Man, I really wanted to spread a lot more merits to the members on the latest list, but most of them only posted memes and others just didn't write posts that were all that good.  I think I may have helped at least one member to rank up, though, so I'm happy for that.

Guess I'll check previous weeks' lists that I missed.

I'm not up to speed on most aspects of pop culture (and we're probably from different generations, too), but that theory might hold some water.  Kudrow is not a common name--at least not where I'm from, nor is Briggs really, but I've seen the name Boyle a few times.  Who knows whether that's how the usernames were derived?  Either way, Ratimov and members who posted in his thread have provided enough evidence to clear up any doubts people had as to whether those accounts are connected.

Speaking of which, I haven't seen that thread or the other ones by Jazmin Whoever being bumped in the last day or so.  Have they all given up any pretense that they're not an account farm or what?

Most of the forum is intended for bitcoin discussion, but there are sections dedicated to other things (like Meta).  There are plenty of newbies posting in Bitcoin Discussion, but their posts are generally written for the sake of whatever campaign or bounty they're in--and that's been discussed to death, so I'll end my statement there.  I do agree that the ambitious newcomers who want to climb the ranks tend to post about merits and other non-bitcoin related stuff a lot, but usually I know the difference between an attempt to get merits and a genuinely good post.

I don't blame you, and I kind of have the same mindset--though lately I've been meriting a lot of Hero/Legendary members, since their posts are the ones that have stuck out from the rest of the dreck I've been reading.  I do try to follow that "ranking up pipeline" thread, because I like helping out members who are close to their next rank--and it's a great way for me to hand out a lot of merits in a short period of time, since I'm basically doing post history reviews.

Wow.  I'm not sure if I'd want to pay the government with crypto for anything, but in general this guy seems very pro-crypto--and that's a good thing.  Maybe then Binance can take NY off its restricted list, as well as all the other services that sell crypto for fiat that aren't allowed to operate in the state.  I'm still not sure why that is, but I know it's been a long-standing problem.

If only other politicians made statements like this as part of their platform.  Unfortunately, I think these types of statements are going to be limited to republicans.  Democrats are for bigger government, more taxes, more regulation, and are less likely to take a pro-crypto stance.

Interesting.  I do remember Yang but didn't remember his party (and I'm surprised to learn that he's a democrat).  You're probably right about a republican having no chance of getting elected as governor of NY.  We can only hope.

At this point I'm ready to believe anything when it comes to alt accounts and the associated BS that happens with them all around the forum.  That scam accusation thread against nutildah is obviously an example of that brand of nonsense.  There's no proof of any wrongdoing in it, and it was locked right after it was created.  I'm not accusing you of anything, colires.

Oh man, I haven't even thought of those members in a long time.  It's so nice that CH and his army of alt accounts and supporters (I think he had at least one that wasn't his alt) are gone....for now.  Knock on wood, because who knows when they could show up again. 

Laudanum I'm only somewhat familiar with.  Wasn't that an account created to criticize Lauda?

That's funny--I was in the same position back in 2014 when I was lurking and just starting to get interested in bitcoin.  I was reading all of these really crappy posts by members who obviously couldn't write English very well, and they were basically just writing garbage posts anyway.  I had no idea what a signature campaign was or what would motivate someone to write those kinds of posts.  Only after I registered and started to get a feel for the forum did I become familiar with the reasons behind the plague of shitposting.

Also, it's great that you lurked before becoming a member.  Not many people do that anymore; they just come here to participate in campaigns or bounties and their contributions are usually net negative to the forum overall.

I don't know about that, because I've started a few threads in which I was asking for help or information, and while there were inevitably crap posts made, I did usually get my answers.  One thing members can do is create self-moderated threads to eliminate nonsense replies (though some members don't like them and will choose not to post in self-modded threads).

He's got one neg with a valid reference and doesn't have many positives--but I don't know what to think about him being involved in scammy projects in general.  If he's knowingly managing and participating in bounties of projects he knows to be scams, then that's a problem and he'd deserve some DT tags.

In general, though, I don't think there's any problem with a bounty manager participating in his own bounty.  There have been bitcoin-paying signature campaigns that have had that happen with their managers.  I'd think of the manager's slot as an "extra" one, meaning I don't think the manager is taking an open slot in the bounty away from another applicant, but I'm not sure about that.  But in any case, what can you or anyone else do?  As long as the project owners are cool with it, there's nothing the community can do to stop it.  Theymos and the mods certainly aren't going to step in and prevent it.

Nah, I didn't get that impression at all.  That advertisement seemed more like a display of "diversity" (kind of like all of the left-wing shit I see everywhere) and social networking than trying to ape what crypto is all about.  In the end Visa is what it's always been, and I'm not even sure why they need to advertise.  It's not like people want to go get a Visa card after seeing a crappy advertisement like this one.

If I'm not mistaken, Visa was interested in bitcoin in the early days but nothing ever came of it.  I still don't see any connection between the two in that ad, though.

Except there's no decentralization there, just a showcase of different colors of people--which is what Visa thinks those young people want to see, and it's pandering if you ask me.

Here's a great example of why Legendary members receive more merit: this post, made by stompix, was the only one in that thread about El Salvador citizens protesting the legal tender status of bitcoin.  The thread was started by a Jr. Member and in the OP he said this:

That's part of the long post he wrote, but his thinking shows a clear lack of understanding of other people's point of view, and to me it just sounds like a blindly pro-bitcoin stance.  And if you read the other replies in the thread, most of the replies made by members below Legendary adopt the same "those protesters are wrong" attitude.  And there's this part of the post made by Ucy, which baffled me:

That statement is almost elegant in its symmetry of wrongness; bitcoin's volatility is frequent, though perhaps not in the last month, and fiat currencies are so much less volatile than fiat that the comparison is just ridiculous.  Ucy makes some good posts, but this one is just....wow.

I tend to think lower-ranked members are younger in general, and that might not be a really bad assumption.  Higher-ranked members  have been on the forum longer, and they were obviously younger when they registered.  The older you get and the more experience you have with bitcoin, in life, and on the forum, hopefully the more insight your posts will have--and I think that's true in a lot of cases.  But for lower-ranked members, I don't think they have as much experience in those areas in general (and I stress that, in general), and their posts reflect that. 

Add to that the fact that most newcomers only want to use the forum to make money (in general), and you get the result that most of their posts are made with minimal effort and thought.  Hence, they don't earn as many merits.

Bro....first of all, if we're talking about pensioners, which I assume are older retirees, of course they're not going to be in favor of bitcoin, which is a form of money that's only been around since 2009.  I also assume many older folks in El Salvador probably aren't up-to-date on a lot of new technology.  That's part of why they're resisting it.

And I also wouldn't dismiss their point about volatility, because no matter how much you and I love bitcoin, an El Salvadorian with very little money is going to want a stable form of money, not one that they have to worry about fluctuating in value--sometimes drastically--from day to day, if not by the hour.  Put yourself in their shoes and stop thinking like a young (I'm going to assume that about you) bitcoin investor. 

I wouldn't want to receive my paycheck in bitcoin, and I've said that many times--and it's precisely because of the volatility, although there are other factors as well, such as the fact that I can't pay my bills with it or buy food, gas, and most other things either.  So if a bitcoin believer like me doesn't want to completely adopt bitcoin as a currency, why in the hell would you expect the average El Salvador citizen to?

Not sure about the money laundering argument.  I'm sure it happens, but that's not a valid argument against it IMO.

Yeah, if you were around when the merit system was rolled out (very unexpectedly, because there was no talk about it beforehand) and were a Hero member with enough activity to get to Legendary and were just waiting for the week when you'd rank up, you probably were pulling your hair out when you discovered that you now had to earn 500 merits to get there.

I tend to forget that a lot of newer members here don't realize that the merit system wasn't always a thing, that it's only been around for just over 3.5 years.  OP already got his answer, so I won't repeat it.  I'm sure if you go back to threads from 2010, you'll see that most of the members who posted have merit counts that represent exactly what was airdropped in Jan. 2018.  And man, if you go back that far, it'll seem like the forum was a completely different one.  There weren't signature campaigns back then, and I think the moderation was a lot less strict.

Was this post translated from somewhere on the web?  The way it's worded makes me think Google translate was used, and the structure looks very much like a blog post or an article.  I'm just saying.

With respect to farmers and farming, those things might still be done by individuals in less developed countries, but in developed ones farming is done by huge corporations--or at least those corporations pay farmers to farm for them.  That documentary Food Inc. gave some insight into how unprofitable it is and how slim the margins are.  I don't know exactly what the question being asked here is, but if it's whether I'd give money to farmers....no.  People choose to do what they want in life, and they have to live with that.  Farming is in some people's blood, and they enjoy it--no matter how much money they make. 

By the way, Farm Aid (remember John Cougar Mellencamp?) failed in the US back in 1984 or so.  Let the government help out the farmers if they want to use taxpayer dollars to do it.

And plenty of other currencies as well.  The US doesn't have the criminal market cornered by any means.

They're a terrorist organization by pretty much anyone's standards, so I'll make that statement for you.

This issue has been discussed in quite a few other threads in the past few years, and a lot of the replies that make sense to me say that it doesn't matter what the form of money a terrorist group uses; there shouldn't be any prejudice against bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency) because a criminal uses it for their activities.  If that was logical, governments would be outlawing physical cash--and they haven't done that yet, even though the world is moving away from it. 

If you hear any stories on the news about somebody using bitcoin for a ransom, to buy illegal things, or to fund terrorism, that's sensationalistic journalism plain and simple.  And it's just fuel for governments to try to ban or regulate crypto into complete uselessness.

Aren't you aware that merits can be sold?  And if not merits, then at the very least an account that has sMerits or a higher rank than Jr. Member can be sold for a decent price (though I'm not up to date on how the account-selling market is these days).  My point is that merits are valuable, whether it's monetary or not.  That's why Theymos doesn't accept every merit source application that comes to his attention; you have to be trusted enough not to abuse the system.

And there have been account farmers with way more accounts than 60+ (if I'm not mistaken), though it's been some time since a ring this big has been busted.  That's because the merit system makes it very hard to rank up multiple accounts, because an account farmer has to produce posts well above average to catch the attention of members with merits to give--and that would explain why there was plagiarism involved in this case, though some of the accounts did exhibit decent writing skills aside from that. 

You can be surprised at this as long as you like, but this shit used to happen a lot back when all it took to climb the ranks was activity and time.

My apologies--I checked Ratimov's thread and at least one of the others to see if that particular trait had been mentioned before, but I must have missed your post.  So anyway, that's just more evidence that these accounts are connected, whether they're being controlled by a single person or are part of a team.  It doesn't matter to me which it is at this point, because I've got most of them on ignore (I may have missed a few) and they're not getting any merits from me.

I appreciate your input.

IMO it would be best to keep all of this drama out in the open so that the community as a whole can make up their own minds about what's really going on. 

So far I haven't seen a ton of support for RainbowKun and the suspected alt account ring.  It could be that people are keeping silent, but my guess is that if Ratimov was way off the mark there would be a lot more opposition.  It'd be nice to hear from other members who aren't directly involved in this mess.

Sure you can, but don't expect to get a lot of support from anybody here.  It seems pretty obvious you're an alt of somebody, whether it's RanbowKun or not.  I had my own suspicions about it independently of Ratimov's before he started his thread in which he dumped a ton of evidence to support that assertion, and while you have no obligation to defend yourself, you certainly haven't convinced me you're not the owner of multiple accounts, and that's probably because you have no defense.

Seriously--and if I'm not mistaken, he's not allowed to post outside of his ban appeal thread and I've reported him for that. 

Kxwhalexk1, if you make a new account in violation of forum rules, you'll be sniffed out.  Guaranteed.  Other members have tried it (like mdayonliner if I'm not mistaken) and failed, and the community has seen enough of your posting habits to know who you are, and I doubt you'd be able to sufficiently change how you write that you'd be able to elude detection.  Just don't do it.  You're not welcome here.

Yes it has.  I wish I still had that picture of what looked to be a bounty hunter/sig campaign farm, which was a shot of a bunchof people with laptops sitting around a table with the forum pulled up on them.  It was PMed to me by some member a while back and I'd posted it in a thread that I've long forgotten.

Anyway, there could be one person behind the accounts or there could be several--who knows?  But even if there were more than one, it's basically an account farm, and higher-ranked accounts are worth money because they can be used to earn more in signature campaigns.  If the account has positive trust or a generally positive reputation, that can be dangerous if sold to a scammer.  What you have to realize is that bounties and sig campaigns are pretty lucrative with bitcoin being as high as it is, so I don't doubt that someone could spend all day "working" to rank up their alt accounts.

Also, this is not an attack on new members in general.  But when alt farms are busted, they're usually when the accounts are at the Jr. Member-Member rank, and that should make sense.  Truthfully, I have no idea how many of the accounts Ratimov listed are connected, because there's no hard proof, i.e., blockchain linkage, between all of them--but I'm nearly certain that the accounts with similar usernames, registration dates, and posting habits are linked.  And since I'm never going to know for sure, barring a complete confession, I'm going to have to be satisfied with the evidence presented and my own gut feeling and experience, and I'm going to ignore those members I think are part of the alt farm.

You're relatively new here, KingsDen.  If you stick around long enough you'll see all sorts of shenanigans like this.

Edit:

LoyceV, you are truly amazing!

OP, I'm also not that familiar with DeFi, but I know how lending works and know what a pain in the ass it is when you're combining crypto and lending.  The way I see it is that you ultimately need a way to either force the borrower to repay the loan or put up sufficient collateral in the event that they don't.  I'm pretty sure DeFi hasn't found a solution to the repayment solution, but if it's come up with a way to deal with collateral (without a 3rd party handling it), then I'd say the problem is solved--but I'm pretty sure that isn't the case.

Think about all the mob movies you've seen where a debtor gets his legs broken when he's late on a gambling loan.  That's how tough it is to get someone who can't or won't pay you back (because mobs work--or used to work--that way), and in those cases the identity of the borrower is known.  With crypto and the inherent anonymity, it makes the problem much more difficult, and I seriously doubt there's going to be a way to lend funds efficiently without having a 3rd party involved and still allowing people to maintain their anonymity.

I'd also be interested to know if any of these problems have been solved by DeFi or any other system.

On the other hand, I don't think you'd want to do business with a financial services company like Fidelity if their views were so entrenched that they wouldn't change them if presented with new data.  That could be a recipe for disaster as far as your financials go.

That link doesn't work for me for some reason.  But in any case, that's one man's opinion, not Fidelity's official statement on bitcoin (or at least that's what it appears to be).  I don't see anything about mining in that statement either, and I doubt Fidelity does any mining themselves.  That would be a bit strange.