I wouldn't use a service that can't afford a domain and hosting to enable them to host their own images, and harvest the viewing stats.

How about allowing affiliate links in signatures? This would allow bounty managers to reward affiliates based on the effectiveness of their signatures, and not just based on their skills as graffiti artists and polluters.

Starting threads like this that have been answered many times already clogs the board index, and deptives more worthy members of the chance to earn merits. Please don't be so selfish, and read the myriad of threads about this. I would advise you to lock this thread before you do any more damage to your reputation.

It would get ripped off as they went under the bridges. They aready  scratch the paintwork, so what chance would a solar panel have.

The electricity is free, and the network connectivity is already in place, so all you are talking about is the capital investment for the mining hardware. If that is cheap enough, then it shouldn't be too hard to turn a reasonable roi from a fleet of vehicles.

One thing you can do is to stop including massive quotes in your replies. I started to look through your recent posts to see what was meritable, but I gave up when all those long quotes obscured your comment.

Maybe the promotion of all ICOs should be banned. They are getting a pretty bad press at the moment.

When I was younger, I joined a Karate school ( I didn't respect the style and switched to Wing Chun, but that's another story), and one of the first questions that the instructor asked new members was "Why do you want to learn Karate?", and one of the members replied " I want a black belt". His reponse to that was to take off his belt and give it to the new pupil, and he pointed out that he had achieved his ambition, but it was worth nothing. So many new members here have the same attitude. They want merits just to be able to make worthless posts to earn bounty, and they don't consider the far greater rewards that come from learning a skill. Bitcoin Talk provides a wonderful opportunity for new members to expand their knowledge, and to improve their communication skills. This will stand them in good stead for the rest of their lives. Merit should be an measure of your personal development, and not a ticket to a few scammy coins that probably won't be worth much anyway.

Wearing a black belt won't help you to defend yourself, mastery of Chi Sau will. What good is it to become a Legendary, if you still can't communicate in decent English, or have a working knowledge of Bitcoin.

One of the big problems in understanding wide-ranging technological changes is specialisation. You have made a good start by researching the technology, and it is my belief that you may need to understand the macro-economic changes that blockchain is bringing to the world of banking. It's greatest benefit could be in bringing to an end fractional reserve banking, and zero interest savings. You can't have capitalism without capital, and the corrupt fiat banking system has spent many years transferring wealth from governments, pension funds and populations, and into the hand of a few families in an elite super-national community. Your greatest benefit to the world will come from the marriage of good technical knowledge, and the economic benefits that these changes can bring to the general population.

I've always been against what I call the soup kitchen threads, and I make a point of not looking at any of the suggested posts. I prefer to hunt for posts to merit or ignore, and I do get to read a few interesting threads as a result. It is a bit time consuming though.

I think that there is fairly serious consideration before a person is approved as a merit source.  One of the considerations is their record in awarding sMerits. If they don't have any sMerrits to award, then this evaluation becomes difficult. I don't think that sources should be able to appoint secondary sources, but maybe they could suggest potential candidates, as could local communities. Removing a person as a merit source is quite a major decision, and could cause quite a bit of bad feeling, and the loss of a valuable member. Secondary sources would not need to be removed, but if they were not acting responsibly, then they wouldn't receive any merits to award.

I've just given you 2 merits, so if they do make that change, you can continue to post there.

Another possible change is to up the posting permission for the serious discussion board. The juniors seem to be the ones that create the lowest level posts ( OK so that's a generalisation). Maybe posting should be for members and above.

I've put him on ignore. All his posts seem to be abput football anyway.

Thanks for the references to the Fit to Talk English project. This seems to be read quite a lot, but activity is reduced. The real idea behind it was for non-English speakers to have a go at posting in English, and we would help them to tidy up their posts. This doesn't seem to be happening at the moment, and it may be due to my neglect. It may also be due to the fact that members don't feel that their English is good enough. So let me tell you a story.

When I was learning to drive, three of us booked a course on a skid pan. The car was an old Austin with bald tyres, and the surface was covered with wet lime. The first of us who went on to the pan spent all his time avoiding skidding, and he made a very good job of it. The instructor told him that he had wasted his time, as he was there to learn how to control skids, and not how to avoid them. I must admit that I was a bit mad, and I hit a lot of tyres and cones, but I learnt a lot about skid recovery. So what is the moral of this story? When you are posting on the English language boards here, you need to avoid skidding in your post - ie. you need to use reasonable, fluent English that your readers can understand. When you are on the Fit to Talk skid pan, then you can hit all the English tyres and traffic cones you like, and we don't care if your post goes into a spin - well as long as you are trying to be constructive. We'll help you to keep your posting in a straight line, and avoid hitting the mod barriers here. If you want to avoid leaving skid marks in your posts, you need to learn the controls, and how to handle the English language.

I found Godaddy and Namecheap to be a bit expensive, especially for renewals and extras. I use https://NameSilo.com for all my domains. They have a promo at the moment, and .com names are $6.99, and you can save a dollar on your first order if you use the promo code USEBITCOIN Obviously you can pay with Bitcoin, and privacy and a load of other extras ( a market place listing for example ) are all free.

I've got as couple of threads about picking up expired names in the Fit to Talk English project. If you are looking for hosting, then try to find one that includes the free use of Softaculous, it makes setting up a CMS a simple process, and it frees you from restrictions such as having to use Wordpress.

I've thought quite a lot about the merit system, and I think it had given Theymos some difficult decisions to make. In many ways it is a form of board moderation, but with positive rewards rather than punishments. At the moment most people use the rewards to expand their bounty hunting and sig spamming, and this contributes to the cluttering of the boards. In many ways it would be better if nobody were to rank up while sig spamming was still rife. The answer would be for the forum to provide alternative benefits for rank, but I can't think of any - flashing avatars would be an annoyance for example.

The other option is to try to avoid scams and HYIP product promotion in signatures, and encourage the promotion of more stable long term products. I don't really approve of mixers for example, but I can see that some people may have a need to use them, and long term advertising runs for such products will encourage the sponsor to ensure that his reputation is not damaged by bad posting habits.

I think the admins are aware of the importance of the merit system, and the way it has improved the boards. Merit sources will be able to help shape the forum for the future, and I hope that sources can be given some guidance on forum policies. I started my chat room to try to obtain some help with this, and I have received some advice, but I still think I'm a bit of a wild canon with my awards. This is the reason that I suggested the Source2 status. It would allow me ( and other sources) to feed merits into areas with which I have no empathy, but are essential to the maintenance of the diverse interests in the forum

I don't think merits should be awarded in any application thread, or in any bounty announcement thread  either.

When I first started to award merits, I avoided making any awards in threads that I had started, I felt that was unethical, and I know that a couple of other sources felt the same way. I've now changed my opinion about this, and if a person makes a great post in a thread that I've started, then I am pleased to give him some merit. I don't make awards to sycophantic posts though, or as a response to merit requests.

Bitcoin Talk is quite a complex enterprise. Ranks are important to encourage members to follow the rules, and to be active in the forum to improve their perceived status. Ranking can also help to retain members who have worked to improve their status. They also help new members to differentiate between opinions, although this is not infallible.

As a large enterprise, Bitcoin Talk has a number of members with assigned functions, and I suspect these are of more importance than ranking. These functions include moderator and global moderator, Staff, Merit source, DT1 and DT2 and several other functions. The obsession with ranking seems to stem from bounty activities, and the extra privileges associated with rank improvement. In many cases increased rank seems to lead to an increase in these abuses, and this seems to be contrary to the situation in other forums. Bounty hunters seem to assume that all members are bounty hunters, and are just here to milk the forum. I think it would be interesting to know how many active members are not part of any bounty programmes.

You seem to have suggested an interesting variation on the theme. The merit system has two levels - Source1 and Source2. Source1 members obtain refreshable merits under the current system. Source2 members don't get any automatic distribution, but obtain their sMerits from Source1 members. This could be a useful improvement, as it keeps control of primary merit distribution within the current administration.