The US stock market (in my own opinion) is extremely overvalued, and yes I do think that a not insignificant proportion of US residents deposited their stimulus checks right into their brokerage accounts and used the money to speculate/invest/whatever you want to call it.  If you look on Youtube, there are all sorts of videos about Robinhood customers and all the profits they've recently made.  It isn't likely they bought stocks that are components of the DAX or the FTSE, but they might very well have bought stocks in the S&P 500.

I watch the stock market constantly even though I don't have a lot of skin in the game, and I'd say a day of reckoning is coming for the US indexes.  Why?  Because the prices of the stocks in them have been being inflated for over a decade by low interest rates, rampant money printing, and now stimulus checks.  I'm not sure what the P/E average is for the S&P 500, but I'd imagine it's really high.

Anyway, stock prices right now are not reflecting the health of the economy IMO.  Everything is in bizarro land, and that's why gold and silver and bitcoin are looking attractive to investors at the moment.

OP, it's not as if I'm authorized on behalf of the forum to accept your apology, but I'd like to say I respect you for going that route instead of being belligerent or lying about the merit thing or whatever else you could have done. 

As far as I know, you're not going to get banned or suffer any other kind of consequence, so just take this as a learning experience--and also, you might want to read the forum rules if you haven't already, as Bthd has suggested in his post above.  There are things that will get you banned, either temporarily or permanently, and it's good to know what's expected of you on bitcointalk so you don't run into trouble.

Welcome to the wacky, wonderful world of bitcointalk and may your stay here not plunge you into delirium, dementia, or any other serious mental health crisis.  It's been known to happen.

I guess that depends on what age range you consider "mature".  I seriously doubt these shithead DeFi scammers (formerly shithead ICO/IEO scammers) are going after the elderly, unless they're cold-calling people trying to solicit investment money--which I'm pretty sure they're not.  I think TalkStar meant immature in the sense of not being experienced with cryptocurrency, regardless of actual age.

Whatever the case may be, you are correct about this:
But the "immature" targets of these scammers aren't likely to read whitepapers or know much about mining, which is why these plagiarized whitepapers and other sketchy new projects need to be exposed (on this forum at least) and let's just hope potential investors find the red flags before sinking money into any of this crap.  And there will be more of it.  Lots more.

Yeah, and I find that to be quite unfortunate because it seems like there's some potential for good things to happen with DeFi, as opposed to ICOs which were nothing but crap across the board.  If people aren't able to tell the difference between a scam and a legitimate project because of all the scam attempts, it's the legit projects that are going to take a beating that they're not entitled to.

Personally I prefer to open things like that up in a separate tab rather than have a scroll-over pop-up.  Right now, Amazon Prime Video has gone way overboard with features like this, and it's to a point where you really have to watch where your cursor wanders when you've got your hand on the mouse--it's extremely annoying.

I don't think OP's idea is bad at all, but I don't think it's necessary or something that I'd find useful myself.  And I can pretty much guarantee that this will find itself in the graveyard of suggested features that got ignored by Theymos^TM.

Edit:
Didn't read the entire thread before posting the above, and it looks like the talented coders took OP's idea and ran with it, which is great to see because of the aforementioned graveyard.  Props to those who helped him out.

I would say I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiments here, but I don't even know how well the merit system is even working, much less what Theymos's assessment of it is.  It isn't as though he communicates his thoughts about these things all that frequently, so there's no way to know if he's even considering adding any new merit sources.

I don't want the merit system to fall apart, and even though we don't see as many threads in Meta asking about merits (or complaining about not being able to earn them), I wonder whether there's enough merit being distributed--and that there aren't "dead spots" where merit sources never visit.  The forum could probably use a few more merit sources, especially ones that frequent local boards.  Last I looked, there weren't very many new Legendary members being made, and I'm guessing the same is true of Hero and even Sr. Member ranks.

So good luck with your application, OP.  If Theymos ever considers adding new sources, you've got my support.

Democrats would blame Trump for anything from the vanishing of honeybees to global warming--that's the game.  Dems blame republicans for everything and vice versa.  Doesn't make any of it true, which is the maddening part of the blame game.

Trump isn't responsible for the monkey wrench that COVID-19 threw into the economic works.  The economy was doing just fine at the beginning of this year as far as I know, and people are starting to return to work as businesses reopen, at least in the little patch of the US that I can see with my own eyes.

And yeah, unemployment is still high because people are used to collecting unemployment benefits, but some of them may have jobs to return to once the COVID restrictions are lifted.  I think the jobs numbers reflect a temporary situation that has some light at the end of the tunnel, which is quite different than, say, 2008-2013.  I wouldn't say don't worry about it, but I'm pretty confident things are going to keep improving this year and beyond.

I don't even understand what he even means the way he arranged those words into that sentence.  There's obviously a language barrier here (or a basic comprehension barrier in my brain; you can never rule that out), but are you suggesting that he's suggesting that members who give him five merits are guaranteed entry into the campaign?  That's what it looks like it might mean, but I honestly don't have a clue what he means.

Edit:  Looks like the OP might have edited his post, because in this post his quote is pretty clear, and I missed it before writing everything above.  That looks not so much like merit begging as using merit as a kickback to get into a campaign, and that's definitely against the spirit of the merit system.

OP, I gave you merits because you put some good effort into exposing this instance of whitepaper plagiarism....but I'm really curious as to what other accounts you might have had in the past (or still control).  That's an off-topic question that I don't mean to get into in this thread, but it's the first thing that came to mind when I saw this thread and saw when you registered.

All that aside, it's starting to feel like 2018 in the Scam Accusations section except the scammers aren't ripping people off with idiotic ICO projects that are either completely fake or were inherently destined to be worthless; DeFi is now the hot new thing, but the scamming tactics so far look to be almost exactly the same. 

Good catch on this one, OP.  I'm sure there's going to be many more for as long as DeFi is being hyped up.

There might well be risks with KYC, and it could be dangerous and useless, but none of that matters if the government is requiring an exchange to enforce KYC procedures.  I don't think BitMEX was just itching to spring this on all of their customers.

Also, this is a typical crypto news site article that's poorly written:


Not that mainstream journalism is much better, but don't any of these sites do any proofreading before publishing articles?

Eh, probably they'll have a drop in volume but I wouldn't expect it to be too drastic.  It isn't like there are many no-KYC exchange options out there that BitMEX customers can migrate to.

The biggest risk in my eyes is getting your phone stolen.  Since that's always a possibility, I would protect whatever wallet you use with  a solid password that won't allow access to your coins unless it's entered correctly.  Some wallets use PINs, and I'm not sure how secure those are.

It's definitely got a decent reputation, and I think you could do a lot worse than Electrum for a mobile wallet.  I've used it with no problems in the past, as well as Mycelium.  There are so many available, and I haven't used most of them but the password security issue goes for any of them--and always back up your wallet with the seed phrase or whatever a given wallet gives you the option to do to back it up.

Well, I totally agree with that but OP asked specifically about mobile wallets, so I think he's looking to use one.

The question boils down to whether you believe in truly free markets or not.  If you do, then the above situation is an unfortunate (but acceptable) consequence of free market capitalism. 

I'd also point out that the people getting rich right now are not necessarily doing anything illegal or even immoral.  Jeff Bezos's net worth no doubt increased, but he's created a service (Amazon) that is serving a lot of people right now, and Amazon shareholders have also done pretty well, too.  In addition, a lot of these ultra-wealthy individuals do some good things with their riches--charities, foundations, and the like.  I would never fault anyone for becoming super rich, as long as they didn't screw people over in the process (and that's certainly true of some of them).

IMO the focus shouldn't be on the wealthy right now.  It should be on the government and how they're spending their money and what they're doing to fix all these problems we're having.  They're the official rulers of all of our countries, not Bezos, Gates, Buffett, Zuckerburg, and all of those folks.  The government is the entity that collects our tax money and is supposed to provide services to us that we need.  The ultra-rich have no obligation to do anything other than to pay their own taxes.

OP, those are two different questions you're asking so it's hard to give an answer to this poll. 

My economic situation has definitely taken a hit because of the COVID-19 outbreak and all the businesses being shut down.  I don't want to get into specifics, but it feels like my life has taken a baseball bat to the head. 

As to the second part of the question, my outlook for next year, I'm hopeful that things will have returned to some semblance of normalcy--and I'm already seeing it happen in my city and state.  Unless the virus mutates into a much more lethal variant, I don't expect 2021 is going to be worse than 2020.  Anything can happen, of course, but I feel like I've either got to remain positive or I'll lose my mind.  This is an election year in the US, too, so I think the result of that election is going to have a huge effect on America's collective state of mind. 

Let's hope so.

Yeah, well sometimes you take people's posts at face value and assume that they're original and not plagiarized.  Usually if I see a post by a new-ish member that's in perfect English I'll do a google search to see if they've copy-pasted something before giving them merits, but we all make mistakes.

By the way, we have run into the issue of members cross-posting content they've written themselves on blogs and other sites.  Somebody ought to bring this thread to Lasky366's attention and at least give him a chance to clarify if the plagiarism accusations are false.  Either way, he should have provided a citation so that we wouldn't have to go through all of this, but my guess is that this stuff was plagiarized.

You might be fully aware about how the DeFi market works (I'm assuming that's what you meant), but I'm sure as hell not.  I've done just a little bit of reading on it and have an extremely low-level understanding of how it's supposed to function, but the vibe I'm getting from it feels very much like the ICO craze, which has been mentioned multiple times in this thread alone. 

Of course the top-name exchanges are jumping into DeFi tokens.  If they don't, they're going to be losing out on enormous profits, as I'm sure they see another crypto craze forming.

Hell no, it doesn't matter to them whether there's any quality behind the token.  The only thing they care about is its trading volume, which is where the exchanges make their money.

Hopefully.  I have the Services section on ignore, so I don't know how many campaigns are running or who the top campaign managers are, aside from Yahoo62278 and DarkStar_, but if there's any sort of merit requirement for acceptance into a campaign, that's a positive.  It might not be a perfect way to weed out shitposters, nor to select the best applicants, but it's a start.

That's probably true.  If a member has a decent number of earned merits, I think it's more likely they were earned legitimately rather than bought or obtained through some other inappropriate means (unless it's a purchased account, of course, in which case all bets are off).

I agree, but I've thrown up my hands and given up on trying to combat merit abuse/misuse.  As far as I'm concerned, as a merit source my primary concern is to distribute merits to worthy posts so as to keep the system running. 

I'm confused as to the exact meaning of the above (and it could just be my scrambled-eggs brain).  Are you saying members caught for plagiarism are being permabanned or is nothing being done?  And are you saying that moderators aren't even considering ban appeals anymore? 

As to OP's point, I thought if a member was caught in multiple instances of plagiarism, his entire post history got nuked, because I'd seen that occur a number of times.  But I guess it was because of that activity limit imposed on the mods.  In any case, if we're talking about a senior member with hundreds or thousands of posts who got banned for plagiarism, I don't think their entire post history ought to be wiped out even if mods were allowed to do that.  They might have posted some original posts that have value and I don't see any reason why those should be deleted.

Yeah, and that's one of the cases I was thinking about.  Another would be that an old-time member committed plagiarism early on and never got caught and subsequently stopped copy-pasting.  Why delete all the valid posts because a fraction of the total were plagiarized?

And that's the part of bitcoin I love the most, that it's not a product of governments or banks.

But as far as this "reset" goes, I think it's an enormous overreaction to a virus that's being touted as being far more deadly than it really is.  The reaction the world has had to it is quite real, but it's over the top.  People aren't quarantining themselves anymore, at least not where I live, and most folks are barely even keeping six feet apart anymore.  They've had enough of this bullshit, and it shows.

I don't think bitcoin is going to gain or lose because of the COVID-19 pandemic.  People still aren't using it as a currency, and they're not going to unless the entire fiat system falls apart--and if that happens, things are going to get so ugly that we'd probably be looking at a Walking Dead situation, where guns and food and land all that stuff are the most important things to own.

Merits aren't supposed to be given out as prizes unless the contest has something to do with making the best post or something like that--certainly not for making the right call on a soccer game.  That's something I'd probably report to the moderators, though I'm not sure how they'd handle it.  Hopefully they'd put a stop to it, as it's a blatant misuse of the merit system (though I can't read German and thus can't understand exactly what's going on).

Edit:
Fair enough, but I'd probably do it anyway if I saw it happening in a language I could understand.

Buffett didn't really "change his mind" about gold.  He saw a potentially profitable investment and bought it.  He also didn't buy a pile of physical gold, but stock in a mining company if my understanding is correct--but either way, this isn't the first time he's bought something in the precious metals market.  Years ago he bought a bunch of silver and sold at a profit, and I think I remember him stating that he regretted doing that.

But no, I don't think Warren Buffett is going to change his mind about crypto, not even after that kind gift of Tron from Justin Sun (lol).  He's not ignorant about what bitcoin is; he just doesn't invest in things like that.  He's a value investor who buys companies that are currently undervalued in the market, not a super-speculative asset like bitcoin.  That isn't his style, and his style isn't going to change.

You're out of your mind.  I suggest you read one of Buffett's autobiographies if you haven't yet done so.

I'm not exactly sure what the hell the article is saying, since it sounds like a bunch of economist gobbledygook to me.  What it doesn't sound like is that the Fed has any concrete plan to raise interest rates, and if they alluded to doing this in the article I'm pretty sure it would spook the market big time.  Investors/traders/speculators have been used to cheap money for so long that they're going to have to be weaned off of it slowly, like a methadone taper for a heroin addict.

I've said it a few times in recent posts: if interest rates get raised, watch out.  That will mean less margin trading (among many other things), which will have a negative effect on stock prices--and probably gold, silver, and bitcoin as well.  Unfortunately the Fed is going to have to raise rates eventually, but whether we're expecting it or not it's still going to come as quite a shock regardless.

And yeah, OP, that money printing press just continues to work overtime with no signs of a break in the action anywhere to be seen.