I know this is a Forbes article, but to me this reads very much like sensationalistic journalism.  It really doesn't matter much what a bunch of unknown banking executives think; it matters what the banks actually do--and right now there aren't a lot of banks that even want to have anything to do with bitcoin, i.e., it's the same as it's always been.

And as far as bitcoin or any of the altcoins replacing the USD in five years?  I seriously hope that isn't the case, and that's coming from a bitcoin fan.  There would have to be an economic apocalypse before that happened, and I'd be very interested to know why those bankers who were polled think the USD could be in that much trouble.  Yep, I'm aware of the US's debt and money printing and all of that, but when bankers start making predictions like this, it's a bit scary.

There's also the possibility that the poll data is complete BS.  The banking execs are anonymous, and think about it: they could be crypto holders, and by saying something this bullish they could be anonymously manipulating the market.  That might sound far-fetched, but who knows.

The profuse thank-you's and similar posting style wouldn't have my radar up, but that part of his merit history is concerning.  Then again, I was duped into meriting some of them myself before they were sniffed out.  

I'll have to re-read the entirety of this thread, because off the top of my head I don't recall KingsDen being involved in the alt account ring.  Assuming he wasn't mentioned previously, I'd be interested to know if there's any evidence he was, because I've been giving him a pretty fair amount of merits.  He started this thread today, and it immediately struck me as a merit-grab attempt because there's no purpose to such a thread and it's not likely any of the Meta regulars would care about the suggestions he made, since they've been made before.

Well, he probably got reported by multiple members.  I know I reported him for plagiarism today or yesterday, and it'd be pretty hard for the mods to ignore such obvious proof of it even if they were inclined to do so, which I'm hoping they're not.

Lol, after I posted this question to kxwhalexk, he locked the thread.  Well, actually it was after Kingsden's post, but still--it was his thread, and the title is asking for the community to "judge this matter".  I think he doesn't like how he's being judged and knows he's busted at this point.

I'd say that this is a pattern among a lot of members who don't speak English that well, but those "coincidences" are hard to ignore.  Yet more nails have been driven into his bitcointalk coffin.  Good catch, Ratimov.

We shouldn't give up, no matter how much it might seem that the battle is lost.  It's discouraging, yes, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be raining holy hell down on these account farmers and shitposters when possible.

Edit:

Sweet.  Thanks for that bit of intel, and glad you agree that the fight is worth it.

OP, I know you stated what your motivations for making this thread are, but the whole thing just comes off as an attempt to earn merits.  Maybe I'm getting even more jaded about these kinds of threads (including the self-congratulatory ones when members rank up), but I'm starting to become a lot more careful about newer members and what their real motivations likely are--especially after threads like this one.

No doubt you put in a lot of effort here, but most of this stuff has been discussed in the past....so what is this, a thread to discuss everything from the evil fee to having a mobile-friendly version of the forum?  Or is it just a thread in which you voice your thoughts on the forum?  If it's the latter, why bother?  If it's the former, well, good luck with it but it's not necessary.

Hate to be negative, but I'm getting a strange vibe lately from threads like this.

If you have to sell off assets in order to pay out dividends, that isn't going to be sustainable unless there's always new money coming in.  Unless the fund invests in something that pays income, I don't see how this would work.  REITs pay out hefty dividends because there's always income coming in in the form of mortgages and rent (if I'm not mistaken; if I am, someone please correct me).  That income is then paid out to investors as a dividend.

What you're talking about is selling assets and using the capital gains to pay the dividend, and that's assuming there are any capital gains to begin with. 

The last post made by PsychoticBoy was in 2017 (though I have a lot of sections ignored), so it's possible that he's not aware that selling accounts became very much frowned upon back in 2016, and he might not be aware that putting his account up for sale like he did would earn him negative trust--but that's on him.

It might not sound logical that someone would do this, but from an economic standpoint it makes a lot of sense if someone doesn't plan on being an active member of the forum anymore and has an account with that much history.  Too bad it'll probably go for much less now that it's tagged.

You make it sound as if you didn't register your account exactly 13 weeks and 1 day ago, as if you made that one mistake a long time ago.  The truth is that it isn't ancient history, and even old-time members aren't always forgiven for plagiarizing--so you don't stand much of a chance if the mods decide to take action.

I also think this is your alt account, but I have no hard proof other than merit history and the use of colored text to highlight names or sections (see this post and this).  If anyone can link these two accounts, I'd be happy to reward them with merit.

There's no need to, IMO.  With that one post you hopefully ensured that he'll be banned for good, with no excuses this time.  Did you report that post to the mods, by any chance?

And people wonder why I'm so careful when meriting newbies, to the point where it seems like I'm biased against them.  Well, all of the evidence presented in this thread should serve as vindication of that cautiousness, because I've seen crap like this happen before.  

Um....why are they not?  Is that not a thing anymore?

Eh, then Theymos can ban these idiots.  In the meantime, the community should take matters into their own hands, just like they do with scammers, which Theymos allows to thrive on bitcointalk.  Know what I mean?

Yes you do.  And even if you aren't involved in the alt account ring, you sure as hell plagiarized your way to some serious merit earnings, which you then used to merit multiple members of the ring, thereby contributing to it.  Hopefully a permaban will be forthcoming, and sooner rather than later.

In that same thread you posted this:


Shoe's on the other foot now, isn't it?  You seemed very comfortable lecturing another member about obeying the rules and blah blah blah, but now that you've been caught in some shady activity you come to Reputation begging for mercy for a negative trust?  And why aren't you banned already for plagiarism?  Not sure what you explained to nutildah to get that feedback removed, but any instance of suspected plagiarism should be reported.

Mods, please look into this guy if you're reading this thread.  

July 12 is not a long time ago, not in my world, not in yours, not in anybody's.  This isn't a "mistake" you made years ago, it's plagiarism about a month and a half ago.

How is it you haven't been banned for plagiarism yet?  Hopefully those posts have been reported, and if not, I'm going to report them myself right now.  I don't understand your explanation for doing what you did; it sounds like an excuse, which is most likely what it is.  This forum is full of those.

Well Ratimov, you busted the members I'd mentioned in my own thread and more, so props to you!  You also did an excellent linkage analysis in one of your posts above, which was exactly what I was looking for when I made that thread.  Guess you were way ahead of me.

I'm trying to add those members to my ignore list, but every time I click on "ignore member options" the page just keeps loading and comes back with an error on the bitcointalk server--and that's been happening for several days.  I'll keep trying, and I'd suggest that anyone who doesn't want to unwittingly support an account farm by giving merits to any accounts involved in it to do likewise.

Can't wait to hear from some of the people involved in this.

As a counterpoint to your argument, I'd say that we've seen lots of evidence of members with alt accounts abusing bounties and signature campaigns, and many of those members have been tagged by me or some other DT member(s).  I didn't make that assertion with nothing to back it, and you've been on the forum long enough to have seen people getting busted for enrolling one or more alt accounts in a campaign/bounty.

And even if that wasn't the case, why not try to do a good job so that your chances of getting accepted into another campaign or bounty are higher?  If you're in a 3rd world country and can make more money participating in a sig campaign than you could with a full-time job in your area, don't you think you should put in some effort?  I don't think that's an outrageously high standard.

Yep, you're right about that--and I think the only problem with Yobit's last campaign was that they seemingly didn't have a cap on how many members they'd allow in, and the result was that there were well over 100 (if I recall correctly) members with varying post quality all trying to make the maximum number of posts per day, which also was a lot.  There isn't likely to be a campaign like that again....I hope.

Jeez, I totally missed your reply, Pmalek.  Anyway, I guess it's getting harder for me to detect humor/sarcasm on the internet (or at least on this forum), because I really thought you were serious.  Lol.

Do you or anyone else here know how old he is?  I'm not sure if I ever really thought about it, but now I'm curious.

I bet you he does, especially if his name is in the title.  I've often been surprised when he posts in a thread I would have sworn he wouldn't have read.  Plus I know he reads posts in Meta, which is pretty close to Reputation (in my view, anyway).

There's no way to do that; many have asked, none have succeeded.  Maybe that'll be a feature of the soon-to-be-arriving-soon new forum software.  Plus OP doesn't really want his account deleted, because he seems like the type who'll just keep coming back whenever it suits his purposes, and when he inevitably runs up against the brick wall of moderation he'll continue to bitch about it.  Some people outgrow bitcointalk within a year or two, and some people linger far past the point when they should have left.

Wow, could you cram any more platitudes into such a short post?  Also, you don't have to believe in time.  It exists, and even the worst tin-foil conspiracy theory nutjobs won't dispute that.  Jesus, the shitposting around here is getting stinky.  Somebody please open a window.

I get what you're saying, but participating in a bounty isn't like buying a lottery ticket; these bounty hunters do all sorts of time-consuming things for weeks or months before they may or may not get paid--and it's a crap shoot if they end up with anything other than worthless tokens.  Did anyone seriously believe this dogeporn token would ever be worth anything?

Speaking of dogeporn, if there was any bounty you'd never want to join it's one based on pornography.  Hate to say it, but someone looking to cash in on the dogecoin craze using porn as the project idea just shouts dishonesty, because the porn industry is filled to the brim with scumbags.  It shouldn't surprise anyone that these fuckers didn't pay their bounty hunters.  Fortunately from the looks of it, there weren't that many participants.

It did, but the problem is that bounties don't pay out like traditional signature campaigns, which is something I think needs to change.  As I said, I have no sympathy for bounty hunters in general, since they're mostly responsible for the spam-fest this forum has become, but if they paid out weekly and in bitcoin (or an altcoin) then it might not be such a problem.

This is the problem with the dogeporn bounty (and most bounties in general):


From what I saw, Royse777 did his best to get the promised shit tokens from the bounty owners, and they just blew him off.  Should he have been more selective about being their bounty manager?  Yeah, I think so.  Especially if he had prior communications with them, because whoever was replying to him came off as very unprofessional.  But the main problem is that all those bounty hunters are basically gambling on whether they're going to get paid and doing all of that "work" in advance.

I have no sympathy for any of these bounty hunters, because they continue to be stupid enough to waste their time advertising for crappy projects that promise to pay everyone in some garbage token once the campaign is over.  That's a recipe for getting scammed, and if you're not aware of that, wise up and stop participating in these idiotic bounties.

Not sure what you mean by that in the context of the twitter thing you linked to.  Care to elaborate?

Dude, that article you linked to is from July, and it's a mess of jumbled sentences that don't make any real sense.  Also, this is a quote:


So if you read the article, it would seem that it was written from the perspective of Thai traders and somehow the US is attempting to prosecute Binance for advertising its services to Thai customers:


I have no idea why that would be the case, but I wouldn't jump to any conclusions just yet as to how this is going to affect Binance customers in any country.

Ugh.  I thought I might have been on the trail of a purchased account, as I could only see posts made by this member as far back as 2020 (the member registered in 2017), but then I un-ignored a bunch of sections and suddenly could view a lot more posts.  This person is going on my ignore list so fast it'll make Satoshi's head spin:


BuNga_cute is still active on the forum five years later and still making crap-ass posts like the ones above.  That is some serious dedication to shitposting, and if we gave out trophies with bronze turds, I think he/she ought to get one right up the wazoo.

Oh, I've been into bitcoin long enough not to get excited about extreme jumps or drops and have come to expect both in short time frames--and I know damn well bitcoin only goes up in a straight line for a finite amount of time before it drops.  Long before bitcoin came along I was a stock market junkie, so I'm used to looking at price charts.  Bitcoin sort of acts like a pink sheet stock in terms of volatility as opposed to a blue chip stock.

Ah, OK.  I appreciate you clarifying that for me and anyone else who didn't know what that meant.  I haven't been following MSTR's business dealings at all, and I don't even watch their stock price (though it's in my watchlist) except for times when I reference it for purposes of posting in this thread.

This is what I'm talking about, and you know it:


You gave a reason, but it doesn't make any sense.  That's not exactly an explanation--but if anyone is satisfied with
as a valid reason not to post evidence against someone being accused of something, they've got very low standards.  My point is that you should stop beating around the bush and just present what you have here, in public, for everyone to see and judge for themselves.

But that doesn't mean you're right about this one.  You could be, but there's no logic behind that statement.