I definitely couldn't tell just by reading the text of the OP whether this is anything other than a dead-serious post, but I suspect it's not.

What happened with him?  I did notice that you and he were removed from the campaign last week.  You said you were removed because you made too many of your posts in a section or sections where there were already other participants posting.  That sucks if it's true.

Plus the female participants get paid 30% less than the males and I think race is being used to discriminate against applicants (thet there's a joke, son).

I saw the drama in one of the threads about Chipmixer (and commented on it), but the only thing I've seen is that Lauda had tagged a single member--brought up in another thread by muslol67.

Truthfully I've always hated the trust system here, and the main reason for that is that anyone can leave anyone else a neg or a positive and no proof of trade has to be provided.  That's quite obviously led to tons of trust abuse, but it's just something that I've come to accept over the years.  I don't think there's any ideal way to create a trust system, and if Theymos makes any changes he's going to no doubt be criticized because the solution isn't perfect.

I'm curious: is there any more recent evidence of the trust system being used against Chipmixer applicants or participants?

I have to confess that I don't closely follow or really understand how booms and busts happen in the real estate market.  On the other hand, I did learn a lot by reading a few books about the 2006-2008 mortgage/banking meltdown--in particular how mortgages are packaged into securities which are then sold to bank and other high net worth investors and the effect of giving mortgages to people who never stood a chance of paying them.  It was pure craziness back then.

Hopefully some lessons were learned since then, and I know the US government regulating agencies were keeping a close eye on the banks and so forth--but who knows.

I guess my partially informed opinion is that there might be a downturn in the real estate market, but it would be nothing like the 2008 debacle.  Anyway, I've never owned property so I'm not personally fretting about it.

I definitely agree with that.  I'm wondering if the campaign manager (and am I correct in assuming it's CryptopreneurBrainboss?) has Lauda on his trust list and therefore Lauda's neg on OP would indeed show up as trusted.  That's my understanding at least.

Once again, I don't agree with one of Lauda's negs and I don't think OP has any marks against him in my book after reading Lauda's reasoning.  I hate this; I used to value Lauda's opinions and feedbacks greatly, but I think now's the time for me to finally ~Lauda in my trust settings.

No, I'd be really surprised if Theymos stepped in to mediate this issue and I'd bet money that he's not going to.

I don't think DarkStar_ is influenced by anything except his own judgement, nor do I think he is (or is going to start) discriminating against any particular group of members, like the Turkish community.  There are some very vocal and belligerent members in that community, but they don't represent the whole Turkish section by any means.  And Jesus, DarkStar_ has rejected applicants with near-perfect English who consistently make constructive posts and who'd usually be snapped up by another sig campaign in a heartbeat.  He's got high standards, but it doesn't necessarily follow that he's rejecting certain members because of prejudice.

Why should there even be one "token" member?  I think DarkStar_ ought to continue to accept only the best posters (and the most reputable ones) and not give in to this absurd nationalistic crusade you've been promulgating.

Yep, but I've seen that sentiment expressed before and it's always baffled me.

In any case, I thought I recalled Theymos saying the forum's finances were such that no more donations were needed--and even if I'm wrong in my recollection, I can't see any good reason to donate money to bitcointalk, even if you love the forum as much as I do.  I won't even donate money to charities, as I have no idea what they're going to do with a donation. 

Bitcointalk might have needed donators in its early years, but I'm pretty sure that isn't true anymore.

Can't remember exactly, but I think there was way more enthusiasm and hype before the last halving--but nevertheless there's still too many threads speculating about the upcoming halving (which is a day away if I'm not mistaken).

And as I've written before, I don't think we're going to see anything dramatic happen at or after the halving this time around.  The economic butt-slamming that the coronavirus unleashed on the world has also introduced a lot of uncertainty with respect to bitcoin and its growth prospects.  I'm actually surprised it didn't say down in the $5k level when it started dropping a month or so ago. 

But those are just my opinions, and I could be way off the mark.  I'm definitely going to be paying attention to the price for the next week or so, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

That's some of the worst advice I've ever heard, and if I didn't know better I'd say you'd just discovered bitcoin and bitcointalk within the past 12 hours.  For the rest of us who've been around a while, we know that scammers and various untrustworthy slime are lurking around every corner.  That's why there was originally a scammer tag and then the advent of the trust system.

I doubt you're trying to do any of that.  You're coming off more as a person who wants some power in the form of being on default trust.  Unfortunately for you, you've demonstrated your mental instability in multiple posts and it isn't likely you're going to rally people to whatever your cause is (it's hard to understand, because your English is so lousy).

Dude, I'm 99.99% sure this mindset was set in motion at the moment signature campaigns were created.

By the way, I admittedly fall into the category of ditching my old avatar for Foxpup's creation--and since I wasn't married to the previous avatar, it's no big deal to me to change it.

OP, I know you know this is a forum about bitcoin and that there are many of us who are passionate about it.  If an opportunity presents itself to get paid for doing something you'd be doing for free anyway, it's a no-brainer.

I think that's probably going to be my last reply to OP, as bonesjonesreturns is obviously an alt account of cryptohunter/TOAA or one of those.  He's just trying to stir up shit as usual.

Yeah, I don't think the price hit $10k in the past week, though it's been close.

No idea what he's thinking about this, and I'm wondering how much he understands about things (not that I'm an expert myself or anything).

And I have to say, wow--I lost track of time and hadn't been thinking about the halving all that much lately and thus didn't realize we're this close.  Frankly, I don't know what to expect as far as price movement.  Seeing as bitcoin is very close to $10k, the market might already have reacted in anticipation, and we may not see much more in the way of big gains this year.  But I've been so very blatantly wrong in the past that I'm not even going to guess what's going to happen.

Lol, what are you blabbering about?  The fact that I'm wearing Foxpup's avatar doesn't mean I'm doing anything that I wasn't doing prior to me adopting his avatar.  I don't even know what "merit cycling" means--I happen to like my current avatar because I enjoy bicycles. 

And I'm confused as to your vampire reference, but the truth is I don't really care to hear an explanation.  You're an established troll using a new account and the same old gripes and the results are going to continue to be the same: the vast majority of members are going to tune you right out.

Big LOL, as I've had that same feeling about more posts than I can count over the years.  Usually if someone writes something that is so patently idiotic that it convinces me I will never want to waste another nanosecond reading another serving of tripe by the same author, I hit the ignore button so fast my fingers produce little sonic booms.

But this idea has been brought up before and has been either ignored or rejected by Theymos.  In fact, I seem to recall someone calling for a demerit function shortly after the introduction of the merit system.  So as much as I sympathize with your frustration and support your suggestion, I'd keep my expectations low if I were you.

It's funny (sort of) to think about this:  I have no problem whatsoever holding stocks with an online brokerage, because I don't worry that they're going to abscond with all their customers' funds--but with cryptocurrency exchanges?  I'm scared to even keep $10 worth of crypto on any of them for longer than 24 hours, and that includes Binance, Kucoin, and the handful of others that are considered reputable.

I hate to say this, but stock brokerages are tightly regulated by the government, and that's why I trust my money with them.  I'm not exactly wishing for the government to stick its proboscis into the business of crypto any more than it has, but if crypto exchanges had more oversight I'd be far more willing to trust them.

Lol, I'm looking at that graph, and not being a TA guy, it looks like a bunch of graphical gibberish to me.

But the question is whether bitcoin is going to hit $10k (or when it's going to).  If you'd asked me this back in the first couple weeks of March I probably would have said it wouldn't be possible this year--and I think I posted exactly that opinion in at least one thread.  When bitcoin started to fall toward $5k as the news started to come out that we were all going to have to go on lockdown, I figured it would have stayed that low for a long time. 

Once again I'm surprised by bitcoin's behavior--and yeah, I do think $10k is possible in the next couple of months.  It might happen toward the end of 2020, but I'm fairly confident it'll be this year.

I'm not sure what exactly is expected to blow over by summer, but my guess is that the COVID-19 situation will have at least improved by then--but those layoffs and all the economic damage that's been done certainly won't be repaired so quickly.

My suggestion would be to lower your expectations a few notches.  Reopening businesses won't be a panacea for the economy, but it will help. 

J.C. Penny has been on death's door for a long time now, so that isn't surprising.  I wasn't aware about the J. Crew situation, but the first thought that pops into my head is that they probably didn't have a strong web-sales business going for them.  And I don't know much about Neiman Marcus, but brick-and-mortar retailers have been suffering for years and I expect quite a few of them to be gone in a few years--coronavirus or not. 

Things are pretty bad right now, but we haven't reached doomsday yet.  If businesses start reopening, there will be a large number of people returning to work, even if some businesses are cutting back on their work forces.  It's going to take some time, but things are going to get better.

Yeah, I think there's some congestion going on, because I've sent small amounts of bitcoin recently--from Electrum, no less--and in order to not wait for hours for the first confirmation I would have had to pay a pretty high fee.  Luckily I wasn't in a rush and used a fee of about 5 sats/byte.

And OP, I know your pain.  I remember a couple years ago when it would have cost me about $40 to send $150 worth of bitcoin.  That was from my Mycelium wallet, where you can't even adjust the fee as low as you want it.  This situation happens from time to time, and every time it does it reinforces my opinion that bitcoin probably won't ever be widely adopted as a currency.  

Yeah, I definitely would have adjusted the fee to a much lower amount--but I say that after having been into bitcoin for years now.  Assuming OP is the original owner of his account (registered in 2014), you'd think he would know better....but who knows.

I hate to see this happen, because I've done business with petahasher several times with no issues.  If this issue hasn't been resolved by now, Raja_MBZ really does need to open up a formal scam accusation thread instead of discussing it here.

Hopefully this doesn't turn out to be a scam by petahasher--but stick around bitcointalk long enough and you'll see reputable members go rogue.  Again, I'm hoping that's not the case here.

I don't know if I'd call it "nonsense" or not, because some members of the forum--and especially the older ones in particular, I think--don't really care a hell of a lot about the merit system.  Unless you really feel the need to "like" a post or want to help lower-ranked members with the merit requirements in order to rank up, it's just a waste of (some) members' time to give out their sMerits.

This has been discussed before in other threads, and I think I recall giving the example of gameristo, who basically only makes posts trying to buy bitcoin in the Currency Exchange section.  He's a member who probably doesn't do a lot of reading here, and that's perfectly acceptable, but he's an example of a member who's likely indifferent to the merit system.  I think he's even got every single one of his airdropped sMerits from 2018.

So some people are very miserly with their sMerits.  That was probably anticipated by Theymos, and might be one of the reasons he made some members merit sources.  They're usually members who believe in the system and want to make it less impossible for Newbies & Jr. Members to rank up.

That's a bunch of BS, just like OP's proposal.  There are plenty of honorable members of bitcointalk who are in sig campaigns and don't abuse the privilege.  

Mostly it's the members who've come to the forum specifically to earn money through bounties and/or sig campaigns that end up being the corrupted ones (though there have been exceptions to that, of course).  

And as most members are wearing paid signatures, I'm not sure how you'd put together a DT list that wouldn't be laughable on its face.

Oh yeah, by far.

I had to go back and check my exclusions list, and yep, I have ~peloso on there.  I also checked my PMs and he'd contacted me twice asking why I'd excluded him.

Yeah, ya think?  I liked it a lot better before Theymos started this rotation process, and I'm not sure that change was for the better.  That isn't to say there weren't problems with the old system, but the way it is now can get very ridiculous very fast.