That might be true, although we can only judge this on existing sections, and in serious discussion there isn't much altcoin discussion going on. You are probably right in that it would get more exposure if there was a serious discussion in the altcoin section, but there needs to be visible demand before that happens.

I'm not judging the merit system until it's in full flow either.

You'll find it very difficult to find anyone willing to provide finance for income generated by mining. First of all your mining equipment would have to be generating more than what they need, and usually when something is offered for collateral it's at it's price that it can be sold for. A few  businesses are put up for collateral due to their earnings the past year, but it's far more likely that the businesses assets are put up instead of the actual business.

You could work out your last 3 years earnings with the mining equipment and send that to banks providing finances and see if they are interested. But, due to the difficultly and price of Bitcoin dropping and rising it's unlikely they'll be interested.

Well, if you are dealing with Bitcoin and earn over a certain amount then you'll need to either do your taxes yourself or hire an accountant anyway. It doesn't matter if you are a company or a day trader. Accepting Bitcoin as a business only as a few limitations and concerns, the biggest being exposure and the amount of people willing to use Bitcoin for your services is very limited.

Yeah, they do that. But, that doesn't mean that this should be done. If you are replying to a thread unless it's situational such as the wall observer thread you should be reading every single reply to see if what you are going to post hasn't already been posted and discussed.

If you are posting about the current price of Bitcoin and want advise or want to point out a trend then reading the last few pages might be alright, but this is situational depending on the type of thread.

You shouldn't be actively looking for merit, if your posts are up to standard then they will get merited anyway. There's many threads which are reviewing posts and distributing merit, you could just post your topics there if you feel that your topics have not been merited enough for it's quality you'll likely have more luck that way anyway.

A lot of his posts seem to be unsubstantial posts but, I'll take a look into it in more depth when I'm reviewing and adding the other accounts which your currently in my queue. Thanks for linking that user though.  

I'm not sure when I'll be reviewing and adding the next batch, but won't likely be for another week or two due to the snow disruption recently causing a backlog in work, and I'll admit I've been enjoying the snow.

Like Vod said there's no way of proving that this is the case, and without accusing you are anything I find it very odd than someone would get access to a hero member account, use it's merit to rank up it's alt accounts using it's merit. Did they even attempt to get into your email? I'm assuming your password is different on here to what it is on your email and therefore they didn't take over the account completely.

If you can provide a signed address which was posted by that account publicly I'm sure a DefaultTrust member would be willing to help, contact one via personal message if you want to keep it confidential for what ever reason.

You being part of a altcoin team isn't going to be sufficient evidence though.

Locking down the account was done in good faith to prevent anyone getting access to the account and posting as you. You could try sending all the information you have about the account, but it's likely that you won't  be able to recover it without a Bitcoin address. You said you used throwaway addresses what were these created with? If they were created with an online wallet which are quite common for throwaway addresses try and find out if you wrote the identifier down anywhere.

If you can remember any of the password at all, or any patterns that you've used in the past this could be cracked within minutes by yourself using btcrecover. As the above mentioned you could just brute force it, but if you remember something about it you can use the tokens.txt and list what you think was in it.

If you know you used a certain number then you could include that, if you know you used a number at the end you could state that in the tokens.txt. Follow the tutorial at: https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover/blob/master/TUTORIAL.md

It's well worth the read for 13.8 Bitcoin. If you can't figure it out yourself, and you want someone else to do it for you, don't send them the wallet.dat, extract the mkey from it and send them that. When they find the password they will not be able to access the wallet because you have the wallet.dat, but they will know the password.

I just wish that campaign managers were held responsible for this too. Even if they can't know for certain that these are alternate accounts, their post history should be up for review and any that aren't up to the standard should be removed. Hopefully theymos starts punishing actual campaign mangers as well as those who spam for signature payments.

The staff don't have enough time to verify that the website is owned by the user, and would take a lot to verify that they actually own it too. If signature campaigns only accept high merited users then that should exclude a lot of the spammers that we see. Anyway, some signatures have some awesome unheard of websites and by introducing a centralized list of websites which are allowed in signatures could stop these niche websites from getting noticed.

There's been many in the past, but take Vod's signature for example. Again, if we did have a list of websites that were allowed in signatures then this would have to be approved by staff members and they likely don't have enough time for that.

It's down to theymos to pick the moderators. If you speak a local language and are reporting posts in that local section, then there's likely a need for a moderator and you'll have a somewhat better chance of being picked to moderate that section. I believe there's been polls in local sections to have a vote on who should moderate the section, whether theymos agrees to that is whether it will happen or not.

I think theymos discourages "applying" for moderator though.

Report it to the campaign manager they'll have to use their discretion on this matter on whether these accounts are connected or not. It's very likely that most of these are connected, but without any real hard evidence such as posting the same address etc, there could be a few false positives there.

So you don't think this is a shitpost: "Awesome information i really love it"? or

These are shitposts, and probably contributed to why this account got banned. I'm not saying that's the only reason, but I'm sure it didn't help their case. Here's another one:

These types of posts are deleted on a daily basis, and if the user didn't take this as a warning and continued to post these sort of responses then they could of been banned for it. Generally, these types of posters normally copy and paste at some point too, but you'll have to wait for a response from a moderator to find out the exact reason.

The newbie board used to be a introduction section, but, that didn't really work out as planned all it did was restrict the spam to one section and looking at these accounts that spam advertisements a lot of them are in the altcoin section. I don't think introducing a introduction section would actually benefit us here.

Change your email password, and account password. Make sure that any accounts that you use the email and password for you change too. Contact theymos through personal message to see if he can find anyone matching that VPN. Although, it's likely a VPN/Tor exit node and won't be helpful.

You just got to keep on trying them every so often. I'm not sure how frequent but, send a reminder every 2 weeks/month and eventually they should get back to you. Judging by the amount of people complaining they have been waiting for months there's a huge backlog currently. So it's unlikely they've missed your messages, it's just there's so many people before you in the queue.

If everyone actively works on reporting these threads then there's no need for new moderators. Most of the spam that is reported in that section gets removed within a hour or so I'm sure the moderators will appreciate your efforts.

A lot of sections are overrun currently though, and I don't think Bitcoin discussion is the worst one. But, because it's the first one everyone sees when they visits the page a lot of people post threads in there which belong in other sections, this is probably unavoidable and creates a bigger workload on the mods. 

The problem with automated bots are that they bring up a lot of false positives, and there's no easy way around this. Some bots are effective and I believe Mitchell was using a bot to deal with certain members. Just keep on reporting these accounts that are copying and pasting and they'll get dealt with.