If the member didn't write the content outside of bitcointalk himself that's being paraphrased, I would definitely consider it plagiarism if there's no citation of source.  Plagiarism doesn't have to be a verbatim word-for-word copy/paste of someone else's writing.  Those word spinning programs "paraphrase" things, but just because a few words were changed or sentence structure has been altered doesn't mean it's not plagiarism.

And if the person did write the off-forum content, that person can appeal any ban from the mods. 

I would report to the mods any instances of crap like this that you find and let them sort out what they want to do with it.  I'm not sure how bad the plagiarism problem is right now on the forum, but it was pretty bad up until at least last year, so we know it's happening.

I have nowhere near your amount of knowledge of the mechanics of crypto, but I suspect you're absolutely correct.  If someone--like a government agency--wanted to trace any cryptocurrency to whomever they were hunting, I'm fairly sure they could do it.

I'm not sure that premise is correct, my man.  I don't know about what criminals are doing as far as what currency they're using, but the average Joe on the street is using digital currency for sure--but not cryptocurrency.  And in the area where I live, using cash to buy stuff at stores and restaurants is now frowned upon unless you have exact change.  The US is experiencing a coin shortage for some nebulous reason....but that's beside the point.

I haven't seen any increased adoption of bitcoin or any other crypto because of COVID-19.  I'm not sure if other countries are having a difference experience, but I suspect that as long as the banks are still in business people are still using fiat to pay for everything, just like they've always done.

You're making this way more complicated than it really is.  Criminals use cash because criminals have always used cash.  It remains the most anonymous method of payment as long as the transaction isn't done in front of a camera and as long as the currency isn't marked, i.e., by law enforcement in a sting operation. 

In addition, cash holds its value quite well, at least in the short term--unlike bitcoin or any of the privacy coins.  If you're a criminal who's receiving money for illegal goods or services, do you really want to take on that volatility risk?  I seriously doubt it.  Anyway, if anyone has proof that criminals are starting to adopt crypto more so than they have, I'd love to see it.

Your second statement is true, but I disagree with the first.  Merit has never been a yardstick for any member's reputation when it comes to doing deals in which there's a possibility getting scammed.  The only "reputation" gained by having more merits is maybe the reputation of being a good poster, but that's about it.  Possibly by obtaining a higher rank with bought merits, that might give the uninitiated the impression that the member could be more trustworthy--but I don't think the effect is all that significant. 

I think this guy deserves some red tagging for the merit sales, but not a flag.  That's stretching it IMO.  But it's just my opinion, and you're obviously free to disagree.

Just looked at nutildah's feedback for OP: 

I haven't heard the name Rambotnic in a long-ass time and assumed he'd moved on to greener pastures, like cryptotalk or some other such website.  Could be, though.  I don't recognize any of the other members in that list.

Ah, I needed a big LOL right before bedtime, so thank you for that at least.  But what does Lauda have to do with any of this?  The cantankerous old cat hasn't even been active that much lately, and I don't suspect that any of the feedback left was at Lauda's behest. 

OP, if you're trying to pick a fight with DT members when at least one of them has some valid evidence for a neg or a flag, just forget about it.  You can spout obscenities until you turn blue and it won't do you a damn bit of good.  It's just going to put you under a microscope, get you more negs, and probably will expose other alt accounts you have which in turn will also be tagged. 

So you've lost already.

I can't read Russian, and so don't understand the reference link for the flag.  Nor do I necessarily think that because someone is selling merits necessarily means that a person is at risk of losing money by dealing with him.  I think merit selling is a terrible practice, and I've tagged this moron for doing (or attempting to do) so--but I'm not supporting the flag.  

Nor am I opposing it, though.  I just think it's a little much; but good job spotting and creating this thread.

The guy probably is a complete scumbag scammer.  However, the flag is specific to the merit selling thread he created and I wouldn't make a judgement about trustworthiness based on an instance of offering merit for sale--and that's a general rule I personally follow.

It's not crazy down in Mexico with respect to COVID-19?  I know this isn't the thread for that discussion, but I'm genuinely interested.

If you placed those bets in Mexico, your US citizenship shouldn't make any difference.  The part of their TOS that Avirunes quoted says people physically in the United States are prohibited from using their service, not US citizens who might happen to be traveling to a country in their approved list and who happen to use their service while in that country.  Disclaimer:  I'm not a lawyer; I'm not familiar with Cloudbet; and my opinion is worth exactly what you paid for it.

But it seems to me that you should be entitled to the winnings as well as whatever you deposited--but at the very least they should return your deposit.  And I don't think you're overreacting at all; that's a large sum of money you're talking about.  Maybe it's not huge to you, but it's certainly worth fighting with Cloudbet over.

OP, nearly everyone gets some posts deleted at some point so don't fret too much about this.  As hilariousandco said, they were reported as being off-topic, though I don't think they looked like begging posts as acroman08 suggested. 

This forum really isn't the best place to be soliciting bicycle parts, however noble the cause may be.  As an aside, I wish you didn't live so far away because I have quite a few old bikes and parts that I could spare, but there's no way in hell I'd ship them to the Philippines--I can't imagine what that would cost, but I'm sure it would be more than the parts are worth.

Good luck with that project, though. 

How are you defining "very active"?  I know traffic is way down as of late, but that number somehow seems low.  I would bet that the number of active old-time members, or those with a reputation that makes them "known" is less than 1000, but I can't imagine that figure includes members like bounty hunters, for example.  They're extremely active on the forum, though 99.99% of them are unknown, unknowable, and probably have more alts than members of their family.

As I said in the WO thread where you first posted this, I'm not against titles for certain members like you proposed.  I'm just not sure Theymos would be willing to get behind an idea like this.  When was the last time he did something like this?  For that art contest a while back?  

I would also suggest that only a small handful of members deserve a special title, and they should be very well known, probably very active (with the exception of Satoshi perhaps), and have been a member of the forum for at least one or two years.  You may end up giving a title to someone who stops posting, and so I think it's important that a nominated member have a proven track record of being dedicated to the forum--and that takes time.  Members like Vod, TECSHARE, Quickseller, OgNasty, and some others have been here a long time and would be some names I'd be thinking about.

Holy shit, Foxxy--I just checked your profile and never realized that you've been here since 2012.  You definitely qualify for the old-school bitcointalker list.  Sexiest?  I'd check you off on the ballot box for that. 

Yep, same here.  I don't know who has access to them, so I prefer to delete any ones that I absolutely don't need--or ones that don't contain any private information at least.  But lately I've been deleting most of them anyway, because I don't trust that they're not going to be read by people who intend to use any info contained in them for nasty/nefarious purposes.

So I personally wouldn't have any interest in a PM-saving tool, but I have no doubt that there are less paranoid members out there who'd love it.

Uh yeah....I'm the furthest thing from a bitcoin guru that you could possibly find, so I don't know how my name got thrown into the mix.  Even if you put my name in for a vote, it would be a waste of your keyboard strokes--so don't bother.

The rest of the idea sounds fine to me, except I'm not sure Theymos would put his seal of approval on such an award system. 

Don't know what thread you're referring to, but I believe you.  This doesn't sound like something Theymos would get behind.  Or in front of.  Or anywhere near.  But life is full of surprises, so we'll see.

I'm not entirely convinced this is actually an escrow scam attempt.  From reading what Tedfrost wrote, he sounds more like a confused newbie who doesn't know what escrow is and doesn't trust people--which is a perfectly acceptable sentiment in the world of crypto.  He sounds like he doesn't have any experience in trading crypto for fiat and doesn't know what we normally do around here

In addition, escrow is useless with PayPal anyway.

Then again, I could be completely wrong and Tedfrost could be a cunning scammer posing as an inexperienced noob, but I'm not sure that's the case here.

OP, if you really think this is a scam attempt worthy of a flag, you ought to post this in the Scam Accusation section.

It's nice to be able to quote the above post in 2020 and realize that the shitposting situation that was so rampant up until only recently (I don't know exactly when the shitposting dropped off a cliff, but it was at some point in 2019) has dissipated such that I'm no longer writing long rants about spam and garbage posts being a persistent problem.

Seriously, I used to write a lot of posts in Meta raging about how useless certain sections were.  There are still shitposters, of course, but nowhere near as many as before the merit system was put into place.  It took time, but members began to realize how hard it became to rank up an account past Jr. Member, and I suspect many of them either gave up trying or purchased a high-ranked account.

I agree.  There's a lot of important (to the forum at least) history that's happened just in the last year or so and it's neat to look back at threads like this one.

I don't know if this is a "nice" merit record, but it certainly is devilish:



Congrats on that--I think most new members and even a lot who've registered after the merit system was implemented have an extremely low chance of attaining Sr. Member rank unless they can write extremely well.

You'll get there I'm sure.  I'll take a look at your post history and see if there's anything I'd consider meriting.

That was probably a cruel jab and I apologize, but I was irritated that you deleted my post--nothing to do with having my post count deleted, just that I'd wasted time composing some thoughts about you that I figured might be useful.  You didn't specify that you wanted claims of illegal dealings with evidence only, and you did say this:

Thus I didn't figure I was wasting my time writing a post in your thread.  I guessed wrong, but no harm, no foul.

Probably a good idea, since I just had a post deleted very quickly from that thread which I reposted in the active thread about Vod being on DT.  He said he would counter any criticism in his thread, so I'm curious as to why the tiny bit that I gave him was nuked instead of replied to--not that I heavily criticized him or expected a refutation.  In fact, the second feud I made reference to I couldn't even recall the full details of--but I'm pretty sure Vod knows what I'm referring to.

Off-topic:  I could use some more of those shiny stickers with the QR code if you can spare some.  I'm still sticking them to things on my bicycle rides.

Vod started a thread asking for criticism, so I gave him a little of that but a higher dose of praise--and he deleted my post.

For the record:

Vod, I know you're probably on blood thinners since you had your stroke, but they shouldn't be thinning your skin.

OP, good eyes finding these morons. 

I might be a wee bit ignorant of how bounties work, never having participated in one myself.  Why would someone registering for a bounty use a fake Facebook or Twitter profile?  I'm assuming it's because of the number of followers required for the bounty...?  If that's the case, wouldn't there be any verification that the FB or Twitter account used for the registration actually belongs to the applicant?  Am I missing something obvious here?

I would definitely encourage YOSHIE to do exactly that when he comes across stuff like this--but I also think it's good for other DT members to add a tag in case there are changes in DT2 whereby a DT tag can become meaningless.  I will walk the walk as well and tag the fraudsters once I submit this post.

I have 0.01BTC I'm looking to trade for PayPal at preev 1:1 rates.  Drop me a PM if you're interested, thanks!

Edit:  Deal done with Legion13.  TxID: cc8aa76b33312f413d9df57ef5ce3e102aae125418a108e77c47ee3e3e29bbc9

Locking thread.

Yeah, this will probably be my last post in one of OP's threads (and I'm sure there will be many more to come), but this part of his post bolded below completely convinced me that it's CH we're dealing with.  Also kind of sounds like TECSHARE, but I don't know that he's ever used alt accounts to get his point across.

Why don't you go right ahead an appoint someone who will do exactly what you want them to do:  investigate and then punish the guilty DT1 members?  Wait a sec.  Why not just drop the investigation part of that and skip straight to the punishment phase, since you've obviously pre-judged certain members who you won't name. 

Oh wait, didn't you state in the title of this thread that the DT1 scammers are "proven" scammers? 

What if an independent 3rd party doesn't reach the same conclusions as you?  That's rhetorical.  You'll say the party was biased or paid off or whatever, because that's how your mind operates.  And I'd love to know exactly who you're blaming and what you're blaming them for.  You can answer that or not; I don't actually care.  Signing out of your threads for good.

Jet Cash, I wouldn't waste your time trying to increase traffic forum--though I'd love it if it would happen, since the topics and discussions have been a bit....dry....for months at least.  I used to post a lot about combating shitposters, but that seems to be a battle that doesn't even seem worth fighting anymore since there's been such a reduction in them (as far as I've seen, anyway).

I'm not sure you'd be able to encourage people to join the forum unless it was with the enticement of all the money to be made by participating in signature campaigns/bounties.  That's how a great number of members were led here, and the rest presumably joined out of interest in bitcoin or crypto in general.  People either have an interest in that or they don't.  You'd be tilting at windmills if you attempted to recruit members who have a genuine interest in bitcoin. 

Maybe we're just in a dry spell.  Maybe if and when bitcoin starts shooting up toward a new ATH more folks will start registering here and the volume and quality of discussion will pick up.  We'll see.