Since any lie can get viral just by sounding convincing, yes. Of course, it can.
People are willing to believe anything. If you say the earth is flat, they will believe it despite all the proofs against the idea. The people only need somebody looking convincing; if you are one of them and you say airplanes are making us incapable of having children, they will believe it.
Facebook makes the people invest their time in reading stupidity, as viral stuff, where this girl went to dinner last night; how must I dress up...

I don't have any facebook nor twitter personal accounts, for they seem to be a waste of time. 

Thanks for your answer, man. Yes, I came into your last month publication (which I haven't seen, unfortunately) and this is truly amazing, yet difficult to understand.
Take a break if you wish, we all will be waiting for you!! Your work is awesome.

Awesome, again, thanks.
Yet this is kind of difficult to understand, after taking a while it is a clear analysis.
So, if I'm not wrong, the merit sents seems to be related for a few. I mean: in the forum, there are almost 2 million users (according to the stats from the last week). Even when your analysis was made a month ago, the number of users sending/receiving merits is not comparable to the total.
So, can it show us how many users are truly active?

PD. Take a deserve vacation if you need, I think we all here will be expecting your return impatiently!!
(You should be paid for this awesome work )

Photography is not just about learning how to use a camera, you can be a great photographer even by using a phone. To me, there are some rules about photography (please notice I have studies in photography, but to me it has been just a hobby, I earned some prices but i don't work as a professional photographer):
- Composition laws. A good photograph is always a good story (at least to me) so, in order to be able to achieve this great story, you need to study composition. It is about how are you going to "organize" your picture. For instance: you want to make a photo of a child playing. Then you can choose a general map of them just playing and it will be the story. But, if you want to introduce a poetic image, then you can choose just a hand of a little boy playing, but the action of the hand must suggest the whole playground (I don't know If I made myself understandable, it is difficult to me to explain such abstract concepts in English, sorry).
- Light. Photography is based on light. There is a different kind of using the light in order to achieve one or other sensation. For instance, you want to make a portrait of an old person? I would suggest always a soft light coming from a side, not frontal, so the wrinkles in his/her face become more profounds.
- Color. Of course, color is important. We all have grown under a color perception, and the color is related to the feelings an image can suggest. For instance, greys with red are always profound. So, coming back to the old person portrait, I will choose brown (an old chair), grey to the back and something in red to represent life. About this matter, you can read Erns Gombrich, an Art Historian dedicated to the psychology of art. (You can read him here https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00043249.1961.10794062?journalCode=rcaj20)
- Focus. It is related on where are you going to put your attention. I love to play with the focus in order to build my own story.
- Thematic. This is not the same to be dedicated to natural photography rather than social or personal one. This is really different. I would try as much as I can, but, for instance, I love details, so in nature, I always take pictures of small things as leaves, water drops... To be honest the most I love is portraits...
- To find an identity. I think this is the most difficult part. To achieve your own personal identity, the invisible signature implied in your photographs. It can take years, but, step by step, you will discover your own favorite settings, colors... and a personal way to express yourself. This can change as well as you will change with the years to come, but, from my point of view, having a special identity captured on your work is what is going to make you extraordinary.

Always read and observe the work of others. Be humble and patient.

Regarding cameras:
- I love Nikon because of the light, but, of course, it is always personal. You will find all kind of discussion between Nikon and Canon... but, at the end, you must choose a camera suitable for you. My camera is old but great: Nikon d-90.
- Technical is important. You will need to learn about the tools you are going to use, but it takes time.
- There are some programs to use. I always choose Darktable (linux open source program similar to Lightroom, but free). It is for processing photographs as if you were in a red room. Of course, son post-processed is necessary sometimes, despite some people are against it. This is normal, this has been made since the very beginning of photography, so learning how to use a process program is important too.
Remember to know your camera, your lents and your software. To choose well your tools.
I hope it helps to you to get into this amazing and beautiful world.

Every time an historical social advance takes place, there are retractors and people trying to stop humankind to progress. Even so, in between that social advance, there will be people scamming and taking advance of others. Such is the normal progress in human history, I'm afraid.
That's why I don't care anymore about nonsense opinions, for the future will determinate what Bitcoin means to humanity, and how humankind is going to seek the opportunity of a new kind of money.
For the moment, the situation seems normal to me, according to history and the common behavior of the people about new advances.

Awesome work, as usual.
So the merit system is really working on stopping non-deserving users to rank-up, but also is showing how it can be corrupted by so many users.
Once detected, what is the path to follow? I mean: when you detect this kind of users, earning merit in such an improbable-fair way, what do you do? Do you report them?
One of my deepest concern regarding the rank system is the spamming: we all have seen how many users are selling merits as a new kind of scam, as well as accounts. On the other hand, we have many users farming alt accounts in order to rank up their alt and join many signatures or be able to scam more users.

Have you thought about a new statistical insight into this misuse? I mean: Can you make another thread (I know you are already tired, but your work is so amazing I'm afraid you are going to have many request ), regarding how many users are scamming the merit system?
And, besides, as you said, a comparison between the ranking activity before and after the merit system?

Sorry for asking you to work even more harder. But I truly admire your work jejee.  

I've read a similar history before on the Spanish board (with a couple of Netherlanders implicit as well, and the same kind of offer) and it didn't have a happy ending.
Never, NEVER, trust in somebody offering you "easy money", because such a thing just can't be real, Besides, asking for your bank account number just seems too shady.
It is sadly usual to read this kind of "offers", but they are always scamming. So stay away from them like from the lepra.

Because they aren't moving under any "celestial" law, man.
As it has been said, not playing a sport can't be a sport.
You said they are "pretty organized", but under what? under one only common thought: God doesn't exist, but there are many atheists believing in life after death, but with no laws to determine how is going to be the step.
To be inside a religion you need some rules to follow. For example, Catholic stuff believes in the final repent. So you can live in sin and just in the final moment say "Oh! I repent!" and then go to the sky. Just really convenient.
Atheists do not believe in something ahead, in some entity with power dictating rules, they (us) just live, but under many different points of view. There's no common rules, there's no religion at all.

I prefer to never underestimate the people stupidity so yes, maybe Trump can be re-elected.
Nevertheless, if what you said about Oprah has any fundament, I will bet for her: the first woman in the White House must be she, for sure!!

I don't know, man. To me, Bernie Sanders was the most suitable for the US presidency, but he was soon removed and Trump resulted as a winner, something I wasn't expecting at all (as many US citizens, I'm afraid). So, who knows? Anything is possible.

Ufff.. this is a difficult question, though.
If most of the wars were based on inequality, then crypto will have a chance of making the world much more fair to everybody.
But, unfortunately, wars are based on economic interest from the richest ones. You just mentioned Siria, Libia, both countries strategically positioned, in an oil-control area, and both of them have suffered several historic wars for too much time. They are just in the middle of the external interests, the ones able to possess them will be ruling the whole area and the east-west passage.
Crypto can help to build a more fair world in terms of economy, but, regarding mankind and the thirds of the power of many rulers... I don't think it will be able to stop any war, I'm afraid.
By taking a look at the present, most of the wide problems are based on the need of few of showing their power: Putin, Trump, Merkel... Psychopaths ruling the world.

I read more about RaiBlocks looks as the future for onchain gambling, with those fast transactions and the non blocks feature should be almost instant.

Personally i has been playing with clam coin in the past weeks. I like the 1 minute block feature and there are some fun sites for it. You can give it a try on Just-Dice or Clambling by LuckyBit.

The only bad point about clams is... there is not a site to play poker with clams yet. I wish too see one soon.

I was surprised as well, but it just seems as the mods have been occupied cleaning the forum.
There were too many repeated topics, each day we were used to having at least 5 o 6 new about merits in the Beginners board, another 5 or 6 in Meta...
So it just seems like a cleaning-necessary action.

Take a look at this website: https://coinmarketcap.com/
If you see at the graphics on the right in the screen, you will perceive that many alts are based on the BTC price, for the graphics usually shows the same patron as BTC. 
That basically means that the altcoin market is based on the BTC price.
That's why it is going to be difficult for any of them to overcome BTC, or even making any influence in its price.

Someday, perhaps, a new alt with an improved system can overcome BTC or somehow influence in its value, but, as you can see on the graphics,  it hasn' t happen yet.

Finally, an article wrote with some common sense...
From the last couple of months (probably since the hype), I've got tired of reading about how bitcoin is the evil itself and the currency for assassins, scammers, drug-dealers, and all kind of "bad ones".
For example, in the most important newspaper from Spain, they began talking about how some scammers had robbed the bank system more than a million euros. The finished the article writing nonsenses about how dangerous can BTC be, due to the use of the crypto for money-laundering. Nonsense.
It has been the general mood on the press since the last time, so I'm glad about this article.
Probably it will not get as viral as the Bitcoin-haters ones, for the truth is said in there and it doesn't seem to be of interest right now.

To ignore them is useful, I agree, but if you want to read about altcoin you will need to enter manually.
The problem with the alt section is not, under my perspective, the alt itself (for me it is interesting to discuss altcoin), but the misuse of the "altcoin section" and the "altcoin announcements" one, which seems to be the same. I put on ignore the "altcoin announcements" section, due to the number of announcements which I don't like to read, but now the complete altcoin section seems to be dedicated to useless new icos.
I think the necessary action is to move all these announcements into the "altcoin announcements" in order to maintain clean the "altcoin discussion" section.

Hello therealfalcon, i have some recommendations for you... The idea is good but you have to do something to make it legit.

First you need a nice thread about the game, lot of users had run lotteries on this forum before and lot of them try it just to scam other users... And here is where we hit the second point.

You need a collateral or some one who hold the money of the game (escrow). Lets say, if the round 1 is 10 players with 0.1 btc buy in each, then you need to give 1 btc to the escrow user,  That way we can be sure you will not run with the money.

So, read more about how to make this kind of dynamics, they try it again. Good luck

Hey, welcome. Tell us more about the current situation in China.
I also recommend "Mastering Bitcoin", a great book for a good starting https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mastering_Bitcoin

I don't really like Ledger Nano, but I found this article (solved) which seems to have your same problem.
Hope it helps, dude... https://steemit.com/ledger/@shortcut/litecoin-wallet-access-problem-with-ledger-nano-s-solved

I love nature, and my favorite travels have been:

- México: Vulcanoes (Iztaccíhuatl/Popocatépetl), Tulum (Caribbean), Palenque, Bonampak (Chiapas), Real de Catorce (San Luis), Nayarit (San Panchito)
- US: Sequoia National Park, Yosemite, Great Canyon.
- Costa Rica (the whole country is amazing).
- Chile: Uinil de la sal
- Cuba (uuffff) Cuba is not about nature at all, but if you like music, you will be enchanted.
- Spain: Sevilla, Cádiz, Granada, Toledo, La Coruña, Santander, Donosti, all of them are beautiful (I love the most Andalucia, the southern region).
- England: I just have been in London, but I loved it.
- Poland: Zakopane, Potks, Krakov!!
- Holland: Amsterdam!!
- Belgium: Brujas!
- Portugal: I love Lisboa and a very closed town called Sintra with a beautiful beach.
- Indonesia: Yakkarta. Always visit the TigaLima Hostal, amazing place.

I can say many many many more.

It just depends on why are you here. If you're here with the goal of earning some money (as many newbies) ranking up will allows you to earn more if you joint a signature campaign. Nevertheless, it is going to be hard, for many new users' goal is the same and this is a really competitive place. So the most probable situation is for you to get desperate for merits and so.
If you're here because this is a place with the free knowledge and with people willing to share it by free, then ranking up is not really important. For you will be able to learn a lot, no matter your rank.
Ranking up, of course, can be seen as a reward for creating good topics and useful content. But it takes a while to understand the system, so just do not be obsessed with it, just chill and learn.