Heh heh.  I studied all sorts of chemistry and physics in college, and I'm familiar with thermodynamics (though I've forgotten most of it, since I don't use it in my job).  There's no conservation of anything in economics, because money and society aren't regulated by any such hard-and-fast laws.  You can't violate the laws of thermodynamics--people have been trying to create perpetual motion machines for centuries, and no one can do it.  You can't create matter or energy out of nothing, and that's why the conservation of energy and matter are considered laws. 

But come on.  We're talking about governments and politics and money.  There's no real science involved in any of that.  Economics is fascinating to study, and for sure there's some mathematics involved but you don't find inviolable rules anywhere.

I get your point, but I do believe all of the bitcoin forks have produced coins that have at least some value.  There are always going to be people who think there's something to a BCH or Bitcoin Gold or whatever, and they'll trade it on exchanges.  There's no comparison to the laws of physics, though.  Not even close.

Great claim, but this is the internet.  Anyone can say anything--but I suppose if you bought a bunch of bitcoin a few years ago you could be telling the truth.  I'm sure a lot of folks have made big money just by holding.

Don't know about those articles, and I'm not clicking on them.  However, the claim of this:
is complete nonsense.  Bitcoin is far from a stable store of value.  You might have made millions, but that would be precisely because of bitcoins instability.  That's why people don't use it as a form of money that often--it's much more lucrative to hold it and hope it shoots up in value.

I don't know whether you're telling the truth or not, but nobody is going to trust you unless you provide proof.  I don't care if you do or not, because I'm not that interested in the fortune you made, but just know that you wouldn't be the first one here to make incredible claims of riches made with bitcoin.  As I said, you might be telling the truth but I'd just drop it if you can't back it up.

Lol, you have a point there--but that's one of the idiosyncrasies of the priorities of the forum rules.  I couldn't tell you why the forum doesn't ban scammers and prohibit scams, but that's the way it is.  That said, spamming and shitposting are definite problems here, and I think that low-value posts made in extremely broken English should be deleted. 

The "low-value" part of that is key, because as I said before there are members whose native language isn't English, and yet they make valuable contributions.  Whether a post is nuked or not shouldn't just depend on the quality of language but its overall value. 

And yeah, I've always thought that scammers should be banned, but that's a debate for another thread.  Actually it isn't, since Theymos isn't going to budge on it.

Tagged him, though this is probably a throwaway account and the owner likely doesn't care about his trust rating.  Good catch, though.  If you find any other threads like his, feel free to drop me a PM in lieu of starting a thread (although the latter might result in more tags I think).

There are so many scams being perpetrated not only in crypto in general but on bitcointalk in particular that I wouldn't discourage anyone from trying to expose them.  That said, this isn't a valid accusation IMO, nor would I concentrate my efforts on merit abuse if I was a newcomer to the scambusting world.  Theymos has pretty much said to leave it alone, so it's just wasted time and energy.

Maybe you're frequenting the wrong sections.  There's always petty bitching going on, but threads in Economics, Speculation, and a few others seem to be free of that nowadays.  Meta and Reputation are always rife with squabbling and I doubt that's going to change anytime soon. 

Not sure what the problem is with formatting.  Nothing seems to be different to my eyes, though I did see your thread about not using bold text in posts.  I agree with that, along with not using caps and symbols in thread titles.

I would advise likewise--except that I would only start up a thread if there's good evidence of a scam or other wrongdoing, and I'd probably stay away from merit issues.  It'd be nice to hear from Dabs, but he probably thought he found a newbie who was undermerited and thought he'd do him a favor.  Nothing wrong with that.

Eh, I don't think this constitutes merit abuse.  Was it a lot of merits to give a newbie?  Yeah.  But those posts were actually pretty decent, and they were written in good English.  And my guess is that Dabs also agreed with what MichaelX wrote.  I don't have a problem with any of this personally. 

It's not "normal" necessarily (especially with a newbie account involved), but that doesn't mean something shady was going on.  My advice to you is to stop worrying about non-issues like this and focus on earning your own merits and rewarding posts you think are worthy.  If Dabs ever did show a sustained pattern of merit abuse, it'll come to light eventually. 

I've done it, too.  There are some members who are glaringly under-merited and sometimes I've looked back into their post histories and sought out posts to merit.  Not saying that's what Dabs did, but who knows.  All I know is there's not anything about what he did that would lead me to think he's a merit abuser.

That would be fantastic!  If a thief broke into your house, the probability of it getting stolen would be pretty low.  Then again a Ledger or some other hardware wallet can be tucked away pretty much anywhere since it's so small.  Not so with a TI calculator or even an old smartphone.  Still, this idea intrigues me though I'm not sure how secure it is--but I'm no technical expert.

Agreed.  If it weren't, I'm sure people would already be declaring it a scam.  Having said that, I would not want to be a guinea pig for this app (and I don't even own enough crypto to justify it).  I'll be curious to see if it catches on and what users have to say about it.

Grr....I've been on the fence about buying a Nano X.  I really don't need another hardware wallet as I already have a Nano S and a Keepkey, but this edition looks pretty sweet.  That price, though.  It's not astronomical, but it's pricey enough such that I'm having a hard time making a decision.

Got a question about the Nano X:  if you have a portfolio of, say, 10 different coins.  Can you view them all at once, which you can't do with the Nano S?  That's really the only thing that bugs me about the S, even though I don't have many alts.  I'd like to be able to view an entire portfolio of coins instead of having them "hidden".

I had to chuckle at this statement.  You're looking for fortune tellers or very confident TA people to give their predictions, but anyone's guess is as good as anyone else's.  I don't have any data or charts to back up my opinion, but considering that there are about 3 calendar months left to 2019 I think it's entirely possible to have a rally.  If there were only a few weeks left in the year I'd say it's probably unlikely, but I've learned that anything can happen with bitcoin.

Yeah, probably not a rally that would bring bitcoin back to its ATH or anything even close, but it certainly could get back to $10k.  Three months in the bitcoin world is a long time in terms of what could happen with price movements.  If the drop from $13k to $8k was only a selloff, it could very well be that the bull market will resume--but I can't say with a straight face if that's going to happen or not.  My crystal ball is nonfunctional.  In fact it's never been functional.

I'm not so sure about the "low sentiment".  As I said, this could just be a correction in an otherwise strong market.  I also think the halving event is already priced in.

You registered in 2015, right?  You must have been at a fairly high rank in Jan. 2018 when the merit system was implemented.  Not taking anything away from your achievement but I'm pretty sure you didn't rank up all the way from Newbie by that point.  Anyway, congrats on hitting Legendary.  It's still quite an accomplishment doing it under the merit system.  I had just barely ranked up to Legendary when the merit system went into effect, so I kind of lucked out.  Props.

I'd agree with this only if the activity is fairly high to begin with.  There are some Jr. Members who've made one or two really good posts and have therefore earned more merits than they have activity.  I wouldn't bestow any honors on them without a track record of quality posts as determined by earned merits.  I like the idea of custom ranks and badges and other acknowledgements of things, but I don't think Theymos cares about doing any of that.  It's too bad.

You'll get that sooner or later, I'm sure of it.

Altcoins aren't dead, just taking a break like they've done many times in the past.  If you think they're dead, you're missing a buying opportunity IMO.

Bakkt is for the big-money players if I'm not mistaken, not for the populations you described.  I'm fairly computer illiterate but you don't need an extensive technical understanding to own bitcoin, just like you can drive a car without being a mechanic.  In fact, this 4th point you brought up perplexes me a bit.  A trader who doesn't have "resources to keep their own" bitcoin probably won't be using Bakkt at all.

Monthly?  Not much.  I'm more than happy to be just a bystander, watching the market swings without having a lot of bitcoin.  But nor am I selling.

I do agree with the title of the thread, but I figured the re-accumulation phase was in effect when bitcoin was at or above $10k, so who knows.

Yep, and we've seen that before.  Adding a KYC requirement right at the end, along with a rule about not faking documents is probably done by the devs (or campaign manager) to shake out some of the participants and thus keep more of the money for themselves.  I have no issue with KYC in bounties per se, but they need to state that it's required up front when the bounty starts. 

They know how big a deal it is for people in the crypto community and that a lot of participants can't or won't give up their dox--you can't trust an ICO team not to sell those dox to even shadier folks on the darkweb.

Of course they are.  That's always the final step of the scam, suppressing dissent or just not acknowledging the people who they made promises to and who helped them advertise their scam project.  It never changes.

You're not alone by any means.  It's annoying, and when I see titles in big capital letters or with symbols and so forth, I immediately assume it's some shitposter or scammer trying to use those petty little means to bring attention to their shitty thread.

Haven't seen you around in a while, Jet Cash.  Glad you're still here with us.

Yeah, then every moron thinking he has something important to say (not usually the case) starts to do it, and then it's not long before everyone does it just to keep pace.  It's a neverending shit spiral and needs to be quashed.  Props to Jet Cash for bringing it up.

Dude, thank you for posting that map--the information contained therein was not something I was familiar with, and I honestly didn't think there were that many countries that had outlawed bitcoin or restricted it.  Very, very interesting and I thought Russia had banned bitcoin for some reason.

OP, I got questioned by my bank once about a bunch of small bitcoin buys that I did through my checking account.  That was back when bitcoin was in the $400 range and Circle allowed you to buy small amounts.  I was asked by the bank branch manager what they were all about, so I told them I was buying bitcoin.  Nothing ever came of it since I did nothing wrong.

Banks can be pains in the ass sometimes, but they have their business to look out for and what their customers are using them for is definitely their concern.  My bank didn't know I was buying bitcoin.  It was just a weird (maybe suspicious to their eyes) bunch of small transactions that caught their attention. 

Then I wouldn't sweat it.

I skimmed through that thread and saw that most of the posts were being made by cryptotalk.org campaigners.  Some of them weren't exactly shitposts, but I'll take your word on the obviousness of some of the replies.  No doubt they're motivated primarily by their campaign. 

I have the whole altcoin section blocked now, as this seems to be where all the crap posters flock to.  Sometimes I find interesting threads there, but right now I don't feel like sifting through a mountain of manure either looking for a hidden gem to merit or to read something that catches my attention.  That entire section stinks to high hell--it always did, but now it's even worse. 

If that's the case, you ought to learn to lower your expectations.  Bring a shovel and a poopy bag next time you see a thread where the majority of the members are wearing a signature that has anything to do with Yobit or cryptotalk.org.  Lol. 

Anyone remember Secondstrade?  Their participants were just as bad as Yobit's, except I think they put a cap at how many they allowed in their campaign.  It makes a huge difference.  If cryptotalk.org would just accept maybe 50 or even 100 members, the problem might not be so bad.  Or if their manager had any say in the matter as to who gets into the campaign.  The automated process they use is crazy.  No post checking, no merit requirement, no nothing.

I assuming then that bounty hunters worked for 5 months with no pay?  If so, that really sucks.  In the past year or so I've seen so much of this crap that I wonder why bounty hunters would be willing to continue to do things like that anymore.  Especially if you're getting paid in tokens--some of them might be valuable if you can sell them in time, but if I'm not mistaken most of them end up being worthless.  It's risky work at best and at worst things turn out like this, being complete scams.

Yep, that's usually the final stage of the scam.  I've seen it quite a few times before, when bounty hunters start to grumble and potentially sabotage the scam project.  Not a good sign.

I'm tempted to tell you that at least you got something out of it, but that would be small comfort when they screwed you so badly.  If you don't mind my asking, what are those 25k tokens worth?  Is this even on the market yet?

A signature ban and a real ban are practically the same thing for many of these members, who are only posting to get paid.  So I would certainly have no objections to not allowing them to use their sig space for advertising, at least for a while.  Then maybe they'll get the message (if they didn't already with your campaign ban) that they need to seriously improve. 

Not a bad idea either.  Theymos shocked me when he did that with the Yobit participants last time, but I thought it was reasonable.  A lot of those folks had flooded the forum with more garbage than usual and I think they deserved what they got--and the punishment IMO was fair and not overly harsh.  Not all of the participants are shitposters, so going by the ones that were banned from Yahoo62278's campaign would be a good guideline on who ought to be held accountable.

I'll have to look up the former, but the latter....isn't he one of the precious metals permabulls, along with guys like Schiff and Kiyosaki?  I've seen a hell of a lot of nonsense videos about metals, especially around 2011 when prices were peaking.  They never tell you to sell; it's always buy, buy buy. 

And I don't really frequent Youtube for finance videos, though I have watched a ton of them about bitcoin and other cryptos.  I like Philipma1957's channel a lot, where you can see all of his mining adventures.  That's the only one I've subscribed to.  As with the precious metals crowd, there's a ton of idiocy in the crypto videos.  There was one where a guy claimed you could stake PIVX on a Ledger.  My eyeballs just about popped out of my head--and he said it with a straight face.

Just some friendly advice: there's only so much you can learn by watching a Youtube video, and you sometimes don't know whether the person is even qualified to be speaking about finance topics.  As I said, there's a lot of misinformation out there and I would suggest taking a course at a university if possible.  I learned a lot about corporate finance and economics when I was in school.

Exactly--and this happens in the stock market too, I've noticed.  When bitcoin is rising, you'll get tons of speculation threads predicting even higher prices, and when it's headed south you get the exact opposite.  Crazy, because nobody knows what's going to happen with any certainty.

Probably none.  Looks like garbage data to me, and I'm not even sure what the relevance is or what it's supposed to mean.

I can't stand Reddit, and I've said that a million times.  Just an awful cesspool of idiocy, and that's why I stick to bitcointalk (only occasionally a cesspool of idiocy. 

Anyway, the market would seem to contradict what those charts are trying to say.  I would assume that if "sentiment" (kind of a vague term here) were at rock bottom, the price would be a hell of a lot lower.  Hell, we were at $3XXX not too long ago, and right now we're in the $8k range.  Not too shabby IMO.

Yeah, that's the one I was looking for.

And while I obviously could look at a bitcoin price chart, I have not done so in a couple of years--I didn't even realize that it had hit $13,880 this past time around.  Totally forgot, since after that it had pooped out at $10k for a while.  I really ought to check the chart sometime soon, but I don't believe in TA so that's not my thing.  Perhaps I'll do it just for nostalgia's sake.

Edit:  I looked at the chart, and bitcoin didn't go as high as $13,880 in 2019.  Got close but did not reach that level.

Definitely true.  When bitcoin was vacillating around the $10k mark, I'd figured that when it busted out of that range it'd go upward and back toward its ATH.  Didn't happen, and there's no telling where it's headed from here.  True, it did rebound from below $8k....but nothing is certain.  Traders and chart watchers would do well to remember this.

Bitcoin seems to always be either in a bull or bear state except when the price is flat--and those flat parts can last a long time.  The drop from $20k was certainly when it was in a bull market.  Ah, the euphoria.  I do miss that so.