What with gender identity being such a big thing these days, just thought I'd point out that I'm not certain Foxxxxxy identifies as a female.  I could give you my opinion on that subject based on the hardcore sex orgies parties I've attended, but I might find myself with a slit throat at the next Cycling Club get-together.

Now as far as this here contest goes, man....my brain is so fried from 2021 that it's going to put a strain on what remaining neurons I have just to remember what personalities ought to be voted for in each category.  Last year was that f'in bad.  TECSHARE dying was definitely a big thing for the forum, because he'd been around since 2011 and was one of the OGs that didn't drift away from the forum until he died and probably wouldn't have if he had lived to 100.  Same thing for Vod, though there's always the possibility of him coming back (regardless of whatever was said about that by him) whereas that isn't true for TECSHARE. 

Anyway.  I'll keep my eye on this thread to see what's being discussed, as it'll help me when it comes time to cast votes.

Cool, thanks for linking to the article OP--I had no idea who Merkle Standard was until I read it.  Are they a public company by any chance?  I know they're basically a mining operation, but there are at least a couple of those that have gone public so far (Marathon and Riot are two that I know of) and I've been thinking about maybe investing in one of their stocks.

Is the announcement of a big purchase of equipment like this standard for mining companies?  It seems a bit odd that it would be reported, even if only on a strictly crypto-related news site.  You don't see big corporations put out press releases that they've bought millions of dollars worth of rapidly-depreciating assets, know what I mean?

Speaking of that, I assume bitcoin mining operations have to upgrade their miners at some kind of frequency.  Does anyone know how often they have to do that?  My knowledge of ASIC miners is limited, but I'm pretty sure that if you're a serious miner you have to keep up with the newest equipment else you risk being left behind in the hashrate race.  Someone correct me if I'm wrong, please.  And if that's true, what does a company like Merkle Standard do with their obsolete miners, sell them?  Just curious.

I'm familiar with the Piss Christ piece, and that's an example of real transgressive art, the kind I haven't heard much about in the last 5-10 years at least. 

Art is subjective, and NFTs are brand-spanking-new.  In addition, Wikipedia is just a website.  If there's a debate going on as to whether NFTs are a new form of art, so be it, but whether the Wiki community wants to include an entry on them....first of all, who cares, and second, it's a trivial news story.

Anyone see the movie Don't Look Up?  I'm sure a lot of you have.  This would be perfectly placed in it as something that grabs people's attention instead of the much bigger, vastly more important issues that are going to affect them in the not-too-distant future if they would only just masturbating for entertainment with their smartphones.  So this is a non-issue for me, but if I had to give an opinion I'd say that there's nothing that distinguishes an NFT from a simple jpg file, and as such the NFT and jpg file represent forms of storage for art, not art in and of themselves.

As wary as I am about scams (especially those perpetrated through e-mails), one that looked like what OP posted might completely fool me into clicking on that link.  Generally I disregard every single e-mail I get from places I have accounts--not crypto exchanges in particular, but even ones from my bank for instance.  If I think there might be some truth to whatever an e-mail from a crypto-related account says, I'll log into my account and see if there's any messages for me.  If not, I figure there's a good chance the e-mail is just a spammy scam attempt.

Thanks for the warning, OP.  I hate to think how many people actually do fall for these kinds of phishing attempts.

I think you're misinterpreting what I've written in this thread, because I don't mean to tell anyone here "I told you so", nor am I panicking about anything.  I love bitcoin and everything it stands for, and I hate to see it get slaughtered like it has in the past few weeks. 

Long game or not, we're talking about a corporation in this thread, and the brutal fact is that while Michael Saylor may not plan to ever sell the bitcoin he's bought for MSTR, the company's stock is taking a beating because of those purchases.  MSTR shareholders might not share his zeal for bitcoin and may not have the patience to wait for either bitcoin or MSTR's stock price to recover--and if enough of them end up selling, it could tank even worse than bitcoin (assuming btc keeps sliding downward) because of market forces alone.

I share passions for the stock market and bitcoin, which is why I've posted so many times in this thread--not because I'm rooting for MSTR's demise or because I don't like Michael Saylor or anything he's said or done.  I've been keeping an eye on a few other bitcoin-related stocks as well, such as MARA, RIOT, and Coinbase.  They just don't happen to be relevant to this thread.

OP, just from reading the first blurb there about coinmarketcap's alleged understatements regarding bitcointalk's status among crypto forums I can see that this is all just nitpicky stuff.  There might be some language difficulties that account for your claims, whether they're on your part or on the sites you took quotes from.  For instance:

For one thing, f you put a comma after "forums" in the first sentence, the meaning changes to exactly what you said CMC didn't recognize.  For another, CMC looks like it uses a lot of "couch phrasing".  A lot of people and journalists do this, writing "one of the best/biggest/whateverest" instead of declaring absolute dominance.  Calling CMC out for that just isn't worth doing, IMO.

My advice to you is to just read before starting these threads about bitcointalk.  You might have fallen in love with the forum, you might be fishing for merit, but to me (and probably some other older members) it's kind of blah.

If you've done all that, why did you start this thread which you seem to have abandoned and will no doubt never lock?

All the answers you're ever going to need are probably on the first page of this thread, and most likely all future responses are going to be from people who didn't read anything here or don't know what they're talking about.  Welcome to bitcointalk.

I haven't read your other posts and don't know if you're really new to crypto, but if you stick around long enough and gain enough familiarity with certain things like exchanges, PoW vs. PoS, regulatory trends (which have to do with your privacy concerns--and I'm with you there, by the way), and on and on, you'll learn how to tell what's a scam and what's not.  Hopefully; even experienced bitcoiners get scammed hard from time to time, so just be careful and good luck.

Of course it was the government--obviously if FB had its way, Libra would be a thing right now instead of something that just kind of quietly died.

Why in hell was this thread bumped, anyway?  The bumper didn't really add much to this generally awful discussion except for a generic but lengthy shitpost.  Anything that's going to happen with Facebook and crypto and/or the metaverse has yet to be seen, and speculating about a potential stablecoin with Facebook's brand stamped on it is even more pointless than speculating on the price of bitcoin.

Oh, they're called Meta now, I forgot.  They should have just changed their name to Uni so that when they take over the metaverse space, they can just claim they own the Universe.  Bunch of fucking sociopathic autists in motion.

I don't understand what you said in the above statement, and one reason for my confusion is that what Michael Saylor says about what he's going to do with anything MSTR owns (bitcoin included) has nothing to do with accounting principles.  The only thing that matters is whether any bitcoin is sold and profits/losses are realized, i.e., what MSTR does and not what it or Saylor says.

And if mark-to-market accounting has to be used, it doesn't even matter if bitcoin is sold or not.  It'll be treated as an appreciating or depreciating asset based on what the market dictates.

Can you define that term in the context of this discussion?  I'm really curious.

Are you working on the new forum software by any chance?  I ask this for two reasons:

1) I find it nearly impossible to believe that Theymos wouldn't be able to slap up a price ticker somewhere on the screen, even though the current forum's software probably came on a 8" floppy disc, and
2) If you are one of the worker bees contributing to whatever it is Theymos is doing with the new forum software, could you tell us if a price ticker is going to be a feature?

OP, obviously everyone has made you aware that you're not the first person to request this, but nor should you feel stupid for asking.  Personally I think it's an excellent idea, and the more threads that pop up asking for it the better.  That way maybe Theymos will take notice of what some of the community members want.  And frankly I think it'd be helpful in some ways--like when writing posts in Speculation or whenever you need to know the price of bitcoin for a post and don't feel like leaving the site to check preev.  It's not a massive pain in the ass, but it'd just be a nice feature.

Since I've been closely watching bitcoin's nosedive (with clenched teeth, even though I don't own enough to be sweating right now), MSTR has been on my mind.  I've no doubt Michael Saylor will continue to justify his purchases and pump bitcoin, MSTR shareholders might be questioning whether it's worth holding their stock--I kind of have the feeling that at least some of them aren't familiar with how severe bitcoin's price swings can be or how much they can now affect MSTR's stock.

Here's my periodic chart dump, this one a 10-day chart:



It's Saturday in the US, so the stock market is closed for the weekend.  Since 4pm yesterday when the market closed, bitcoin has dropped over $2000 in value, and it was falling all throughout the trading day as well.  If bitcoin doesn't show some sort of recovery by Monday morning, my guess is that there's probably going to be a flood of sell orders for MSTR stock.  Yikes.

ShowOff, if you're wondering why the number of merits you've received since you hit Legendary rank has fallen off a cliff, just take a look at how many I gave you prior to you hitting Legendary.  It was 199 merits out of the 524 it took to rank up, which I was trying to help you do.  Now that you can't rank up any further, I'm not reviewing your post history anymore and, as usual, am saving my sMerits for lower-ranked members who need them.

That's my theory as to why that happened to you; it's not because you don't make good posts, because you do.

That's precisely it, and I don't think there's any other reason for ShowOff's merit-earning drop.

And he might have done nothing malicious with Legendary status had he earned it, but there's a good chance he might have more than one account with that rank by now and might be eyeing bitcoin-paying signature campaigns that generally pay more if you've got more signature space to rent.  And what would then happen?  Spam city....which is precisely what the situation was prior to the merit system.

Thus it doesn't make me sad or happy or bring a giggle to my deviant brain that these >1000 activity Newbies exist.  All I am is satisfied that the merit system took care of those potential problems I mentioned.

No.

I do thank you for calling attention to yourself and your trust score, because apparently I missed the thread in which you were called out for selling accounts.  There's rules and then there's the real rules, and you ought to know the difference between the two.  If you don't, start learning quick.

Why else would corporations be interested in something like the metaverse (which I confess I don't completely understand)?  They sure aren't getting involved for charitable purposes, and while monetary profit is no doubt one of their aims, I think you're absolutely right that they're looking to squeeze as much personal information out of people as possible.

Personal data is almost better than cash to companies like Facebook, since the more they know about you the more efficiently they can target all that bullshit advertisement.

Yeah, I was watching some videos on good ol' YT and I heard that fact mentioned.  As I said above I'm pretty ignorant of what the metaverse is exactly, and I wouldn't have known it didn't come zipping straight out of M. Fuckerberg's brain had I not been made aware of that fact.  Seems sort of like a very hostile takeover of old, publicly-available tech, being rebranded by an evil company for sinister purposes.  Think that's being overwrought?  MZ is worse than every single Google employee put together.

I take that as a suggestion which sometimes has to be completely discarded.  More often than not I've found myself in an unforgiving frame of mind when dealing with PMs asking for negative trust removal--but that's not to say I don't remove feedback, because I've removed many. 

But if the feedback was given a year or more since the appeal via PM, I always look to see if there's any evidence that the member has improved in any way, or at the very least hasn't repeated whatever it was I negged him for.  So I would suggest to Poker Player that he try to step back and look at the reason(s) why he left the feedback in the first place, why the member thinks he needs that neg removed (is he a sig spammer or bounty hunter-spammer?), and what's the person done in all that time you weren't on DT?  People can rehabilitate, but I find that it's rare.

In any case it's your call, Poker Player.  Be bold and be confident--or at least fake it until you're rollin' around bitcointalk with a Cuban stogie a-smokin' in a Bentley like a boss.  You've got the potential to be that guy.

Jesus, with my attention span being on the extreme left of the bell curve I'm surprised I found your reply--but I'm happy I did and I thank you for recommending those subreddits (even though I hate reddit in a general way). 

And by the way, I never used to care so much about my privacy.  My concern only started well after my government and huge corporations began their un-lubed violation of everything that even resembled a privacy-shaped hole, which they still haven't slowed down on.  If you're not following me, I'm saying that to Google, Facebook, Twitter, and every branch of the US government, your privacy is nothing but an industrial-strength blow-up fuckdoll.

Where was I?  Ah, thanks to dkbit98 for the post about ways to watch YT vids in a very sideways and deliciously subversive way.  Individuals may not have the power to stick these whores with the big D, but even small pokes can satisfy if one's frustration level has gotten into the red zone.

You better believe it--I remember 2016-17 when bitcoin was exploding people's brains all over the world.  The forum had an influx of new accounts, alt accounts, you name it, and they were all trying to get into signature campaigns regardless of whether they met the qualifications or not. 

It was a crazy time (don't know if you were around back then), and all of those new accounts led to a lot of very low-value posts.  That was the bad part.  A lot of people weren't interested in discussion so much as plopping down as many shitposts as they could during their waking hours.

Sure man, it's a free forum and you can ask DT members to tag cheaters all you like--as long as you provide sufficient evidence, because if you don't you're just going to get ignored.  The way OP did it in this thread was perfectly acceptable, but it's up to individual DT members as to whether they want to tag cheaters, scammers, or whoever.  DT members aren't some unified group that works together; it's just a bunch of members who happen to have high trust ratings, and not all of them are scam busters.

You can certainly do it yourself if you catch someone cheating, though if you're not on DT the member probably won't even notice they've been tagged.  Some years ago I wasn't on DT but had tagged a whole bunch of members for buying/selling accounts.  The day I made it onto the DT list my inbox was flooded with requests to remove the feedback I'd left, because it now carried more weight and those members' trust scores showed up red.

TL;DR: Tag 'em yourself, but try to get at least one DT member to back you.

I agree, and I think OP did the right thing here--he wants negative trust with some oomph to it, if you know what I mean.  The sad fact we all know is that not all negs are created equally; DT negs will change a member's trust score and display the bright red color to members who don't have a customized trust list.  Asking DT for help and presenting solid evidence was the right way to go.

Unfortunately these look like junk accounts that could easily be replaced, because they're just being used for bounty (cheating) activities.  So the owner likely isn't shedding any tears that his reputation is destroyed or anything like that.  It's always so much more fun when members with real reputations get busted for shady shit and bukkake'd with DT red.