That was my first reaction, and it put me off looking at the project. What are you going to do if a red trusted member gives you a positive rating?

I don't have a facebook or twitter account - I've never seen the reason. To my mind both sites seem to be full of inconsequential rubbish posted by kids or politicians. I've got a McDonalds promotion bean stuck over the camera on my notebook as well. I don't want to feel that I have to shave in the morning just to log into the net.

I'm with you in this.

I'm also finding it difficult to discover good discussion threads, and posts, and I'm starting to wonder if this is the result of a changing attitude in me. I do start a few topics, but it's a bit discouraging if they don't generate much activity. Excessive spam posts in a thread can kill the topic, and we all lose out as a result of this. I'm finding that spam can make me less tolerant, and sometimes I just exit the forum for a while.

Here is another topic to provoke discussion about Bitcoin amongst newer members ( mods - please don't move this thread, and allow beginners to discuss the topic ).

The UTXO pool is a database of all of the transactions that are currently unspent. I'm seeing some analysis of this, and there is an assumption that the coins are held by HODLers  if the entries are more than a year old. Of course this needs to exclude lost coins, and those of Satoshi. My feeling is that it is not really representative, as we have seen large blocks of coins moved by whales, and we don't know if those are genuine sales, or just movements to reduce the size of the UTXO pool.

So what do you guys think, should we ignore the UTXO when we are trying to work out how much Bitcoin is in circulation? Another consideration is the increase in Bitcoin use in Venezuela. It's use for daily transactions seems to have increased exponentially over the last few months, and many of those transactions will be peer to peer. Should we try to analyse those to assess a current market value for Bitcoin?

This thread is intended to encourage beginners in the world of Bitcoin to think about the transfer of coins between wallets. At the moment, it is dependent on the current Internet, but that will change in the future. The recent transfer of a payment over the Lightning network using ham radio is an indication of this. In my early days in this forum, I suggested the use of ham radio for payments, and I was told that ham radio had no use case in the modern world, and it would never happen. Well it has arrived, and it is viable. Also, I believe that some mobile phone network providers are looking at providing coin exchange services that don't rely on the Internet.

So here is a chance for the more creative amongst you to earn some merits by discussing the methods I mentioned above, or maybe you can think of some new possibilities that may become possible in the future. Near field communications via embedded chips is one possibility that is being discussed widely.

My advice - buying Bitcoin is not "investing", it is speculating. Unless you are buying it to purchase goods on-line of course.

At the moment, I'm sitting at a table in McDonalds, and on the table opposite is a kid of about 6, who appears to have severe mental problems. My belief is that this was probably caused by forced, and untested, medication when he was a baby. I think any "doctor" who injects poisons or disease into a young child should be struck off and imprisoned. At best the kid will have to live with an impaired immune system for the rest of his life, at worst, society will have to support a child who could have been a useful and productive member of society, and who has now become a burden.

I'm not a big supporter of the current "trust" system, as it doesn't seem to have much to do with trustworthiness. Highlighting this just reduces my interest in it. Maybe in the new forum software we can have something that is related to trustworthiness in trading, and reassign this to reputation or some other concept. Reputation is equally important in my opinion, but merging the two concepts reduces the effectiveness of each of them.

MinerJones may have excluded me because I stated that the mods in the mining forum are rubbish and damaging the forum. I think that that speaking the truth should be a positive factor, and not a negative one.

I haven't read all of this thread, but I would just point out that vaccinating babies increases the incidence of SID ( sudden infant death ), and the countries with the highest rates of vaccinations have the worst health in their populations ( ignoring famine victims of course ). You have to dig through the stats to find these facts, and big pharma tends to suppress them. Alternatively, you can just look around you if you live in one of these countries.

I've had to back off this a bit. I'm getting up to 3,000 intrusion attempts per day at the moment on the VPS, It's unmanaged, so I'm having to teach myself about VPS security and management before I can move ahead.

I'm still spending too much time looking at Bitcoin trading stats and prices, but I believe that now is the time when we should be accumulating.

I've given in and bought a pack of spiral bound notebooks for £2. I'm trying to do so many different things, that I keep forgetting settings and passwords. I've got into configuring the VPS that I've had for a year or so, and I've never used it, so I'm having to teach myself VPS management. I'm shocked by the hacking attempts that are being reported - anything up to 3,000 per day. I decided that I would lock it down as much as I could before I moved on to installing the new forum software to test.

I'm also interested in the Bitcoin price as well. It seems to be crossing a variety of indications and giving mixed and contradictory messages. The fundamentals still look strong, but I'm having trouble with working out trading strategies to reduce the cost of accumulation.

Can somebody track those accounts and red tag them please.

It looks as if I awarded meits to 15 subsequently banned members. I'm going to have to ignore this fact, as it is hrd enough to find post to reward, and I've had to cut down on post history research. Looking at it from a strict perspective, I believe that merits are related to specific posts and/or threads, and not to posters behaviour. The trust/reputation system should take care of that, and the mods of course.

I don't believe it would be right to avoid meriting posts of red trusted members. Of course there is the issue of meriting posts AFTER the poster has been banned, and I don't think that should be done. That raises the issue of included the banned status in the displayed profile.

Bounties have never appealed to me. I thin there are better uses fr your time, and your signature - nt that I'm making the most of mine

I'm having trouble with trying to be both a HODLer, and a trader, and that is why I started a thread about it.  I'm starting to come to terms with it now, and also looking at picking up payments as a content producer. We must be kicking around the bottom of the Bitcoin price now, so I'm very cautious about selling until the trend becomes more obvious.

I tried that guide and fell over at step one. It didn't find the repository.

I gave up as I was suffering from brain overload after trying to install a control panel over spotty WiFi. In the end I used the Centos panel, and that seems to do everything I wanted. I've resolved the dns for Crypto Hints and set up an ftp account. I just dumped the first index page on it that I found on my machine.

I tried to install the Epoch software through a terminal on the Ubuntu machine, but had to give up almost immediately to sort out some other problems.

My difficulty stems from the fact that I've always used managed servers with Softaculous. So I've had to set up the VPS and the DNS server. I also had some problems with Webmin which wouldn't start, but I switched to the Centos panel, and that is working well. I'll have a go at the actual installation tomorrow.

I've reconfigured the server, and installed the Centos control panel, and enable ftp. I tried to trad from the epoch repository, and it isn't recognising it.

Are there any simple installation instructions anywhere?

Well I still want to try that old Butterfly Labs one that I picked up. There doen't seem to be much support for it though, and all the references to the old manuals and software don't resolve any more. Maybe the software and the manuals will become more collectable.

You've reminded me of my old Snow Eagle project that I never completed. I put a load of the Bitcoin Talk avatars on this page
Bitcoin Talk avatars at Snow Eagle

You used to be able to obtain prepaid debit cards in the UK. These were designed for unbanked people, but I don't know how much they will have tighned up on issuing them. You could fund those by obtaining cash through local bitcoins.