I have been following Welsh's posts and although we may not agree on everything, I do see he's trying to get more involved.

One suggestion to improve SnR, and it also stands for many others too: Post less, increase quality of what you do post. Good quality posing posts are shitposts. When commenting complex things, you need to know what you're talking about. Lengthy comment, while maybe properly done itself, if done off the actual present discussion or without sufficient depth or knowledge of what have been discussed, decreases signal-to-noise ratio.

Most of the threads/discussions do not require that sort of stretching, though.

I guess Welsh would be OK as a merit source.

Anyone know how many reports are needed to see the full report history? I have 273 reports (254 good, 3 bad, 16 unhandled) and don't have access. Given mdayonliner's report page, my guess is that it unlocks after 300 reports or 300 good reports.

I had also missed the 'Your report history' link, but I've started to report spam from the Bitcoin Discussion topic 3 days ago (with nearly 0 report count that time). I haven't really paid attention for the number of the reports so close, so I can only guess that the magic number is somewhere around 300 reports, because today I'm over 300 and the 'Your report history' link has appeared. It's good to see which posts were reported in vain...

This is a very compressive guide on how to report, I have left you 5+ merit, this is useful for me since my mother language is Spanish now I have that kind of cheat sheet to make reports.

I don't have the exact list of my reports but I'll bring you a screenshot of my stats.

If you need any assistance with the guide or editing, let me know.
I tried to find a screenshot of my bad reports I remember I took some time ago but couldn't find any.
If I find something I'll post it here so you can use it as an example

I often read about the flow of merit getting less, and I've only seen relatively new users "complain" about the fact that they don't have any sMerit to send. When I closed my merit source application, I still had plenty of sMerit left, and I've only recently decided to merit more posts (after I realized "good posts" deserve merit as well as "excellent posts", because the Merit system wasn't introduced to stop people with good posts from ranking up).
And here you are, running out of sMerit all the time! I've randomly checked 3 posts merited by you, and as expected from previous observations, they are good choices. I've merited one of them, and a few from your "10 posts" too.


While waiting (it took me 3.5 months), and since I have some sMerit left to give, feel free to PM me your list of worthy posts. I especially liked reading Carlton Banks' post, so reading your list may bring me to parts of the forum I don't usually read. No guarantees though, as I expect many long posts to read

You never threatened to "I'll put you on my ignore list" and other shit (as far as I know). Other than that, I think you have a good (technical) knowledge of bitcoin and blockchain. So +1 from me!

I'm SHOCKED that (1) you're not a merit source and (2) you had not applied until now. I'd be willing to forgive this dereliction of duty if you get approved with no less than 1000 monthly merits

Seriously though - I think you'd make a great merit source and I hope theymos sees it that way too. Good luck!

Most of the answers in this thread should have been really helpfull for the OP, i didn't see many mistakes being made by other posters. I did, however, wanted to elaborate on this statement.
If, for example, bitcoin forked into replayattackbitcoin (a fork without replay protection) and you have 1 unspent output funding address 1MyoriGinalAddress before the fork, what could happen if you spent this unspent output on the replayattackbitcoin network?
1) You create a transaction using the unspent output to fund 1AddressGeneratedbyAseller
2) you broadcast the transaction on replayattackbitcoin's network
3) the attacker saves this transaction and broadcasts it on bitcoin's network
4) the transaction gets included into a block on both the original and the new network's blockchain

The end result is that address 1AddressGeneratedbyAseller will become funded on BOTH chains. The attacker cannot use your transaction funding 1AddressGeneratedbyAseller to fund a thirth address owned by the attacker.
In other words, the attacker has to convice you to fund his own address on chain A, then replay the transaction on chain B, otherwise he'll gain nothing from the attack (he can still perform the attack to annoy you, but he won't have any financial motivation to do so).

I actually made this diagram a long time ago (copyright: me). It shows a replay attack and a simple way to protect yourself from such an attack.

Hi Shunsai,

In the following example, say I had a majority of stake at block A. Then at B0, C0 all the way up to head block H0, I sell off my majority of stake, understanding that there is an upper limit on stake transfer.


Then, I create a double spend of my stake using the historical private keys, which I still own, thus sending it to myself in a fork continuing fork B1 - C1 - D1 that I create and approve myself (majority stakeholder).

This is not a 50% attack, because I don't own the value held in the private keys anymore, the cost for doing this is nothing.

Why doesn't the network just accept this fork as canon, given that its the same length (or longer if I chose) than the genuine fork?
  

My question is, what does the stakeholder have to gain by approving anyone's blocks but his own? If he has an edge by not doing this, there is a very real problem.

I am pretty sure you made a small mistake there. You do ignore the order of the 4 missing words with your statement: ( 49! / 4! (49-4)! )
You do iterate through each position with your words, but you have to iterate within the words too.

This should be the correct calculation:



There are 58 choose 4 possible combinations to pick the 4 correct chars from the charspace (without considering the order).


Now consider the first two characters as already known. Only looking at the private key without the first two chars here:

To put the first unknown char into the correct place, you can choose between 1) before of each already existing char (45 possibilities) and 2) behind the last one (45+1).
For the second one you choose either before each char in your privkey (46 possibilities) or behind the last one (46+1)...

Overall there are 46 * 47 * 48 * 49 possible combinations to place the 4 chars into a private key with 45 known characters (ignoring the first two) into the right order. This assumes the already known characters are in a correct order already.


The total search space (for the private key without the first 2 chars) therefore is 46 * 47 * 48 * 49 * (58 choose 4) = 2.1574231*10¹².
Multiplied with 4 (combinations the priv key can start with) = total amount of combinations = 8.6296925 * 10¹²


Considering the birthay paradox, there is a 50% chance to find the correct private key after 1/2 of this space.



Feel free to correct me if i have made a mistake!

There's an unfortunate endgame to the central bank paradigm.


In principle, once sovereign debt of any state becomes too high (as a % of GNP), the debt becomes unpayable (and it is convincingly argued that because the interest on sovereign bonds isn't created as part of the money supply in the same way that the principal is, that all national debts will end in default on some timescale). Argentina's creditors have recently attempted to use any means necessary (both legal judgements and force) to re-coop their losses, and they go after state assets. That means productive infrastructure that taxpayers supposedly own (lol).

And so the conclusion may well be that the central banking system is the most spectacular long-con ever conceived. When we consider that (for instance) those who instituted the US Federal Reserve provided zero capital for the institution in the first place, it can be argued that central banks represent a leveraged buy-out (where money is borrowed to buy up a company) of an entire country, on behalf of those who buy the bonds (often acquaintances of the central bankers).

It's spectacularly clever if designed that way. All the labour and resources needed to build all that infrastructure existed, the infrastructure itself wouldn't exist if not. The financial system basically lies: all this infrastructure wasn't affordable today, so we'll just throw the part that couldn't be afforded on the national debt. This is essentially a system that creates distortions in prices such that no public money ever gets spent on public infrastructure, it's always borrowed from the central banks, who literally have and provide nothing of value in return (except their debt tokens!). Then the phantom debt can be used to buy the entire state apparatus over the course of a few centuries. It's so clever that the general public sort of deserve to be treated like this, it's so sophisticated as a form of theft that there's not much point in trying to explain it to most people.

You're missing the point.
The Lightning Network is a layer on the bitcoin blockchain; it does not have the infrastructure that the underlying blockchain does.
In bitcoin, the recipient of a UTXO does not need to be online because there are other people doing that job: nodes.
Nodes track UTXOs and store unconfirmed transactions in their mempool.
The Lightning Network is just a layer, it does not have nodes.

Even though bitcoin transactions are technically peer-to-peer, the nodes act as facilitators to Every transaction and UTXO.
The Lightning Network, however, is strictly peer-to-peer.
Transactions between peers in a LN channel are just signed bitcoin transactions that aren't broadcast to the bitcoin blockchain, so they are sent DIRECTLY between themselves, without need for nodes or miners.

If Alice is sending bitcoins to Bob, Bob doesn't need to be online to track or receive the transaction because other nodes do the work because Alice's bitcoin node BROADCASTS the transaction to the other nodes in the blockchain.

If Alice and Bob are peers in a channel, and Alice sends some funds to Bob in form of a commitment transaction, it will fail because Alice is sending the transaction DIRECTLY to Bob's node, not broadcasting it, and if his node is not there to sign the transaction too, then it will fail.
There are no other nodes involved in the transaction so there is no mempool for transactions to reside till the other peer comes online.

Also, commitment transactions are multisig bitcoin transactions (2-of-2 multisig p2wsh transactions to be precise) have to be signed by BOTH parties so if Bob is not online then he can't sign the transaction. A third party, Charlie, can't act in lieu of Bob, because that would require them having Bob's private key.

To summarise the reasons why payments fail when a counterparty is offline are:
1) transactions require the signature of both parties, and obviously won't work with just one signature
2) the transactions are relayed directly p2p, and there are no other nodes that are involved to store transactions

There are two overall, often conflicting, strengths in this forum that need to come to terms. On the one hand, there are those that vouch for a spam free forum, centered on Bitcoin discussion. On the other hand, we’ve got a set of Campaigns that are here for their own profit (but that are also a core asset to the Forum’s financial structure), using the Forum as a means to their objectives, but with little regards for the former annotated conflicting strength. This duality of focus, that coexists within a single closed space, leads to the current situation.

Campaigns seem to be here to stay, but that does not mean that the rules that apply to them cannot be tweaked in favour of overall content quality. Merit is an approach in this sense, but it focused on the labour side of Campaign, whilst no additional focus has been placed on the root of the problem, being that Campaigns and Campaign Managers themselves.
Self-awareness by forum elders that also manage campaigns is creating a ripple in the system, by tightening the rules to specific campaigns for those campaigns that they manage, but the main core of campaigns are still running wild and remain rather much exempt for responsibility over their recruits.

I agree therefore that the focus has to be placed there, and that is the reason for the OPs thread, as well as other interesting proposal we’ve seen recently such as this week’s thread by d5000 on the matter ( The core of Bitcointalk's spam problem ), knowing full well that this kind of thread will be buried soon on the nth page of Meta and probably lead nowhere in practice.

But we do have a right to a tantrum and hope to actually get somewhere eventually, so let’s add our two cents to the thread.

It sounds good, but adds the difficulty of management and an overhead of time to forum moderators which I suspect are not too empty handed right now. If such cases were sort of rare to manage, the overhead would be small, but as we often see, the amount of spammers grows with ease and one signature block on a low ranked account could easily be replaced by another low ranked alt account taking on from there.

A lot of bumping goes on in the Ann section, but so long as it affects the Ann section only, the spill on other Forum sections is not an issue, and delimits only to competing for prime space within the Ann thread. It is not a spam issue, but a “play by the rules of the book”concern as I see it. So long as the bumps are legit (i.e. not paid to bots or serviced accounts that deploy that kind of service), they seem to conform to the organic positioning within the Ann thread.
Bump cheaters could be forced as you say to have a kind of visibility punishment within the Ann Forum Section, but from a the spam point of view at least, what goes on there, if confined to the Ann section, is a lesser issue.

The price would have to be heavy though, since I guess that the idea would be that the first page be for paid positioning ICOs and from the second onwards for natural organic bumped ICOs.

I would rather prefer for them to compete for the space than to pay for it. We could bring Merit in to the equation here. For example, we could play with positioning based on three variables:
-   Accumulated pre-signature Merit of Campaign´s signatories (this could be gained Merit and not Airdropped Merit for the signatories instead).
-   Accumulated Merit of Campaign´s signatories during the actual campaign.
-   Natural bumps.

The algoritm would create a scoring based on those three variables, being the second and third more relevant. For example, whenever a signatory is merited, the score for the positioning would be incremented, and thus the ICO’s positioning thread within the Ann section. Gained merit would have more weight than a bump, and a longer time effect in the positioning algorithm.
The above would play on the lines of basing positioning both in terms of participation (natural organic bumping) and quality/interest based by the signatories posting capabilities. Good posters would draw more attention to their signature through their natural activity, whilst rising collaterally the ANN thread’s position. Crappy posters would benefit the Campaign on neither accounts.

Am I right that the goals of this protocol are primarily to reduce the finality time in comparison to Bitcoin as well as reduce the cost of running the system?

The image of how blocks are set up (https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1000/1*fPsB4-t6J_1u1UpF37dYHw.png) reminds me strongly of the way blocks are chained in the "two-hop blockchain" (https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/716.pdf). I would like to see more in-depth comparisons to other consensus protocols, especially DPoS which seems particularly close in mechanism to Proof-of-Approval.

Your comparison table claims Proof-of-Approval is fully finalized after a single block,  however, you also talk about how there may be multiple top-level blocks where the "preferred" chain is unresolved. Doesn't this imply that your transaction being inside a valid block doesn't mean its been fully finalized? How do you reconcile that?

Since any node can produce a candidate block, this seems like it would potentially cause unbounded network traffic with everyone and their mother suggesting blocks to vote on. How is this resolved in the case of, say, an adversarial ddos attack? But I have the same question as monsterer2, why would anyone with stake approve the block of anyone without stake? In fact, why would anyone with stake approve *anyone* else's blocks? It seems there's no incentive to mine on top of someone else's blocks. This could manifest in more subtle attacks where you have stakeholders who refuse to mint on top of a competitor. It could also manifest in deadlock as nodes try to maximize their probability of winning the minted block.

I have a hard time seeing the purpose of having nodes pay attention to timestamps and comparing them to their receive-time. At its core, the mechanism is just voting, right? I don't see why the protocol doesn't just let nodes vote for whatever blocks they want. I see the appeal of a simple stake-voting process for block creation (similar to DPoS), but the Proof of Approval method seems like rational profit-seeking minters would make things devolve into the top 50% stakeholders passing around permission to mine the blocks, completely excluding the other 50%.

Also, could you provide a glossary of variables you use in this paper? Its hard for me to keep track of which variables mean what and find their definition in the prose when I need to refer to what they mean later.

@monsterer2 Are you suggesting that greater permissionlessness is desriable? Also, I've come to the conclusion that bootstrap poisoning can be entirely solved by blockchain checkpoints hardcoded into whatever software you use - since the software should be audited, and malicious software can make your client choose whatever chain it wants, hardcoded checkpoints don't reduce security in any meaningful way and yet completely remove the possibility of long range attacks including bootstrap poisoning.

Also @monsterer2 I would actually call your most recent proposed attack a 51% attack, since you *did* own a majority stake, and are using that fact to attack the network. I'd say its just an interesting twist on a 51% attack.

Correct.

I shouldn’t have posted this thread when I was so sleepy and looking at the screen cross-eyed. I try to push too hard which can be my undoing.

My concern turns out to not really be about the math, because it requires a political-economic assumption as to the maximum percentage of the stake that will collude. And I was incorrect to think we would need a noncentral hypergeometric distribution. The standard hypergeometric distribution is applicable after we choose a threshold level for the maximum colluding set.

With a fresher mind, clearly the DFINITY paper is computing the case where one (or one colluding set of) entity(ies) would have ⅓ of the (e.g. stake deposited) permissioned nodes. That’s the maximum attack threat they consider, presumably because above that exceeds the ½ safety and liveness thresholds of their design, so the attacker could double-spend or stall the consensus indefinitely.

That very low ½ safety threshold is a significant weakness of their design in the proof-of-stake context, but if they choose instead ⅔ safety threshold then the liveness drops to ⅓ making it much more likely the chain can become stuck if it is not controlled by a “benevolent” (less overt) oligarchy. Moreover, the typical attack on proof-of-stake is not to stuck the chain but rather to be a less obviously malevolent oligarchy and employ the control to extract maximum rents from the system such as by maximizing the transaction fees and/or capturing disproportionately all or most of the minted block rewards (which in the case of Steem is to cartelize control over the voting algorithm, see also). Which could be especially onerous if DFINITY employs the random beacon (as they propose to do) to supply randomness to the smart contracts, then the attacker can do more than just double-spend his own tokens and actually infiltrate smart contracts in presumably insidious ways.

I think they should have computed the maximum adversarial percentage threshold to be more congruent with the reality of power-law distribution of wealth:


And the reality of how easy it is for an oligarchy to take control of 80+% of the stake of any proof-of-stake project token.

Based on the above reality, I presumed in my analysis of DFINITY that they would have to choose instead ⅔ safety threshold and thus the liveness drops to ⅓. That very low liveness is a significant risk of chain getting stuck, but they really have no choice given the reality above. And also typically the attacker will not choose the stuck chain approach of maximizing profits by shorting the token.

So with 10,000 permissioned nodes, 50% of them controlled by the adversary, and with a ⅔ safety threshold, then I compute roughly the same group size as computed for the ⅓ adversary case in the whitepaper (with ½ safety threshold). So the ⅔ safety threshold seems viable as long as the adversarial stake remains below 50%. I still don’t think it’s very secure (because of the nothing-at-stake cost free attacks) but that is less unrealistic than their ⅓ adversarial stake assumption.


Correct. The random beacon can be biased when the safety threshold is exceeded. And I do not know if their BLS threshold signature scheme can be made to function with a ⅔ safety threshold instead of ½. If not, the design is very unrealistic. Presumably it can be. But still the security is weak because of nothing-at-stake and the fact that nothing-at-stake incentivizes an oligarchy to obtain 80+% of the stake. My assertion is that proof-of-stake is not viable unless the nothing-at-stake incentive is removed somehow. But no extant non-proof-of-work design has figured out how to do it. I think I know how to do it.


Because the BLS threshold signature does not scale to unbounded set size at the desired slot confirmation delay. And that wouldn’t ameliorate the security issue you are concerned about anyway, because then either it would still be adversarial always or never, because there can be no other additional randomness injected by running the protocol.

The BLS threshold signature is fast enough that they can do it every block (slot), unlike in Ouroboros which can only do unbiased (i.e. secure) multiparty signature every epoch. And this is perhaps related to Dan Larimer’s criticism of Ouroboros. Algorand isn’t even unbiased.

EDIT: I have more carefully read Dan’s criticisms of Ouroboros and I think he is being very disingenuous. I have rebutted on his blog.

You should look into universal basic income, if you haven't already. If you look into UBI you will find some ideas that pretty much align with what you are suggesting. There are also practical experiments, both past and ongoing, looking into the matter. Using a cryptocurrency as means of distribution would of course lend itself to the idea, but it's not an easy problem to solve, especially with both UBI and cryptocurrencies being rather unexplored fields.

Here's a list of pilot projects that may interest you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_pilots



Of course there are a lot of passion jobs where money is secondary, but at the end of the day they still require money to continue their work. You can't just look at individuals in isolation without their socio-economic surroundings.

Also note that while researchers may not be in it for the money, a lot of them still get paid fairly well and rightfully so.

Point being, it doesn't matter if parts of the population don't care about money. As long as there are some people striving for wealth, they will try to exploit the current system. And if they are able to exploit the system, that's exactly what they will do -- at the cost of everyone else who "doesn't care about money".

Even if your main intention is to spread wealth evenly amongst the populace, as long as there are some angles to exploit or positions of power to obtain, the approach is prone to failure due to human nature. Case in point, every implementation of Communism so far either digressed into a dictatorship or some form of centrally controlled capitalism.

Communism is easy to romance with if you never lived in it, but it's not a pretty system due to being relatively easy exploited from the top down. Maybe even moreso than Capitalism.


That being said, I'm convinced that due to technological and economical progress, some form of UBI will become a necessity in the future. It's going to be a very hard problem to solve though, regardless of whether it will involve cryptocurrencies or not.

Often I see questions pop up on the forum regarding safe keeping of passwords and data. I decided to write up a detailed instructions on the encryption of data.
For creating encrypted data base, I use software called VeraCrypt. It is free and open source. More details on the software here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VeraCrypt
Download and install the software here: https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Downloads.html

1. Open the software, double click "Create Volume:


2. Now we click the check mark next to "Create an encrypted file container" and click next


3. During the next step we decide whether we want to create a regular encrypted volume or one with double encryption. In these instructions I am going to show regularly encrypted volume. So, we choose "Standard VeraCrypt volume" and click next


4. New we connect our usb drive to the computer. During this step we have to manually enter the path to the file which is going to be placed on the USB. For this open "my computer" and see under which name is our USB (in my case it is E). So, we enter our path for the file being created and click next.


5. Choosing type of encryption as "Twofish", and clicking next


6. Need to choose the encryption size. Here you are going to have to judge yourself. If you are planning to have encrypted just password database and private keys, you will not need much space. My recommendation then would be to take up a small amount of the USB and the rest of it to fill up with various files. This is done so if ever your usb was lost or stolen, and open by a third party, the file would not stick out.
My usb drive size is 3.7gb so I am choosing 1gb for encryption file size and leaving 2.7 gb empty


7. Now need to come up with a password. Password needs to be new and not something you use everywhere else. Better to make something out of 15-20 various symbols with different sizes. Write it down on the paper for you. After a few days on constant input you can throw away the paper


8. Start up the generation of you key encryption, move your mouse around, the key will be generated quicker. When the bar is fully green, press Format


9. The process of encryption itself has began. The larger size you picked during step 6, the longer it will take. For example when I was encrypting 60 gb it took me 30 minutes. Process is complete when you see this message


On the next window press Exit. On this step the process of encryption is complete. Now I will show you how to use it. Access your USB and we see this kind of file. It can ONLY be opened with the software VeraCrypt AND putting in your set password

Upon accessing VeraCrypt we see many different unused volumes in your system. Choose one, say A. Click select file and our created file on the usb and click mount


On the next window enter the password you created during step 7 and click ok. Access my computer and we observe the new local drive.

This is our encrypted volume which appeared only after we entered the password from it. In it we can store our password, private keys etc....

IMPORTANT: Upong ending your work, do not forget to close the volume, otherwise you may risk of losing your data. For this we press Dismount in VeraCrypt


After this we can dismount the USB from the PC (not forgetting about the safe way to eject the usb and not just pulling it out). The process of creating encrypted volume/database will take about 20 minutes but save you a lot of time you could have spent worrying about keeping your data safe

No.
Your trust list does not say anything about how trustworthy a person is.
Your trust list should include people who "give good trust", i.e. whose trust ratings are useful for yourself and possibly others.
You could even add a known Scammer to your trust list if, and only if this person is careful about giving meaningful trust ratings (even though I would advise against it).
Your trust list should explicitly exclude people whose positive trust ratings have been given to untrustworthy people or whose negative ratings have been given as "retaliation" or whatever.

That's the way I use my trust list. I also offer to delete negative ratings once I see "betterment" or a reasonable explanation for someones behavior. I even sometimes delete "old" trust ratings when I no longer deem them appropriate, maybe because the user in question has "changed" in my eyes. Obviously, I can only do the latter for users I know quite well from our local community.

I "strongly believe that this person is a scammer" may not be equivalent to, but certainly is an emphasized version of "I don't trust this guy", semantically.
At least that's the way I understand it.
Then again, I've always been known for shooting first and asking questions later

I had England 2-0 but I had Senegal to win 1-2 and I thought I got it when they scored the second goal but Japan did equalize few minutes after. At least I got 30 points for finding the correct answer to the question which was Senegal to have the most number of shots on target and off target.

Nah.  I took a look at a couple posts he merited and it looked like they were in Russian.  That board definitely needs a merit source, and it looks like xandry is fulfilling his duty there.  I don't speak Russian, so I can't attest to the quality of the posts he merited, but I don't think there's anything inappropriate going on.

If you have a board on ignore, when you look at a merited post it shows up as deleted/ignored.  Even if xandry merited some posts that got deleted, so what?  If you're insinuating that he's selling merits or somehow giving them out inappropriately, I don't see the evidence.  He's given them out repeatedly to some of the same individuals, but look at how many times pugman or TMAN has given me merits.  They just like some of my posts, and I think the same thing is going on with xandry.

[...] Indeed, when merit system appeared, I got the opportunity to encourage users for help in moderation, which was frankly lacking. (Note: In Russian section.) At first I tried to apply it to "service" threads (about bans, ranks, forum rules, etc.), but sometimes I haven't got enough time to watch if something useful in these topics appeared, so when I click on a link in report and notice that person not only sent a report, but also, for example, explained to author of violating post what they did wrong (thereby I don't need to explain it myself), I endeavor to gratitude them in a merit form. By the way, it turned out, that "violators" often take such user warnings into consideration and move their topics to the correct sections or delete their posts.
Regarding the possibility of obtaining merits this way. Here're some situations when I don't give them:
1. You were wrong and I do not see any violations.
2. You wrote a message with an explanation, but I trivially did not read it.
3. You didn't reach even a Jr. Member rank "naturally".
3. You collected too much merit in the last 30 days, try again later. This is not my personal limitation - it's set by the forum.

Therefore, we have some kind of game of chances here.

Counter rating is stupid. It doesn't change the bad rating and messes up the system. Correct way is to make bad ratings untrusted.

Why shouldn't there be multiple "counter ratings" against a bad negative rating? Why should only one DT member have a say in there?

I would like if you add a note or something that highlights how reporting stuff is always better than creating a new thread. For instance, a lot of new comers recently have started creating threads for stuff like "x User is shit-posting" or "x user is Trolling". An example thread for the same could be : Can this guy (cryptoaeronet) be ban?. This unnecessarily opens up a thread which instead can be effectively handled by the 'Report To Moderator' function by explaining the case properly.

I do report such cases very often and moderators do take the respective action..

Edit : To check your previous reports simply use this URL once you're logged in : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=reportlist;mine (doesn't work for all the accounts, I guess only works for accounts with good amount of reports)

- You can send me one on my way if you want me to colorize it or however you want it.

Let me know which one I got right?

This is the screenshot of my report page history: https://i.imgur.com/nCeFpxX.png
Is that something you are looking for?

- It does not show all the reports though. I am sure after certain numbers the oldest ones were cut off from the page.

Some people might be interested in screenshots of the full Report History. (I can't actually see it myself without generating dummy data, since I don't report posts...)

Some people might be interested in screenshots of the full Report History. (I can't actually see it myself without generating dummy data, since I don't report posts...)

If their post history is the same, maybe it can be reported both, mentioning this in the report, to let the mod have a look too and decide if this means spam or not...
What happens if we report a user with copper membership? (Paid membership). I haven't reported any copper yet. Does that mean any kind of protection against vulnerability?

So this thread encouraged me to do reporting more actively, I think step by step we'll clean this forum from shitposters. But the thing which I noticed and it looks weird to me when I report somebody my report count and accuracy increases instantly, it's at 100% accuracy right now, but reported posts stays in the place, without any actions. Is my account somehow broken and I can't report anyone, because looks like my reports didn't even get to the mods.

By the way, you're right about what you've said. Also almost 90% of people here really just registered to earn money as their priority, not even worrying about the quality of posts. But I can assure you that I'm different from those people. I earn money by posting Good post as long as I can make it good.

Sir, Do you think that my posts are spams? Or they are just fine enough to be called "constructive"? I just really want to know. Because I'm risking my reputation here saying over and over that my posts are not spams. But, I really don't know if you guys accepts my posts and consider it as constructive.

That’s completely new for me. I’d say this guy having earned 61 merits means he has made a good contribution to the forum.

It’s perfectly compatible to want to make money and to be a good forum member.

I’m all in for it too. It would even be better to have it on the actual Report to Moderator pop-up screen as a link to the guide, being therefore more effective than a pinned post, although I figure we won’t see this happening.

EDIT
Just found something interesting:
Archive
Post/Topic:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4524527.0

So if I want to report this, it's not nr. 33 copypaste, because the source is included....


Maybe this fits the nr. 1 'pointless' type of post, but I have to describe why it's pointless. It's pointless, because it's a copypaste of some other member's post, but the source has mentioned, so it's not a copypaste, so I'm stuck.
The reason why I'm asking this that I don't want to ruin my 99% accuracy (have nearly 650 reports and only 10 bad, so if I can reach the 1000 reports with 10 bad, I hope the system will round the 99% up to 100% )