If Bruno’s ICO turns out to be a scam or otherwise unsuccessful then you will lose your money. If it turns out to be a successful enterprise then you may turn a profit. The overwhelming majority of small businesses including those that have an ICO will fail, while those that ultimately succeed generally have great returns.

I don’t think it is outside of the norm for a mod to invest in an ICO. Many mods prefer to keep their money in bitcoin and don’t want to invest in altcoins or ICOs but I don’t see any reason disallow this.

I would say as long as there is no hidden arrangement such as a mod receiving an undisclosed payment to promote an ICO or a payment to say they have invested when they have not or otherwise be deceitful there is no issue here. I am not aware of any of the above being the case in this situation, nor any allegations this is true, unfounded or otherwise.

I think you have found some examples of users receiving merit that were probably not deserved. In some cases this may have been people giving merits to their actual friends who happen to not make good posts, while in others, this may have been people giving merit to their alternate accounts (and there may be some cases in which people have given merit to random people to 'try it out').

I am not sure if everyone who "deserves" merit has received at least one merit or not. I know we have a problem with people making shit posts, and spamming the forum, however I somewhat find it hard to believe this problem is so bad that less than 1/50^th of 1% of active users are deserving merit. If the problem really is so bad that >99.8% of active users do not deserve merit, then frankly, the solution is to get rid of signatures.

Yes, I saw that. It looks like they ended the ban, maybe in response to that editorial.

Many ICOs are outright frauds, however some of them are essentially small businesses that are trying to raise money in their early stages. Historically speaking, these small businesses have failed at a very high rate -- just look at how many businesses have gone out of business here on the forum.

I also remember seeing many advertisements for non-existent counterfeit miners, and likely fraudulent cloud mining contracts before the ban was instituted.

I would say that verifying the identity of crypto related advertisers and limiting the scope of advertisements is probably generally speaking a good thing, and will prevent confidence in crypto in general from being eroded. With that being said, the author cited another supreme court case (noted above) that says that noble social causes (such as to prevent fraud) are not legal grounds to engage in anti-competitive behavior.

Facebook was previously also banning for example Coinbase from advertising, which is an on-ramp for retail customers to buy crypto and use it to buy things in a P2P manor. However Facebook also has a messenger service in which users can send money to their friends in a P2P manor, which likely competes with Bitcoin.


 

He has two accounts (#6 and #7) in the top 10 number of posts.

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Ironically enough, in a twisted sense of logic, hilariousandco has a problem with Bruno trying to enter into a transaction in which both parties consent to the terms, and no one is harmed, while he has stated he would prefer that he take out a loan, when the evidence suggests Bruno is not in a position to repay any loans.

In other words, hilariousandco would rather a lender get scammed than Bruno sell his account.

It appears as if the concept of selling an account causes mass hysteria to a certain group of people...

Thanks for this.

It looks like roughly 0.6% of users (who have received merit) are receiving sufficient merit to rank up in a timely fashion, and an additional 1.28% of users are accumulating sufficient merit to rank up at half the rate that activity would previously allow. This doesn't account for the thousands of people who have received zero merit. A good number of members who have received a lot of merit do not need any merit to rank up.

According to Vod's BPIP, there are over a million active accounts, although I am not sure how many of them are spam accounts that have been banned. But by any reasonable measure, well under 1% of active accounts have received any merit at all.

I am not sure if this is a accurate representation of the percentage of users who have sufficient post quality to be deserving merit. Maybe if theymos were to run a report of the number of users who meet all of the below criteria, we could compare that number to how many users have received merit:

• At least one post in the last 6 months
• Average post length, excluding BB code, outside of any quote tags to be greater than 100 characters
• Total time logged in divided by number of posts is greater than 3 minutes
• No bans in the past year

When you buy an account, you quite literally have invested in your ability to constructively participate here. Further, the forum is not affected if someone is using a purchased account to post crap verses someone using an account that posts crap.

That is a disingenuous argument. You (should) know very well that if someone advertises they purchased an account today they will receive multiple negative ratings.

This is a common argument, however I have not seen evidence this is actually a common occurrence. In fact, I believe the fact that an account is a purchased account has a material affect on a scam attempt is a fairly rare occurrence -- the most recent example I can think of this happening is aTriz, which was a couple of months ago.

It looks like, in general, users need to earn an average of 1 merit per day to rank up past being a "member" starting from when they create their account.

On its face, this does not sound very difficult, however there may be fairly extended periods in which users are not very active (eg, they make <1 post per day).

Being 6 months into the Merit system, how many users have received at least 180 merit? What about 90 merit? I don't think there are many, and merit was being given more freely when it was first implemented as everyone had a lot of sMerit to give away.

Crossing the border illegally is not the same as going on a day hike. Hundreds of people die every year while crossing the border, most of which are not violence related. Further, ignoring the fact that crossing the border in itself is illegal, there is a lot of illegal activity on the border that puts anyone who crosses in harms way.

I would also dispute that parents are crossing with their kids for their kids to have a better life. The number of adults detained with children nearly match the number of children detained with adults, which indicates that most adults bring exactly one child across the border. I would argue this indicates that people are bringing one child with them in order to avoid getting detained by ICE.

One good example of the above happening is the girl who was recently featured on the cover of TIME magazine. According to news reports, according to the father, the girl's mother brought her daughter across the border illegally several years ago, the daughter was never separated from her mother, however, the mother left multiple other children behind when she left.

According to a Wall Street Journal editorial published today (paywall), the advertising ban on Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrency services from being able to advertise on Facebook's and Google's advertising platforms may be against anti-trust laws.

The rationale, according to the author, who is an antitrust attorney, is that GooglePay, and Facebook Messengers p2p payment service compete with Bitcoin and related services such as Coinbase. The author also noted that both Google and Facebook have announced initiatives for various blockchain- and crypto-related projects.

The author cited Lorain Journal v. U.S. (1951), in which the US Supreme Court held that businesses may usually “refuse to accept advertisements from whomever it pleases,” they may not refuse advertisements that harm its competition.

The publicly stated reasons for the bans is that crypto-related ads had a very high rate of fraudulent and deceptive advertising, however the author notes the US Supreme Court held in FTC v. Superior Court Trial Lawyers Association (1990), that “social justifications for the restraint of trade don’t make the restraint any less unlawful.”

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What are your thoughts on the advertising ban?

In general, may in the Bitcoin sphere probably do not like the idea of the government telling companies how to conduct business.

The issue is not so much that merit sources are not giving out enough merit (if this was an issue theymos could just designate more people to be merit sources), I believe it is a bigger issue that nonmerit sources have sMerit that is unspent, resulting in much less merit propagating than expected.

This is very hard to address and I don’t see any obvious solutions to this. 

It looks like that kind of username is now restricted.

I would not say that selling your account is remotely comparable to selling your soul. Making that comparison is disingenuous.

Also the notion that someone should take out a loan they cannot repay instead of selling their account is ridiculous and should be condemned.

Can you release the signed message agreeing to the terms of the loan? Or if unavailable the relevant PMs with the terms of the loan? Or any other evidence of the loan?

I messaged _darkstar about the alleged loan to see if he can provide more information. Stay tuned...

If there is an outstanding loan in default you should either repay the loan or negotiate terms with the owner of the debt agreeable to both of you, if you can, that will put you not in default. As long as there is a loan in default outstanding, it is difficult to argue against the ratings.

Out of curiosity, what is your criteria for repaying what you owe?

I think there are certain things that should be done as far as monetization that would be good for the forum as a whole. One example would be to charge to enable features such as the ability to have a signature/avatar, or to enable certain signature related features. This would force users to pay for the ability to earn money via the forum, and eventually users who know they are unable to meet forum standards for post quality will be unwilling to pay for signature features.

Proof of captcha is a decent way to fight spammers, however proof of money is significantly superior. 

I think the merit system had good intentions, however far too frequently, I see posts with merit that I believe received merit because the sender agreed with the content of the post, and not the underlying effort put into the post. I believe that over time, the merit system will only contribute and encourage groupthink. 

He was not just banned, but apparently, theymos changed some settings so that when he tried to access "bitcointalk.org", he is unable to access the forum and is shown a blank page(?). 

MNW and theymos very much did not get along, although he was previously a staff member. I remember seeing his negative rating on theymos show up that resulted from him being on someone's trust list, that said that theymos is just a 21 year old kid who ran an illegal stock exchange.

MNW was apparently banned and temporarily unbanned a number of times so he can post updates in regards to repaying his debts. Although he said at the time he was trolling when he was guaranteeing repayment of pirate40's ponzi, he did eventually pay a lot of money who took him up on his bet.

He was fighting extradition, so presumably he did not want to end up in the US court system. 

Being in prison in Thailand means he potentially will get out of prison in the somewhat near future. Being extradited to the US means he will likely spend the rest of his life in prison.

I am not familiar with the conditions of Thailand prison, however there are other considerations that he will take into account.