That account has not accessed his account in ~5 years, and I don't see him logging in anytime soon. I don't see any of that merit being misused.

There are obviously a limited number of spots. Any campaign manager will choose the objectively best candidates for the slots available so that both the subject company and perspective companies will see positive results from signature advertising of the campaign.

Any merit requirements are minimums to even be considered (this is my presumption). If there are enough people who have received 50 merit in the last 4 months to fill the entire campaign, chances are they will fill all the available spots if everything else is equal.

If you have very low merit, chances are hiring you to advertise would not reflect very well on the company paying for the advertising, nor the campaign manager. 

This is a fake YoBit site, however I put some of the blame on YoBit for this. They have consistently had such poor support and customer service that these types of scams have popped up over the years on many platforms. I have long speculated the owners/operators/management of YoBit to be behind at least some of these 'support' scams.

Well I believe that altcoin giveaways are not allowed, so any worthless altcoin creators would need to be giving away bitcoin or else the thread would be disallowed, regardless of the sponsorship. This is why I mentioned that the last thread referenced in the OP is against the rules.

It is possible to require Pre-clearance to have a sponsorship thread, however there still needs to be clear guidelines as to what is allowed and what is not allowed, or else there will be controversy when certain requests are denied that are similar to threads that are allowed. 

I would argue a sponsorship may be appropriate if the sponsor is funding the prizes/giveaway, or a substantial portion of the prize. This appears to be the case for the first thread.

I think this is also the case for the third thread, however I don’t think they are giving away bitcoin so the thread is actually against the rules because altcoin giveaways are not allowed. If they were giving away bitcoin, I would similarly argue it would be fine for a sponsorship for similar reasons as above.

I agree that the second thread is not sufficiently high content to support a paid sponsorship. The majority of the thread is a list of participants and it appears the prize is being paid out of coin collected from the various participants minus a fee.

I was referring to the thread opened by the OP. He has not presented evidence he is the owner of the account. He has not even presented evidence the account changed hands (this was uncovered independently of what he has posted).

I don’t dispute the account changed hands, it almost certainly did. I dispute there is evidence it was hacked.

This may be a distinction without a difference to some people...

It could have changed hands possiblyprobably, but a single post three months later, IMO is insufficient evidence to support it is hacked.

Any troll can review the same information you reviewed programmatically and find accounts to make a troll thread about.

Probably at least 95% of those who meet the threshold criteria who participates at least every week.

I believe Biden already said he is going to have a Women or a person of color on his ticket as VP. Mayor Pete is neither of these.

Mini Mike Bloomberg announced he is dropping out and will endorse Biden.

This basically sets up a two man race between Sanders and Biden.

It now looks unlikely there will be a contested convention as the candidates that dropped out have only about 130 delegates out of 3979 (3.2%). Warren likely cost Sanders from winning the majority of delegates last night and she has no realistic path to victory going into last night.

Meanwhile, trump is doing his best to sow discord within the democratic voters, trying to make Sanders supporters believe that the DNC is trying to prevent him from getting the nomination, which is probably true, and by pointing out that Warren cost Sanders MA.

As always, it was a pleasure. Very professional

The merit system was not designed to stop fighting among forum members, it was designed to stop spammers from being able to rank up.

There is a lot of fighting among cliques of forum members. There are probably at least 5 threads with various disputes in both Meta and Reputation that are posted in at least daily.

This is the reason your account was banned. When your account is banned, *you* are banned. You cannot create additional accounts to evade your ban.

If you are banned and wish to participate in the forum, you will need to plead for clemency from the admins. If you don’t have permission to create a new account when your previous accounts are banned, any future accounts you create will be banned. If you continue creating accounts without permission, or otherwise cause problems, it will become less likely that clemency will be granted in the future.

Were you evading a ban? Do you have any other accounts?

Many western jurisdictions will require KYC and AML procedures when there are transactions exceeding certain thresholds.

Someone wanting to launder elicit proceeds could potentially create 100 accounts on a gambling platform, make equal deposits, and on each account go 'all in' on a 99-1 bet that should payout exactly once over the 100 accounts they made. Each deposit was small, however the amount being withdrawn would be ~100x (99x) the initial deposit.

In general, companies can deal in fairly small amounts (a few hundred dollars, to a few thousand dollars per transaction) without completing KYC. The majority of gamblers will either withdraw less than their deposit, or a small percentage above their initial deposit due to the casino's house edge. Someone who deposits $500 worth of coin is almost certainly not going to have to complete KYC based on the above. Forcing everyone to complete KYC will increase costs, and will force the casino to increase their HE to compensate for these increased costs. If someone who deposited $500 happens to win 200x their initial deposit, they will probably have exceeded thresholds that require them to collect KYC/AML information.

Also, if someone wins many times their initial deposit, there is a chance the gambler is exploiting a weakness in the site's security. If a casino might have been exploited by a hacker, but the casino is unable to prove it, they may decide to collect KYC, payout the winnings, and go to law enforcement later once they have more evidence.

It sounds like the final model uses features that are outputs (predictions) from other models, and sometimes those other models use features that are outputs from other models.

Keep in mind that a classification model that is accurate 90% of the time is considered 'good', so 538's 'final' model may be relying on inaccurate information (they say they account for this possibility, at least this is how I read their 'how it works' article).

When 'training' a model, you need a lot of data to avoid overfitting. At the end of the day, there are only presidential elections every 4 years, and less frequently if you remove primary seasons that are not really competitive (such as the current GOP primary season). It is not entirely clear how they are accounting for this.

I would point out that if the probabilities change a lot after an election, that means either one of their downstream models was incorrect, or their 'final' model made a bad prediction.

The point I was trying to make in my previous post is that what is important to voters has changed since Trump got elected, and this means that certain assumptions that could have been good assumptions in previous models, may no longer be good assumptions. Not directly related to a changing electorate, but the DNC had thresholds to get on the debate stage, one of which was the number of individual donors, so early in the primary season, some candidates were spending $50+ to get a new $5 donor. A feature might have been able to accurately predict outcomes in previous elections might not have similar accuracy in the 2020 election, and this may hold true after these thresholds are dropped as campaign staff likely got more efficient at getting new donors.

That is one model and I wouldn’t trust the daily movements on these models, and the political landscape is so different than in the past, so I would consider these models to be unreliable in general (they are based on historical data).

We will have a much clearer picture by Wednesday morning. I would predict that Bernie gets between 40-45% of the delegates awarded tomorrow (including those that Warren wins) and Biden/Bloomberg splitting the remainder roughly evenly either directly or via endorsements. If Sanders gets over 50% of the delegates tomorrow, it will pretty much be over (as in Sanders getting a plurality) unless either Biden or Bloomberg immediately drops out.  

Looking at the polling for ST states, I would not put Sanders getting >50% out of the question.

If you are okay with using Google Cloud instead of AWS, you could get a 300 credit upon signing up. The credit expires after a year and does not renew, however they do have an ongoing free tier I believe. Your account is not restricted when you sign up to get the credit.

It looks like that some back room deals are taking place to clear the majority of the field prior to Super Tuesday.

It is almost certain that Sanders will win a plurality of delegates with Bloomberg (having spent $400 mm+ with the intention of starting to even be on the ballot on ST), and Biden (coming off a big win in South Carolina. Although he might be confused why Voters in SC are voting for a senate seat in Delaware), being in the race. Their delegates combined may be greater than Sanders.

From the looks of it, no matter what happens, there will be a large group of Democrats very unhappy with the nominee.

Are you referring to this thread as the basis for what you are saying? If so, I believe you are misrepresenting what happened.

My understanding is that FJ asked someone to stop gambling at their website and the gambler used an alternative account to continue gambling.

If you are going to transact with a reputable company in large amounts, you are going to have to complete KYC, or else governments will eventually shut down the company when it becomes associated with money laundering. There really isn’t any way around this. I don’t like it, but it is reality.