As long as there are shady ICOs/campaigns around, aTriz should have no trouble getting hired to manage campaigns.

jamalaezaz has a decent amount of controversy around the campaigns he manages and he allegedly has gotten a decent amount of business since these controversies. He probably can even hold the ICO tokens necessary to pay bounty participants because if he tries to pull any shenanigans, it would be trivial for the company behind the ICO to resolve this issue by invalidating stolen tokens in one of many ways.

This is one reason why I am against using the trust system against those who are not suspected of planning on trying to steal money or property from others in the future (or have not attempted to steal the same already).

I would say the totality of the circumstances indicate that aTriz never cared about the community and has only ever cared about his personal finances. 

Hey this was supposed to be kept confidential! Not cool....your inability to keep secrets has been noted.

You should exclude the brand new users from your stats. They are likely to be spam bots that are banned.

I don’t think it is exactly breaking news that signature campaigns are contributing to the amount of crap posts around here.

1- you fraudulently altered that quote and enough people know the area where I live and the area TF lives for it to be reasonable to say we are not the same person.

2- you know very well that theymos cannot say without a doubt that an account is being run by it’s original owner so you are basically saying that because you speculate something that you have zero evidence of cannot be disproven it must be true. That is the exact kind of logic that would make me question their judgement.

3- BadBear confirmed years ago I have no unknown alts, which you choose to ignore.

I would be extremely skeptical of anything TF says when you cannot independently verify his statements. TF is very smart, and knows how to make well rounded arguments that have merit. However TF also likes to mix in information that is difficult to substantiate and/or is otherwise untrue into his arguments, which ultimately makes those arguments not hold water. As it stands now, TF has not funded any kind of escrow for that bounty, and even though he has said he will pay "someone" for information, it appears as if that someone is likely to be an account that is under a week old.

I am not entirely sure what TF's angle is in soliciting an escrow but not selecting and funding escrow for his bounty. Perhaps it is to give credibility to him paying old CL debts via settlements, as he is likely running up against the statue of limitations to file suit against him (5 years). It is also very possible he has simply been unable to locate anyone he sufficiently trusts to act as escrow, and there is no ulterior motive. My understanding is that TF has denied that he was involved in any of the thefts/losses his customers suffered via his businesses.

In regards to the OP, I am not a huge fan of telling people what services they can and cannot offer to others, as I strongly believe people should be free to evaluate people's qualifications and trust to make a decision to trust them or not. On the other hand, Mdayonliner very much has very close to zero trading history, and from what I can tell, has been entrusted with nearly no of anyone's money in the past, and was offering to hold ~$120k of someone else's money for a year -- it is difficult to argue that this is not a scam attempt. Also, to be frank, his trust history of trying to call out "merit abusers" is evidence he was trying to get unwarranted trust.

The problem is that there are incentives to do bad things in the forum, such as paying people to advertise while making crap posts as said advertising creates exposure for what is being advertised and there are no real consequences to doing this. This is in addition to incentives for people to make low effort posts they are being paid for by the number of posts.

There is no easy solution because most solutions will affect those who are not causing harm.

I don’t understand why so many people around here think it is okay to tell people how to conduct business and how they should be saying things.

This forum is an advocate for freedom and likes to give people as much freedom as possible.

I don't think it is the administrations place to say who can and cannot earn money, especially if they are not doing anything on the forum except making a post in a specific section not designed for actual discussion.

There is a reason why the people behind ICOs want broad exposure on social media -- because they want many people to see posts (that are really advertisements) for their ICO, and hopefully have one of their #hashtags go trending for some people. I would not be surprised if some of the mass accounts are actually hired by the people behind the ICO to manipulate social media, and the other mass accounts are still providing social media exposure to the ICOs anyway, so those behind the ICOs usually wont care one "person" (more likely a bot) is claiming their bounty 100 times.

Regardless of the above, I don't see why someone who isn't very active on the forum but is active on other social media platforms shouldn't be able to participate in bounties. If someone wants to tweet about ICOs or talk about ICOs with their friends on Facebook, let them, and let them earn money doing so. If we force people to rank up to participate in bounties who have no real interest in posting here, they will only post crap they put little effort into, and will go around begging for merit so they can rank up. If they have no interest in posting here, let them post what they want on social media.


When you charge people to enable signatures, people will quickly learn they will lose their investment if they post nonsense. More effort could be put into banning multi-accounters when they are posting crap, and maybe even the threshold to ban them should be lower, so someone with 10 accounts might risk $200 instead of $20 if they post even a little bit of low quality posts.

Non paying users might be able to have very basic signature functionality. Maybe users could have some signature features enabled for free if they self-certify their signature is not being used for commercial purposes each time they change their signature, and if they are caught with a commercial signature after certifying their signature is not commercial, their signature privileges can be revoked for a year, or however long.   

Why do you think this would make things worse?

If signatures were outright disabled, the incentive to make low value posts would essentially disappear, and the value of a higher ranking account would be little because of the lack of earnings potential a higher ranking account would have, so I don't think the merit system would be necessary anymore.

If people were required to pay for signatures to be enabled, we could outright remove the merit system. We could even have a system in which users each time a user ranks up they will need to pay to have additional signature features enabled. I personally would prefer to use something like this because it gives users more of an incentive to not engage in behavior that will get them banned because doing so would result in them loosing their investment in their signature features. The payment for signatures would essentially be a bounty that users will not post low value posts.

One of the biggest flaws in the merit system is that everyone who was already ranked up was grandfathered into their rank. A good number of the people I have seen posting crap have a fairly high ranking account but have received exactly zero merit since the merit system was implemented.

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As a general rule, it is trivial to obtain bitcoin to two separate addresses that cannot be linked to eachother, even if they have transactions. It takes patience, but it is also not difficult to move bitcoin to an exchange in order to consolidate bitcoin inputs if the exchange allows for multiple deposit addresses.

I am also not a fan of forcing people to conduct business a certain way.

The facebook page lists bepminhhuy[dot]com as their website, while their facebook page is called "maxpara[dot]vn"

This leads me to believe that the business owner in Vietnam created a website on the maxpara domain, created a Facebook page with the same domain, then somehow lost access to the domain (and/or server), and created a new website on the bepminhhuy domain, and forgot about the maxpara domain.

Considering that the domain is still being used as a phishing site to steal login credentials, I would say whoever currently is in control of the domain is the culprit.

I could help out if you are unable to find anyone else to escrow.

I may have been thinking about secondstrade. It looks like lutpin was in fact managing the 777 campaign starting in July 2016, however before lutpin took over (a new thread was created by lightlord), the pay was very low, but it looks like the amount of spam generated by that campaign was mitigated because of the limited number of spots.

He is not lauda. He is significantly smarter than lauda.

He moved on. The account he was as posting from was not his first not by a long shot and likely won’t be his last.

PrimeDice came to mind when I was writing that. Their advertising campaign was very big, and full of spammers, and over time many people started publicly complaining about their advertising, and they eventually reduced their campaign to only posters with good posts, and subsequently only allowed staff to advertise for them.


Another example was, IIRC, the "777" campaign as they paid very little but accepted everyone(?), and attracted many spammers. The owner of that casino eventually earned negative trust.

Some campaign managers will say they will only manage campaigns with certain rules, however it is ultimately the company's money, and someone who doesn't agree with the rules, or is being denied payment what they perceive to be unfairly, can appeal to the company directly for an exception to the rule.

The problem with this is that campaign managers are ultimately paid by and are accountable to the companies behind the ICOs, or the bitcoin related business that are advertising.

In the past, when a bitcoin related company was advertising their services, they would have an incentive to only accept those with a decent reputation, and/or to not accept those with a negative reputation, and to take other measures to prevent those advertising on their behalf from making garbage posts. The incentive was that if many users over time made garbage posts while advertising for the company, then the company's reputation would suffer and the advertising would do more harm than good.

The problem with ICOs is that their goal is to reach as many people as possible very quickly, so there is an incentive to allow for people posting garbage. Also, an ICO will only last a month or two, which is generally not enough time to weed out spammers from an advertising campaign, so they can claim that any spam problem is being worked on. Most importantly, once they raise money from their ICO, they generally do not need to worry about their reputation anymore, so any negative reputation "earned" from the spammy advertising will not affect them.

I would speculate whoever is ultimately behind this spambot is using something similar to mTurk to have people create accounts from a diverse IP address, and solve the recaptcha from the same.