with a specific issue - we don't want to stop these people from posting.

I think the logical next step (as I've said before in other threads), is to remove signatures from Junior Members in addition to Newbies, effectively meaning that a user has to earn 10 merit before they are allowed to display a signature. We are starting to see many shitposters with exactly 1 earned merit, suggesting it is too easy to gain 1 merit from either begging, buying, or trading.

I mean, why would anyone bother with a coin which has a working product, constantly being updated and improved, and a real world use, when you can just throw your money at some random ICO without any of these things which promises to 100x your money!? (/s)

Thankfully, a prolonged bear market is likely to flush out most of these scam ICOs, and many of the blind "get rich quick" chasing newbies too.

The "Your Reports" page actually shows the last month of your reporting activity, regardless of total number of reports you have made. You can access it (once you've made 300 good reports as mentioned) by clicking on "Your Report History" on the reporting page, or by clicking on this link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=reportlist;mine).

You do not need to submit details.

The bitcoin address that is displayed on that page is unique to each account. Once the stated amount (0.00208333 BTC) has been paid to that address, the page you linked will automatically update to display a form which gives you the option of turning Copper Membership on or off.

I know I'm not DT, but I thought I'd chip in anyway. The account has 100% been bought or hacked. There is no other explanation to go from posts like this:

to posts like this:

Given the account was either bought or hacked for the sole purpose of enrolling in a bounty campaign, I think a red tag is completely justified. It would also be worth flagging this up to @Hhampuz as manager of the campaign this account is enrolled in.

I agree with everything else you say, but you are mistaken here. The number of hours you spend tweaking Windows 10 is irrelevant - it is tracking you, regardless of what you do. You can make it better, certainly, but I would never consider it "secure enough" to be using for anything truly sensitive.

Even if you turn off all tracking and telemetry features, Windows 10 still tries to phone home a staggering 5,500 times in 8 hours. The additional use of third party tools designed to stop this did help a bit, but these researchers still reported 2758 connections in 30 hours.

Other researchers have similarly found that even when you disable Windows 10 features like Cortana, it is still logging your activity and sending it to Microsoft.

I never said they should wait and do nothing. They also do not solely rely on external sources, and as with Trezor, have a team who are constantly analyzing and improving their device's security. All I said was that there will always be bugs, and there will always be bugs which the developers miss and are found by third parties. There is a Bounty Program and an established method of responsible disclosure of potential bugs, which the security researchers in HeRetiK's video ignored, and as soon as the bug was revealed, they got to work on it.



I think it's worth repeating that while they installed a custom bootloader on the Ledger Nano, they haven't been able to gain access to the secure element and they haven't been able to extract private keys, PINs, seeds or funds. The bug is non-critical and they've stated it will be patched on their next firmware release. I don't think it requires an emergency firmware release to fix.

I mean, yes, legally they are different companies, but they are different companies ran by the same people out of the same offices and are intrinsically linked. Any new Tether that is printed enters the market via Bitfinex, and any Tether that is removed is also done via Bitfinex. If it turns out Tether having been lying this whole time (which I think they are, why else would they consistently refuse an audit?) and are insolvent, then it's almost a given that Bitfinex is also insolvent. Your statement about a bank run is spot on, which would likely result in them ceasing withdrawals and many people losing their coins.

Given how uncertain the whole situation is, and given the plethora of alternative exchanges and stablecoins available, I just don't think it's worth the risk.

The whole point of bitcoin in the first place is to be trustless and not rely on a third party. The second sentence in Satoshi's whitepaper includes the words "the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required". Given that the entire point of bitcoin is to avoid using a "trusted third party" for transactions, why would anyone willingly use a "trusted third party" to store your coins on your behalf, especially given how easy it is to set up your own wallet.

Coins stored on an exchange do not belong to you. It's as simple as that.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love for the price to go that high, but I don't think it's a realistic target for another bull run which is based mostly on speculation and trading. That kind of fiat value will only be reached (IMO) when we see widespread adoption and the frequent, daily use of bitcoin, which I think is probably another decade away at least.

Hindsight is 20/20. You have no way of knowing which were accurate and which were not prior to them happening. I could go to the Speculation Board or Google and find predictions that bitcoin will hit every multiple of a thousand dollars between 0 and 100k by the end of this year. I can find predictions that say ETF is coming and that it isn't. That Bakkt is coming and that it isn't. That institutional investors are coming and that they aren't. None of these predictions are in anyway useful because they are all guesses. Focusing on the 1% that turned out to be accurate and ignoring the 99% that didn't is simply selection bias.

As we have seen all year long, listening to "experts" for their price predictions is useless. If you believe in the technology, get involved. If you want to day trade, do so with your own knowledge and understanding and not because some else tells you to.