Eyyyy!!  Congrats to all the newly-ranked up members, and it's good to see there's a lot of them this time around.  I could have sworn BITCOIN4X had already reached Legendary, but I guess I was mistaken.

Merit sources must be doing their jobs well, and I'm hoping non-merit sources are doing their best to distribute merits to those in need.  The system is over three years old, so it has a decent track record but it'll fail if members hoard their sMerits (I think I've said that like a million times already, but it's a persistent fear that I have).

Once again, I'm going to offer post history reviews to any member below Legendary rank as long as they don't already have 1000 merits.  Just drop me a PM asking to review your posts and I'll be happy to do it.  I'd actually be grateful if more members took me up on the offer, because I haven't been doing as much reading in the past few weeks and so haven't handed out as many merits as I usually do.  I'm trying to improve, but it'd help if I had my attention focused on where to send merits.

I'll take OP at his word that this place (and I highly doubt there's even a place) is a scam.  I took a look at their "contact" page and saw this:



Sure, it's possible that this is an ASIC retailer based out of Minnesota in the US and that the owners have an extremely poor grasp of the English language....but it's far more likely that this is just a phishing site preying on the world's growing desire to break into the mining business.  That isn't even how you format a US address, by the way.  You'd think anyone living in Minnesota would know how to write their mailing address properly.

Not only isn't there only a single way to alleviate poverty, but blaming it on whatever currency is being used is just plain wrong, i.e., poverty isn't going to magically go away if the world switches to bitcoin or any other form of money.  The state of being poor has existed since the beginning of mankind, and there have been all sorts of measures taken to help the impoverished over the years by many different countries....and yet, poverty still exists.

The only thing that can be done is to try to limit the extent of it, and to that end I don't think our present leaders are doing much good with their reckless monetary policies, which are driving up the cost of goods and services and weakening fiat currency.  I don't see crypto as a viable alternative, though--not even bitcoin.  And why?  Because it's too damn volatile to be used as money (in addition to its other problems such as transaction fees and confirmation times).  I wish it were that simple to eliminate poverty, but it just isn't, plain and simple.

This is obviously a shady service being offered, but I have no idea what "votes" are being offered--are these for a contest or to support projects of some sort?  I'm curious, as I've never seen votes of any kind being sold here or anywhere else.  Seems very much like all those other things that can be purchased to give a false representation of something, e.g., fake reviews on Amazon, fake likes on Youtube, etc.

Who in their right mind would invest in something based on an internet community review?  I guess a lot of people do just that by listening to anonymous internet personalities on chat boards and whatnot, but this seems a bit different.  Can anyone give me a TL;DR explanation?

Well, just playing devil's advocate here, he may have meant security in another context and not necessarily security of the wallet/address itself.  By that I mean it might be an address he no longer wants to have anything to do with for whatever reason, i.e., he wouldn't want to be caught with the keys to it...again, for whatever reason.

I think the negative trust Jannn got is valid, even if it's harsh.  Those kinds of tags are exactly what Vod would leave to warn the community of a potential scammer.  It's absolutely true that an account waking up after a long period of time and immediately asking for an unsecured loan is sketchy, and if you can't sign a message from an address you staked on the forum?  Double sketchy IMO.

No, and that's one of the reasons why the inflation reports are skewed, i.e., it can "feel" like inflation is much higher than what the government is telling you.  Even consider things like stocks and bitcoin--those are both rocketing up in value (price), but they're obviously not included in the inflation numbers even though their prices are being inflated over time.

By the way, gas prices are still pretty high in my area, but they haven't gone up much (if at all) since I last posted in this thread.  I don't really keep an eye on oil prices--or even gas prices--but I'd guess that if gas were to start going for over $4/gallon, I'd be hearing about it on the news.  But even still, gas was more expensive than that back in 2004 or so, when the dollar was worth slightly less.  So $3.50/gallon is high but not record-breaking high, and I know it's way more expensive in other parts of the world.

Interesting read.  While goofing around on Youtube a few weeks ago, I came across some videos pointing out how scammy Earth2 seems to be, since people are speculating on virtual land but there's no games to be played on said land--and thus all the parcels are basically worthless, since there's nothing anyone can really do with them.

I can see how there would be value in Facebook's metaverse, but this is just insane:

That tells me that there are a lot of people with way too much crypto to play around with--or at the very least they're doing very stupid things with it.  Makes me wonder who exactly these people are who are buying up all of this virtual land.  It isn't exactly cheap.

And like I mentioned with Earth2, there could be scammy elements to some of this virtual real estate.  Figures.  With every new crypto thing, the scammers rear their grotesque heads first, preying on the newbies in the space.  I don't think that'll ever end.

I'd say these inflated prices are, though I don't think people are going to stop buying up space in FB's metaverse as long as it keeps appealing to gamers and whoever else.  Who knows, though?  I'd say it probably depends on what the economy does in the next few years.  If there's an economic downturn, I'm not sure how much money people are going to throw at virtual land.

Very cool (even though I don't qualify for one)!  I think having a badge for reporting is a great incentive to keep doing so and an excellent way to recognize members who do a lot of good for the forum in the background, without receiving the recognition they deserve.  If it weren't for people who report a good deal of shitposts, spam, and whatever else, bitcointalk would be even more of a mess than it is.  Moderators deserve props for taking action on the reports of course, but without those reports there's just no way in hell they'd be able to detect all of the nonsense.

Thanks for the show of gratitude, mprep.  You're a great moderator, even though I don't frequent the sections you handle very often.  You've also been around for as long as I can remember.

Bro, you've got an excellent merit:post count ratio, so I'd say if you were more active you'd be climbing the ranks in no time--but in general you're right, merit really isn't easy to earn unless your posts really stand out against the backdrop of zillions of uniform-length, poorly-written shitposts that make most threads unpleasant to read.

By the way, it's good that you're more of a reader than a poster, and I mean that in a positive sense.  Sometimes it seems like the members who post the most are bounty hunters or sig spammers just trying to earn money.  Nothing new there, but I think it's pretty rare that members like you who've been around a few years just enjoy reading.  When I was a lurker years ago, I found the drama aspect of bitcointalk fascinating--and lately there hasn't been much of that.  Ah well.

I'd argue that it isn't similar; using content from the web in order to take credit and thus get paid for it is blatant cheating.  And I agree with everyone that the account deserves to be tagged for the reason you mentioned, i.e., to warn other bounty managers that this person has a history of this sort of BS.  The tag also needs to be from at least one DT member, because otherwise it might not even be seen if those managers don't check all feedback in advance of accepting members.  I don't think most of them do.

No, you're not....but damn, the way you write is like littering on the sidewalk.  Do you pick those out-of-place characters and words at random or what?  Do yourself a favor and don't try to earn money by writing.  You don't have a knack for it.

Ahh....thank you for that clarification.  As I was reading the first few posts here, I remembered a map of the world showing where crypto is legal and where it's illegal, and I could swear I saw India colored red indicating that they'd made it illegal.  Good to know that the situation changed.

I don't know all that much about India as a country and certainly very little about their economy, but I do know that pretty much every Indian I've met in the US has been of above-average intelligence.  And yeah, even though that's a positive pigeon-holing, it's still pigeon-holing, which is still not a great habit to get into.  Nevertheless, I'm betting that they're going to be responsible for some future innovations in crypto, whatever they may be.  I don't think I'm way off base in saying that engineering is extremely popular as a subject of study in India, so there are probably a shit ton of math and computer geeks with great ideas for crypto projects. 

Isn't GDP a reflection of total domestic product?  If so, India's size alone would skew them toward the top of that list and wouldn't be an accurate measure of their general economic health.  I could be wrong, and I'm way too lazy to research it for the sake of this post.

You know, you'd hope that anyone who's gone through the effort to buy, set up, and keep coins on a hardware wallet would know that any e-mail asking you to enter in your seed phrase has got to be a scam attempt...but I don't know how many people own Ledger wallets, and if the number is large enough it's almost guaranteed that a fraction of them (however small) will fall for it and thus lose all their coins.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone post here that they'd fallen victim to a phishing scam like this one, and while that might be because of pride, I'm hoping it's because there really are only small numbers of victims.

Remind me to never enter my real e-mail addy into any crypto-related thingee ever again.  Seems like the whole space has a horrible track record of security failures and dishonesty.

While that's absolutely true, I have to say that the past two years have been like nothing I've ever seen in my life.  Actually, a lot of the chaos kicked off when Trump was elected, and it just continued all throughout his presidency until the present day.  The COVID mess and the way governments and institutions have reacted to it just shows you how insane our leaders are.

And man, I'm getting tired of this shit.  I'm not just talking COVID, but the other stuff OP mentioned too.  Inflation is no joke, nor is the supply chain problem--and I don't hear many people talking about that.  Where I live it's really hard to buy certain food items and various other things.  I'm not sure if people are hoarding or if truckers aren't driving....but it's a mess!

I'm hoping the world can dig itself out of the hole it's in, but as time passes I find myself growing much more pessimistic.  Somebody cheer me up!!

Theymos can encourage whatever he wants, but he never set any written rules down regarding the tagging of members.  The community might have a problem with someone who consistently leaves negs for petty reasons, but Theymos specifically said that negging account sellers was alright--and no, I don't have a link, but I asked that question specifically.

As to Groundbit and whether he should be tagged, my question would be when the last time he bought or sold an account was.  If it was in 2018, I wouldn't be inclined to take action.  If it was in the last year or so, hell yeah I'd give him negative trust.

I also don't know what his motivations were in creating that B&H thread, but regardless of whether he himself has sold accounts in the past he isn't wrong in his advice about doing so.

There's never been a good way to "manage" a bubble.  Governments have tried to do it before by raising interest rates and other means at their disposal, but bubbles by their nature just have to burn themselves out, i.e., pop.  That's because there's no way to make people realize that they're investing in things that are extremely overvalued; by the time a bubble has formed, people are in full retard mode and aren't thinking clearly.

The NFT market is a great example of how insane things have gotten, and it's unfortunate that those got lumped into the "crypto" category in this article.  True, NFTs are a form of crypto but they're a hideous malformed bastard child, the kind that gets locked in the cellar for life.  They should never have been born IMO.

Speaking of this article, if Jeremy Grantham is a legendary investor, I've sure as hell never heard of him before.  Does anyone else recognize his name from somewhere?

I'd also add that not every DT member is a scam buster by any means.  Last I knew there were a lot of members in the collectibles section that were on DT, and I don't think they got their positive reputations by going after forum scumbags.  Ultimately it's up to each member (DT or not) to decide if they want to dole out the negative trust--Vod did it for years, but he was constantly fighting a losing battle whether he knew it or not.  Most people who end up on bitcointalk with the intention of scamming do it with brand new accounts, so if they end up with a red trust, they just start over with a new account.

I used to do a lot of tagging myself, but I don't go looking for idiots anymore (my beef has always been primarily with account sellers).  That doesn't mean I won't help out if I see an obvious case of wrongdoing that's reported in a thread.  As was said, it's up to you to set an example if you think DT members should start a tagging posse. 

That's what I can't understand about this whole thing with Russia moving toward a crypto ban, unless all those Russian miners are somehow putting a burden on the nation's electrical grid--or if there's a whole lot of tax evasion going on.  But even if there was tax evasion, my guess is that having a lot of people engaged in mining and other crypto activities is helping the economy in an indirect way.  People are paying for that electricity to mine, and they're either buying things with crypto or converting it to rubles and then spending it.  Either way, I don't see how a total ban on crypto would be a good thing for Russia.

Maybe it has something to do with the political situation, i.e., the impending invasion of Ukraine (or at least the tensions resulting from the anticipation of the same)?  I'm not a politician and I could never figure out the way they think, so I'm at a loss.

Looking at your other feedback from last week (both negative and before TwitchySeal left his), it would appear that you tried to pull off some kind of scam yourself--assuming you trust the screenshots that were provided in the reference link that was given.  I don't know who did what in this case, but with respect to the red trust you got from TwitchySeal....there isn't much you can do about that. 

Maybe you can work it out with him in this thread, but I suspect that if members who see this thread look at your trust page they're not likely to give you much support (not that it would do you much good anyway).

What do you have to say about those screenshots of PMs you sent to bdosusd?

Uh...OK.  That sounds like a recipe for losing all your money, but hey, maybe this Twitter guy with the sage advice knows what he's talking about.

OP, I'm going to be straight here:  this quote is a bunch of bullshit; most of it is just very general "tips" that I've heard repeated over and over, and there's absolutely nothing in this list that I could follow as an outline if I wanted to become a rich, successful trader.  Trading crypto is nothing more than gambling unless you have some inside information about a coin.  It isn't like the stock market where there are fundamentals to be analyzed (and if you think there are, you're very much mistaken).  The only thing very active crypto traders do is make guesses about the direction of the next few price ticks, and the only real "system" is TA....which is akin to homeopathy or some other pseudoscience.

What would we do without tweets like these?

How, indeed.  I've long wondered how the US would go about implementing a complete ban on crypto if they were ever inclined to do so, and the only answer I could ever think of was by simply passing a law outlawing the use of it.  I'm not sure how a US law would prevent off-shore exchanges from providing service to US customers.  Some might not give a shit, some might comply, but I think only places like Coinbase, Gemini, and other US-based crypto exchanges would be truly affected by a law like this.

Do you live in Connecticut?  If not, there's no way for you to do anything about this jackass being in office.  And CT has been a blue state (majority Democrats) for as long as I can remember.  Hopefully this piece of shit provision will never see the light of day.  Hopefully the Winklevoss twins are doing something about this (and other crypto gazillionaires, too).