Quick question— is it possible that someone is buying up all the ERC 20 coins from the people on your list?

It was actually in 2013 when counting transactions with economic value. The transaction in 2014 was a payment to that address worth less than a half penny at the time and is worth $0.03 today.

I wouldn’t give the time to respond to this and wouldn’t blame anyone involved if they didn’t either.

It doesn’t take anything to receive a merit and merit isn’t generally worth anything to a high ranking account that isn’t trying to help a specific person to rank up.

I can see this turning into another witch-hunt, which is not something I want to see.

He has already said that he lost his private keys when his HDD died due to an electricity problem in his house. The value of his bitcoin may have been only a few hundred dollars and it would not be out of the realm of normalcy if he didn’t have backups.

Signing a 2011 address won’t prove anything, nor would signing an address with a hundred coins.

I am not aware of any prior hacked accounts that waited 4 months to start causing trouble— they will almost always try to scam or spread malware immediately because of the risk of the owner coming back to claim it.

It is fairly clear to me that the demands for proof of ownership is the result of his criticism of the current status quo.

Is there any indication his email was recently changed? If the email was not changed, the account presumably was not hacked -- this is speaking nearly four months after any potential hack. In general, hacked accounts will immidiately try to scam or otherwise cause damage because of the ongoing risk that someone will come along claiming to be the original owner of the account. If the email was not changed four months after the fact, there is also the risk the owner will simply reset the password via email to reclaim the account.

I am not aware of any hacked account causing damage 3+ months after the fact.

I would also not be especially surprised to see someone reseting their password via email after a long time of inactivity if the password was semi-unique, as people tend to forget these types of things if they have not used them in a long time.

The loan request was clearly not a serious request, and was more along the lines of pointing out all the ridiculousness in the lending section.

To be entirely fair, this is a question that you asked, and according to you, it was answered correctly. As you point out, the reference is only available to a small set of people, so someone looking through his post history would effectively need to do so while logged into his account.

I don't think there are many people from 2011 that can sign pre-2014 coins, especially large in large amounts. I suspect that most who did not cash out in 2013, cashed out in 2017 when the price went up to $20k. There are also probably a decent amount of sad sacks that cashed out at $20 or $50. Others probably did not put a lot of effort into ensuring their private keys worth $500 would remain when a HDD is no longer available.

I think the account is most likely not hacked in large part because he hasn't tried to cause any damage in the four months since he returned, despite having a very low profile. There was this thread, but it did not get much attention.

With that being said, he has very little trade history to start with, and as I pointed out here, it is usually not a good idea to trust someone (with a long/successful history of trading) after returning from a hiatus as their situation may have changed and caused them to be willing to do unsavory acts.

The US taxes its citizens' income, and takes approximately 50% of income at the most, but the majority pay much less, and even those who earn a lot can lower this to roughly 28% via simple, legal tax strategies (long term capital gains). Taxes paid in the US more or less goes to providing services for the country as a whole, defending the country or goes to the less well off. Venezuela has seized nearly all income and resource producing assets, and including (hyper)inflation that the government directly causes, taxes its people at an effective rate at over 99%. Tax revenue in Venezuela largely benefits the political elite and well connected.

Citizens are free to criticize those in power in the US without consequence from the government, while those in power in Venezuela will see those who criticize (who have influence) arrested on bogus charges, or otherwise are subjected to violence from the government.

Some of his political opponents knew about the photo for several months but were unable to publish it because they were unable to verify the photo.

It appears that someone decided to roll the dice with the photo after his comments defending the killing of babies.

Your proposal is good as the current system makes it difficult to keep track of changes in the trust network when VIPs and mods change their display name.

On the other hand, only providing UIDs makes it very difficult for anyone to analyze the information without automated tools.

Maybe a good solution would be to map the name to the UID if the name appears on trust.txt.xz

It is on deposit at their central bank.

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The current government is doing very bad things to their citizens and anything of value given to the current government will be turned into resources that will help the current government stay in control (and continue starving, arresting without cause, and murdering their citizens).

Once democracy is restored, the gold can be released. Obviously, socialism must also be done away with too.

No. I am not sure why you would think this...

There are a good amount of accounts that have lauda on their trust list who belong to a single account farmer and I know that some added lauda to their trust lists before he was ever anywhere near DT because that is when they were last logged in (others I cannot rule out adding lauda after he was added to DT because they logged in after lauda was added, but they nonetheless belong to the same person).

I don’t think there is any argument to say that there is not consensus that lauda should be anywhere near DT based on the very high number of high ranking, trustworthy people that have explicitly excluded lauda from their trust lists. (Plus the number of lesser known people that have also explicitly excluded lauda).

Just to let you know, many people will (and should) be suspicious when someone returns from a long hiatus and immediately asks for a loan. The risks of nonpayment for this type of situation are higher than ones trust/trade/loan history might imply.

This really doesn’t work prove anything.

I don’t think it is best to have a trust system in which all ratings are based on trades. There are plenty of reasonably legitimate reasons to leave both positive and negative ratings for non-trade related reasons, an attempt to scam is a good example of this.

If you are going to have any influence in the trust system, at a bare minimum, you should have trade experience. Similarly, someone with a lot of positive trust, should have trade experience, maybe not necessarily from the specific ratings they have, but in general, positive ratings should be observations of someone being able to trade and be trusted.

I am not aware of any cases in which someone has (attempted) to sell merit, at least not publicly.

If someone did want to sell merit, they would probably tell potential customers to contact them via PM or via some other off site mode of communication.

This is a good example of people being added to DT1 who do not have a proven track record of acting in a trustworthy way, and in many cases, do not have any meaningful (if any at all) trading experience. I am not sure this is a good thing.

The people who have ranked up after the merit system was implemented are few and far between.

Out of curiosity, what would the basis be for giving negative trust to someone receiving merit? Someone could be selling merit privately, get caught and have given merit to an innocent person. Or, someone could make a person look bad by giving merit when they are a known merit salesman.

I don’t know what that has to do with anything...

As long as zero people in participating in the dig campaign this should be fine. If there is anyone participating he needs to hold sufficient funds to pay each person.

You are going to send the money back? What about the people that joined with the understanding that payment would be guaranteed by you?