Well, you read what I wrote as far as cock-of-the-walk standards, and I probably should have included buying some sort of luxury vehice--not a Bentley or Rolls, but a slick Mercedes or sporty BMW would do just fine.

So it sounds like that $1500/week would buy a pretty nice lifestyle in the Philippines.  Thanks for that input, I appreciate it.  It's also kind of what I assumed, because I've had the feeling that the cost of living in your country is pretty low if you compare it to the US (how much is gasoline over there, anyway?).  My next question would be: how does one go about getting citizenship in the Philippines?  Can somebody just fly there and take up residence, or would they be deported?

I'm still looking for places.  And just and FYI, this is not a new idea kicking around in my head.  I've wondered about this for years.

I'm asking this question seriously, though I'm going to qualify that by saying that I'm not planning on doing anything like this.  It's just a fantasy of mine, and the question very much has to do with economics, i.e., it basically has to do with economies in various parts of the world and the cost of living.  **Edit: This thread would be appropriate for Bitcoin Discussion as well, but mods, please don't move it there.  This isn't a thread that's meant to be funny, and I'd like thoughtful replies--which I won't get if the thread gets buried in a picosecond within the wasteland of what should be the most important section on the entire forum.**

Let's say a few of the Chipmixer crowd wanted to escape whatever tyranny they were living under in their country or countries (I picked that campaign because I think it's the highest-paying one, but correct me if I'm wrong).  We'll assume for the sake of argument that the campaign is going to continue indefinitely and that each member (let's say five in total) make the maximum number of posts per week, earning $300 worth of bitcoin in the process.  Let's further assume that these Chipmixer snobs demand only the best--Havana cigars, a large dwelling with a decent amount of land and no neighbors, a wine cellar (to be filled), and all the illicit and legal substances their cadre of well-endowed women can procure.  And a lawyer on retainer.

My question is whether there's any place on earth where $1500/week could allow five roommates to live very comfortably--perhaps not as boss-like as I described above, but maybe at least the big house and property.  Over the years I've heard stories that Filipino members were able to pay for a good weekly allocation of food just from campaign earnings, and they amounted to a lot less the last time I participated in one of those discussions.  I'm not picking on the Philippines; it's just something I remember and I don't even know if it's true.  What I'm fairly sure of is that there really do exist bounty farms within single households, where multiple family members are all on bitcointalk spamming away and earning who knows how much.

That tells me that there's something to it, because there's no way father, sons, mom, and whatever grandparents are still alive would be bounty hunting if it weren't at least a little bit lucrative.  So I'd love to know how far campaign earnings ($1500 per week for 5 people in my example) could be stretched.  Are there actually places out there where one could not only survive but thrive by earning bitcoin on the forum?

<and how does one go about getting citizenship?>

I'll lock this thread if anyone reports that this has been discussed ad nauseam.  But if it has, I've certainly missed it.

I'd be willing to bet it's not a hacked account but an alt that was created during the 2017 boom in order to participate in as many bounties/sig campaigns as possible.  I haven't looked at the statistics as far as how many new accounts were created in 2017, but I'm pretty sure that was a banner year in that category.  The person who owns the Advo82 account most likely is using a primary account to post with (if he's currently active on the forum), and if not then perhaps he resurrected himself in order to create that thread.  Who knows?

That sort of reminds me of a book I read a while back....can't remember the name....has numbers in the title....Big Brother something....anyone know what I'm talking about?

Just speaking as an average US citizen, I feel for both Russians and Ukrainians who want no part in this mess--and I've never held any animosity toward any Russians, and I've known a lot of them in the states (I haven't met as many Ukrainians, but I'm not prejudiced against them either).  There ought to be strong political opinions being voiced right now, but I'm not sure how divided any of this has made the forum.  I've not seen any pro-Putin remarks being made, at least not in the sections I frequent.

I really wish I could read Russian or Ukrainian, because I'd like to understand what people in those countries have to say, assuming they're not writing it in English. 

Gotcha, and I appreciate that input.  I'm thinking I might just un-ignore P&S for a couple of days just to see what people are writing about the Ukrainian invasion.  Are there a lot of Russian/Ukrainian members chiming in?

OP, are you a complete ignoramus or something?  It isn't the average Russian on the street who's doing all of this stuff, it's Putin.  The Russian army, just like with all other countries, doesn't really have a choice but to carry out his orders.  Is that a valid excuse?  No, it isn't.  It's the same one the Nazis used, but the reality is that if you're in an army and your political ideology suddenly differs from some crazy thing your leader mandates that you do, you're not really left with many options.  I'd think that's especially true in Russia.

And as I just wrote in another stupid Meta thread about this conflict, I don't think the forum should be taking stances on any political issues and certainly shouldn't do something completely idiotic like locking out an entire country from accessing the site simply because there's an invasion going on.  

This isn't Facebook, Twitter, or any of those other street-whore social media sites that have one set of lips on the US government's cock and both hands grabbing your personal data.

P.S....You can keep posting horrible pictures of whatever you like, but that's also a trick that media likes to use to sway opinions by tugging on people's heartstrings.  Me, I'm not buying any of that as an excuse to nuke the Russian section.

There's absolutely no need for bitcointalk to do anything because of a display of insanity by Putin.  I don't think there's any hatred between the average Russian and Ukrainian citizen anyway, so it isn't as though there's any fence-mending to be done--and this is a bitcoin forum first and foremost, not a forum for political discussion.  There is a section for that where interested members can voice their opinions if they like.

In addition, I don't think bitcointalk should take any sort of stance, positive or negative, on stuff like this.  Creating a joint board for Russians and Ukrainians would be a statement that could be interpreted in a number of ways, and I don't think it's appropriate.

I've been kinda-sorta inactive for the past two days, but just based on the threads you linked to I'd say no.  I get that it's an important topic and that there are a lot of Russians and Ukrainians here, but flooding Meta with threads about....whatever....is unwarranted.

I don't even know if that's what project owners/devs have in mind when they're looking for someone to manage their bounty, because they might not even know what distinguishes one member from another in terms of what it takes to manage a spreadsheet, the participants, and all the payments.  I'd think having a track record would be of prime importance, but a lot of these projects are scams anyway so who knows what the underlying projects' bosses are thinking?

I lost track of how many bitcoin-paying signature campaign managers there are in the past couple of years.  There used to be at least 6-7 of them IIRC, and I think there are even more active bounty managers--plus I think the barrier to entry to be a bounty manager is a lot lower (though I could be wrong).  What I do know is that you have to have some sort of trust record on the forum before anyone would consider you for a job where you're handling a lot of funds (or you'd have to have a pre-existing relationship with the project).

Multiple threads aside, I don't think there's much anyone here can do for him other than stake.com, and from what I've read so far it doesn't seem like they're inclined to do so. 

There might be very real (legal) reasons why stake.com thinks Baskin198 went about the KYC process in an improper way and why they're not allowing him to withdraw his funds.  It'd be nice if they laid it all out for him instead of giving him the runaround, which is causing him more frustration and hence is leading to louder complaining here on the forum.  If I missed the part where stake.com gave him their reasoning in full, my apologies.

Take a look back at decades of politics in the US and every president has pretty much run on the platform of making things better.  But do things actually get any better?  Some things have, but in general it's the same tired, old story:  the rich and powerful look out for themselves and their cronies and in the process make things much worse for the average person.  This is why there's always, always so much room for improvement.

As far as being helpless to do anything about it, well, that depends on how fast you want change and how much you want to break the law, because the laws are stacked against the average person (or at least enforcement is).  Again I'll reference Andrew Joseph Stack, who flew a plane into an IRS office in Texas.  That was a guy who'd had enough of being fucked over and wanted blood.  Did he change anything?  Nope, and that's an extreme example of civil disobedience, but the only thing you or I could do to change any given policy is to vote, protest/petition, or become politicians ourselves--all of those things being useless as far as I'm concerned.

They called that thing at the White House last year an insurrection.  That's a joke if I ever heard one.  Not a funny one, either.

Huh.  I never considered that aspect of bitcoin ATMs--you don't have to pay taxes when you exchange other currencies (like USD-->CAD for instance).  Does the UK consider bitcoin an asset that's taxable as opposed to a strict currency?

Anyway, that could be a reason, but if I had no other info I'd suspect that this has more to do with the KYC issue.  In the US you can only buy small amounts of crypto at an ATM without having to show a drivers license (and some of them you have to even for small amounts if I'm not mistaken), but I don't know how the ATMs are set up in the UK.  I can't imagine the ATM providers aren't paying some sort of tax so they can operate.

I'm with you, man--and I agree with the part of your post I snipped for space as well.  The problem is that the average citizen--and even groups of citizens united for a cause--have very little power over shit like this.  A thousand people could picket in the street over bitcoin ATMs being taken away, and chances are that it wouldn't even be on the news, much less attract the attention of politicians who could reverse the decision.  I'm sure the decision wasn't even made public until it was made anyway.  So yeah, the whole game is fucking rigged.

I'm with you there, Hydrogen.  However, this executive order was probably not Biden's brainchild but the result of lots of input from bank lobbyists, the Fed, Biden's advisors, and who knows what other interests--I'm guessing Biden doesn't know all that much about cryptocurrency and has what passes for his presidential mind on a million other things, so there's no way he could have written this thing himself even if he had the time and inclination to do so.

And why is NY so crypto-restrictive?  I thought they were supposed to be the crypto center of the US, if not the world (I think I've heard statements to that effect in the past).  Believe me, I'm not arguing with what you said about NY and CA, because it's absolutely true.  I'm just wondering why NY in particular, which is home to Wall Street, won't even allow their citizens to use exchanges like Binance or even ShapeShift (do they even still exist?).  It's goddamn depressing.

Problem: One that's well-known to many members of the forum, especially older ones.  
Solution: Exactly what Royse777 wrote.  
End of thread.

Don't know why you're overcome with emotion about some stupid idiot offering to post for money, but what I would suggest is that you try to make posts like the OP of this thread a bit more concise.  You're probably trying to earn merits, and I can tell you that while some members might fall for an extremely long post that kicks off a thread and give the person merits, what I see here is an extremely bloated mess of words and an issue that could have been summarized in a few sentences at most.

I've been guilty of prolixity on occasion, but I think in general I keep a lid on it.  Anyway, most problems like the one you've driven yourself into a tizzy about can be solved by simply reporting a rule-breaking post to the mods.

I wouldn't think that'd be true for a business like Binance, though if they had their database hacked and those docs made their way to the darker corners of the interwebz, that could be a problem.  I'm just not sure why so many pics of people holding their driver's licenses and whatnot get rejected--and I've had that happen to me before on exchanges like Kraken.  I couldn't make the photo any clearer, so I finally just thew up my hands in disgust.  Now I wonder what happened to the pics I tried to upload.

I'm actually now watching a decent Youtube video about Roobet, KYC, and all the scammy stuff that can happen.  It's from last year, but it just popped up on my home page and it's interesting.  KYC is truly the enemy of everything bitcoin and crypto in general stands for.

What in the name of holy hell are you blabbering about?  Your post reads like it was processed through a translator program written by someone who doesn't know how to code correctly--but even aside from that, what little I could understand doesn't seem to make a coherent point.

If you're trying to make some vague argument that everyone plagiarizes because nobody's thoughts are completely original, that's a failure from the get-go.  It's an argument that would be made by a highschooler caught cheating on a research paper.  "Everyone does it!" is what I'm gathering is being said, am I in the ball park or what?

Plagiarism isn't carrying on the work of others--especially not on bitcointalk.  Usually what it boils down to is members being too lazy or illiterate to write their own posts (and get paid for them) that they break out the standard shitposting, bounty-hunting keyboard:



I think that model is a best-seller in certain parts of the world.

I know it wasn't me who gave you the merits, but what you described above could be a reason why any old comment receives merits way after it was originally written--just look at all the merits satoshi's posts have earned.  He hasn't posted in over a decade.

Sometimes if I'm doing a post history review for someone or if I'm looking to give out merits to help someone close to their next rank, I'll do a deeper dive than I normally would and sometimes I'll hand out merits for posts made months ago.  It might look unusual if you're paying attention to which posts of yours got merits, but to me it's just kinda normal. 

Plus there could be members reading old threads for educational/entertainment purposes, and they might merit old posts.  I've done that as well.

I'd like to point out that goldbugs are always screaming about inflation--whether there's any significant inflation or not--whereas bitcoiners tend to be a little less blindsided by their investment of choice.  Goldbugs are so in love with gold that they keep repeating the same mantra of it being an inflation hedge, that it's been around for millenia, etc., that they'll never talk about selling gold.  Ever.  I've seen this in action for the last decade on sites like coinflation.com and zerohedge, and I saw the same arguments being made in an old magazine from 1982 that I happened to pick up a few months ago....so it's just rhetoric for the goldbugs.

But yeah, I just heard the same 7.9% figure on the news this morning.  If I'm not mistaken, gasoline was included in the statistics (please correct me if I'm wrong), and I'd think that would heavily influence the reported inflation rate since unlike some of the other things in that "basket of goods" gas has skyrocketed.  Groceries and restaurant food have gone up quite a bit, but I don't think those prices have kept pace with what gasoline has been doing.  At my local gas station, it's up another 1% overnight.

Well....sometimes it's hard to tell there's merit abuse going on, but I've seen some pretty blatant examples since the whole system got started.  The issue isn't (and has never been) whether it can be detected or not, but rather if anything should be done about it by DT members.  And in the past couple of years, most DT members have taken a hands-off approach toward merit abuse cases, which mirrors Theymos's attitude.  Personally I don't have much of a problem with that, since there's too much reasonable doubt (as you've pointed out) and it's way too much of a pain in the ass sniffing these idiots out when compared to how much good it does tagging merit abusers.

Back on topic, I'm relieved to see I'm still in the top 20 at least.  I thought I'd slacked last month more than the numbers show, because it seemed like there weren't a lot of members taking me up on my offer of a monthly post review (which I'll once again offer to anyone under Legendary with <1000 merits who's reading this).  Just send me a PM asking for a review and I'll be happy to oblige.

I think some merit sources have just completely dropped out, i.e., they didn't want to be sources anymore--but who knows?  I don't think Theymos has ever made any proclamations in which he's given his reasons for removing merits sources.  He even keeps them anonymous as we all know, so there's no telling why he's removed some of them (though I think you're correct about a few of them just not distributing enough merits).  I know one or two have been nuked for merit abuse, but the last one I remember was a couple of years ago and I can't even remember his name.

Ah, I don't feel so crazy now that I know at least one other person has that picture saved on his computer!  I missed this thread when it started, but I'm glad I found it now.  That's a snapshot of a stereotypical bounty farm if anyone's wondering.

Also, I've run into messages like the one OP posted here (though not very often).  There are probably a lot of things that could be improved upon as far as the site's functionality goes, and if you've ever tried searching for anything too quickly you'll see another example of things getting overloaded where they shouldn't.

Have you got a lot of neighbors participating in bounties or signature campaigns?  Just wondering, because I know I've heard stories of entire villages supporting themselves on the proceeds of bitcointalk.  I don't know what's true and what's just a fable, but it stands to reason that with the money that can be made through them that they'd be extraordinarily popular in areas of the world where, say, 10k sats goes a long way toward paying the rent.

OP, I think it'd be highly unlikely Putin or anyone else in Russia (on the state level) would be targeting Ukrainian bitcointalk accounts.  Sure, stranger things have happened here but this forum likely doesn't even register on the radar of any Russian hackers right now.  If they want to hack Ukrainian accounts, those accounts would be ones linked to banks and whatnot, i.e., they'd have funds attached to them.  So I don't think our members from Ukraine have anything to worry about.

LOL.  Are NFTs still popular?  Based on how few new videos I'm seeing about them on Youtube, I would have guessed that fire had extinguished itself within the past few weeks or so.

Maybe, but all of those preppers who've been stocking up on nonperishable food, supplies, guns & ammo, and land don't seem to be as crazy as they did maybe a year or two ago, do they?  My point is that while money (even crypto) can go to zero, there's always going to be valuable things in times of economic or political crisis--and that's always been true.

I don't disagree that having some cash on hand is a bad idea.  Even if you don't trust fiat it's not going to lose all of its value overnight, and if you plan on buying any of those things I mentioned above, it's best not to be caught short of cash when you need it.  That said, I'm hoping this current crisis in Ukraine resolves itself peacefully and that economic armageddon doesn't strike them, Russia, or the rest of the world.  We're all interlinked more than we probably realize, but just take a look at gas prices for an example of how true that is.  If the situation worsens, we're all vulnerable to one degree or another.