The forum isn't dying as far as I can tell.  I'm curious as to what makes you say that.

Yep, that definitely looks like retaliatory exclusion to me.  I'm not exactly sure why he hasn't excluded me from his trust list, but it could be because he knows I don't have anything against him aside from the fact that he's overzealous with the negs he leaves--and I've communicated that to him before.  I believe I even told him I would reconsider my exclusion of him if he modified his feedback-giving habits, which he hasn't.

JollyGood, if you're reading this thread (which you probably are), you should weigh in on this.  Otherwise it's just going to be a discussion about you without hearing your thoughts, and that's kind of lopsided. 

If I'm not mistaken (and I'm by no means an accountant), most corporations don't have to use mark-to-market accounting.  Financial companies do, or often do, but I'm not sure if MSTR is required to.

The reason I'm chiming in about this is because I remember reading a history of Enron, and Jeff Skilling was lobbying the company to use mark-to-market because it would allow Enron to value its assets however it wanted to (and they often overvalued the ones that were hard to value in order to inflate their balance sheet).

In any case, if a company is using that method of accounting, there's nothing really bizarre about having to report a profit/loss on a quarterly basis.  That's the whole point of m-2-m.

Man, it must be time for me to get new glasses.  I swear I didn't see my username on that list, but I just checked it again and it was there.  Maybe I should get my head checked, too. 

And I don't know how I wound up that high on the list, but I'm flattered.  It sort of reminds me of how grateful I was to be added to DT2 a few years ago, back when it was a really big deal to be on the DT list.  Newer members might not have a sense of how hard it used to be to get two DT1 inclusions now that we have a rotating system, but I remember that I was beyond flattered that I was being considered by hilariousandco, Lauda, Vod, and Blazed.  How times have changed.

Wow, that's ballsy.  I respect that, though there's no way I could keep all of my assets in crypto--it's just far too risky, and at my age I'm more risk-averse than I used to be.  But I bet you that the people who do keep all or most of their wealth in bitcoin (I'm not sure about most altcoins) are going to see it pay off big time within a few years.  My one big regret in crypto is that I didn't buy and hold bitcoin when I had a chance to buy it at around $200 back in 2015 or so.

Do you know what the rate of inflation is in your country?  Every country has at least some inflation, but right now it's hitting certain regions harder than others.  In the US it's climbing, though I'm not sure what the exact official rate is (not that I trust it completely).  In any case, holding onto cash is a bad idea.  I don't know if crypto is a great hedge against inflation, but it's far better than keeping your money in the bank.

It's more like saying if you have the choice between throwing water on a flaming pile of shit or your house that's on fire, you should choose wisely.

It's not much of a stretch.  People are so caught up in making shitloads of money from frivolous ventures like NFTs that they've lost sight of why such things have become popular: tons of "free" money that isn't free at all--there's a cost to it that we haven't seen yet--and markets that are booming because of rampant speculation.  Everyone is drunk at a party that they think is never going to end, and to use your analogy of a burning house, there's a fire at the party that's starting to block the escape routes....but everyone is so plastered that they're not even aware of the smoke.

As far as the staring at smartphones, well, I see it every day.  We're growing into a world where people prefer staring at screens rather than talk to the person who's next to them.  Nobody is living in the moment, communication skills are being lost, and it's no wonder society has become so fragmented.

Every young generation has been poo-poo'ed by older generations; that's not unique to millenials or gen Zs, believe me.  The youth today are going to be the leaders of the world when they get older, and I'm just hoping they know how to run it.  They're also going to have one hell of a mess to clean up, courtesy of those "older counterparts".

I've got nothing against Neopets; I'm just not aware of it, and it seems trivial from my perspective.  No offense to the young folks here.  I'm an old fart who's discontent with the way things are run and the way I see the world headed.  Take everything I say with a mountain of salt.

It should go without saying that when people sell bitcoin they usually have need for the cash they get from it--unless they're just traders who're taking their profit off the table because they think bitcoin has hit a peak.  I've always had the feeling that a lot of smaller bitcoin owners are speculators who bought it with cash they're probably going to need in a month or two, and I think that's especially true during extended bull markets.

Regarding your story about the developers who bought land from people and did a lousy job with what they built: whoever sold them that land probably had to let go of it at some point.  Real estate very rarely stays in one family for more than a generation or two anymore, so I wouldn't fault them for selling it.  Unless you know the reason why they did, I don't see how they could be criticized for it.  I doubt they knew what the developers were going to do after they bought it.

It's amazing how much outrage and cohesion amongst people that can be created by some barely-known game trying to pull off some sort of NFT scam.  Yet when our governments are screwing us all in the ass with economic policies that are surely going to wreck the countries in which we live, most people shrug and continue staring at their smartphones.

To all the millenials and young folks from the newer generation: if you don't start paying attention to what's really important, you're in for a fucking catastrophe, which is probably coming sooner rather than later.  I wouldn't give a second thought to Neopets, NFTs, or any of those sideshow distractions.  Support real cryptocurrency (like bitcoin) and either get involved in politics directly or make your voice heard to the politicians now in power.  If you don't, you'll regret it, believe me.

As far as this Neopets thing goes, what do you expect?  OP summed up what the conversation probably was like at their headquarters, and the bottom line is that they thought they could exploit people's mania for NFTs, which I think are absolutely ridiculous.  If you paid 1 satoshi for an NFT, you've paid too much.

But freedom of speech should mean something to everyone if they believe it to be a human right, regardless of governmental guarantees.  No? 

In this case, we're talking about whether an internet forum should filter information based on whether or not it's true.  The discussion is also extending to governments and corporations, too, though that's kind of off-topic in this thread.  It ultimately boils down to whether a post that says "2+2=5" should be allowed, and I think that it should be.  I think that kind of statement should always be allowed, whether you extend it to flat-earthers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, or anti-vaxxers.  The minute you have someone filtering speech based on what that someone believes is the truth, we're in 1984.

Yep, it's all about you.

Yep, got the vaccination.  I've never been anti-vaccine--far from it, though I don't like government, school, or employer mandates for people to get the COVID shot.  I got it because I didn't see much risk to it, since vaccine technology is pretty well advanced and the manufacturers of them know what they're doing.  Are there risks?  Always.  But the benefits outweigh those risks IMO, and I don't want to have to deal with the hassle of being unvaccinated if we're forced into a "vaccine passport" situation.

It was a compromise of my values, true, but this wasn't a hill that I was willing to die on.

I think this is probably a discussion the community should have, and you'll notice that my username isn't in any of OP's quoted lists.  That's because while I appreciate JollyGood's attempts to fight scammers and general scumbags, he's far too overzealous with the negative feedback he leaves, and quite a few of the negs he's left have been abusive.  I haven't looked at any that he might have changed to neutral since I excluded him from my trust list, but he definitely has a habit of abusing the trust system with wrongly-given negatives.

So no, I don't think he should be on DT unless he starts abiding by the community standards (and Theymos's suggestions) with regard to what behavior deserves a negative trust and what doesn't.

I kind of figured there was a personal reason why you reacted as strongly to BADecker's post as you did.  I'm sorry for your brother-in-law, and I know caring for someone with dementia is very hard.  I'll just leave it at that.

What precisely are you suggesting here, that bounties don't accept members of Newbie rank?  At all?  Or are you proposing that they limit the number that they accept?

I have signatures and avatars on ignore, so I can never tell who's in a bounty/campaign unless they have something written in their personal message space.  Are Newbies even allowed to participate in bounties?  I thought Jr. Member was the lowest rank that could participate.  Either way, I doubt that bounty managers (most of them, anyway) care much about keeping the forum clean, so this suggestion will just probably be ignored and forgotten about.  That's the sad truth, OP.

Edit: OP added those thread links while I was writing my post.  I clicked on the first three, and it looks like only Jr. Members and above can participate in the bitcointalk part of those bounties, which is good except that it doesn't take much to rank up from Newbie.  But who knows how many alt accounts there are in any of those bounties?  Probably tons of them, but it's been a problem for a long time and nobody seems inclined to do much about it.

When you say "you", are you talking about me or BADecker?  I never said humans aren't humans, so I'm confused by that statement.

I think you're making an enormous mountain out of a molehill.  I looked through that thread and nowhere does BADecker call for the killing of anyone.  What is this murder of 3 billion people you're talking about?

And to everyone else: I don't claim there shouldn't be limits on free speech, but the government controlling the dissemination of information based on whether they believe it's true or false is a very bad thing.  Science has made mistakes many, many times in the past, you know.  Science is changing all the time as new information is discovered, and people should be able to have all arguments laid out on the table in order to judge for themselves instead of having everything filtered through a governmental censor.

As to what bitcointalk does, that's less of a concern to me.

That might not be obvious to OP how to do it, in which case I'd point out that Pmalek made a post that I greatly appreciated:

It works, and I swear I thought you weren't able to generate wallets with legacy addresses.

I'm aware of that, and I'm also aware that free speech in the US isn't without restrictions, but lying isn't one of them unless it's to obstruct justice.  Lying on an internet forum or spreading false information on one is not the same thing as yelling "fire" in a crowded theater; that's a false equivalence.  Can you imagine if the government decided to ban statements that they deemed to be false?  They'd essentially be deciding what's true and what isn't, and that sounds a lot like an Orwellian nightmare.

I don't see you complaining about it often, but what does that have to do with anything?  Obviously you feel strongly about either this issue or the member who made the statement.  Either way, I don't think a post should be deleted because it's misinformation.

Good point, I think.  I'll have to give that some thought.  Part of me sees the contradiction, part of me sees this as the forum deciding what's true vs. what's a low-value post, e.g., "bitcoin has great future and is increasing day by day, I love bitcoin, blah blah blah".

I'd love to hear what others have to say about that.

Actually, Ramen noodles and cigarettes (if they can be smuggled in if we're talking about US prisons) are the real currency.  An inmate's word is just a gauge of respect. 

Why on earth did you bump this thread, even if it's yours?

I don't think the forum has anything to worry about, and hopefully if any government agency started giving Theymos any grief about it, he'd tell them to fuck off.  We do still live in a country that allows free speech, you know.  Youtube might have caved in and started banning accounts that take an anti-vaccine stance, but they're in bed with everyone from their advertisers to the government.  Bitcointalk is not.

You might not like what BADecker posted, but that's the whole point of free speech (which Theymos believes in, if I'm not mistaken).  The only speech that needs to be protected from censorship is the type that people don't like.

I don't know why people even post there.  This is a bitcoin forum first and foremost, and there are other sites where discussion about politics is better by orders of magnitude than the P&S section.

1) Stop using that word "sir".  You might intend it as a sign of respect, but on this forum it's a hallmark of a bounty hunter shitposter's vocabulary.

2) You might want to post in whatever local board you fit into, because your English makes your posts hard to read, and that's in addition to the lack of anything interesting in them (I looked at your post history before writing this).  You've been posting in Meta and Economics quite often, so that tells me you're actively merit-seeking.  I don't doubt that's exactly what you're doing, because:

Again, stop it with the "sir".

Maybe we see things differently, but if not, can't you be straight with the guy?

Edit: 

LOL.  Gotcha.

Are you seeing a new market for merits?  I ask that because I've heard of merits being sold on telegram for quite a while now--but I don't visit any of those sites you mentioned, so I wouldn't be up-to-date on any boom in the merit sales market if there was one.

And if that's the case--that there's currently a lot of merit being sold--I wonder why that is.  Are there currently a lot more signature campaigns than there have been in the past couple of years or so?  I think I've asked that recently, and I don't think there are.  Bounties, maybe, but not sig campaigns.

Ah, I remember that as well, but I'm pretty sure it was a joke.

Yeah well, people who sell accounts or merits have proven that they aren't always the brightest bulbs in the box.  Some of them kept creating account sales threads right on the forum after it was common knowledge that they'd get their accounts tagged by DT members.