Another point not fully touched upon by the above users is it is in a lot of ways more sketchy than an IPO.

IPOs are a regulated form of selling stock in a company.
ICOs are unregulated and use cryptocurrency instead. This means that there is no real force preventing ICOs from just running away after a token sale, and all you have is trust.

ICOs usually skirt the law or are outright illegal in some cases. ICOs have the potential for pump and dumps.

The cryptocurrency community has a lot of unbridled enthusiasm sometimes. Be wary.

If it is a minor investment (<$2) as you have said, go for it.
But I would be wary about trusting any investment advice from anyone, especially with the degree to which the altcoin market is flooded with pump-and-dumps
Don't base investments on what a single person tells you.

Wouldn't owning one address always make you own the other address as well?

ie: If I have address A as my BTC address, and address B as my BCC address, if someone incorrectly sends BCC to A, then I can import the privkey of A into my BCC client and refund it the BCC anyways.

I guess the only advantage of having the address stored on both wallets in advance is if you expect it to be very likely that people make this kind of mistake... which might be the right guess.

5% interest = 0.05 * 0.05 BTC = 0.0025 BTC, implying 0.0525 BTC + tx fee

I suggest clarifying whether you mean 5% interest or 0.005 = 10% interest. It would be kinda bad if this only comes up when repayment is due.

sMerits are not as finite as you think.

As long as Merits keep moving around (being given out by sources), some users will accumulate Merits and hence sMerits as well.
Sure, no single user can expect to consistently be a sMerit seller by this standard, but wouldn't a good deal of users their Merits if offered something?

If sMerit sales continuously lead to negative trust, some things might happen that lead to more secretive trading.
Like how sold accounts often led to negative trust, hence the account name was revealed only to the other party....

I think this is a legitimate concern that we actually need to think about.

Thanks for collating the information on merits. I see something that might be a minor error though.

I think this:


refers to sMerits, and not Merits.

Quoting my Merits page:


You might want to update that in your original post.

The reason I don't understand how this stops account farmers, is consider this:

Assume an account farmer with an extremely large number of accounts has roughly the same number of mean Merits per post as a normal user.
If he gets 100 Merits, he also gets 50 sMerits. He then redistributes these 50 sMerits amongst his accounts. Assuming he has planned this well, he should be discreet about it, and in the end he'll get 25 more sMerits to distribute.

Once you calculate the entire thing, you realize that for every Merit the account farmer receives, he gets close to a total of two Merits across his entire group of accounts, once you account for sMerits.

Counterargument:

I think this might just be the Toupee Fallacy.
You only ever notice that bad colluders are performing collusion, so you assume that everyone who colludes will be readily noticeable.
When collusion goes well, and with the merit system, I think it might be easy to hide, you will not notice it... and hence assume that the only people who collude, are the ones who obviously collude.

So in the end, account farmers get twice the merit across their accounts for the same quality of posts.... which is an issue, but I guess it's not the worst.

Hmm I was thinking something along the lines of warning/temporary bans rather than immediate permanent action.
I guess my issue is that a good deal of users might try to build up post/activity count to join signature campaigns later, despite having their signature enabled.

Actually, since the people causing this issue usually just try maximizing metrics (post count/activity)... I wonder if freezing those could work too.

To be honest, the merit system seems extremely weird for Serious Discussion/Ivory Tower too tbh.
Those seem like locations where you should be motivated to talk by intrinsic motivation, rather than extrinsic motivation of post count/merit.

I honestly still see myself wading through the trash in Bitcoin Discussion to find the occasional good post, and I think the "total" amount of good discussion in Bitcoin Discussion still outweighs Serious Discussion. But I admit that permanently having to ignore spam is tiresome.

I agree with you in the fact that it seems certain that the Merit system will not just add a quality requirement, but also increase the overall time requirement. And it might seem unfair that the time requirement is increased.
But arguably an increase in time requirement seems like it was deserved. With account farming, users seem to be bursting through the rank caps a lot faster than should be expected.

I could've seen this implemented due to just an increase in required activity... but this was a lot better.

Hmm I just gave one out in the Serious Discussion board about a minute ago (just got back after a hiatus and hadn't checked it out before), but in my opinion, that board and the Ivory tower don't seem like they will do too well.

I was looking through Serious Discussion, and it seems like the Bitcoin Discussion forum to me. There is definitely less spam, but the trade-off is a lot fewer active users.
Ivory Tower is even worse in that aspect, there is something under ten posts there right now.

Sure, they might be higher quality, but I still don't know if it will have enough active users for it to be worth monitoring.

EDIT: I notice you, OP, have probably the most posts in Ivory Tower, and I guess my point stands. Barely any users are aware of it to contribute.

What about more aggressive community-driven moderation?

I noticed today that Pharmacist (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=487418) has probably >100 negative trusts sent out that just mark a user as a spammer.
This seems relatively effective, as it would block them from signature campaigns, but somewhat rubs me the wrong way because it seems to detract from the regular purpose of the trust system.

I somewhat like this idea:

But what about instead of targetting signatures, making it a community moderated "block". When a user is reported, some heuristic could be applied and if the "score" of the users that reported is high enough, the user would be temporarily banned or at least pushed further up a moderation queue.

There is a distinction between rank and trust on this forum, and rank does not bestow any trust.
However, I think you're right to a degree, I'm not sure if the trust system should be used to mark users with poor quality posts, the actual moderation team should be involved with that.

Yikes... is it just me or does the merit system seem like it might worsen the account-farming problem even further.
I don't see myself randomly meriting posts, even if they are helpful. So account farmers would have a much easier time gaining merit on their accounts than regular users...

Some things are unclear, like this:

Does this mean you will only pay back £20,000 regardless of how BTC's price changes? If so it might be a bad idea.
Otherwise, does it mean you are willing to pay a larger amount if BTC's price increases?

But other than this, the concern raised by others still stands.
Websites like BTCJam tried to establish trust in users by requiring identity verification, and prior trust and everything, but it generally tended to be a bad idea without actual collateral.
Even if you could actually prove without a shred of a doubt that you had a business as you stated, there's no reason to believe you wouldn't run away with the money, which is an issue.

Furthermore... it has been about a week since you posted this... and with an actual monthly profit of £50,000, you should already have £12,500 of the £20,000 you wanted.....  If your numbers aren't bogus, maybe you should just wait a few more days and you'll be able to afford everything  

Bitcoin Talk Name: Jambola2
Bitcoin Talk Profile: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=148258
Rank: Legendary
Post Count (including this post): 1622
BTC Address: 1FRkoJDy8CwZ84RSeMs2tCEKBdVfHu32Ra
ETH Address: 0xcd317d72778029733B68c6280b936360721f6d0D

Always nice to see someone else try making a Bitcoin Shop. There's a lack of products currently, you should add more things!
Also, can you add USD and other currency amounts somewhere else as well? Since BTC is pretty volatile, it helps to be able to have an idea of how much the items cost even if you're actually paying in BTC.

Joined the email list!
I'll definitely buy one if you can come with a good looking tee or hoodie. The idea seems pretty cool, because tbh most existing crypto apparel is too blatant.

The lightning looks best to me right now. The Bitcoin symbol isn't lowkey enough imo, and the rumble t-shirt doesn't make much sense to me either.

Hi can you refund my payment and cancel the account?
You haven't given me account access so I guess it would be possible.

The only match I was interested in watching is over and I wasn't able to get the account in time to watch it anyways. You can send it it to my profile address, and I had posted the txid earlier today.

Yeah I'm waiting on it too... It's going to be pretty bad if OP doesn't come back in time before the fight... I think quite a few people are relying on it.

Anyone here have any alternate way of watching the match? Despite paying 8 bucks including tx fees for this match, I can pay again to watch if there's some other way.