If you are referring to this one,






then such an assessment seems very plausible.  Sure, we don't know for sure until after the fact and maybe a few years later, but seems like a pretty decent case that we are in "first sell off/bear trap phase"..... or another scenario could be that within the next few months BTC prices go up to somewhere between $50k and $100k, and then thereafter in the end of the year or early next year fall down into a  "first sell off/bear trap phase" that brings us down for a more sustainable down market and lasts a year or more until after the 2020 halvening...   I don't really know, but I could see one more up before having a decent sized down that plays out over 2018.

I was trying to give you some benefit of the doubt, but surely you are not helping your own case with your attempts at nonsensical diversions that largely seem to establish that my grounds were pretty strong in the "hate" word choice arena.   

First, you are looking at the wrong indicator, if you believe that my avatar is attempting to send some kind of message to you on this particular topic.

Second, you are whining about this merit system, and sure it is possible that you have convinced a few other whiners to chime in to support you in your complaining cause; however, you have also erroneously attempted to argue that I have some kind of burden to support the status quo system that has been established (this new merit system), when I do not. 

I do not need to provide either evidence or argument regarding why the status quo new merit system is better than some amorphous and unspecified change that you may be proposing (such as going back to pre-change, perhaps?). 

If you are proposing a change to the status quo merit system that has been established, then you have both the evidentiary and the logic burdens of presentation and persuasion to convince others.  For me, your whining has not accomplished much of anything in terms of either evidence or logic, but perhaps others will be more persuaded by your lack of presentation, perhaps Theymos?  Yet I doubt it because I think that Theymos would likely prefer to see more evidence and logic if he is going to make some changes that goes beyond mere whining or attempts to divert discussion through largely irrelevant and unjustified personally attacks.

Even though I don't agree with your overall conclusions because I believe that you are a bit too premature to be coming to such strong assessments and conclusions about the lackings of the merit system, I did give you two merits for the post because 1) it seems that you put quite a decent amount of effort into the post, and just doing a quick glance at your posting history, I see that you have quite a few decent and well articulated posts.  

Furthermore, it is likely that you will be able to earn another 88 merits to rank up to full member as long as you continue to engage, post on topics that interest you, attempt to provide value by reading the OP and reading recent posts, attempt to keep some humor and even to help yourself to sort through the many questions that a lot of us continue to have in this dynamic space about crypto currencies (hopefully you are interested in bitcoin, but perhaps other cryptos as well)... and of course , there are other topics on this forum too that may be interesting to you and cause others to award you merit for your input and participation in such topics.

So what? 



You seem to be reading too much into your feelings about yourself.

As I mentioned a few times, there is a concept called grandfather clause... and peeps cannot know when they are going to benefit from such a clause because peeps cannot necessarily know when they are going to be  a grandfather or a grandchild.. or some other status in between.  The employment of grandfather clause is to attempt to cause a more fair transition, and that seems to be what Theymos was attempting to accomplish in the transition from a system that never used to require merit into a system that required merit hence forth.


I don't know if it rises to the level of "poorly thought out" , so your word choice does seem to reinforce the correctness of my conclusion that you are bitter rather than attempting to recognize that Theymos had reasons for the way that he rolled out the system.

Sure the system is not perfect, and sure the roll out likely has some flaws, but even conceding those points does not mean that as individuals there are not ways to attempt to figure out ways to deal with it rather than just whine about the negatives and attempt to find maliciousness in those who might speak in favor of something that you don't seem to like in your seemingly bitter childish way, that you have demonstrated.


Well, maybe this reflects your bad attitude about a lot of things in life, besides merely the newly implemented merit system.  If you only focus on negative, then likely you are going to see a lot of it.  Seems like your choice, or at least something you could attempt to fix within yourself, if you wanted to.


In most instances, no one is going to hold your hand, except maybe your mom.... so sometimes, you have to do some of the work in order to attempt to achieve what you want.. and perhaps in the end, no one cooperates - however, that non-cooperation from others does not mean that you cannot get advantages by going through the process of asking the question(s) and attempting to help others can also help you to help yourself.


You assume a lot, here.  There seems to be a goal to weed some folks out, and if the newly implemented system weeds out too many, then perhaps it will be tweaked or if it does not weed enough then perhaps it will be tweaked.  It does not seem to be a implementation that is set in stone - even though its current implemented status may take a decent 6 months to figure out how it is playing out and what effects (good and bad) it is having.


Is this like the death of bitcoin, too... Bitcoin has died a lot, right?  Let me assert this: bitcoin is the king of the cryptos, and there is a lot of disinformation out there about bitcoin.  There are a lot of attacks on bitcoin and there is a decent attempts at competition and muddying perceptions about the dominance of bitcoin, and through this forum you have a lot of potential to interact with some of the smartest folks in the world regarding bitcoin and the various role of alts and ICOs.  You can take a lot of the information with a grain of salt or you can supplement with other forums, it is your choice, but I hardly would conclude that the implementation of the merit system is going to pervert this forum into a status of irrelevancy as you would like to assert.  Sure, you can go over to r/btc or bitcoin.com to get your information, and good luck with the bullshit being spouted in those misinformation forums.


It seems that I concluded based on the context and the words that you said, and your further comments seem to further establish that I was on the right track because you seem to have difficulties engaging in a substantive discussion, but instead you continue to whine about how much meanie I am towards you.... blah blah blah.. makes little sense to me about what kind of objective you are trying to achieve except to derail into meaningless discussions about how the world is out to get you.. and how you are being treated sooo  unfair... . 

It surely is a dilemma determining whether to respond or the extent to which it is good to "help people out" or just leave them to figure out some of the seemingly basic questions.  I do agree with the biblical saying that it is better to teach how to fish rather than giving fish.. but at the same time, giving a few fish here and there does not seem to be a bad thing, either...

I have heard that expression that "we are all Satoshi, except Craig Wright." .. ... so technically you are correct, Tman, as long as none of us is Craig Wright.  hahahahahaha

Hahahahaha... That's what I thought, but then when he said that he's "got nothing to do with hate," I was beginning to think that I might have mixed him up with someone else.. but you are correct that my memory seems to have been that I saw a lot of distracting nonsense coming out of his posts regarding race and IQ and some other nonsense, that I kind of generally referred to as hate, but maybe sometimes the haters don't realize that they are hating (because they happen to be so smart that it is merely an intellectual thingie-ma-jiggie)

Maybe, for some strange reason, I was mixing you up with that bug?  I will try to pay closer attention in the future.

Did you read the OP (Opening Post) of this thread?   Theymos announced the new merit system and he explained why he was implementing the new merit system.  He also made a few other posts giving further rationale behind his thinking for implementing this new merit system.

Ultimately there is no exact objective standard for getting merits, and so therefore, some members are going to like your posts for differing reasons, and some of those members might have smerits that they are willing to give to your post, if they believe that you are adding something for them or maybe if you have a kind of pattern of providing information that they believe is useful ... so there could be a combination of your attempting to learn by reading the OP but also that you are engaging in various threads and posting in ways that are potentially useful and helpful to others.

So, ultimately, you are concluding that the merit system does not work...  because some other complainer is saying that the system does not work?  Do you think that is a good approach?   If so you are going to approach this new system by merely complaining about it and asserting that it does not work or do you think that there could be some kind of other way that you could attempt to earn merits from other members?

What's up your butt?  Look I am using nice language, here?   

Your coming into the conversation to get in your two cents, makes you come off as a bit bitter and envious, no?   

Do you think that I had anything to do with implementing the new merit system? 

Here, I am merely talking about it, and you can proclaim my bias.. blah blah blah.. but that likely reflects more on your bad attitude rather than anything to do with me.

Accordingly, the content of your posts suggest that you are unwilling or unable to understand or accept both concepts of system changes and the concept of employing a grandfathering clause type arrangement in order to attempt to fairly transition members from the existing system into the new system. 

If you were attempting to make another point, then I am all ears, but mostly what I got from you was a weak-ass diversion attempt at an ad hominem attack rather than attempting to deal with actual substantive matters related to the merit system.

ok.. you are still a beginner to the forum, and I have been on the forum for four years, and during those first four years, we were not able to give merits.  During that time, sometimes I wished that I could "like" a post, but the remedy ended up being responding to the post, and attempting to interact with the person on the other end, if the subject is interesting for you, and if you believe that you have a meaningful contribution that you can make.

There's is almost no chance that you are going to get me to argue that this newly implemented merit system is perfect, but from some angle, it is what it is, and Theymos already decided what he was going to implement, and he did it in such a way that he thought was fair while attempting to get this newly implemented system to attempt to remedy some issues that are developing on the forum with both a giant influx of new members but also questions of shitty posts and farmed accounts. 

Whether this newly implemented system adequately addresses those issues and does not raise it's own problems is still to be seen.  There are going to be anticipated problems and unanticipated problems and perhaps there will be some need for Theymos to tweak aspects of the merit system.. perhaps?

As you may realize, he has already decided to limit the number of sources of merits, so everyone does not receive a source of merits on a regular basis unless you 1) received some sources during the transition based on your rank and activity level in the past year, 2) receive merits from other members.   

You are likely correct that there are going to be fewer merits circulating around amongst the lower ranks, but so in that regard, you may need to attempt to figure out ways to earn merits by making interesting posts and attempting to interact with members who may be able to give merits - either by reading your post or by their showing appreciation for interacting with you... so yes, it could take some time to earn enough merits to rank up to full member.. regular member may be a bit easier to accomplish, but certainly not going to be earned without any effort.

What do you mean?  What is "new ranking scheme?"  Are you talking about merits?  If so read the OP and there is a link in the OP about merits - in the first couple of sentences.  That might be helpful to read that, unless you are asking about something else.

Did you read the OP of this thread, and the link about merits that is in the first few sentences of OP? 

Currently, you have to have 100 merits to rank up from member to full member.  Then you will need to have 250 merits to rank up from full member to senior member.

How do you know so much about how the merit system of the forum is going to play out? 

You have been a member of the forum for about 1 month.  The merit system was implemented 1 week after you registered your account.

I suppose that if you do not like this new merit system, then you don't have to use it, right?  You have only one month invested into the forum, so far, right?

That is a decent point, avreli, and also as we know this forum merit system is somewhat different from the "like" function on Facebook.  There is a kind of warning that describes what it means to give an SMerit and it informs you of how many you have, and in the end, giving an smerit is not reversible... Once you do it, it is done, and it does not even matter if the post gets deleted later, your smerit sticks to the person who received the smerit and generates 1 merit plus .5 smerits for the recipient.

I recall something about your panic sells, and it seems that you were able to take advantage of that kind of screwed up situation and you were able to come out of the whole matter a bit better than Rosewater and BMB.. hahahahaha

Your outline of the stress of the matter are all real concerns, and yeah, you can take your profits in fiat or in BTC, and decide how you are going to treat your accounting and your taxes, whether you have yet realized any gain that is necessary to report in regards to taxes....

I am not really sure about how to measure my situation because if we look at BTC's recent price history we can start at $5k, and see that BTC's price went from $5k to $20k and then back down to $6k and assuming that it is returning back to $20k.  

For simplicity sake, let's say that the first time that we passed above $5k we were mostly loaded down with BTC so for all intents and purposes we had X BTC and $0; however, when we got up to $20k, we had about a 4x increase in price, which would have caused us to sell about 20% of our BTC which gets converted into fiat (we sell about 20% because we are selling about 10% every time the price doubles - or 1% for every 10% price rise, and if the price goes up 4x, it has doubled twice).  When BTC prices return back down to $6k, we end up using almost all of the fiat that we accumulated on the way up to $20k to buy back BTC.  We are not getting those BTC at the cheapest price because we are exercising incrementalism, so if we are lucky, we might accumulate 10% more BTC with the 20% fiat that we accumulated, and when we return back up to $20k, we may only end up with about 5% more BTC than we had the first time around.  

Surely, I am ball parking these numbers, and in the end, like you mentioned, no killing is being made, but you can sit back and feel comfortable and keep your blood pressure down by 10 to 20 points, perhaps.

And, really, we hardly ever get 70% price corrections like this, but we do get a whole hell of a lot of corrections that are a lot smaller between 10% and 40%, and you can have decent stacking up no matter what the level of volatility because usually your orders are going to at least be able to account for 10% swings, and maybe more commonly allow for some catching smaller swings, too -- 5% can be reasonable, and some high volume high frequency traders will do 1% swings, and I am not going to do that, and currently, I consider myself to be in the 5% to 10% arena... so even my system and application varies a bit with the passage of time.. like I mentioned earlier, I started out at using 1.5% increments, and kind of got into about a 5% increments groove, and progressed beyond 5% and up to 15% increments - however, I think that I am moving back below 10% increments, at least on a short-term basis.... based on what I perceive to be current market conditions.

He is a fucking con artist, and sure he would like you to believe that he was actually an insider, when he is just full of shit...

but, I will play along with your hypothetical that he would gain access to about 1 million bitcoins, which currently would be valued at about $10billion dollars, and sure he could dump those 1 million bitcoins.  It would likely crash the bitcoin price, but it would not destroy the fundamentals of bitcoin nor be able to sustain control over bitcoin.

We should have a plan for such calamity - but we should not be planning our lives around scenarios that are likely less than 1% to actually happen, right?

Maybe either approach could work as long as you account for the likelihood that we are in an exponential s-curve, but you recall that the past  few weeks including yourself are asserting that we are in a bear market.. or even entering into a bear market how the fuck do we know, until we are in it for 6 months..?  yeah we can have hunches and kind of bet on the hunches, but still exercise incrementalism....  Part of my point is that we don't really know and we are safest to hedge both directions, but mostly (and largely up.. because we understand that the fundamentals are UP).