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.

Based on the available evidence, it appears that Gox lost a fairly modest amount of money (in terms of USD) in 2011 that compromises a decent bulk of the missing money. They were subsequently hacked a number of times that have been publicly reported, during which they likely lost some amount of money.

I am not entirely sure why the losses compounded over time, maybe Gox was not a profitable operation, and they took customer money to fund the losses.

Security did not seem to be a strength of Gox's. If they had been honest about the loss in 2011, it would likely have been not a very big deal, but Gox would have closed and some other exchange would have taken the spot of having the majority of trading volume.

The Gox trustee did in fact sell a lot of coins on the market starting from the mid teen's down to near the February low.

In January the price was about $17k, and in Feb the low as $6k, and quickly bounced back to just under $12k. The trustee stopped selling before the price hit $6k, and the price has since declined back down to $6k multiple times, and breaching that low this past weekend. 

This is true, especially in regards to Muslims. I do not doubt this is influencing the recent wave of populism and the recent wave of anti-establishment votes. 

This has been fairly widely reported, and in this case is accurate.

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This is very concerning, and is another example of the Obama "Deep State" and abuse of power that took place under his administration.

I would be willing to speculate that the "Russia" investigation will ultimately result in multiple indictments of people associated with Clinton and that work(ed) in various intelligence agencies under Obama. 

This is largely a dispute over influence and control over SE Asia, and trade in the area. If China controls the international waters in the area, they can effectively control trade with countries that are not named 'China'.

How would you feel about a parent who has a young child in the back seat of their car while driving after having a lot to drink -- enough to put the parent well over the "legal limit" of alcohol in their blood to be driving? Do you think it would be right to take away the child from this parent because the parent has shown willful disregard of the child's safety?

There is a lot of misinformation about this issue.

Parents were separated from their children under Obama, Bush Jr., and Clinton, however Trump's zero tolerance policy effectively resulted in this happening more frequently. In fact, many of the pictures and videos published by the MSM are from when Obama was in office, but are being misrepresented to be more recent.

The fact of the matter is, the people who brought their children over the border broke the law, the punishment of which is up to 6 months in jail. In any civilized nation, when a parent goes to jail (or is arrested for breaking the law, and is taken to jail pending trial), their children do not go to jail with them. Also, the trip from Mexico over the US border to "civilization" is very dangerous, and often results in death -- the child is in no position to consent to taking this kind of risks, nor are they in a position to understand the risks and even attempt to protest taking the risks, and as such, there is an argument the parents should have their children taken away for putting their lives at risk alone.   

There is no way this trade will end badly /s

OP -- I would suggest opening an account of one of many exchanges available to US customers.

Unhandled reports are somewhat of a "soft bad" report as a no moderator has chosen to take action based on your report.

Is your concern that he bought the account, or that the account he bought has positive trust?

If it is the later, it doesn't look like he has engaged in any trades since buying the account, according to his sent/received trust history,  and he is currently participating in a signature campaign. Based on the evidence, I would say he was more likely buying an account that is xx rank, so he can participate in a signature campaign that happened to have some trust.

The person who gave this account positive trust has not been active for years so asking for it to be removed would have not accomplished anything.

Since we are discussing researching accounts that may have been sold a long time ago, I might ask what your opinion is on aTriz being very clearly sold, and going into business with someone who has an even stronger stance on sold accounts than you do, by a large degree.

I generally don't have an issue with leaving negative trust with very little evidence of wrongdoing (or planned wrongdoing) in order to warn others of general suspicions while an investigation is ongoing (for a short time), provided that after a few days, the rating is either removed, or justified with more solid proof the person is a scammer. This time can be used to either gather more information or ask questions about suspicious activity.

My concern about using the "I don't trust someone" standard, is that it encourages a mob mentality and removes any kind of accountability to those leaving ratings -- both of which seem to be a problem as of recently. It also makes it much easier to leave ratings for personal reasons, which appear to be happening at a greater frequency as of recently.

If you are unable to articulate how someone is a scammer, as a general rule, a negative rating is not appropriate.