Holy shit, I didn't realize it was that much.  I actually thought it was much, much less--but then again, I don't pay much attention, since I never donated and it's none of my business what the forum does with its money.  

You said part of that gets paid to the mods, but I thought I also heard that they get paid very little and also that it depends on how much moderating they do.  Someone please correct me if I'm wrong on either of those points.  But jeez, with 125BTC the forum could afford to pay for a ton of moderators even if it paid well.  

And how much does it cost to upgrade the forum, anyway?  With bitcoin at $55k or so, you'd think 125BTC would more than cover it (but I won't complain about that either, since I'm kind of a fan of the way the forum is now).

I'd say this forum isn't dead even if the set of all forums is on the decline--and that's probably because of sig campaigns and bounties, but nevertheless bitcointalk is far from dead.  And what's Reddit anyway?  It's a collection of forums with heavy censorship.  I want no part of that, thanks.

I don't think it's inappropriate, but I refuse to do it nonetheless.  There are a few things that could go wrong when doing so, including the original neg being removed while the counterpositive remains (for whatever reason).  I also don't like leaving a positive for someone unless there's a damn good reason, and a wrongly-left negative--even though it's not right--doesn't rise to that level IMO.

OP, there's a lot that's wrong with the trust system we have, and there haven't been any significant improvements in my time here.  Since there aren't any hard rules telling members what they can and can't do, everyone is basically free to interpret the spirit of the trust system as they see fit--regardless of any consensus among DT members or anyone else. 

It's almost pointless debating stuff like this since people will likely continue leaving counter-positives and there aren't going to be any consequences for doing so (even if it were against the rules or even frowned upon).

That's most likely what happened, since mods aren't known to just delete a member's posts in bulk unless someone has reported a whole bunch of them (although I could see hilariousandco doing something like that).  Taking a look at OP's post history, what I see is mediocrity and it seems obvious to me that he's just writing posts to fulfill a character count for a bounty/sig campaign--at least that would be the first thing that would come to mind if I were to just randomly look at a handful of his posts and guess his motivation for being here.

On the other hand, I've seen posts that were much worse that didn't get deleted, so I'd be curious to know what those deleted ones looked like.  They were probably bad since someone obviously reported them and a mod agreed with the report(s).  Try to do better, OP.

That's the fundamental difference between online life and real life.  The layer of anonymity that the internet affords you basically takes away the fear to say things you normally wouldn't in a face-to-face conversation.  Haven't you realized that by now?

As far as why people beg here, a lot of newbies don't realize that bitcoin is actual money and they think people here are just going to give some of it away for nothing.  And then there are scammers posing as beggars (the ones with the hard luck stories and whatnot); any of those should be reported immediately to the mods.  Fortunately I haven't seen too many begging posts or threads lately--but that could be because they tend to get reported and nuked fairly quickly.  Back in 2015 it seemed to be a common thing.

Eh, it's at $52k as I write this, which isn't bad.  You kind of have to expect that when bitcoin breaks through a new all-time high there's going to be some selling going on afterward, and I'm pretty sure that's what we're seeing.  This has happened before, and it'll happen again. 

But think about the mood of the bitcoin market overall--it's still very bullish as far as I can tell, so I think the price will get back to and beyond $60k in the not-too-distant future as buying starts to pick up again.  Now's definitely not the time to sell, so hopefully nobody's panicking because of this dip of a few thousand dollars.  It might seem extreme if you haven't been around for a while, but this is just how bitcoin acts from time to time.

People have been saying this same thing about the trust system and the DT members in it for years now.  I'm not sure if the rotating system has made things better or worse, but with Lauda gone there do seem to be fewer "cliques" within the DT system.

I hadn't read any of your previous posts, OP, so I'm not sure why YOSHIE and the two others tag-teamed you with neutral and negative feedback, but I don't think any of it is justified.  You might have been too persistent in asking YOSHIE to prove her identity (she wasn't gone all that long and I don't think there's any evidence that the account changed hands), but I don't think that's so offensive that it deserves even a neutral, much less ones harshly-worded as the ones you got. 

Everyone involved here should just take a breath and re-evaluate the importance of the issues at hand, which IMO, are not critical.  I don't think a member who's been gone a few weeks should have to sign a message to prove their identity, and I also don't think someone insisting they do so should get blasted on their trust page.  Get a thicker skin and don't leave what amounts to retaliatory feedback for a trivial issue.

Way too expensive, and the makers of the OpenDime sell what amounts to exactly the same thing (on the coinkite website, linked here, you'll find it as the Opendime Capsule).  And it's only USD $13.99.  I have one of these and you can definitely fit a Nano S into it with room for padding, though the Nano X doesn't fit.

I like the idea of this kind of storage, which is why I bought one from coinkite--but as NeuroticFish has pointed out, you can find something similar that will do the job just fine for a lot cheaper than what OP is trying to sell them for.

I guess if you were planning on burying this somewhere, the waterproof aluminum case would come in handy, unlike a Zip-Loc bag.  I'm not sure how many people have buried anything related to crypto, but I'm sure there are at least a few out there for which a case like this would be useful.

I do, though I end up meriting plenty of posts made by Legendary members anyway.  I'm a merit source, so I see my job as at least partially helping lower-ranked members to get enough merits to get to the higher ranks.  Unfortunately a lot of what gets written by Newbie-Jr. Members tends to be unreadable garbage (or at least too mediocre to warrant giving merits to).

I was fortunate enough to rank up to Legendary shortly before the merit system was implemented, so my data point probably doesn't help OP's hypothesis at all--but man, I'm glad it turned out that way, else I would have had to wait a lot longer to get to Legendary.  Even without the merit system, it took almost three years for me to get there if my arithmetic is correct.  That's why nowadays it's almost impossible for the average member to achieve Legendary status.  You'd have to be very committed to the forum for a very long time frame in order to do it, and I suspect many members have just given up on trying.

So true, and I'm just wondering when the famine is going to start--and I also suspect that it's going to be prolonged and severe when it arrives, so I'm not looking forward to it.  All of this stimulus and money creation that's going on all around the world can't go on forever without having serious consequences (unless I'm missing something that our esteemed economists in power know).

I don't understand currency trading at all, but it does seem strange that the USD would be increasing in value relative to any other currency aside from the extremely weaker ones.  Economics seems like so much voodoo crap these days, and I'm just hoping that our policy makers are keeping an eye on all of this and have plans for the future that don't include forcing the population to live in bunkers for the rest of their lives.

Miners might be holding for the short-term, hoping bitcoin keeps achieving new all-time highs, but I can't imagine that they're going to hold their mined BTC for the long-term.  Not that I have expertise in mining operations, but I'm assuming the costs involved in running a huge mining farm have to be paid for with fiat currency (like the electricity bill for example).  They're going to have to sell eventually.

It's in the miners' interest not to crash the market, so I would think that the bigger mining operations would consider how to sell large amounts of bitcoin without moving the market--e.g., not dumping a ton of it onto the market all at once.  But who knows?  I think it's smart for them to hold what they can, as this bull market still has some powerful legs, but miners aren't in the business of speculating on bitcoin's price.

Aww, that's kind of you, Foxpup.  And the reason you gave was what I was going to suggest if you hadn't posted here--I've never seen you do any deals on the forum, so there would be no real need for you to hand out any positives.  And man, there are just so many reasons why members should get negatives.

OP, you'll find that DT members tend to have a very high negative/positive ratio for trust left for other members, and that's because a lot of DT members have become trusted by busting scams and catching cheaters.  They also have to be very conservative about leaving positives, since that could potentially turn a questionable member's trust to green--and that could be exploited in order to scam.  It's been known to happen before.

That doesn't make any sense.  You're interested in cryptocurrency because of Binance?  Me brains can't handle that kind of motivation, and you're saying many others share the same motivation.  Bizarre.

And by the way, the success or failure of bitcoin (or crypto in general) does not depend on Binance or any exchange.  There have been many big exchanges that have failed, and the most those failures have caused were bumps in the road of bitcoin's success.  Having said that, I hope Binance doesn't fail--they're an awesome exchange, even if I'm unable to use them myself.  They survived that massive hack a year or so ago and it would have killed weaker exchanges.  That says a lot about them, IMO.

That's because it's a bizarre thing to say.

Aww.  There's no way I'm attempting to solve your riddle (I'm not good with standard ones anyway, so a blockchain-based one would require more brainpower than I possess at the moment), but I'm sort of missing Lauda as well.  She/he certainly made the forum spicy, and that spiciness has been noticeably lacking since Lauda disappeared.  Perhaps Lauda will break her/his vow and come back one day, though I'm not gonna hold my breath for that.

Nullius, I'm with you on treasuring every satoshi I own, which doesn't amount to much.  I keep thinking about how much you could get from faucets about 3-4 years ago when people were saying faucets were a complete waste of time....now, it doesn't seem like such a waste, does it?

Yeah, it's crazy isn't it?  I couldn't imagine a disaster that disrupted national supply lines for an extended period of time.  If something like that were to happen, our nice society would probably descend into anarchy in no time.  Hell, the US has seen looting and crime waves occur during blackouts (though not recently). 

Anyway, no surprise food prices are going up.  So are gas prices, stocks, crypto, pretty much everything.  I'm not sure if this is the direct result of all the stimulus money that's being handed out or the pathological monetary policy that the US has been following for at least a decade, but it's not unexpected.  I'm afraid things are only going to get worse as far inflation goes; let's hope wages keep up and we don't see hyperinflation hit any of the developed countries.

I expected that link in the OP to be from zerohedge as soon as I saw the title of this thread--I was wrong, but this is the same argument that goldbugs have been using to hype precious metals for as long as I can remember. 

And I'm sure it's true, because no government has lasted forever and thus there's been no currency that's lasted forever.  But so what?  It's not like there's any guarantee that bitcoin has to hold any value whatsoever, much less be worth $60k/BTC.  Do I think bitcoin is going to go to zero anytime soon?  Nope.  But I also don't expect the US dollar to go to zero in the near future either (though with all this money printing, I'd say it's getting closer and closer as time goes on).

All bets are off as far as friendship goes when you're dealing with a problem gambler.  If that is indeed the case, it doesn't surprise me that he isn't even acknowledging his debt to you and it's also not likely you're ever going to get paid back. 

And yeah, trust can be destroyed in an instant--especially these days with all this call-out culture we've got going on, as if nobody's made mistakes of their own before.  Anyway.  I've read your Hitler scenarios, but my brain isn't up to thinking about hypothetical situations like that today.  Ask five different people how the trust system here should work, and you'll get six different answers.

Epochtalk is going to be out of date by the time it ever rolls around these parts.  Lol.  And as much as I understand OP's concern, I seriously doubt Theymos is going to make a change like that, even if it's one that should be made and probably wouldn't require a lot of extra coding.  It's just that suggestions like these tend to fall on completely deaf ears.

On the other hand, there is a way to follow responses in your own thread, and I know you can get e-mails when members post in them.  That at least should provide somewhat of a solution.

Oh shit, I was way off base thinking you'd only been gone for a short period of time and was probably just taking a breather.  I didn't suspect that anything that serious had happened--and there's nothing I can see that you have to apologize for.

Glad you're OK, man.  It sucks when good members of this forum are lost forever, and sometimes you just never know when they've been gone for a while what's happened exactly.

Yeah, but Coinbase is regulated pretty strictly by the US government, and I'm kind of surprised that they'd do something like this.  With off-shore, unregulated exchanges I'd say most of them are engaged in some sort of shenanigans but Coinbase not only has a lot to lose but also has less of a chance of getting away with shady shit like this.  Very interesting.

I don't know about that; they've been seemingly honest as far as not scamming their customers.  You might see threads about their crappy customer service or people getting their accounts banned for trivial reasons, but there haven't been any credible claims that they've actually stolen from their customers.  Of course this new charge against them sort of shows that they're not squeaky clean.  I don't think any crypto exchange is.

I guess my problem is not in what the manufacturers or retailers do when situations like this happen, but the government does.  As long as the government doesn't stick its nose into free market activities, I'm fine with GPU makers or retailers that sell GPUs setting limits or whatever restrictions they see fit. 

I've come to see that the solution probably isn't making more GPUs but finding a way to distribute the news ones fairly.  Unfortunately there's so much demand because of ETH mining (and other altcoins) that people will pay scalpers whatever outrageous price they're asking for high-end GPUs.  It's a shitty situation and I imagine if ETH keeps increasing in value it's only going to get worse.