Heh heh....thank you.  You can just call me Sceptical Chymist without the "The".  It's cleaner.

And thank you for PM'ing me what you posted here, because I would have missed it since I don't check this thread regularly.  I did take a look at at least the first few pages of each of those members and did my best to distribute some merits among them.  One member (soliton) I could only see two posts for, so they probably post in sections that I have on ignore.  The other members post mainly in the WO thread and a lot of their posts were one-liners, but I did find a few decent ones.

See?  If you PM me with requests to review post histories, I'll do it--and usually I have enough sMerits to give, although I just ran out of source sMerits and tapped into my earned ones, but that's no big deal.  It's not like I'm saving them for a special occasion.

Maybe, unless OP is located somewhere where Binance doesn't allow it (and I happen to be in one of those areas myself).

I saw those threads about wesellbitcoin/wesellcrypto.com opening back up, and if they're legitimate--which I haven't verified--you might be able to buy bitcoin through a PayPal account connected to your bank.  I don't know if they take debit cards, but I'm assuming they don't since they never used to.

How about trying to locate a bitcoin ATM?  If you've got a debit card, you should be able to get cash easily enough, and if you've got cash and have a bitcoin ATM somewhere nearby, you're good to go.  Other than that, I have no clue as to how to do it.  But good luck, and hopefully you can figure something out.

Rare maybe, but I'm not surprised one has popped up right now given that people are probably doing a lot of searches for bitcoin/crypto.  Seems like a weird imitation, as usually the phishers go for misspellings rather than using a symbol like that over the "o" like this one did.  I don't know who would mistakenly type that out, but it'd probably fool a lot of people if it showed up in search results.

Thanks for the heads up, OP.  I'm not sure how many bitcointalk users would have fallen for this, but the warning certainly can't hurt.

That would definitely be a nice feature, but I'm sure it would drive up the cost of the wallet--probably to the point of being way too expensive, given that the seed phrase/private keys for a hardware wallet have to be backed up just as securely against fire and everything else.  If you buy a Steelwallet or something similar, the hardware wallet itself could be destroyed and you'd still be able to regain access to your coins.

I kind of like the Opendime devices, as they're really small and just kind of neat.  It would be nice if they came with some kind of thing to guard the contacts, though.  The downside is that they're only made for one coin (AFAIK). 

I'd love to see a HW wallet with the capability to store obscure coins, i.e., ones that Ledger and Trezor don't currently support.  I used to be into shitcoins like RDD, GRC, and others and I had to store them on their own software wallets (admittedly, they're PoS coins, but it would have been nice to have the option to keep them on a HW wallet if I needed to).

Yeah, but credit cards tend to have outrageously high interest rates.  If you could use bitcoin as collateral for a bank loan, you could probably get a much better rate--but finding a bank (or any other lending institution) willing to accept crypto as collateral might be a problem. 

And imagine that the bitcoin collateral you put up for the loan suddenly drops 25-50%.  You're probably going to have to put up more collateral, much like a margin call.  And seeing as bitcoin is one of the most volatile investments in existence, a drop like that certainly could happen--and quick, too.

If you've got a bunch of bitcoin but need a loan, something's wrong there.  Situations like that make me think the person over-invested in bitcoin and didn't keep enough of a cash reserve on hand.  I'm sure that's happening a lot lately, given how high bitcoin has climbed.

It's only strange to you because you're not looking at things properly and your math is way, waaaay off.

Coinbase is an exchange, not a component of bitcoin's market cap.  Anyway, you figure it out for yourself.  I'm kind of amazed that Coinbase is valued that high.  As I said in the other thread, they've never released any profit/loss statements (because they were never required to), but I'm starting to think they're a pretty profitable operation.  It's either that, or the company is being extremely overvalued at $77B, which is always a possibility with tech stocks--and I'd consider Coinbase to fall into that category.

I think the Reputation section should be reserved for issues regarding members of this forum that don't include formal scam accusations, and there shouldn't be threads in that section about external websites and all that crap.

Scam Accusations is definitely a bloated mess right now, and I agree that there are a lot of topics worthy of simply ignoring (which I frequently do).  If you're not filling out a formal scam accusation form against someone or pointing out a scam that's going on on bitcointalk itself, it probably doesn't belong in Scam Accusations.

Unfortunately, those two sections are what everyone has got to work with, so those threads that we all ignore probably don't have a better place to be (that I know of; maybe moderators have a different opinion).  I'm against restricting either section based on rank, because I don't think it's bad enough that such drastic measures need to be taken.  As LoyceV pointed out, this forum should be as free as possible.

WOW.  And it looks like they didn't even get a bulk discount on their purchase, either--and as of this very moment, they've lost on this last investment, since bitcoin is just under $48k.  I'm wondering when the CEO is going to stop buying.

Hopefully this is all kosher with MSTR's shareholders, because holding that much bitcoin is obviously extremely risky and sometimes stockholders don't like to see companies do stuff like this.  But I just took a look at MSTR's stock price, and it's soaring still.  Obviously right now those shareholders don't seem to mind, but what happens if and when bitcoin starts to tank?  I'm hoping that won't happen, but we could all probably agree that it could, in which case MSTR will have taken a huge paper loss.

This is definitely bullish news, though.  I'm expecting bitcoin to be well above $50k again by next week (and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for that).

The posts you referenced were all made by members who definitely are not undermerited--which I thought was the point of this thread. 

As a merit source, I'm personally interested in finding good posts made by less senior members, as they're the ones who need the merits to rank up.  There have been a few threads recently in Meta bitching about how hard it is to rank up, which leads me to believe that members are starting to care about that again--and probably because of bitcoin's huge price increase making sig campaigns more lucrative. 

Anyway, I'll make this offer once again: If you think you've made some decent posts yourself, don't hesitate to PM me and ask that I review your post history.  I will be happy to do so.  Just don't beg me for merit outright. 

I don't any more than I see buying Amazon stock as indirectly investing in Nike (or anything they sell).

It is indeed interesting news, however--and I'm taking OP at his word that it's true since I haven't verified it.  I don't think there are any other publicly-traded exchanges of any type, or at least I can't think of any.  As far as whether their stock is worth investing in, it depends on how profitable they are.  I've never seen any reports about that (not surprising since they never had to file any such reports), but I bet they make a pretty decent chunk of change unless they somehow have a lot of overhead.  

This will definitely be a stock that I'll put on my watch list once they finally get listed.  Betcha there'll be a ton of buying on IPO day.

No?  I thought when you get listed on a stock exchange, the initial stock sold to the public is the IPO.

Jesus, that sounds as though Enron were back in business and manipulating electricity prices for their own gain.

The storm in Texas is most likely going to be a black swan event, something that isn't likely to happen again for a long time and I doubt that any effect on electricity prices and/or mining profitability it had will be long-lasting.  As far as I know their weather is pretty predictable and the snowstorm was a fluke (though it was no joke to the folks in Texas who went through it).

Nah, I don't think that's even close to a forum record.  I recall an old-timer (sort of) member getting heat for posting up a storm, and if I recall he'd said he wrote some of his posts in advance or just wrote very quickly or whatever.  Wish I could remember the member's name.

Anyway, as long as campaigns don't go by your total post count this is going to be an easy way for very lazy members to abuse the privilege of being in a campaign and as Leo pointed out it's certainly not unusual behavior--it's just another way for people who lack any motivation to write to continue to get paid for writing.  Crazy.

I would definitely point this out to the campaign manager whenever someone catches a member doing this, because even though it might not be against the rules it certainly is bending them to the point where it might as well be broken.

That's not a bad idea either.  It's a good one, in fact.

Seriously--it's a free market, and I don't think any of us would want it any other way.  I'm pretty sure Satoshi would want bitcoin to be freely traded, with anyone being able to buy or sell as much as they want, including big corporations, government institutions, whatever.

So not only can't we stop these uber-deep pocketed companies from buying spitloads of bitcoin, I don't think we would want to even if we could.  There's plenty of bitcoin to go around, and I'd also point out that bitcoin (and a lot of long-time hodlers) have benefited greatly from all of this institutional buying.  I'm not hearing many complaints around here.

I sure as hell wasn't certain bitcoin was going to go as high as it did, even after all of that "good news" you alluded to.  I figured with MSTR and the other corporations buying bitcoin that the price would go up, but I would not have thought it'd go as high as $50k.  It still amazes me that it did, and fortunately this correction the market is experiencing hasn't deflated the price all that much (bitcoin is at around $49k as I'm writing this).

I'd love to say I got rich off this bull run, but that isn't the case unfortunately.  Oh well.  It's still fun being a bystander fan, watching the bull market craziness and rooting for crypto to keep rising.  Whoop whoop!

I'm not sure DT members are tagging suspected merit abusers anymore, nor do I think Theymos wants them to.  And as far as whether this is truly a farm with individual members or one person abusing bounties with multiple accounts....well, this is why I stopped tagging members based on evidence like this. 

More than likely there's definite bounty abuse going on, but I think you ought to point any bounty managers involved to this thread and have them take a look at the evidence presented.  As I said, I don't tag people based on sharing ETH addresses, but that doesn't mean other DT members wouldn't.

Nice catch on this one, OP.

He attacked me as well (in my feedback) and was a complete prick to me most of the time....but the man's dead now, and it's not as though he was evil incarnate--he was just a human being with flaws, as we all are.  If he'd just left the forum voluntarily, that would be one thing.  I might have said good riddance, but he didn't.  He died, and I would not have wished him to leave the forum that way.

All is forgiven from my end, TECSHARE.  No hard feelings wherever you are, and rest in peace my man.

Yeah, it kind of makes me wonder about TMAN and probably some other members whose names I might recognize but can't recall at the moment, those who've been away from the forum for a long time.  There are certainly many other reasons why someone would stop posting on a discussion board besides death, but these days I just wonder. 

Abuser of what?  He abused the trust system and got kicked off DT for that, but he wasn't a scammer by any means.  In fact, there's a long trail of evidence in his trust page attesting to the fact that he was honest in all his business dealings.  And yeah, he was an abrasive guy, but if everyone here agreed on everything it would be a fucking boring forum.

I'm not even sure how to interpret this incoherent post, but I would say that even if the forum were better off without TECSHARE, I still mourn his passing.  I mean come on, he'd been a member of bitcointalk for a long time and did a lot of trading here, and he was certainly respected by a lot of members.  So fuck you and your pissing on his grave.

Sure it could, but no I don't think any correction that happens in any raging bull market is cause for concern.  There's been absolutely no negative news and nothing I can see that would pop this bubble (it might not be a bubble, but you know what I mean). 

People are just taking their profits off the table after having made a lot of money--and there are probably silly panic sellers as well driving the price down.  But all in all I don't think the bull has stopped charging; it's just taking a breather and will resume once it catches its breath.  I'm thinking bitcoin could probably be near $75k by the end of the year, but we'll see.

The community seems to be skeptical, not necessarily negative, and for good reason.  OP is a random newbie giving us the news, and this is the internet where anyone can claim anything--so what you'll see is that most people hope that TECSHARE's death isn't true and want some evidence to back up OP's claim.

As I said, I didn't have a good relationship with TECSHARE and we bickered a lot, but I wouldn't have wished him dead by any means.  This looks like it's the truth, and I'm sorry to see him gone.  This sucks.

Yeah, that's kind of the sucky part of bitcoin rocketing to the moon--you have much less incentive to spend or send it to other wallets.  Crazy how high the fees are.

Whatever happened to Kwukduck?  Anyone remember him?  He was always so bearish when bitcoin was rising and I always thought it was amusing how wrong he'd be--and then he just disappeared.  Maybe he finally figured out that bitcoin is no joke as far as being an investment and went long on it.  If he did, I doubt he'd report back here telling the community about his change of heart.

Oh yeah, and don't panic now either.  Bitcoin dropped about $10k in the past day or so if I'm not mistaken, and I'm sure that scares the hell out of some people, but for the rest of us who've been watching it for years it's just business as usual.