Yeah, that's basically the definition of merit begging.  He's not asking anyone to review his post history to see if there's anything worth meriting; he's just straight-out asking for someone to give him not one, but three(!) merits. 

One thing I've noticed about the WO thread is that its members are exceedingly generous with their sMerits, and that guy certainly picked the right thread to beg for merits in--and I'm guessing it was intentional on his part.  I'm not saying there's merit abuse in that section, just that there are some very generous members who frequent the thread.

OP, you should report posts like that when you see them--and don't bother creating a thread like this one.  If the mods agree with your report, they'll act on it.  If not, at least you've done your part.

The prediction certainly could turn out to be true, but I don't think coronavirus is going to be the ultimate reason.  This bull market in stocks has been going on since the banking crisis of 2008/09, and the laws of financial gravity don't allow for any asset class to just keep going up and up indefinitely.

On the other hand, popping bubbles are invariably precipitated by some sort of catalyst, but my guess is that there's going to be some kind of increase in inflation and/or interest rates that kicks it all off (and the effects of COVID-19 won't help matters, either). 

I wouldn't worry about new mutant strains and vaccine effectiveness, however.  Science will keep fighting the virus regardless of what it does, and unless it suddenly turns out to be far deadlier than it is, I'm not going to fret about it.

Yeah, I don't understand exactly what a "financial reset" is.  If anything, all this money printing and stimulus checks might lead to some severe inflation--and that won't be good for anyone assuming wages don't rise as well. 

That's not to say that governments couldn't or wouldn't take advantage of a pandemic to do some shady things, but I seriously doubt any government created COVID-19 with the intention of affecting the economy.  I'm a firm believer that this is what biology does from time to time: produce mutant strains of viruses/bacteria which are much harder to deal with than anything previously known.  So despite the "evidence" of a conspiracy, I'm not buying it.

Sounds like it could be a Chrome-specific issue, since I've never, ever seen a bolded subject line that I can recall, and I don't use Chrome.  In any case, it doesn't sound like a major problem (plus it's one that Theymos is apparently aware of), so it'll get fixed in its own sweet time. 

At least we're not under that spam attack anymore.  That was even more annoying, with all of those threads getting bumped with SEO-type spam.  I'm hoping that doesn't happen again anytime soon.

I'm no expert on the US government or how exactly laws are passed, but I am a US citizen and I'm pretty sure Trump is just trying to pull a bunch of bullshit in his last days in office which Biden will likely reverse.  I wouldn't expect anything Trump signs between now and the 20th of this month to hold up for long, and I wouldn't worry about this news story in particular.

Whatever Trump decrees as a lame duck president Biden can easily overturn (I'm fairly sure of this, but perhaps someone with a bit more knowledge than me can give a better answer). 

So happy Trump is headed out of the White House, even if he's not going willingly.

Yeah, fuck them.  I just tried to register an account yesterday and upon completing the KYC procedure, I get the message that "your account is suspended".  WTF??  I only wanted to make an account to buy a single altcoin and have never traded on Bittrex before. 

Hopefully my info won't end up for sale on the dark web or something. 

First of all, this isn't a forum where you can go begging--for anything.  Even soliciting for charities is frowned upon, depending on how it's done.

Second, nobody is going to believe a new member if they say they've been starving for X number of days--and I daresay that a lot of members wouldn't even care.  That's a tired old scam strategy, and it's been done so many times here that it just becomes amusing when people claim shit like that.  You should have friends, family, sympathetic strangers, or some kind of soup kitchen available instead of a bitcoin discussion forum to meet your nutritional needs.  If you're in a situation where none of those are available, that sucks for you, but it's not our problem.  It's your problem (if it's even a real problem, which I seriously doubt).

Stop it with the drama.  Just delete your posts and go away.  Problem solved for you and everyone else.

Ahhh!!  Thank you, I didn't even notice that.  That makes it much easier, and I appreciate you pointing that out.

DdmrDdmr, I very much appreciate this list and look at it every time it's updated--but wouldn't it be better if there was a link to the members' profiles so that merit sources (and whoever else) could quickly and easily take a look at their post history?  I don't know if that's been suggested before but it sure would make things easier.

That said, I'm going to sift through a few of these profiles in the next hour and see if I can't help some of these members rank up.

Edit: Looks like several of those members are posting in sections I have on ignore, which is too bad--but hopefully another merit source will have a look and see what's worth meriting.

I have a better question: who the hell cares?  The list of wealthiest people is going to keep changing with time, and so is the list of companies with the highest market cap. 

And also, I don't think Elon Musk has all of his wealth because of Tesla (someone correct me if I'm wrong).  He's had his hand in a number of different pies throughout the years and had loads of money before the inception of Tesla.  I also don't think Tesla should be worth nearly as much as Amazon or Apple for that matter.  It isn't as though everyone you and I know is driving a Tesla--but the stock market can do weird things to company valuations (especially bull markets like this one we're in). 

Even for peer-to-peer transactions bitcoin usually isn't free--it can get close to that when the network isn't severely congested and very far away from free when the network is all jammed up (like it has been for the past month). 

Those payment processors like BitPay and Coinpayments (I'd honestly never heard of them before) are necessary to mitigate bitcoin's price volatility for both merchants and customers, not to mention that most merchants probably wouldn't even accept bitcoin if they had to take possession of it outright.  Businesses generally don't want bitcoin; they want fiat, and so those payment processors are absolutely necessary IMO. 

I'm not even sure Satoshi thought bitcoin payments should be entirely without cost, just that they should be low-cost.  Most of the time they are, but just take a look at how long you have to wait nowadays to get a payment through if you don't bump the fee to something like 100sats/byte.

OP, I hate to say this but you're being naive if you think anyone here is going to give you trading tips that would potentially give you an advantage in the market--assuming anyone had such legitimate tips.  Since I don't think that's the case, what you're going to get is a lot of nonsense and/or misleading advice designed to eliminate you as competition.

We're all in the same boat as far as bitcoin being in uncharted territory, but having said that there is in fact a trend (if you hadn't noticed).  That's probably the best way to play the market and one that doesn't make us competitors--until it comes time to sell, of course.  As they say, the trend is your friend, and bitcoin's trend right now is up.

I'm not hugely invested in the market right now and am more of a cheerleader for bitcoin on the sidelines.  But it seems to me that the winning strategy at the moment is to buy and hold until you've made whatever profit goal you've set for yourself.  Best of luck, but beware of bitcoin's notorious volatility.

Yeah well, I've learned to let those regrets go.  I mean, come on--how the hell was I supposed to know bitcoin would go as high as it has so far in 2021?  And hell, I got rid of plenty of bitcoin back when it was only a few hundred dollars/BTC.  If I kept thinking about how wealthy I'd be, it'd turn my hair white overnight (assuming I hadn't pulled it all out in a fit of rage).

Nobody here can predict the future, so give yourselves a break if you sold out too early.  A lot of bitcoin traders--and even long-term hodlers--did just that, and I'm sure a lot of them are kicking themselves for not holding just a little bit longer.

True, but it's still a pretty impressive figure if you ask me--although comparing crypto and stocks leaves me with a weird feeling.  It's kind of like comparing Apple's market cap to the total number of outstanding USD, i.e., they're fundamentally two different things.

A corporation's market cap is essentially how much it would take to buy it out (or to buy a controlling interest, which doesn't take 100% of the MC).  It's also not necessarily a great indicator of how much the business is actually worth, since bull and bear markets can cause the market cap to over- or under-value a given company. 

On the other hand, the value of bitcoin is exactly what the market says its worth.  There's no underlying company, no dividends, no profit changes from quarter-to-quarter, none of those metrics that you get with stocks.  So while I'm impressed that bitcoin (and the other top altcoins) are being valued so highly, this is one of those apples to oranges comparisons IMO.

Trading Discussion does everything that an "Investment Discussion" section could do, I would think--plus I could probably come up with about five or so ideas for sub-sections that would be more useful.  In fact, members have suggested quite a few new child boards that I've supported, but Theymos never created any of them.  So unfortunately for you OP, he isn't likely to create one for your idea here.  I'm not saying it's a horrible idea, just that Theymos isn't inclined to keep expanding sections unless it's for the local boards.

Yeah, but everything that could or would be discussed in an "Investment Discussion" is/will be discussed in other sections like Trading Discussion (as OP mentioned) and probably Economics too.  I think such a section would be superfluous even if it didn't turn into a spam pit.

Nope, no problems for me on my end right now--I just tried it, and it's working as fast as I'm used to.  It could be that it got temporarily bogged down with traffic because of bitcoin's price rise.  I'm sure there are a lot of folks who are doing a lot of searching for bitcoin and/or other cryptos, and CMC is usually one of the first search results for most of them.

I don't use either one all that often, but I agree with you.  Coingecko does have seemingly more coins/tokens listed than does CMC, though each one has all the major players in the crypto space listed.  Comes down to a matter of taste, I suppose.

Hmmm.  There's another member who's well-known for writing the above kind of rhetoric, though he seems to have been absent for a month or maybe even longer.  Someone please refresh my memory as to who that is.  I know someone here has got to know who I'm talking about.  Anyone?

I don't know if it made anything worse, but it did make things more convoluted IMO.  When you've got trust inclusion/exclusions; three tiers of trust scores you can leave for other members (neutral/positive/negative); and a flag system on top of that, it gets quite confusing--especially to those who might be new and unfamiliar with the trust system.

And am I led to believe that this thread is really about Chipmixer jealousy?  OP mentioned "merit cycling" and despite Foxpup's team's name, nobody in it is cycling merits among its members or abusing the merit system (that I know of).  Hell, take a look at the merits I've sent and ask yourself if I'm favoring anyone in particular.

I just had to un-ignore the Speculation section seeing as how bitcoin is going through the roof and I'm interested in hearing what people have to say about it.

A lot of people would argue that it's not just a saying but a law of both physics and finance--and I don't think I'd be able to argue against that successfully.  Bitcoin has shot up really far, really fast, and usually that means it's going to experience some kind of correction sooner or later. 

The thing that appears to be different between 2021 and 2017 is that the price is seemingly being buoyed by institutional investors with very deep pockets and not thousands of speculators who would tend to sell once they've made a decent profit.  I think companies like MicroStrategy and Grascale are in bitcoin for the long term and thus shouldn't be dumping large amounts of it onto the market and thereby initiating a correction or crash. 

We'll see though.  Most of my predictions about bitcoin have been wrong, so I'm not even going to try to make one here.  I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that the market can sustain it at around $34k or so for a while.

I just found an interesting Youtube video from yesterday, with Coindesk's Michael Casey talking about bitcoin's rise.  He doesn't think it's due to the average Joe on the street speculating on bitcoin but these so-called "whales" who are driving up the price of bitcoin--which I'd assume would include the companies mentioned in this thread.

And that makes sense to me completely.  Big money being put into bitcoin in a relatively short period of time can drive up the price quite quickly, quicker than if this was some homegrown rally of smaller investors. 

As I've said before, I'm just hoping these intrepid companies that are so bullish on bitcoin don't get burned in a bubble-type situation.  I'm assuming they've done their due diligence, but anything can happen in the world of bitcoin.

That's what I'm wondering, especially since the US government is absolutely pro-KYC when it comes to its citizens playing around with cryptocurrency--just look at Coinbase. 

Then again, I'm completely ignorant as to what rules are on the books on the federal and state levels.  Colorado is a pretty liberal state, but they're still subject to any federal laws that exist.  I never could stand ShapeShift, but I do appreciate their stance against KYC requirements, and it's great that their fighting for anonymity.  I expect the government to fight back, but if and when they do, at least we'll get a sense of what their stance is on crypto buying/selling and the need for KYC.

Pretty good news story, and thanks for posting it OP.