Coin-1, every time you publish this monthly list I get more motivated to hand out merits.  Some days I feel kinda bleh about posts or just don't see good ones because I'm not doing a lot of reading, but having some semblance of a scorecard like this thread just makes me want to do better as a merit source. 

Thanks again for keeping this updated, and I'm going to do my best to improve upon October's statistics (though I think I'm off to a worse start than I was last month).

Hopefully that's true, though I've seen plenty of scam accusations opened by brand new members who obviously did not see any warning signs originating from bitcointalk before they got scammed by [pick your choice of project/exchange/business] that had numerous threads dedicated to them being scammers. 

I even checked what the search results pulled up for "1xbit" and IIRC all of the top results were links to the site itself or positive reviews and so forth.  There weren't any red flags that showed up in at least the first two pages of search results.

Part of me agrees with OP that the Scam Accusation section really ought to focus on scams involving the forum, whether it's between members or concerning a project with a presence on bitcointalk that's scammed people (like bounty hunters, for instance).  But the other part of me does agree with JeromeTash that accusations against crypto-related scammers do serve a useful function not only to our community but the crypto community as a whole (though I have my doubts as to the effectiveness concerning the latter).

That makes me wonder about where the coins he bought for the fund were purchased and how they're going to be stored.  I think it's very cool that Singh chose to buy BTC and ETH outright (if I'm reading this correctly) instead of opting for derivatives, though I'm not sure if those futures/derivatives are any more risky than just owning the underlying coins.

IMO any more than that would be playing with fire--no pun intended.  There's a reason crypto generally doesn't correlate with other asset classes, and I think that's because it's such a new thing and hasn't attracted the attention of huge institutional investors who tend to buy and sell stocks and whatever else in tandem. 

Firefighters are among the bravest people in the world, and I really hope this investment strategy of Singh's bears fruit.  $25 million doesn't seem like a lot for a pension fund, but maybe that's because I'm not in that industry.

Nice work, OP.  I'm confident enough that Sterbens is involved with this ring that I left him a negative--and I tagged all the other accounts as well.

Interestingly enough, I had given negative trust to terrorJR back in 2018 for cheating bounties, and I'm amazed that he's still allowed to carry on as if it wasn't a problem.  Don't bounty managers look at feedback, or do these projects just not care about who they let advertise for them on the forum?  Christ, what a lousy business advertising model.

Wow, two newbies with shitposts in Meta 7 minutes apart.  Wonder what the odds are they're alt accounts?

This is not a Meta thread, OP.  I'm going to report it as belonging in another section or in the trashcan, because it's a bullshit, generic post with poor grammar and sentiments that have been written hundreds of times before, e.g., "trading takes much knowledge of cryptcurrency" etc.

That is a bit odd if you ask me, though I didn't look at mich's posts vs. the sources they were apparently copy/pasted from.  I'm assuming from the original thread plus this one that they're legitimate instances of plagiarism, so I'm not exactly sure why he hasn't been banned.  There isn't usually a pattern of double standards for older members when it comes to plagiarism as far as I know.  I've seen Legendary members with positive trust get busted for it before.

I'll be paying attention to what happens to this, OP.  Don't know about anyone else, but I appreciate you noticing this and making a thread about it, because it does indeed look like it should have resulted in a ban.

That's been pretty much my understanding of what they are, but it's always puzzled me why a government would want to implement a national cryptocurrency for any reason other than financial surveillance.  Right now, there might be a little bit of separation between banks and government, but it isn't much.  If the government created a currency based on a blockchain that wasn't anonymous, it wouldn't matter if people still used it with the banking system because they'd be able to see all of your financial transactions from the present all the way back to whenever you started using the CBDC.

Physical currency is quickly becoming antiquated, which seems to bother no one but is disturbing to me.  At present, the most anonymous form of money is cold, hard cash--as long as what you use it for isn't caught on some security camera and preserved for all eternity. 

People's attitudes toward a lot of things bother me these days--from mask-wearing to giving up privacy to companies like Facebook-- and I see the world headed down a very dangerous path.  Something like a CBDC might easily catch on in China, but man....I hope it never becomes a reality in the West.

Fuel was pretty low before COVID came along if I'm not mistaken, or at least gasoline was nowhere near as expensive as it is right now.  At my local gas station, the price is $3.56/gallon and I haven't seen it that high in a long time.  As far as there being logic to it, I'm not sure that's always involved in determining what a barrel of oil goes for--and the same goes for stocks, crypto, and nearly every asset class for which there's a market.  There could be politics involved, it could be the effect of inflation, it could be anything that's driving prices up.

But I think the most likely explanation is, in fact, inflation.  I'm seeing it everywhere, so why should oil/gas prices be exempt from it?  I'm hoping we don't see gas prices near $5/gallon like we did in the 2000s.  That was pretty rough, but that was before 2008 when (I think) the recession started after the housing market crashed and the banking crisis happened.

I absolutely agree--and the thread started by ArcusIsidar meets those standards, because it's nothing but a statement that says "these members suck, and they're scammers".  There's no evidence of any scam presented, and there's not even a description of any scam, no details, just an angry flame post.  Those types of threads don't belong in any section, because they're just trolling threads and that isn't allowed here.

If ArcusIsidar has a problem with all of those members he named, he ought to create a thread or maybe multiple threads in Reputation to air his grievances, but I think that's all he's got, i.e., complaints about how DT members use the trust system and who knows what else. 

Nobody has the right of free speech here.  Theymos has been very good about letting members express all sorts of things without fear of being moderated into silence, but this forum doesn't abide by the US constitution.  Other than that part of your post, I agree with your assessment of ArcusIsidar's garbage thread.

Yeah, speaking of campaigns and skills....there seems to be a plethora of under-qualified workers in that area, given that the main skill needed to participate in them is writing.  And if you post was supposed to be a pep talk about the availability of online work, I'd say it's probably unnecessary; people are scrambling to find work online, especially in crypto.

And of course, I'd say your advice applies only to a small demographic, which is most likely males in their 20s-30s with programming skills or at least some serious knowledge of crypto projects.  In other words, you're preaching to the choir here.

See what I'm talking about as far as those under-qualified shitposters?  Dude, if you're creating videos on Youtube, blogging for money, or any of that I don't know what that "freely" part is all about, and there are so many strings attached if you're using one of those platforms that you might as well be working as a hand puppet.  TL;DR: You have no clue what you're writing.

Yeah, there are two things that seem to determine whether an exchange will require KYC or not--one is the daily withdrawal amount, and the other is whether you're trading with fiat (and a third would be the exchange's regulatory compliance, I guess).  I've never had to go through the KYC process on exchanges, as I don't trade much and never trade in large amounts.  Sometimes my trades are for laughably low amounts.

And OP, I'm sure you got the answer you were looking for since all the options I know of were mentioned, but I just wanted to add that unless p2p exchanges become the norm, the probability is high that there aren't going to be any centralized exchanges that don't require KYC in a year or two from now.  When Yobit closes up shop for good, you'll know that time has come.

I'm not surprised that Coinbase would offer a lending service like this, since now that they're a publicly-traded company they've got to keep coming up with new products/services to keep their revenue rolling in; I just question whether this is going to be taken advantage of by many people.

People who own crypto tend to not want fiat, that's the first thing that comes to mind, and second, if you own bitcoin (or whatever Coinbase is accepting as collateral) you probably are well-off enough such that you wouldn't need a loan.  I know those wouldn't apply to absolutely everyone and that there would be some crypto holders who'd use Coinbase's lending service, but my gut is telling me that it's just not going to catch on.

Look at the Lending section on bitcointalk.  It is (or was) so frequently the case that people in need of a bitcoin loan never have any altcoins they can put up as collateral.  That section represents a very small slice of the bitcoin-using population, true, but somehow I think the same thing is going to hold true in Coinbase's case.  We'll see.  I don't think it's a horrible idea on their part.

Say what?  I can't speak for Bestchange's campaign, but as far as Chipmixer goes, it's got a reputation as one that's extremely selective as far as accepting only members who have a proven history of making posts of above-par quality--not the other way around, i.e., its members don't make better (or even more) posts because they're in the Chipmixer campaign. And believe me, there's no forcing of anything going on.  Some members consistently make fewer than 50 posts/week, and other members who make way more than they'd get paid for.

You think?  I'm not so sure, because people give merits for a wide variety of reasons and even from one merit source to the next there are different standards as far as what constitutes a merit-worthy post.  The only consistent criterion I could see would be length, with a well-answered question (of any length) coming in at a close second.

I'm not quite clear as to what you're asking in the above (or in the rest of your post), as your English is too difficult for me to understand this early in the morning, but I'd say no--what you described about members coming back to life and either asking to have feedback removed and/or joining bounties again isn't unusual at all.  I've had members I'd tagged 3 years ago go inactive and then, magically once bitcoin is booming and there's another altcoin craze (NFTs, DeFi, whatever), they've rediscovered the forum as a cash cow that they're going to use to milk dry yet again.

The general rule I've found is that once someone has figured out that money can be made here by bounty hunting, they never really go away unless they get banned and don't create a new account and fly under the radar.  A lot of members are from countries where the money they can make on bitcointalk and the projects that advertise here is far more than they could make doing hard manual labor for 12 hours a day, so who in their right mind would choose the latter?

Yeah, I'm curious about the "schemes under the table" part of his accusation, because he doesn't provide any evidence for such--or any evidence of anything at all.  That thread ought to be trashcanned instead of moved to Scam Accusations, because all it is is a mud-slinging mess of a thread. 

That's not to say that green-trusted members haven't pulled off scams before, because they absolutely have (anyone remember MasterP?) but they don't remain on DT or green-trusted for long after their scams are uncovered.  But those members who've been trusted and who've scammed people aren't the ones ArcusIsidar mentioned, so it's really a BS thread.

OK, I think it'd be just good customer service to fix the problem without charging the customer for a silly error like this--but to charge $500?  That's just a straight-up shitty practice, and that tells me they're willing to gouge anybody and everybody they can, because obviously they care more about $500 than they do about keeping someone using their exchange and/or about a disgruntled customer creating a black mark on their reputation like OP did.

I've never heard of BKEX, by the way.  Are they a really small, unregulated exchange or one that just services a single country or something?

I'd be in doubt about that as well, and I bet you're quite conflicted as to what to do.  That's a lot of money you stand to lose if you don't pay them, and if you do, you run the risk of them stealing another $500 from you.  I wish I had some sage advice for you, but it's a tough call on this one.  If they don't have an extensive history of scam accusations against them, I might send the $500 (even though it's outrageous) but again, I don't know anything about BKEX.

Pretty sure that's all you're going to hear from them, unfortunately.  Whatever you decide to do, keep this thread updated if you would.  I know I'm interested in the outcome.  Good luck.

As DireWolfM14 mentioned, dkbit98 has had a short fuse lately....and I'd go so far as to say he's always burning a short one, because if my pathologically-constricted memory serves me correctly, he's been snippy with me a couple of times in threads about Ledger wallets, which I know he's not a fan of.  But I mean come on, QS.  You've been here a long time, and I know you've got a much thicker skin than this.

This is true, unfortunately.  I think a lot of us like a little drama mixed in with all the technical discussions and shitposts, as it makes this joint a little more lively--that's certainly true for me, as long as I'm not the center of the drama, but that hasn't happened for a while, and even then it was just some bitching by a group of zero-value members who I tagged years ago.

Man, if all the unhealthy threads got locked, where would all the fun come from?

Well, you're a very generous merit source who likes to help out newbies, and there's nothing wrong with that--but you have to be very careful with very new members who consistently make exceptional posts, because on this forum that just isn't the norm.  And it's been the case many times that when you see newbies like that, they're usually plagiarizing.  It's that simple.

If you got busted for plagiarism, there's little chance your ban is going to be reversed and you can forget about any improvements, because you're done on bitcointalk.

Nah, cheater-hunters tend to get a decent amount of merits when they link a bunch of accounts for instance or expose a scam with a lot of evidence presented--and for the most part that merit is deserved, because those posts have a lot of time and effort put into them. 

Spam-busting is something all members should try to do if they care about the forum at all, and without regard to any status or recognition it might bring.  I agree with the others that OP seems to be a bit focused on increasing rank and building a reputation here quickly, which does make some alarm bells ring in my head.  On the other hand, he's a decent poster so far and hasn't been outed as anyone's alt account (which has happened with members like mdayonliner and one or two others I can't remember).

OP, just keep doing what you're doing and you'll be fine.  Don't jump the gun, because it takes a while to become a known personality here and if it even appears that you're trying to do precisely that, it'll backfire in an instant.

Are you looking for books on purely economics or are you including things like trading and business in your query?

There are some great books I've read about crazy business things, like The Smartest Guys in the Room (the Enron story) and When Genius Failed (about the LTCM debacle that nearly crashed the economy back in 1998).  They're great reads, even if they're about very specific events and not about general economics.

Books about stock trading, bubbles, and whatnot that I've read are The Intelligent Investor, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (or anything about or written by Jesse Livermore), The Snowball (about Warren Buffett), Origins of the Crash (Roger Lowenstein is an excellent author on economic topics), Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds, and Tulipomania : The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower & the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused.

If you really want to learn about general economics, I'd suggest picking up a textbook on it from Amazon or wherever.  I took a few econ courses in college, and they were very interesting.  If you have an opportunity to take a course in that area, I'd highly suggest doing so.