If Ukraine had no laws on the books regarding cryptocurrency and didn't define it either as an asset or a currency, I can see why some people would refer to their recent pronouncement as "legalization", but for journalists to do so is absurd.  The only way something gets legalized is if it was illegal to start with--and OP, I'm sure you know that, but some folks reading this thread might not understand the distinction if there's a language/knowledge barrier.

People making multiple threads on the forum about this "legalization" are just parroting other people's posts or articles, IMO, and not thinking about what the words really mean.  That sort of thing drives me nuts; it's like when everyone was saying "When altcoin season?" in 2019-20.  That phrase has absolutely no meaning outside of a very small group of people, and I doubt even they could define it, and yet they kept using it over and over in posts in Altcoin Discussion.

But in the end, what can you do about it aside from creating a thread like this?  I'm glad you did, because you're setting the record straight for those who couldn't see the distinction--and personally, I didn't know what the status of crypto was in Ukraine, so I learned something from it.  Thanks for that.

Why were you pleasantly surprised by being misled?

Are you talking about the "most trusted" statistic on BPIP?  I haven't checked that site in a long time, and I have no idea who's on that list these days--I should probably take a peek one of these days.

Sweet.  Lesbo Cow does not deserve that feedback, and IMO frankbitcoin ought to rethink how he leaves feedback, if he even cares about DT status (it ain't what it used to be).

Wow....the Lutpin debacle does not seem to have happened that long ago, but I believe you.  Time does indeed fly.  And by the way, it wasn't just Lutpin who contributed to that; Lightlord could have and should have stepped in to rectify things, but when members tried to contact him, it was total radio silence.

For the life of me, I couldn't remember whether El Salvador's fiat currency was in trouble (like Venezuela's), so I checked the Wikipedia page on the country before posting.  I had no idea that they used the US Dollar as their own currency.  Another interesting tidbit from the article was this:


Now that's pretty interesting!  I wonder how much real estate costs in the lower-crime sections of El Salvador and how well one could live if, let's say, they had multiple accounts participating in bounties or signature campaigns.  That would be an interesting way to live if you wanted to live on the edge, don't you think?

Sure, but people who own small businesses in El Salvador didn't start them to speculate in a currency like bitcoin, and I can see why there's a lot of resistance to this.  You're thinking like someone who loves bitcoin already, whereas these merchants are basically being forced to accept a form of money they probably don't want any part of.

It's not delusional at all; I had the same thought, and I seriously doubt this is a case of contagious delusion.  The timing says it all, IMO, and I'm talking about the timing between airfinex's post here and the creation of this thread.  But all of that aside, there does seem to be a connection between those accounts that's supported by blockchain evidence.

If you left him a negative for accusing you of plagiarism, you'd most likely end up being ~'ed from some members' trust lists, including mine, since that would be a bogus reason for a red trust.  And speaking of that, if you're convinced that airfinex is an alt account of a bounty cheater, why haven't you tagged him accordingly?  Don't know if you're on DT or not, but since you're the one who presented the evidence it seems like yours should be the first negative trust on his profile.

I think KingDen's idea is a pretty good one myself, and suchmoon suggested something very similar recently:


If either suggestion were implemented, newbies would have absolutely no excuse and no grounds for appeal if they posted someone else's words without crediting them.  And given that the problem is extensive and has been going on for so long and that it would probably be an easy thing to do, why not do it?  Seriously, how much coding would Theymos or whoever have to do to insert a warning like that?

Fair enough; I don't have any problem with you, Ratimov.  However, there was a big brouhaha some months ago about you plagiarizing stuff, and there was evidence presented if I remember correctly--but I didn't pay it much attention at the time, because it was someone else's investigation and the translation aspect of it diverted my attention away from it.  The moderators not taking action against you also made me think the accusations were false, so I just forgot all about it.

You are correct, you don't need to clear anything up.  It's up to the accuser to prove wrongdoing, but I just figured you'd want this issue to go away forever.  It might anyway, who knows?  Anyway, I'm bowing out of this matter and will leave it to airfinex to do whatever he's going to do as far as presenting evidence of plagiarism and so forth.

That's a pretty harsh statement, and while I respect your criticisms of Ledger devices, I don't think those complaints are the rule; they're the exceptions.  I've had a Nano X for a while now and have never experienced battery problems--and yes, I realize I'm one data point, but I'm guessing I'm not the only one here who owns one and hasn't had a problem yet.

I don't like the bluetooth function, either, to be honest and I never use it.  However, I do like Ledger devices and the X is slightly better than the S in my opinion.  If you're a long-term holder of one or more coins, you don't even need to use the device; you just need the addresses you're going to use and the recover phrase--but that's true of any hardware wallet, I guess.

OP, I'm not poo-poo'ing your references, because obviously people are having trouble with their devices, and that's something Ledger should be concerned about.  Given that the ones you posted are very recent, I wonder if QC at their manufacturing site has gone to shit recently.  Has this been a long-standing problem, though?  Again, I doubt it--but I'll keep an open mind to this issue, and if you follow up with posting more complaints, I'd definitely start to wonder what the hell is going on with Ledger.

Quoting all of this for reference. 

I'm pretty sure Ratimov has been reported for plagiarism before, since these accusations aren't new.  And I'm assuming that the mods haven't found any merit in those claims, since he hasn't been banned yet.  Does anyone think I'm way off base in those assumptions?  I really have no idea whether Ratimov plagiarized anything or not, as I haven't delved into it myself (and if there's translation involved, I probably wouldn't be able to prove much with my skills). 

A bet was obviously proposed here, and I think the matter should be put to rest for once and for all--though I'm just a dispassionate 3rd party here; if I were Ratimov, however, I'd probably want to clear my name so that this accusation doesn't keep popping up.  I'm curious to see what the outcome is, if any.

For an entire country??  That's a drop in the bucket even for a tiny country, which El Salvador isn't (though it isn't exactly huge).  They have a population of over 6 million people, so you do the math as to how much bitcoin that is to spread around and then maybe rethink your comment.  Now, if they go ahead with the $150 million purchase mentioned in the article, that'll be somewhat significant.

I mean I'm all for El Salvador moving in this direction, but the government making a purchase of 200BTC just seems odd to me.  It kind of makes me wonder how those coins are going to get distributed and how much corruption there is in the El Salvadorian government, if you know what I mean.

And this:


Yikes.  Any time a government starts offering its citizens a state-issued bitcoin wallet, they should run, run, run away from it as far as they can get and never look back.  If those ATMs they're supposedly installing all around the country allow withdrawals to private wallets, they should opt for that instead. 

That's good, and if I were you I would keep doing that--and thanks for the merit but don't merit my posts in the future, please.  Save those sMerits for Hero members and ranks below that (just a suggestion; I'm not telling you what to do), because they're the members for which merits are actually useful.  For Legendary members, it'll be just a dick-measuring contest unless Theymos adds a rank above Legendary--but I'm pretty sure that's not in the works.

Or worse, they stay and crank out one shitpost after another, and their post history looks like a list of posts of similar length and content, full of nonsense and devoid of thought or effort.  I think that happens more so than members leaving the forum voluntarily because of difficulties making posts for their campaigns or bounties.

I had the same feeling at first, but I don't think OP is part of it.  The writing is too good, especially compared to the two posts that followed it (which I have no doubt are part of a farm).  Then again, what the hell do I know?  They could all be RainbowKun's alts or kwalxdrzdz's or whatever that dude's name was.

I merited your post because you obviously put in a good deal of effort, but Jesus....I probably should have read it in full before rushing to hand you merits, as the above quote (and much of what you wrote) just makes no sense.

OP, are you seeing why the forum ain't what it used to be?

Da fuk are you talking about?  And as far as this forum having "diversified content", if you want that go elsewhere.  This is bitcointalk, and altcoiners are lucky there's a section for that because Theymos threw them a bone when he created Altcoin Discussion and the rest of those spam-infested cracks of the forum.

OP, were you a member in the early days or something?  I've been reading posts on the forum since before I became a member, which was in 2015, and even then the situation was exactly as you described it.  The only time bitcointalk wasn't afflicted with the plague of signature campaign shitposters and bounty hunters was probably one day prior to the first sig campaign coming into existence, and that would be around 2011-12 (but someone correct me if I'm wrong). 

And yes, you hit the nail on the head--but if you browse through Meta, and I mean go deep into posts made in the last 5 years--you'll see that the shitposting dilemma has been discussed a lot.  Look at posts in Meta from December 2017-February 2018, and you'll probably be entertained.  That covers the period just before and right after the merit system was implemented, and Meta was on fire.

Welcome back if you're really an older member.

It is indeed, and I only remember seeing it happen one other time, with ChiBitCTy (if I'm not mistaken).  The community rallied around him, except it took longer for him to get unbanned than it did with OP.  So yeah, I think the community knows which members are deserving of support, whether the ban was just or not, and which members are just bull of BS.

Glad you're back, Mpamaegbu.  I'd really hate it if those merits I gave you went to waste .  Seriously, I'm happy with the way things turned out and that you had a lot of members at your back.  The same can't be said of many other people here, so that should tell you something.

I would add that quotation marks are fine, but members need to cite the source of whatever material they've used from any source other than their own minds.  I'm sure OP knows that, but it's important for other members to understand that they have to write in the source if the quote is from somebody else.

That would seem like a desperate attempt to make NFTs have a value that would make them legitimate, because otherwise people would wake up and realize that what they have is the equivalent of a digital Pokemon card that someday nobody will want to buy.

Why not buy gold or oil if you want to invest in oil (or in the latter case, oil futures or some other derivative)?  If information is the thing of value, what is it, a secret that only the NFT holder has access to?  Why bother with involving an NFT at all?  Ever since I registered on this forum, there have been discussions about cryptocurrencies being backed by something tangible--like gold, that's always been the most frequent suggestion.  But there's never been any real interest in that, and I'm not sure it could even work, because there would have to be some gold held somewhere to back the crypto, and in that case you're obliged to trust a third party--and that goes against what crypto stands for.

I'm not into NFTs and remain a skeptical observer, just like I was with bitcoin early on.  However, I eventually came to my senses about bitcoin after realizing how it actually worked.  I know how NFTs work, and I don't see them holding high valuations in the long term unless the newer generation ends up preferring them over physical works of art.  Somehow I just don't think that's going to be the case.

Don't you think it's a little bit early to make such a bold statement as that?

That's OP's point (which I've definitely noticed), that corporations have used and used and used it to death, to the point where the internet in 2021 is nothing like it was back in 2000.  Hell, by 2000 companies had already started to attach themselves to everything and anything related to the internet--hence the dot com bubble that burst in April of that year.

There was a lot of talk about "internet 2.0" a few years ago, probably about the time that Youtube started monetizing videos and/or Facebook started to become something everyone used.  I think that was the beginning of social media on the internet, where what you saw on the web started to become user-created posts, tweets, videos, and whatnot.  And of course all of the big companies used that as an advertising platform, and the rest is history.

There's some good stuff on Youtube, but every time I visit that site I swear I'm being shown what to watch by some unknown gatekeeper (probably in the form of an algorithm).  So yeah, OP, I can empathize with your thoughts on this; I remember the internet from as far back as 1993/4, and it was a magical place.  Now there are about 10-20 sites I visit regularly instead of using Yahoo's search engine to find some obscure website that might have very interesting and odd things on it.  Things change, of course, but I miss some of that old stuff.  I can do without all the advertising, that's for sure.

That's so rare, though.  I've watched plenty of indie flicks, and most of them follow some formulaic story or are filmed digitally (which makes it look so much worse IMO) or have actors who don't know how to act.  

Edit:

LOL, now that's old school.  I would have written those "words" when I was in my early 20s maybe, but those days are long gone.  I remember when AOL's chat rooms used to be extremely popular for that sort of thing.

That sounds all good and well, but barriers to entry for a form of money?  That's just not possible.  You have to have money to own bitcoin; the empowering aspect comes from not having the banks or government involved in your financial transactions, not the owning of bitcoin itself.

And note that bitcoin and bitcointalk are two different things entirely.  Things are rough on newbies--at least as far as ranking up and some other restrictions--because this is a discussion forum with a long history of problems caused primarily by new members.  As far as a lurker who has something really important they want to share, there's absolutely nothing stopping them from registering here and posting about it, especially not the merit system.  A member at the rank of Newbie can post whatever they want except for images (and there's a time limit between posts), so I don't see what the problem is.

Being a newbie is no excuse, and I don't understand the link between you wanting to gain knowledge and failing to cite a source for the person's work which you posted.  It also doesn't matter that you weren't in a sig campaign or what your motivation was for posting someone else's content.  The fact is that you broke the rule about plagiarism, and unlike Mpamaegbu you're not claiming that you forgot to cite the source; you're not giving any reason for not doing so, just extraneous facts/feelings.

That's a mitigating factor, but if the mods are going to be consistent, being a Sr. Member with an account less than a year old whose main value to the forum has been exposing 10 scams isn't going to result in the ban being lifted.  A member has to be very much valued by the community for that to happen, and personally I wasn't even familiar with who you were when I found out about your ban (along with Mpamaegbu's in the BestChange campaign thread).  Maybe the moderators will see it differently, but that's how I see it.

By the way, you were pretty harsh with this member:

I would suggest that if the mods or the community apply the same standards to your own behavior, don't expect much support with your ban appeal.  You never made the claim that you didn't know plagiarism wasn't allowed, therefore you knowingly broke the rule, just like the member in the above quote.

Were masternodes ever a bubble?  There aren't that many altcoins that operate using that model that I can think of--Dash, PIVX....and I can't think of any others off the top of my head.  Nor do I remember them being hyped up like NFTs, ICOs, and IEOs.  Plus you can still own a masternode and make money, though they're not nearly as popular or talked about as they once were.

I'd agree with that.  I wasn't even saying that NFTs have zero value or would go to zero over time, just that there's a mania for them right now that I don't think is justified given what they are.  Once the history of the first 25 years of cryptocurrency is written (as I'm sure it will be, and I'll buy a copy if I'm still alive), no doubt NFTs will be included.  What will be written about them depends on what happens in the market from their beginning until then, and that I'm not completely sure about (though I made my prediction in my last post).

Again, bitcoin has been labeled a fad, a tulip, a scam, and many other things in the past--and so far all of those monikers have been disproven.  That doesn't necessarily mean that similar monikers for NFTs are wrong, because bitcoin and NFTs are two completely different things, and I think it's a mistake to conflate the two.

I'm in the same boat--I try to give more merits to lower-ranked members, usually 3-4, whereas Legendaries get 1-2.  And yeah, the most thoughtful posts do tend to be written by Legendary members, but I skip more posts made by them than I merit.  But the way I see it, not every good post needs to be merited by me.  There are other merit sources with different philosophies as to how they distribute merits, so that gives me (and you) some freedom to do with my sMerits as I please.

Lol.  Even if that were true (which it isn't), it would be a silly thing to do since sMerits decay as they're sent.  Wiwo would be better off giving 2 merits to a non-merit source than giving the same amount to a source, which would leave the source with only 1 sMerit to give--and it isn't as if most merit sources need more sMerits.  If they do, they can petition Theymos for an increase in their allocation, and chances are they'll get it.

I'm with you there.  Just like ICOs, exchange tokens, and probably some other forms of crypto before them, NFT owners/enthusiasts will eventually realize that those super-duper-unique "tokens" aren't worth nearly as much as they're selling for.  That was my first reaction upon hearing about digital artwork in the form of an NFT, and I'm sticking to it.  The only question in my mind is how long it's going to take for the market to crash.  It could be a while, but in the interim I'm going to remain a no-NFT'er.

Bitcoin (and a lot of altcoins, too) isn't in a bubble, however.  As far as how long it'll take for the world to accept that crypto is something real and valuable, I'm betting it'll take a generation--15-20 years or so.  That's because older investors see crypto as an oddity, something that isn't quite a viable currency and definitely not a stock, and they're not having any of it.  The newer generation, however, will have grown up with bitcoin already in existence and it'll be familiar to them.  Whether they'll adopt it or not is a question I don't have an answer to, but I'd bet they'll be more likely to than the older generation(s).

BTW, I thought bitcoin was a "tulip" when I first heard about it, which was way back when it was skyrocketing past $1000 and Mt. Gox was imploding.  Then I kept watching it and people's conversations about it, and it became clear to me that it wasn't just a fad.

Just because NFTs might be in a tulip state doesn't mean bitcoin is, or that altcoins are.  Things with real value will stand the test of time, which is why all those ICO tokens are worthless and bitcoin is above $50k as I write this.  So I wouldn't link bitcoin and NFTs like that.  The latter may exist in years to come, but I seriously doubt that there's going to be even 25% as much interest in them in 5 years as there is now.