I´m sympathetic to this viewpoint. Many people don´t seem to bother with the merit system
at all, which artificially reduces the supply of merit. I read somewhere that roughly 600k merits
were initially distributed. As of now merits are not really circulating as freely as theymos envisioned
it. The situation is going to get worse, because only ~11k merits are generated by the merit sources each month.

If the system is not working properly in spite of the huge supply due to the initial starting
balance of each user, how is it ever going to work when new merits are only generated by merit sources?

I know the theory is that merits will trickle down, because each awarded merit generates 0.5 sMerit.
However, this is clearly not working as intended, because many users don´t award merits at all.

Just take a look at a recent 1 hour period:
A few random observations:
-only 16 merits were awarded in one hour
-for nearly 25 minutes of this hour not a single merit was awarded
-maybe 3/16 merits were awarded to a quality post (I concede that this is subjective and only my opinion) ... but if you take
a look at the posts that were awarded with merits most are pretty terrible

There are several other 1 hour periods where exactly the same problems
occurred (low total amount of merits awarded, merits for questionable posts) and I didn´t really
had to invest any time into cherry picking.

I like the general intention behind the merit system, but it clearly is not working very well.
I also disagree with the viewpoint that "you have to give it some time" or "it´s early days" or
similar adages, because as I argued above it should work great at the start due to the merit starting
balances of most Member-Legendary users.

Besides, I completely understand why many people don´t want to bother with the merit
system at all. Even if giving out a merit only takes a few seconds if you are fast it still
interrupts your reading experience.

I would compare merits to a shitcoin with a 600k coin supply, where probably half
of the supply belongs to inactive users and will never be spent while many of the remaining
HODLers don´t want to bother with it, because it is worth nothing and isn´t traded
at any exchange. Consequently, we are left with a few enthusiasts, who use the shitcoin
for its intended purpose and a few people, who just use it to troll or to have fun (e.g. stuff
like awarding merits to random shitposts or old classics like the Satoshi posts).

Disclaimer: I´m not even particularly affected by the merit system personally, because even though
I would be a Sr. Member based on activity, I have already "earned" 91 merits since the introduction
of the system and will likely rank up soon anyway.

I just don´t think that the sytem is working as intended and that theymos has to take
some measures to increase the circulation of merits.

Possible solutions could be:
-increase the amount of merit sources (I´m not talking about 2-3 new sources, I would increase them by 100 % or more)
-lower the merit requirements for ranking up to take into account the fact that they are not circulating as intended
-remove the merit system completely and replace it with another solution
-impose a minimum merit requirement to prevent people from only awarding a single merit to a post
(theymos argued in one of his recent posts that he initially envisioned that people would award 5-10 merits to a good
post and 1 merit to every post that is remotely readable)
...

[/list]

all i am going to say to this is that each time there is a tiny crash, some idiots come out and start calling themselves "experts" and say price will fall to some ridiculously low number. they say this with complete randomness.

hence proving my point that these are idiots calling themselves "experts".

QA, is this it?

It's mentioned in this post of Slush's pool thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1976.msg2439359#msg2439359


Found this pool neighborhood watch statistics site: http://organofcorti.blogspot.com/

I'll never asked someone to give me some merits, i think it's not the way it is created for, i think it is made for every member to make a constructive and quality posts that if someone read and get some thoughts or knowledge then he or she will give merit. I think merit like respect is earned and not asked to give.

Reading over that really shows how far mining has come and makes me remember the days when you could pool-hop for additional earnings.

A possibility I have been thinking is maybe a bitcoin fork could appear focusing in that aspect, with no limit in the amount of coins and with a fixed 3% per year increase in the money supply? So if the supply of the bitcoin fork is 16.8 million at the beginning of the year 0.5 million coins will be created at the end of the year distributed by dividing that number of coins created and the number of blocks created. So instead of a deflationary currency we will have one with fixed inflation that cannot be manipulated by politicians and unlike fiat the inflation cannot be hidden like they are currently doing.

The best advice I can give you is to always read the whole of the OP of a thread before posting. You'll find out there are two reasons why you are asking in the wrong place. If you have a look around you'll find others that are helping people in your situation.

Just thinking, what would be the case in a scenario like

1. North Korea launches a successful nuclear missile to the USA. A war breaks out. Will the Bitcoin be seen as a safe haven?

2. What about if this leads to the World War III? Will the biggest victim be fiat or cryptocurrency?

The world might be not changed, but there will be a revolution in people’s minds. Bitcoin resembles me internet. Nobody could realize years ago that internet would become a part of our life. BTC and cryptocurrency can be also integrated into our life. Money transaction will become very easy.

Great Initiative. Great to see people being nice to each other. Sad that I missed being in this tech in early years (Many other tech forums treat noobs / less experienced users badly)

Nice gesture. I hope you don't mind me sharing my story.
I was senior member and I deleted few posts from February 2017.
So my rank dropped to full member.
It happened only few days before this "upgrade" as you can see from my activity. Hah! Crazy!

So...
...you probably have better things to do in your life than researching 10-20 someones posts and I probably have better things in my life than answering someones questions about bitcoin so we will split here...

But before I go, I will leave you most constructive post you will ever find on this forum, as one true bitcoiner should post. Enjoj reading it.
 
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2839091.msg29254222#msg29254222

We just make the mens do all job for us

I have made a jump in vlom's thread only now since I was busy before, but the thread is already closed - it didn't last very much... Any more Legendaries willing to try that again?

That is a logical answer. But may be they are calculating the salaries of their workers in bitcoin for every month and they pay them in bitcoin, just here in this form some signature campaigns are paying to their participant in Dollar, they calculate dollar for bitcoin and then transfer fund in bitcoin. I think that in future when bitcoin will become more stable then it will become more easy for them to pay them their salaries in bitcoin.