That's an idea I can get behind--not only because it'd be a much-needed (IMO) addition to the ranking system but because a title like that would showcase just how uncensored bitcointalk is.  There are forums out there--many of them, in fact--where you wouldn't even be able to write "motherfucker" in a post without having it deleted by a mod.  So I second that suggestion.

And that's why such members who do stick around long enough to earn the highest rank ought to be rewarded with such, regardless of what it's named.  Maybe 4000 activity is a bit much, but a new rank based on activity and a hard-to-achieve number of merits should at least be considered by Theymos.  I've written much the same thing every time this issue pops up.

I don't think you're wrong; I even thought he'd rejected the idea out of hand, but there's been talk of this for so long that I lose track in my head of what Theymos's most recent opinion is on any given suggestion.  Seems like he so rarely gives one, and when he does I probably miss it.

Thank you for the input, I appreciate it.  I've always loved this forum, with its warts and all--even when the shitposters and trolls were seemingly running the place.  Maybe I posted more because I kinda-sorta bonded with members like Vod, Lauda, Jet Cash, TMAN, and probably a few others who've disappeared.  And yeah, I did participate in a lot of the drama threads.  Sometimes they could be fun, depending on how serious the drama was.  There hasn't been any real tension going on that I know of in quite some time, and often that sparks up some great threads.

I've got to get into the habit of checking to see if anyone has replied to my posts (as I just did with yours), because I've never really done that.  Maybe that's one reason why I feel like my posts are made in complete isolation sometimes.  Eh. 

I haven't visited the altcoin section in a while, and I probably should since I have an interest in some of them.  The section is just so damn spammy, though.  Everytime I click away from it I feel like I have to rinse my eyes out.  There are definitely some good threads that get started, but more often than not they're quickly overrun with shitposters.  That said, the last time I noticed that was maybe a year ago.  Have things changed much?

*WOW*

My post count has seriously dropped in the last year or two--I'm not even in the top 200 for January, and that likely would not have been the case in 2016-18.  Can a person get burned out on bitcointalk?  Is it because we've had a bunch of interesting and drama-creating members leave?  Somebody please explain it to me, because I'm searching my soul but finding no answers.

Thanks for posting this data, Ratimov.  Obviously I missed it initially, else I would have posted here earlier.  Am I seeing that chart correctly, that 55.5% of posts were in the altcoin marketplace section??  I would have lost that bet if I'd wagered on where most of the posts had been.

Nice to see so many merits being given on the local boards, BTW.

I have no idea who's in that campaign either (and honestly I thought it had ended, given all the bad publicity), but even without that knowledge I would bet my house that those posts were deleted with good cause.  Why?  Because campaigns like 1xbit.com's attract the bottom of the barrel as far as bitcointalk posters go.  It was the same thing when Yobit had its campaigns, and it's the same as every single signature campaign or bounty that accepts members with negative trust, no merits, and/or no checking of post history by the campaign manager.

Any time we get one of these shitty campaigns on the forum, it's like the dead are rising from their graves--long inactive members from the 2017 boom start waking up and applying, and most of them are no doubt part of account farms started before the merit system when you could actually farm accounts with no problem.

Just get over it, OP (and anyone else who wants to bitch).  Nobody ought to be in the 1xbit campaign to begin with.

Yeah, good luck trying to get that to happen.  I share your feelings and have since 2015, but Theymos is kind of an anarchist capitalist and thus lets scams advertise here and does sweet fuck all about all the other scams being perpetrated right here on this forum.  Part of me respects that, because it represents true freedom....but part of me just wants all of these jackoffs banned for life.

OK, so what are you asking here exactly?  If the question is whether any sanctions imposed by the rest of the globe will deter Russia (Putin specifically, is what it seems like) from its aggression towards Ukraine, I'd have to say no.  I can't imagine Putin wouldn't have realized how unpopular this move of his would be with the UN, and yet he went ahead with his plans anyway.  Someone please argue against that if you think I'm wrong, because I don't fully understand what's going on over there.  Never have.

There are a lot of bitcoiners in Russia, and obviously we've all seen its value shoot up in the past day or two.  I wonder how much the price rise has to do with the conflict, i.e., if Russians or Ukrainians are buying it as a hedge against any currency devaluation that might happen--Russians more so than anyone else, I would think.  Or it could be a coincidence....but I doubt it.

I'm not Russian, but I grew up in the later years of the Cold War and Russians back then were living under a repressive regime and had been for many years.  Your question is valid, but it's also valid for countries like N. Korea.  My response would be that people can and do live with governments that treat them like shit all the time.  I don't know where the breaking point is for Russians, but I am hoping there's some sort of rebellion in the works.  I don't know what else will stop this madness.

Huh.  Well that would probably explain why so many countries are looking to stop this conflict before Russia puts itself into so much war debt that repaying all the other lenders becomes impossible.  I have no doubt that world leaders are sympathetic to Ukraine's plight (and they should be), but I'm pretty sure that first and foremost they're thinking about themselves and the bottom line as far as what this thing is going to cost their countries.

What a mess, what a mess.

Man, I hope pension funds and retirement accounts are sticking to the stock and bond markets instead of dabbling in foreign currency (especially Russia's).  But I bet there's a lot of currency traders who are making a killing on this--and also a lot who are losing their shirts.

Funny you should start a thread like this (and I'm glad you did)--I just got a PM today from billysaputra, who I negged a few years ago for cheating in bounties.  He offered to pay me to remove my negative trust.  I looked at his post history just for the hell of it, and the most recent post I'm able to see is from 2018.  Granted I do have a lot of sections on ignore, but this member has only made 615 posts since registering in 2017.  I think it's obvious this is an alt account that the owner wants to enroll in a bounty like the ones your group of alts are. 

Is there some special draw to those three bounties you linked to?  Just curious; I don't know why someone would leave the forum for a few years and then come back unless they'd gotten word of an especially lucrative bounty--and for a shitposter like billysaputra to want to pay to have feedback removed, there's got to be some serious incentive.  I'm just going to ignore his PM, by the way.  I like to leave fuckers like him hanging.

Huh, now that's interesting--I didn't even know sites like bitcoinabuse.com existed.  However, with respect to that donation address and the complaints I see on the site, there's no proof of any wrongdoing and the site looks very much like the one that had that huge smear against Vod a long time ago (I can't remember what it's called, but basically anybody can post anything about anyone with zero evidence).

I'd hope that an address like that, which has received over $4m and has a current balance of over $600k, doesn't belong to a scammer.  If it does, I'd like to know what kind of scams they're pulling off.  I doubt they'd be charity scams, but I suppose it's possible.

Call me completely misanthropic, but I've never once donated any money to people in crisis in my city, state, or even country.  There's no way in hell I'm sending any crypto to a newly-formed charity (or even an established one) for people I've never given a thought to my life and whose situation I can't assess directly--I certainly don't trust what I see on the news.  Who knows what these charities do with the money they receive?  

I'm not even in a bad mood.

Good job outing these scamming assholes, Dave.  I'm going to take a look and support your negs and flags.  And yes, to those who haven't been on the forum for long, this is what we have to deal with every time there's a big news story about some sort of crisis.  I can't remember what the last one was, but it was probably over a year ago.  If you see any member posting a bitcoin or any other crypto address for donations, just report it to the mods as begging.

Looks like that addy has received a ton of bitcoin already....hope it's spent wisely.

Yeah, that feedback is inappropriate for sure, but it's not exactly a death threat.  Nor is it likely to cause anyone to act on his call for those members to be killed--so in other words, it's just empty internet trolling and we've seen crap like that on bitcointalk before. 

That feedback should probably get removed by the mods if they're willing to do so, and I don't think it's restricting anything but some immature asshole's anger.  I couldn't care less if this forum deletes nonsense like that; I've had plenty of posts deleted by mods.  I care way more about Youtube and other social media platforms censoring what viewers get to see, because it has infinitely more influence on how people think about things than a silly little case of an angry shitposter.

Youtube just took down an upload of the movie "The Day After" which had been up for years.  A lot of you probably aren't familiar with it, because it was a made-for-television movie from 1983, but it deals with nuclear war between the US and what was then the USSR.  I thought it was time for a rewatch, and it had been there as recently as a month ago...but now it's gone, and I'm guessing it isn't the uploader who pulled it.  Shit like that makes me want to pull some hair out (and perhaps not my own).

Sure they can.  They've got a whole team of moderators filtering all the new content being uploaded constantly, checking it for illegal stuff.  These sorts of offers might slip past their radar, simply because they're ignorant of how scammy they are--but I bet if Facebook got enough complaints they'd take action in a heartbeat.

I see the same ETH giveaway crap on Youtube constantly.  Just do a simple "ETH mining" or "ethereum" search and you'll see about 20 of the same kinds of videos that look like it's going to be Vitalik Buterin doubling your ETH or some other such scheme.  It's obnoxious, but I'm pretty sure Youtube takes all of those videos down eventually.  In any case, there's no warning you can give to people about scams like this.  People either have common sense or they don't.

Ugh.  I started using them recently for small altcoin trades because they list a bunch of obscure ones, and I've had a horrible experience so far.  I've had deposits not show up in my account well after the minimum number of confirmations several times as well as not being able to withdraw coins, though each time the problem was resolved after submitting a ticket.  Compared to Kucoin, they're as bad as Yobit (but only if you compared them to Yobit, mind you).

And yeah OP, Kucoin doesn't require KYC if you're just trading altcoins/bitcoin.  Out of all the exchanges you mentioned I'd say they're the most reputable by far.  I haven't used Huobi or Gate.io, however.

That's an understatement if I ever heard one. 

I'd expect Russia's stock market to plummet at the beginning of...whatever this is they're doing.  I would call it an invasion and I'm not sure what constitutes a war--but in any case, I think Putin isn't thinking about economics.  So far I haven't heard on any news sites any word about what he's thinking about, except for vague speculation about bringing Ukraine back into the fold.  What's to gain from doing that is beyond me.

There was just an announcement that Russia was going pro-bitcoin, and I kind of scratched my head when I read that since it came right when the pot was ready to boil over with respect to Putin's act of aggression.  Sometimes I think leaders of countries are pure psychopaths--maybe 1% aren't, and some of them don't behave like Putin or Saddam Hussein or Pol Pot, but there's a strong stink of psychopathy nonetheless.

You got that right, and its effects are going to be global--the extent remains to be seen, and it depends on how far this situation escalates.  I still can't figure out why Putin is doing this.  I'm fairly ignorant of global politics and never really followed what was going on in the world, but everything I've read about Putin or seen from Youtube clips about him has been relatively positive....and then he goes and does this, something much worse than the leaders of countries that the US has invaded in the past (I'm talking about Iraq and wherever else we've pointed our military force at).  This is just fucking baffling.

As far as sanctions go, I don't have a clue.  Nor do I know what the repercussions of those sanctions will be, but I can't imagine they'll make Putin happy. 

When I think about this whole mess, I can't help but wonder if Russia is ever going to stop being the Evil Empire that Reagan said they were back in the 1980s.

Well stocks are a store of value, too.  There's no rule that a store of value has to be perfectly stable--and not even gold is.

Speaking of gold, I did indeed notice that it and silver had shot up overnight (or at least in the last 36 hours), and it was before I knew what was going on over there in Ukraine.  When I saw that silver had surpassed $25/Oz. whilst bitcoin and nearly every single altcoin were sinking, I kind of suspected something was up. 

Paxmao, you've been around long enough to know swings like this are going to happen, and don't get too sad.  Depending on the progression of the Russia/Ukraine conflict or its resolution, we might be seeing gold drop back to $1800/Oz. and bitcoin heading to the moon.  In other words, this too shall pass.

Spot-on, bro.  If you believe that bitcoin (or your coin of choice) is destined for a much higher valuation--which is probably the case for most of us here--then you ought to be buying at times like this when it looks like everything is collapsing.  Warren Buffett said something like "Be greedy when others are fearful", but it's easier said than done.  For some bizarre reason when the prices are falling in the stock market, the crypto market, and basically any other investment market, people don't want to buy.  That runs contrary to our normal instincts to spot a bargain and to buy something when it's on sale.

I'm just wondering how far bitcoin and all the little altcoin ducklings are going to sink.  It seems like the selloff has something to do with the situation in Russia, and that mess has just started to escalate.  God help us if other countries get caught up in this.

Aw fuck....I haven't been watching the news at all, and it's kind of sad that I hear about major events like this on bitcointalk, but so it goes.

I was wondering why the precious metals markets were moving higher and stocks and crypto both took a nosedive today.  I was too lazy to check what was going on in the world, but I'm going to check out whatever news site I can find when I finish writing this post.  This whole conflict between Russia and Ukraine is madness--since global politics is under my radar I don't even know where this all stems from, but my gut is telling me very loudly that an invasion didn't have to happen.

Well, if anyone was questioning how bitcoin would react to a major global event, just take a look at preev to get the price.  Altcoins have plummeted even worse than bitcoin did, so it looks like everyone is selling.  And damn, if I had fiat to burn I'd be buying like crazy.

I think I already posted in this thread, but in the past few hours I've definitely noticed bitcoin and a lot of altcoins I watch all sinking in tandem.  That doesn't always happen like that, but I'm pretty sure most of the time when bitcoin moves hard in a certain direction, the altcoin market follows suit.

That dependence you mentioned has to do with altcoins being bought/sold with bitcoin--or at least priced in bitcoin on exchanges.  I think if altcoins were traded exclusively with fiat, things would be a lot different.  That said, I don't know that's true by any means and I haven't heard any definitive explanation for the correlation. 

Maybe some PhD student in economics somewhere is doing his/her dissertation on it.  If not, I just threw a great idea at all the grad students out there.  Lol.

Everyone is talking about inflation because that's the most obvious sign that things have gone seriously wrong somewhere--if you looked at the stock, real estate, commodity, and crypto markets you'd think that everything was just buzzing along, A-OK.  What little effect the pandemic had on businesses wasn't reflected in the stock market.  In fact, as I've said here many times the US stock market has been in a bull run for at least 13 years.  It's unbelievable.

Last year I started a thread about the cost of sending things through the post office going up, which I thought was creeping upward at an unusual rate.  In 2016 the cost of a 1st class stamp actually went down from $0.49 to $0.46.  Never before had I heard of that happening, but at the time I made that thread I wrote this:


And these days I'm still sending a good amount of mail using the small flat rate boxes--and at the moment it costs $9.45.  That's an 11.8% increase in one year if my math is correct.  Yikes.

Well some people crave power and control, but all governments not only want both but have it already.  Personally the only thing I want is for the government to downsize and within reasonable limits let people do whatever the hell they want to.  But as it stands, if law enforcement dug hard enough on any single citizen, there's no doubt in my mind that they could find something that would make the citizen a felon--or at least a criminal to some degree.  In other words, there are way too many laws (and the government has way too much power).

This thing with Coinbase, Canada, and the protesting truckers is absolutely flabbergasting to me.  It sounds like the OSC was flexing its muscle for the truckers and those who would support them financially, but even a halfwit would see that the statement from the OSC was pure buffoonery.  I'm not sure where they got the order to put out that statement, but Jesus.  Much respect to Canada, but they've obviously got some politicians who rival the worst of what the US has with respect to intelligence.

Props to the truckers.