Well I just did a post review for you and found plenty of posts worth meriting.  If you were truly a spammer fitting the standard definition of one, you'd probably have been banned already.  Spammers post worthless crap, and it's usually to promote something; that doesn't apply to you as far as I can tell.

It's true that many of your posts don't stand out from the rest (especially in the gambling threads with over 1000 pages), but when you write about football it's clear that you're writing from the heart, because I can see time and effort being put into those posts.  A shitposter would have just dropped lousy one-liners and called it a day.

That's a lot of deleted posts for sure, but you've also been here for nearly 5 years.  I don't know what got nuked, but it looks like you're trying to do better.  That's more than most members are willing to do.

Not for nothing, but that's pretty fucked up that telegram allows that.  I suppose it's no different than anonymous e-mails, but giving people the ability to send consequence-free spam and scam-phishing-stuff just paints telegram's reputation with a nice, thick coating of shit over the other layers it already has.

Don't know if this dude is Humbertin or not, but it wouldn't surprise me given how active he was and likely still is.  When you've found your territory to scam in successfully, it's hard to give that up I'd think.

Good job sussing out this flaming bag of ass, DireWolfM14.  May he be impaled on his own spear.

Uhh....I'm not sure if there's some kind of language issue here, something you meant to convey that got obliterated in translation, but you're not seriously calling yourself a spammer, right?  I haven't checked your post history (though I will in a jiffy once I'm done typing this post) but even dedicated spammers won't identify themselves as such.

Just checking, eh?

And while looking at your post history I will see if there's anything merit-able so's I can do a halfway decent job as a merit source this month.  I think I got off to a lousy start, so I'mma have to pick up the pace.

....like I said, too many laws, too much restriction of freedom, too much government involvement.  Somehow when someone loses something and another person finds it, the government has laws in place that mandate their meddling (for lack of a better word).  I'm not an anarchist by any means, but if we're talking about someone finding something like a seed phrase where it's pretty damn hard to prove ownership of and puts the finder at risk of some potentially very unwanted publicity, I say the law conflicts with what is right.

Just my opinion, though.  Hey OP, perhaps keep us updated if you pursue the find-the-rightful-owner route?  I'd understand if you went immediately silent, however. *that's what I'd do*

Wow, that's one hell of a law--in a silly, brainless way I mean.  I'm not dissing Australia, mind you, because there are just too many laws worldwide and way too many that don't make sense.

What's been said is true.  Nobody could verify ownership unless they produced an identical seed word list/private key without first seeing yours, and if they knew what they were doing they would have already imported that key into a wallet and transferred the funds, thereby making the paper wallet you found useless.

I've read the suggestions about trying to return the funds and find the owner of the wallet...but personally I wouldn't even bother.  You'd be opening yourself up to all kinds of security risks and hassles from who knows how many people.  IMO it'd be better to just quietly move those coins to your own wallet (after learning a little more about bitcoin).

I doubt the cops would ever find out if you just used the funds on the wallet you found.  In crypto, it's basically finders-keepers in situations like this.  But man, I do admire your honesty!

You didn't get what OP's saying because he's trying too hard to disguise his writing so as not to be mistaken for one of his alts, Polo7 being one of them (IIRC).  Not that you'd be missing much if you did understand it, because it's just silliness at its worst anyway.

I'd suggest OP take a break from watching the news or whatever internet sites he's been listening to if he's tired of all the talk about the lousy economy, because that's what sucks in the eyeballs and makes them money.  If they broadcast positive news, 1) no one would believe them, and 2) no one would tune in.

Um, I'd like to challenge that statement by asking for some proof--most of the people I know in the real world don't get their basic needs met by using social media.  And by what means are you talking about, anyway?  Spamming?  Making "content"?  If you know a lot of folks who make their money that way, they're slaves to the giant social media companies and I don't find that to be any better than working a 9-5 job.

And of course social media has gotten overrun by corporations.  Even if something great and decentralized comes along for anything you can think of, the big media corporations (or government) will co-opt it and corrupt it.  Take a look at proof-of-stake coins and the ones that have DAOs, community funds, and so forth.  They basically end up being the personal piggy bank of the major owners of the coin or the devs, whoever can get their hands on the money first.  It's human nature, unfortunately.

It's not just crypto; the stock market is still soaring and has been for over a decade now--it's been the longest bull market in recorded history.

As far as the talk about recessions and so forth, I'm not entirely convinced we're in one yet.  I don't doubt that one is coming, but frankly with all the jobs still open and companies looking for workers to fill those positions with, it doesn't feel like a recession has hit.  Sure, inflation is taking off, but the economy still seems fairly strong (to me, anyway).  And bitcoin has been known to not follow what stocks or other asset classes are doing. 

It is and always has been a playground for speculators and straight-up gamblers, so it shouldn't come as a suprise that the price of bitcoin hasn't tanked worse than it already has--and remember, it did take quite a beating in the past few months.  It was over $63k last year, and it dropped to less than 1/3 of that.  If we're in a recession, I'd say bitcoin did in fact drop accordingly (but I still don't think we're in one).

Word to the motherland, broheim. 

I think part of the problem with adopting this type of energy source is the massive bad rap nuclear power has gotten since at least the 1960s, with Three Mile Island coming to mind first.  Even if this is wildly different, there's still a stigma that's not insignificant which quashes such discussion before it even begins.  Perhaps the newer generation, the young people coming into power, will see past that and pick up where the last batch of nuclear scientists left off and free us from our dependence on fossil fuels.

The biggest problem, however, is that corporations like Exxon-Mobil and ones like them are extremely rich and very cozy with government officials because of the lobbying power they've built up for many years.  It'd be nice if these big oil companies would change with the times and demands for new forms of energy, but it doesn't look like that's happening.  Think about it: the electric car isn't a new idea by a long shot.  They could have become the standard instead of the gasoline-powered ones we've take for granted as the only option available (prior to hybrid electric cars and Tesla, anyway), but oil companies have wielded tremendous power for so long that it's going to take some doing to reverse that.

I've voted with my wallet for nearly the past decade and gone without a vehicle altogether.  If I were to buy one, I'd go for full electric in a heartbeat, assuming I could afford one.  Anyway.

Agreed, and I argued strenuously for not banning franky1 in that thread from January....but I guess he did wind up getting banned, which I don't think I was aware of. 

You know, there's been a push to have social media sites control "misinformation", and I think that really heated up during the pandemic, and now it's reached a point where Youtube will demonetize any video where "COVID" is uttered, along with a list of other words they must have provided to their content creators, because now when I watch videos words are constantly being either omitted or bleeped out, and it's annoying as fuck.

Is that what we want on bitcointalk?  Do we really want gatekeepers of the truth safeguarding....whoever?  I mean Jesus, this is bitcoin.  You have to be responsible for yourself, that's a huge aspect of what crypto is all about--and the forum ought to reflect that, IMO.  We don't even ban scammers here, for Christ's sake.  Why ban someone who's unpopular because of what he writes?  I don't get it.

As I was reading through the quote you posted, that was my first question as well--and who knows?  Sometimes corporations give straight-up bizarre explanations for why they do things or why their profits are up/down/sideways.  My guess is that they're expected to give some kind of reason, even if it's not the real one.

And didn't any stock analysts ask any questions like that during one of their conference calls they usually have with earnings announcements and such?  I bet we're not the only ones who are curious as to what a massive sale of bitcoin has to do with lockdowns in China.

Sometimes I truly believe Elon Musk is just trolling the world the way only a billionaire leading a company like Tesla could.  But you know what?  It's better that whatever bitcoin he owned is on the market (presumably) instead of in his unpredictable hands.  I just hope the sale was done so as not to drop the price significantly--I don't know if 75% of their holdings would be enough to do that, but dumping a lot of bitcoin all at once certainly wouldn't have a positive effect.

Let's see when the other 25% is sold.  It probably won't take all that long for Musk to do it; I'd give him a month, maybe three.

Definitely; I would encourage everyone to report "reserved" posts or ones with ellipses (og kush420 didn't even write a full ellipsis, just two periods, lol) to the mods. 

I realize this is probably just one campaign we're talking about here (1xbit), but how can any campaign manager accept an unfinished post for payment at the end of the pay period?  I'm a bit out of the loop: who's managing the 1xbit campaign, anyway?  It almost looks like the old Yobit campaign style of management, which was to skip having a manager altogether and just rely on post count via an automated bot.

I rarely venture outside of the few sections I frequent, but if I were an active browser of sections like Bitcoin Discussion or the altcoin sections, seeing people get paid for making a post that consists entirely of ".." would infuriate me--and in the past, it's done exactly that.  The years from 2015-2018 to be exact, which is the time I spent on the forum prior to the merit system.  I used to get so pissed at these shitposting idiots that I'd tag them as a spammer.  You can't do that anymore, but my point is that it's annoying at the very least to a lot of people, myself included.

If Theymos allowed me (or DT members in general) to start negging these morons into oblivion, I'd be spending hours each day doing it.  Unfortunately, that wouldn't do much good for 1xbit's collection of shitposters, since the one OP pointed out (og kush420) has lots of red trust, and not even for his posting.  There's a tag from Vod from a few years ago involving an actual scam by that user, and obviously 1xbit doesn't give a shit about who's advertising for them.

It might help with shitposters in other campaigns/bounties, though.  But it's still not a good use of the trust system, hence why people stopped doing it.

To be fair, they're not making guarantees or legally-binding statements, just predictions and morale-boosting crap.  It's been going on for hundreds of years at least across the world and many governments.

It's strange; in my area it seems like nobody wants to work and there are plenty of jobs available.  Don't recessions usually correspond to periods of high unemployment?  Businesses aren't doing badly as far as I can tell, and the stock market is still soaring.  I get all of the arguments about debt and inflation and so forth, but personally it really doesn't feel like a recession to me--definitely not like 2011-13 or whenever the last really bad one was.  Remember those days?

I'm sort of familiar with what happened with Gamestop stock and the Wallstreetbets crowd on Reddit--is that the incident that involved Robinhood sort of what you're referring to, or is it something else?  If so, I don't see any connection.  I did think the hedge funds and everyone else whining about a bunch of small retail traders trying to manipulate that stock was laughable.  Weren't there more shares out short than should have actually been available?  That was very bizarre.

As to our congresscammer here, I'm glad he got busted but honestly if the only punishment he gets is having to give back the profits he made from the insider trading, he's getting off too lightly.  Even if he isn't in congress anymore, any elected official that high up should be held to an extremely high standard.  On the other hand, the profit he made from the Sprint trade seemed to be kind of small (relatively speaking).  It wasn't even $1 million that he made, so I wouldn't expect him to spend years in jail--even though I wouldn't complain.

This sort of thing isn't uncommon in my eyes.  A former governor of my state went to prison for doing something shady with public resources, and in the early 2000s guys from Enron went to prison, as did the CEO of Worldcomm.  I'm pretty sure those enforcement agencies love big busts, and they get them no matter how influential someone is (sometimes, anyway).

I never really had a good sense of what the account market was like in terms of prices for the various ranks (and including green trust, number of merits, etc.), but I would imagine that a Hero or Legendary account would sell for at least a few hundred dollars if it wasn't red-trusted.  If that were true, I doubt many people would take a chance if there was even the slightest possibility of it getting tagged in the future.

On the other hand, I'm not so sure about bounty hunters.  Lately I've gotten the impression that bounty managers don't really care if their participants have red trust or not--not surprising, given that a lot of the projects being advertised are either crap designed to make the devs quick money or flat-out scams.  So I'd imagine there are probably some people who'd take a chance that their bought account is going to get tagged.  They'd also be the ones who'd buy an account that's already been tagged.

Regardless, account sales are still bad no matter how you slice it.  I'm betting most of them happen away from the forum, too.

Spot-on.

Though I don't mix crypto with smartphones anymore, I appreciate the warning.

One would hope that people in the crypto space would be savvy enough not to even open text messages, much less follow an unknown one wherever it leads to, I'm sure there's some kind of bell curve for security-mindedness when it comes to the crypto-using population as a whole, and thus there are some people who'd get scammed by methods like this.  Hopefully any potential victims will stop by this thread and read it if they weren't aware of this Mantis thing.

This crap is scary, man.  I don't download a lot of apps, but when I do and I see all the permissions they ask for, sometimes I just uninstall them even if they're ones I'd really like to use (and yeah, I don't usually check beforehand).  Ugh.

It used to be for both of the reasons you mentioned, though since the merit system started in 2018 it's really only because members want to get paid for their post.  If you look at the members who are making those redundant posts (depending on which section you're in; the ANN sections might be excluded), it's almost guaranteed that the members making them are advertising something.  Sometimes (like the ANN sections) it's to bump threads, but that's less often true.

And man, it used to be much worse than what you're probably seeing, although I don't know which sections you read the most.  All of those posts where you could tell that the posters didn't read anything used to drive me batty.  But I've used the ignore button to good effect, and my ignore list is large.

I'm going to admit: I haven't read all the posts in this thread, but even the second post made mention of the fact that ignoring someone isn't permanent.  With that being the case, I highly doubt Theymos is going to consider your idea when he's ignored so many other ones in the past.  I appreciate you trying to make the forum better, though.

Welcome back!  I don't recognize your username, but you probably post in sections I don't regularly visit.

You're absolutely right that the decline in quality began with the inception of signature campaigns.  I wasn't a member when they came about, but I've done enough reading through very old threads and it's very obvious that there's a cause-effect relationship there, though I think things have improved since the merit system started.  Campaigns and bounties certainly still drive members to post crap they wouldn't normally do if there weren't a financial incentive, but account farming has been cut down dramatically and there aren't as many brand new accounts all over the place posting one-liners.

Huh.  Bitcoin's price never affected my affection for this forum, which is like an intersectional infectionism in my hare-brained noggin, if you know what I'm saying (which you probably don't).  That's kind of strange when I think about it, because when I registered I wasn't completely convinced bitcoin was here to stay.  Now that there's no doubt in my mind about that, it doesn't matter what the market does from month-to-month, as I'm convinced that bad times are just masking an overall upward trend. 

It's amazing how quickly some of these mining pools and exchanges just disappear.  Those last two won't load in my browser, so I'm assuming they're gone, and beastminingpool isn't shown as one of the HTH pools anymore.

I just downloaded the HTH wallet, and for some reason I'm not connecting to any peers.  That's never happened with any other core wallet I've used, and I haven't messed with the settings.  Any idea how to fix that?  I think this is an admirable project, and I'm not sure how much support the team is getting, but given the coin's price I'm guessing it hasn't been a big hit (which is unfortunate).

That's true indeed, but personally I find in-wallet advertising and/or partnering with 3rd party services distasteful, for lack of a better word.  Even when the Dash Electrum wallet suddenly displayed a pro-Ukraine message, I found that to be well beyond what a software wallet should be about.  But when we're talking about one that obviously doesn't do their due diligence on a partner or doesn't care about that partner's reputation, that's concerning (to me at least).

I was surprised to see this thread pop up, because I was under the impression that the Mycelium team had stopped development of their wallet.  There haven't been many threads about it in the last couple of years, and I was pretty sure it had slipped off people's radar.  Interesting.

Edit:  *Oh, shit!*  I just realized this is an old thread!  My bad (though I guess I was right about Mycelium's popularity decline).