Actually, you are correct that there are a lot of ways that folks might end up overinvesting in crypto in one way or another, and that becomes a kind of gambling, especially, if you end up having a decent amount of value in one place or another, and then you either get robbed or some exchange does an exit scam or something like that. Many of us in the space a long time come to realize that scams proliferate the space, but there still remain decent ways to navigate the space and take reasonable risks rather than extra risks. 

Another thing is that sometimes you might not realize the extent of the risk that you are taking, especially when aspects of your portfolio increase so exorbitantly in such a short period of time, but your security precautions do not increase to a reasonably equal level.  I ended up getting screwed pretty badly at one point too (in early 2017), but I guess that I had some luck in the matter, too because I did not really feel a need to take a break from my crypto activity because of such high level of getting screwed over, and I think that in my case, the subsequent exorbitant BTC price increase almost negated (in some ways of calculating) the level that I had been screwed in terms of my total holdings.  I mean really from early 2017 to late 2017, we had a 20x price increase... which really helped because we had already experienced a 4x price increase in 2016, too (at least if we start calculating from October 2015)... so the outrageously high level of gains - even going quite  a bit beyond expectations can help to deal with some of the losses and to put into a better perspective, but still hopefully each of us can learn from our mistakes to improve our own practices and perhaps through forums like this brainstorm with others who go through similar experiences in order to help each other whether that is logic or exposure to new facts, practices or procedures. 

Sometimes there may also be new practices or procedures that come on line (in this evolving space), and I suppose getting ranked up will help each of us to be more credible and sometimes share higher levels of insider information with other members that we come to trust through networks like this (but hopefully always with a bit of a grain of salt).

Your further explanation does not contradict what I said, it merely elaborates on what i had said, so we are largely saying similar things... to make similar points, and that is that your activity level could have been a lot higher based on more posts, and you may have fairly easily been able to reach legendary status before the change in the system had you posted several more times before the change took place. 

Seems like water under the bridge at this point if you are wishing that you would have ranked up prior to the change.

Fair enough that I am speculating about something that I don't really know...


But you likely realize that I am not going to give up so easily, even if I don't know shit about the actual significance of the difference between preheating and boil, because there is the future.....  

And, it looks like this:




 


or worse case scenario, it looks like this:

Personally, I speculate that a larger than 20k quantity of smerits are likely to circulate on a monthly basis with a combination of the source merits, the sendable merits that are generated from source merits, and the already existing sendable merits.  Either Theymos is going to be able to look up specifics, but it seems that theymos already provided enough tools that forum members are going to be able to look up those numbers to speculate a decent ballpark number (if not an actual number) regarding how many merits are being spent on a regular basis, whether monthly or otherwise.

I completely understand the concept of hedge and ways that you would be able to play different kinds of bets, but betting can also be a quite timely thing and the odds change considerably, especially on short term bets if you are not able to confirm both sides in a timely manner - which seems to be the case here....

Once you engage in some bets a few times with the same person, then it would likely be easier to clarify the parameters more quickly.

Well, I am not sure where to go with this exactly, because in some sense you are talking about past performance of bitcoin, and you seem to be trying to suggest that some of the other coins are likely undervalued because they are like bitcoin.

However, bitcoin is different from these other coins, and the symbiotic relationship between the various alt coins and bitcoin (and what affect that each has on the price of the other is not clearly knowable - even if you can have various theories).  I think that part of your presumption in conceptualizing some of the alt coins as undervalued because they could have a similar trajectory as bitcoin is faulty - but I do not disagree with any premise that there might be considerable potential for various alt coins to be pumped whether they are vaporwear or otherwise. 

I have no regret about not buying ripple, because we all know that it is a pump and dump scam; however, its pump and dump scam status had not removed it from the potential of making some folks rich beyond their beliefs (not just the ripple lab founders who should probably be in jail).  So, yeah, you can make a whole lot of money that you would likely not be able to make in bitcoin if you can figure out in and out and maybe even running the roulette table a bit, if you are so risk tolerant.

By the way, you could be empirically correct that there were a decent percentage of folks in bitcoin that cashed out too early, but there are also ways that you could play the bitcoin market that is not a pure hold philosophy and profit beyond your wildest beliefs, and I believe that I am an example of that because I have created and followed a system that attempts to prepare for both upside and downside, and I am completely happy without feeling any kind of need to play alt-coin roulette with my strategy.




Who cares?  You don't need those kinds of profits to have a very sound investment, and even if the odds are less than 10% that bitcoin will reach $100k in the next 5 years, that is a pretty decent long term investment.  Yeah, each of us are going to come to differing numbers and have differing time lines and have differing strategies, but if any investment has a 10%-ish chance of doing a 8x increase in the next 5 years, that seem to be a very good investment that you can build your own reasonable and prudent investment strategy around, whether that is dollar cost averaging, buying on dips, or some other reasonable and self-tailored variation.



Diversify into alt coins seems to be overrated, and risky.  Sure there are concepts in the real world about the benefits of diversification, but investing in crypto is already outside of mainstream, so if you get too diversified into too many risky assets (such as overly focusing on alts), you are likely engaging in gambling rather than investing... so yeah, if you want to gamble that is one thing but if you prefer to invest (which is what I think is more prudent), then that is another thing (even though are related and sometimes can get mixed up when folks try to focus too much on attempting to get rich quick rather than being more measured in their approach).



Great.  At least you have maintained a decent bitcoin holdings.  There are quite a few alt coin advocates who carry no bitcoin or only a very small portion of bitcoin.  Currently, I am about 98% bitcoin; however, I would not frown on higher levels of risk such as 10% or even 20%, but your going 50% is a bit of a different seemingly risk seeking mindset from my own.  But hey, to each their own, especially when it comes to allocation and gambling considerations.

Yes...even though many of us likely realize that heat generation is going to come in handy in really cold locations; however, it seems that your preheating idea has to be worth something, even if such preheating is not bringing the temperature to an actual boil (that generates steam with some the current powerful electricity generation methods)...  and I suppose that part of my point is that if there is ongoing research into such lower heat thresholds, there could be ways to generate energy with temperature thresholds that are below boiling   

- I feel like I am devolving from BTC price speculation down to random brainstorming regarding energy generation speculation with little to no grounding.   

 

I think that the calculation would be something like about 50 merit sources spreading about 185 merits (9,250 merits monthly), to perhaps 100 different users - so 50 x 100 = 5,000-ish different users would receive those 9,250 new merits, which would in turn allow the 5,000-ish users to distribute a portion of their 9,250/2 = 4,625 smerits to more members - a rippling effect, not counting the already existing smerits that will be floating around from the initial distribution and carry over smerits from previous months... not an exact science because of course there will be some hoarding, but I think that Theymos has already put some systems in place to verify how many smerits are being used on a regular basis.

Past performance of alts does not necessarily make them a better value than bitcoin.  You have to consider both upside and downside potential, and don't get caught up on superficial unit explanations or possible vaporware. 

In other words, if you are doing alts, either you better have good luck with your gamble or you better have some ability to figure out which once might be good short term investment risk possibilities.  Sure, in the past year, you could have made decent money with alts by throwing a dart at a bulletin board and picking your alt in that manner, but merely because that was the case last year does not mean that it is going to continue in such direction.. so you will likely need to be watchful, at minimum, with your alt coin choices.

Yep... another famous economics professor who seems to be "misinformed" at best.

It would be pretty unlikely that these spam attacks would go away any time soon, and sure the smaller fishes such as Roger and Jihan backed by some financial and government institutions could be part of it, and sure bigger fishes could try larger and more long term sustainable attacks (even if they are engaging in them at a loss), yet I would imagine that core continues to learn from these attacks - and seems like the system remains pretty robust, even during the spam attacks and even during those periods in which we had to pay quite a large amount of transaction fees making any kind of micro transaction infeasible.

By the way, before December, whenever my BTC transactions got delayed and caught up in spam,  they would revert back to me after a few days.  This time around, I had three low fee transactions that I sent in early December that were stuck for more than 6 weeks, and I was getting ready to work out an agreement with the intended recipient to send those transactions again, which would have likely cost me a decent amount of money - including some financial risk, too.  Anyhow, before I made such proposal to send again, the transactions went through (about a week ago).  Whew!!!!

It seems that if you are a decently-sized residential property owner (not that you are fat), then it could be cost efficient to include some likely low cost energy source, whether that is solar or windmills or geothermal, but yeah, if you begin to generate too much energy, then you will be incentivized to add more miners, too.

I recall that there are some folks researching into ways that they can either use the heat or generate some additional electricity from the mining heat by-product.

A bit of a problem with your suggestion is that it is not even attempting to work with parameters of a system that has just been implemented and in the early stages of testing. 

With out really thinking the matter through you are making a seemingly pie in the sky suggestion that would be to throw out the whole system without really grappling within the parameters of what has just been implemented.. which also likely contributes to the glaring additional downfall of your suggestion that was pointed out in Vod's above response post.

I was not accusing you of anything like that, but I just wanted to point out some possible misleading inferences in your post language.  And, over the years, several of us have read the kinds of inferences that were frequently made about "china leading" or even skorea leading or Japan, and the lead follow is much more complex than that, and likely changes with time and remains a kind of symbiotic relationship between exchanges with some exchanges having more credibility and pull than others, even if they might not actually lead in trade volume... Bitstamp, for example... has retained decent amount of persuasive power.. even though from time to time, it has gotten out of sync with the prevalent BTC prices, too.

We may have to actually wish luck to them.. just as a token of our condolences.

Calling all BIG BLOCKERS.



HELLO??



Are you there?




HELLO?  



Echo,    Echo,






Echo.



I note that we probably should not taunt or invite BIG Blockers, because some of those nutjob Roger Ver(y) supporters might just show up and ruin our MMMMMoooooooo.

hahahaha...   The first line of your post seems to tell all... don't take you seriously.

I did read your suggestion, and I was trying to consider what it might accomplish, and it seems to not resolve anything. 

Perhaps distributing some s-merits to everyone based on activity once a year or every 6 months or something fairly conservative might be o.k, but not every 2 weeks... such frequent distributions, as you suggest, would not seem to solve anything, and would likely cause more problems than it resolves, no?

Surely, we are all getting used to this whole system, and it may take several months to assess how it is playing out.  

Right now, it seems quite likely that several members have not even figured out what is the merit system and they may be a bit trigger shy about using it or they may have already tried to use it in ways that were experiments, or mistakes.  

Furthermore, there can be a little bit of an adjustment for members to start thinking about the quality of posts of others and to employ such a merit sending tool, even though there are some similarities and differences with upvoting or liking.

I understand that you want to create incentives for members to not hoard their smerit, yet there may be a variety of strategic reasons that members want to hoard some of their smerits and to strategically send them or to have them available to send at a time and kind of post that suits their awarding preference(s), so I don't really like the idea of decay, unless such a decay were to be implemented in a very conservative manner and still allow for some hoarding and maybe would be a very slow decay, if there were not any movement of smerits in an account, that would be enough to incentivize some spending/sending of completely non-moving smerits.

By the way, if a user only wants to see merited posts, then sure, that seems like a good option; however, I am doubtful that I would ever use that option because I have a preference to see contexts, which is also the same reason that I do not use the "ignore" button because I can easily skim through or skip any poster that I have recognized to post shitty.   On the other hand, I don't really find fault with any member who wants to use the ignore button - because they feel that such a feature is helpful to them in terms of their time management, or stress, or information overload or whatever personal reason that they have.

You don't need to tell us where this will lead because you are full of shit.

Look.  This system has only been in place for a bit more than 4 days, and you are already spouting off a lot of stupid-ass conspiracy theories based on flimsy evidence.

Sure, you are likely correct that in the end that there are some biases towards any members with smerits giving those smerits to other members that they already know, but that is not a complete loss on the forum, because the receipt of those smerits do generate more smerits (at a 50% rate), so yeah, sometimes it can take a large number of posts for a newbie to get known, and members may not want to give smerits based on one post, but instead after they see a pattern of good posts. 

These kinds of patterns and building of credibility take time, it is not merely a reflection of one or two posts, and the past few days, I have been attempting to send smerits, and sometimes i have given those smerits merely on a kind of whim, and other times, I hesitate to send, and watch for further posts from the member before sending smerits.  So in other words, it can take time to both get a sense of another member (and their quality or lack of) and there can be some reservation too, because almost all members (except for sources) have a limited supply of smerit in their bank and they also have to generate smerit before they are going to be able to give any smerits out to anyone.

In other words, members are still learning about this whole process, and there are likely a lot of quasi-active members who still have not even figured out what merit versus smerits are, and might not even have logged into their account in the past several days.  So, doesn't it seem to be preposterous to be calling the end of the good aspects of the bitcoin talk world as we know it, merely based on a system's change that is still quite early in its implementation and playing out?

Just because a certain exchange is in the lead of a trend does not mean that they are leading the price movement.