I don't know what box I fit into, but my understanding has always been that red trust is for shady behavior/scams, and inclusions/exclusions are to be used to express confidence in another member's judgement as far as their leaving feedback.  That might not be others' understanding, of course.

Yeah, of course.  And the trust system here is a bit....complex, to say the least.  We've got green/black/red trust, we've got flags, and we've got inclusions/exclusions to trust lists.  It's no wonder it's a free-for-all.

As with any leveraging, it depends on what the interest rate is.  If you can get cheap money, you can leverage as much as you like--but no, I've never used a bank loan for any such purpose and I think it's a bad idea to take out a loan in order to speculate on crypto.  I think I remember in 2017 that there was someone who posted here that he was using his credit card to basically do the same thing as what you're proposing, OP.  

Leverage/margin can get you into trouble very quickly--especially in the bitcoin market.  If you're considering doing this, OP just be careful.  If your investments tank, you're stuck with a loan that probably has a high interest rate.  And given how volatile bitcoin has been, I think it's just a bad idea.

Yeah, that's what he's saying.  Borrowing money to trade, regardless of who you're borrowing it from, is leveraged trading.  I'm sure there have been quite a few people who've borrowed from banks to do this, though I bet they didn't tell the bank what they were really going to use the money for.  Banks don't generally lend money out for the purpose of trading.

I agree--there's no anonymity and I don't think there's any advantage to this service that Visa is offering.  It's basically just a way for Visa (and probably Coinbase as well) to extract fees from their customers.  Same old story that's been going on since the beginning of credit cards, right?

Nice to see bitcoin gaining wider adoption--or possibly doing so--but I'm not sure this is going to catch on.

And I also agree that it would be so much better if merchants took bitcoin directly, but there's an obvious volatility risk involved, and I can understand why they wouldn't want to do that.  Even payment processors only convert bitcoin to fiat, which is what the merchant receives.  If I'm not mistaken, there are a few businesses that take crypto directly.  Overstock, Veldt Gold, and Protonmail are three of those, though I'm not sure if any of them still receive crypto directly.

Same here, although nothing is a crime unless there's a law on the books and I don't think there is one regarding mixers....yet. 

Makes me wonder where the pressure is coming from to crack down on crypto like this.  The DOJ is but one branch of the US government, albeit a big one.  I'm wondering whether any such pressure is being exerted by the prez. 

They've probably got all the Chipmixer sig campaign participants on the FBI's watch list.  Never underestimate the power or stupidity of government agencies.

Whew, and that order might get executed too, the way the market is going right now.  Bitcoin is at $9531 as we speak, which is about a $700 drop from yesterday's high--this is one hell of a volatile time, and you actually gave some good advice for short-term traders who want to limit their losses, although I would argue that if bitcoin got as low as $9200 it would probably be better if you started buying the dip instead of selling.  I don't think the overall trend is down.

And yeah, this is a minor correction in the making.  I'm sure plenty of traders made some decent money when bitcoin broke through the $10k barrier, and many of them are cashing out their profits.  But hopefully bitcoin will get back to where it was.  It hasn't been taking long for it to rebound from these dips, but we'll see.

Yeah, except I can't log in unless I do the KYC step so I think that info is out of date.  I bet Kucoin is now being required to do this for US customers, much like Binance was--and I'm wondering if the government is finally cracking down on offshore crypto exchanges.  

And again, I didn't get an e-mail about this and I wanted to know if anybody saw this coming or if it's just me and I missed an announcement.

Edit:
I'm going to assume you're not in the US, but you don't have to verify that if you don't want to.

I tried to log in to their site and was hit with a KYC requirement--and I don't recall ever getting an e-mail with the news about that.  Anyone know the story behind this? 

Not surprised, since I've been thinking that anonymous exchanges are going to become extinct for quite some time now, but Kucoin was one of the last ones with a decent reputation.

And by the way, this is another reason why you don't keep coins on exchanges for long.  It isn't like they're pulling a scam here, but if you want to pull your funds off Kucoin before having to verify your identity, looks like you'd be out of luck and your coins would be stuck there.  Fortunately I just had some dust there.

Lol, I probably wouldn't understand a thing that they were saying--but I definitely see where this shit took a nosedive (and why).

Before reading this thread I really didn't know anything about IOTA.  It was just a project whose name I saw from time to time on the forum, and I had no idea how centralized it was.  I appreciate Nullius breaking everything down here (and for starting the thread in the first place), as I wouldn't have read anything about this scam otherwise.

Wouldn't this sort of shenanigans be a problem with Ripple as well?  And I have to profess ignorance about how Ripple works, but I'm pretty sure it's just as centralized as IOTA is. 

That's all well and good, but bitcoin isn't going to threaten the US dollar.  It's been more of an investment than a currency since its inception; it's global; and the US dollar is waaay too dominant to be replaced by bitcoin.  This is a bunch of propaganda BS, nothing more.  The US government should be ashamed of itself for a lot of things, but it really irritates me when politicians and bureaucrats spout nonsense like this.

OP, even though I hate what was said in that article, thanks for posting the link to it.

See, I don't think any good users are being driven away from the forum because of red-tagging.  And if they're scammers or otherwise unsavory members, good riddance.  The only member I can think of who left because of some red was aTriz and his alt.  Bill gator almost left, but I don't think he disappeared completely--and I happen to like him and thought he probably shouldn't have gotten tagged. 

I don't think putting a big red warning on a potential or actual scammer is accomplishing nothing, by the way.  Sure, there are some members who are trying to build their reputation by doing so, but as long as they get it right I don't have a problem with the motivation.  I started tagging account sellers after I got scammed back in 2016, when it became obvious to me how harmful sales of high-ranked, green-trusted accounts could be--not because I wanted to get on DT.  I never thought that would happen and was absolutely shocked when I got put on it.

I've also admitted tagging shitposters was a bad idea, which is also something I used to do right up until the creation of the merit system.  Those feedbacks have been deleted, though, and that practice has essentially been abolished.

Anyway, I partially agree about the objective standards, but there's no getting around the fact that some subjectivity is going to have to creep in somewhere.  It always does and there's no getting around it.

I'm not really concerned about those private keys when I use an exchange, because I never plan on keeping my coins there--and you're absolutely correct; nobody should be keeping significant amounts of crypto on any custodial exchange.  That's something every newcomer to crypto should learn, but unfortunately some of them have to learn the hard way.  There was just a thread the other day about some Asian exchange called FCoin that supposedly pulled an exit scam, and that's the big danger.

Also, I don't have a problem with those traditional, custodial exchanges as long as they're trustworthy, and some are.  Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, and a few others are regulated and probably aren't going to get away with exit scamming even if they were inclined to do so.  And even though I still wouldn't store my crypto on any of those, I would feel comfortable trading with them and leaving coins there perhaps overnight.

Noncustodial wallets are just stupid, and nobody should be using them.  That's another thing newbies need to learn early on.

Doubly marked, and I did see philipma1957's response--I'm not superstitious myself, but in this case I hope he's right.  And considering bitcoin is around $10250 at the moment it's quite possible.  If it does hit that price by 3/3, I'd sort of expect a nice little correction shortly afterward.

Speaking of philipma1957, I haven't see many videos from him lately on YT.  Always interesting to see the mining operation.

I agree with this, though I'm far from certain whether it's going to happen.  I have a feeling bitcoin will get to $100k, but it might be a while.  Still, it's "only" a 10x gain from where it's at now, and I've seen that sort of growth since I've been into crypto.

That I don't know about.  Bitcoin's market cap would be $210 billion (assuming all 21 million coins were in circulation), but who knows what the rest of the altcoin market would do.  If bitcoin were to hit $100k at a time when people have figured out that most altcoins are useless, there might only be a few left in existence.  But that estimate might be right.  It'll be interesting to see how long it takes for that 10x gain--and I'm more immediately interested in where bitcoin's going to head this year.  It's off to a great start so far, but there's a lot of time left in 2020.

LOLOLOL. Alright, TECSHARE, when you see this don't flame me to death.  My brain saw the "violation of contractual agreement" part and blanked out because I've seen you write it so many times.

I do think those tenets a bit too stringent, however.  There are shady things that go on here that won't be represented by documented theft or any violation of a contract, so there are going to be negs left which won't (and can't) necessarily be kept to a minimum.

Scammers are very sneaky, they're rampant, and we're dealing with the internet here where people are pretty anonymous.  I'd say the standards for getting a neg on this forum ought to be relatively relaxed.  I'm not saying there isn't trust abuse going on, because there is.  TMAN is a recent example of that, and he got called out for it.  That kind of feedback that he left for TECSHARE needs to stop in general IMO.

Not on mine.  I can always agree to disagree with someone on most issues.  And thank you for redirecting me to TS's list.  

And no, I don't think community standards are set in stone, nor that they should include trust abuse or leaving negs for disagreements.  I don't think that's become acceptable, and Theymos even gave some guidance on that a while back when he asked everyone to bury their hatchets.

That sounds like some of the worst double-speak I've ever heard--the statement says absolutely nothing about the reasons why this thing happened or why it is apparently so complicated that it can't be put into words.  And why would an explanation have to be put into a single sentence anyway?

Never heard of FCoin, but this doesn't surprise me in the least.  Exit scamming has been a lucrative maneuver for exchanges for years now, and the more obscure they are, the better (for them).  The amount they apparently scammed isn't small, so hopefully FCoin's screwed-over customers will figure out a way to get their money back. 

Interesting.  Was that discussed mainly in the altcoin sections?  I've never heard of trade mining before--but I don't doubt you when you say there were idiots shilling it and probably not understanding what kind of bullshit they were promoting.

Alright, so this looks to me like TECSHARE doesn't like a particular clique, so he's recommending (or even creating) his own--and at the same time is deriding the formation of cliques.  A'ight, then.

I'd say you're going a bit overboard with that statement, and I'd also suggest that you have yet to formulate any written, non-arbitrary rules for anyone to go by, if such a thing were even feasible.  Ever try to herd cats?  And in any case, most of us human beings tend to function in life without a rulebook of our own.  Yes, there are written laws handed down from the mountain of government, but that's another story. 

Would you prefer that the rules of bitcointalk be the be-all, end-all guide for conduct on the forum?  If you say yes, I'd point out that scamming is allowed here and yet I don't think an ethical person would condone that. 

Anyway, any community forms standards over time.  As an example, that's how account selling got to be frowned upon, though not everyone agrees that it's bad for the forum or could increase scams.  And that's fine, we're all free to disagree about that--but DT members should be free to tag account sellers, too.  And if sentiment about account sales turned 180 degrees, any DT members tagging account sellers would probably be excluded from trust lists and the problem would go away on its own.

TECSHARE, I understand your words but there seems to be some dissonance and I'm not exactly clear what you want to accomplish with those recommended inclusions/exclusions other than forming another set of standards which are anything but clear.  In fact, I can't see into your brain so I don't know what they are.  Maybe if you wrote them down?

So basically the problem is that you're running out of sMerits, right?  I think whether that happens to any given merit source depends on their merit-giving and what their individual allocation is per month.  I'm pretty sure there are some members who have extremely high allocations, because I've seen the numbers and there's no way they could have given out so many merits even if they earned a lot.  Not all merit source merit allocations are equal, that's what I'm blabbering about.

And my suggestion would be to request that Theymos up your monthly sMerit allocation, because I don't think other merit sources need the same increase.  I made a thread last year begging for more sMerits because I kept running out, and Theymos did increase what I get.

Anyway, props to you for running out of sMerits--that means you're probably doing a good job as a merit source.  I need to step it up myself.

There's definitely not, and personally I don't see a problem with what OP is proposing as long as there's actually a second individual involved--and there's no real way to tell that for sure.  And honestly, I don't think there's anything preventing people from just creating a new account after they're banned anyway, and I'm pretty sure most banned users do just that. 

I recall hilariousandco mentioning that mods/admins don't check IP logs on any banned members, and so there's nothing to prevent someone from making an announcement from an alt account or from having a friend speak on someone's behalf.  In any case, since there's no way to tell if a friend is involved and no way to prevent ban evasion, this is really a non-issue.

Yeah, obviously like OP's pattern. 

I don't think the trust system has anything to do with an efflux of members in any given time frame.  If anything, there are probably people who find the level of shitposting to be utterly repulsive and never come back.  And if some people left because they got some red trust?  Fuck 'em.  They should have joined the Thick-Skinned Posse instead.

OP is on ignore, so I didn't read anything he wrote here and I would suggest people at least consider putting him on ignore--the more attention he gets, the more nonsense he's going to post and it doesn't matter which account is writing it.  He's made all the points he could possibly make and nobody with any power here on the forum gives a shit.

I think we're out of the panic-selling mode for the moment, as bitcoin is once again over $10k (wheee!) but this is where the FOMO might kick in again--and I hate that term, but it's an apt one for times like this.

Anyway, the market and the individuals that make it up are going to do what they're going to do and no amount of warning can prevent either bubbles from forming or the subsequent crashes.  It's good advice not to rely on emotion when you're trading, but unfortunately markets are always subject to irrational buying/selling, and that's what makes people not "careful".

That's exactly what's going to happen, because usually people have to learn from their own mistakes and don't follow advice like OP gave.  If they did, there wouldn't be mistakes being made constantly.