Aside from all of that blue text, that doesn't explain why you left him that neg to begin with.  It doesn't seem justified IMO, and at least a couple other members agree with me.

I'm not sure if those blue statements are actual lies or simply the fact that he's new, he doesn't know you, and he's searching quickly for evidence to defend himself against you--and he's not a native English speaker, either, so there might be some misunderstanding on his part. 

I've said my piece on this already in two other threads, so I don't think I have any further input.  I still respect you and what you've done on the forum; I just happen to think this particular guy didn't deserve the neg you gave him based on the evidence I saw.

That about sums up my feelings on the matter as well.  Vod has not been the same in the last year, and I don't know if it's because of the stroke or COVID or what, but the feedback he left for OP doesn't seem like a feedback he would have given out in earlier times.  I honestly don't see the reason why he left it, and I've looked at the reference link.

I also suggested OP remove his retaliatory feedback in the other thread, and I'd again ask that he do it here.  I fully understand his frustration with this, but any negotiation with Vod about that neg is dead in the water as long as that counter-neg is in place.  Take the high road, OP--and I do wish you luck in this matter.

I don't have a problem with people using alt accounts to participate in multiple signature campaigns/bounties, as long as they're not using more than one account in the same campaign/bounty.  Nor does it matter to me who the campaign manager is.  If someone was enrolled in two of Yahoo62278's campaigns, I think that's not against the rules and I don't think it's morally or ethically wrong.

What alt accounts should not do is make posts in the same thread, giving the impression that there's a genuine conversation happening--that borders on spam, if you ask me, and I've caught people doing that in the past.  And frankly, as long as the person with multiple accounts is making reasonably good posts across the board, who cares? 

And whether any of us like alt accounts or not, it's up to the campaign/bounty managers to create the rules that deal with them. 

So does the anonymity of cash, which has been used anonymously for criminal activities since the beginning of money. 

What's up with all of this sudden Chipmixer hating?  There are people who truly value their privacy, and their service offers that.  Similarly there are people who use Tor not because they're buying illegal goods on the dark web but because they don't want the government snooping around in their business--and I can't blame them for that, given that governments have demonstrated a blatant disregard for people's privacy. 

Are criminals going to use a service like Chipmixer?  I would think so.  Does that mean it's an evil service that needs to be shut down?  Hell, no!  This is cryptocurrency that we're all interested in here, is it not?  Does privacy not mean anything to you?

I don't know, OP.  Look at what the crypto market is doing right now and ask yourself if a 5-7% profit on top of all the capital gains you probably made is worth the risk of lending out your coins.  Me, I probably would not take the chance and I'd just hold onto what I have for the long term.  Anytime you're not in control of your coins, you're probably going to be anxious--and for good reason, because the entire crypto space is rife with scammers, and even reputable exchanges have been known to go bust overnight and without warning.

Some folks might recommend going the DeFi route, but I don't know much about that and I'm not sure how safe it is.  I hear stories of people making incredible profits on Youtube videos, but you never know what to believe.  Good luck, though.  I'd just hold if I were you.

As suchmoon pointed out, neither the moderators nor Theymos are going to get involved with this, so your best bet is to work it out with Vod.  I would start by removing the retaliatory feedback you left him, because that's considered abuse (or at least misuse) of the trust system and it doesn't help your case.

Vod is reasonable and is known to reverse his decisions based on new information or if a member has proven himself not to be a scammer over time.  Your account is not ruined and don't give up hope that the situation can be resolved.  Anyone looking at what Vod wrote should be able to see that there's no evidence that you're a threat with someone else's funds.  If I was going to trade with you and saw that neg, I'd have no trouble looking past it.  I can't speak for everyone else, but it's not as bad as it seems.

Yeah well, he's got supporters in the Turkish community and the anti-DT brigade.  No big deal IMO.  Eventually Laudanum will be put on everyone's ignore list and he'll have to create another alt to continue his tirade against the DT system and the members in it.  I wouldn't say the merits he's gotten were wrongly given, because he does put some effort into his posts.  Let him be.  We're free to do with our sMerits as we please, and sometimes you might not agree with some that are left, but that's the way it is.

Nah.  I don't know how long it's going to take, but CH will eventually wear himself out.  He's already easy enough to ignore, so I'd suggest you put Laudanum on ignore and any other alt CH creates if you're sick of his nonsense arguments.

I'm not sure that's ironic so much as sarcastic, and it's obvious to that person at least that there are more pressing issues in NYC than turning it into a crypto hub.

I can't say this is good news, because Andrew Young hasn't been elected (yet).  Right now it's just a politician's promise, and we all know those can go by the wayside once someone gets elected.  However it is nice to see someone running for office in New York mentioning crypto as part of his platform--and kind of neat if you ask me.  

But isn't New York one of the most regulated states in the US as far as bitcoin is concerned?  I've heard that New Yorkers don't have access to exchanges like Binance and others.  So Young can make promises like this all he wants, but he's got to get around whatever regulations are on the books right now in NY.  

I honestly don't have a clue why he left you negative feedback for either that thread or the post that was referenced in the feedback.  I read your OP and didn't see anything malicious or suspicious, and I even merited the post.  Maybe Vod can stop by to explain why he left you the neg. 

Eh, he's left some pretty spot-on feedbacks in the past, and he voluntarily patrolled the Lending section for years, looking for and tagging shady members asking for no-collateral loans and the like.  So most of his feedback is good.  Since he had his stroke, however, he's changed somewhat.  I don't know if anyone else has noticed that or not, but it seems pretty obvious to me (unless there's more going on behind the scenes with him).

Let's await his response if he chooses to give one here.  Hopefully he will, because I'm a bit puzzled by that neg.

That's an interesting way of looking at things around here, but I'd argue that some of the most helpful members I've seen on the forum aren't in signature campaigns (though certainly a lot of them are).  Vod and Philipma1957 come to mind immediately, and I don't think the latter is in a campaign. 

But I wouldn't call participating in a signature campaign as being greedy necessarily.  A lot of members would be posting here no matter what, and it just makes sense to make a few satoshis in the process.

I don't personally click on signatures.  I have them on ignore, just like avatars, because I hate looking at them over and over--but obviously a lot of people do click on them.  If they didn't, there would be no reason to run sig campaigns at all (though I haven't seen any data as to how effective they are at generating business for the campaign owner).

Uh....yeah, where have you been since Jan. 2018 (and even before that as far as fake trust goes)?  It's certainly frowned upon, but even DT members don't really tag suspected merit abusers anymore because there's so much subjectivity involved in merit-giving between members.  Giving fake trust to an alt account might earn you a negative if the proof is solid enough, so I'd say at least that much isn't tolerated.

I don't know exactly what transpired between you and bullrun2020bro, but if he got those merits on the German local board, perhaps he's a good poster there?  I looked at his merit history and I can't access most of the posts of his that got merited.

In any case, merit abuse tends to be self-limiting since sMerits are relatively scarce and I wouldn't pull your hair out if you think someone got too many merits in too short a time span.  There's always been shit like that going on and probably always will be.  For the most part, I'd say the forum is a hell of a lot better than it used to be prior to the merit system being introduced.

That's crazy, but unfortunately I've seen the network as congested and fees as high as this before, and it's one of the few things I hate about bitcoin.  If you wanted to buy something with it right now, it wouldn't make sense to use bitcoin if you could buy it with fiat.  Almost any other altcoin would function so much better in a time like this.  Ah well.

Come to think of it, with bitcoin being as high as it is now, that 170sats/byte might be as high as I've ever seen the fee (in terms of fiat).  That's one hell of an incentive to hodl.

Beware of acceleration services, as I've never been able to find one that works or a person who won't price-gouge you for the service.  If you google around looking for accelerators, there's a bunch of duds that show up in the first few pages, and I'd say 90% or more of them are just spam websites.

True, but I wonder if other companies are actually going to follow in the footsteps of MSTR and Tesla and actually outright buy bitcoin as their cash reserve (or whatever they're using it for).  Should this become a corporate trend, you better strap yourself in for a realbull market--$50k will be cheap at that point if the deep pocket companies start buying.  And hell, it seems like that trend has already started, though it hasn't yet been a long one.

Yeah, he did some of that but he also has the knack for finding undervalued companies that don't need restructuring--but in any case, Buffett's name should probably be left out of this discussion, since he'd never buy any crypto through Berkshire Hathaway.  His shareholders would probably dump their stock like crazy if he veered off the path of value investing.

Yep, I don't doubt that for one second--but Theymos generally keeps his hands off of the DT membership and their behavior.  If a DT member is leaving feedbacks like those, it's kind of up to other DTs to exclude the person who's leaving wrong negatives like those. 

And yes, it is a very imperfect system and there has been a lot of misuse of it and that probably won't stop completely, since anyone can leave feedback for anyone else and trust isn't moderated.  Hopefully DT members are doing the best they can to clean their own house, so to speak.  That's how it's always worked (and sometimes it doesn't work very well).

Unless he buys a Copper membership if I'm not mistaken, too.  

But that's just one avatar.  OP, where do you want to put two images in your profile?  You've only got your avatar, personal message space, and signature--that's it.  I'm assuming you're not asking about how to upload pictures into threads, correct?

If you want to link to a photo somewhere on the web, I think you can do that in your profile under the "website" option.  It's near where you can enter your ICQ and AIM (and all that outdated shit) info.

For the sake of using Bitfinex?  I don't think so.  Maybe if Trump had gotten reelected, I might advise otherwise, but that didn't happen (lol).

I'm not sure if Coinbase is more under the thumb of the big banks or the government--it's hard to tell, but I know where you're coming from as far as they're concerned.  But a lot of exchanges that aren't based in the US have a hard time operating there, and if they can actually do it they can't provide service to every state (like Binance).  I don't know what laws are on the books regarding crypto at the state level, but there's got to be something going on there. 

And OP, I didn't know this particular fact about Bitfinex, never having used them but it's not surprising.  We're not in the wild west days of crypto anymore.  Or at least we're nearly past that phase.

People might flee from the stock market (and cash) to precious metals, but I'm not sure if bitcoin is really considered a safe-haven asset that investors go to when they're looking to preserve their purchasing power.  Sure, it might seem all rosy right now when bitcoin is hitting all-time highs weekly, but we all know how volatile it is--especially compared to metals. 

And yeah, JP Morgan can certainly be wrong here.  They've been wrong plenty of times in the past and will be wrong many more times in the future.  They don't have the market cornered on crystal balls.

You're trolling, right?  Come on, admit it.  You're trolling.

If you're not trolling, making a claim of more knowledge of bitcoin than 80% of members here and then moving the goalpost when asked a question that requires a solid understanding of bitcoin is....trolling, and you ought to be made aware of it.  Nobody here is going to take you seriously with threads like these.  Don't you get enough attention in your private life?

I'm not sure the bankers see ownership of a stock like MSTR as buying bitcoin outright.  The fact that MSTR has a lot of bitcoin is just one aspect of their business.  I'd think that banks look at stocks as businesses (as most investors do) and not care so much what kind of cash reserve they have, although I'd expect them to think of MSTR and the others as being more risky because of their btc holdings.

Interesting info, OP.  Bitcoin has definitely become way more mainstream than it was in its early days (and even more so since I started getting interested in it, which was relatively late).  It started with mainstream news coverage, and now we've got these big corporations preferring to own bitcoin instead of USD or any other fiat currency.  Pretty cool.

That's kind of the same way it is where I live, and probably even less restrictive.  Restaurants have even opened up again, so the US definitely is not in a second lockdown.  Things were looking so much grimmer around March of last year when I thought that ALL nonessential businesses would have to shut down (but most stayed open anyway).

I feel for OP in Greece and people everywhere else who have to lock themselves down again.  Hopefully you guys get the vaccine sometime soon, and hopefully this whole fucking shitbomb of a pandemic will burn itself out--this year.