Dang, I just looked at your date of registration and you must have taken a serious break from posting at some point.  You could have hit Legendary a long time ago--well before the merit system was created, in fact. 

Agreed that overall it's been a positive thing, because just before the merit system rolled out last year it seemed like it was complete chaos with the shitposters overrunning a bunch of different sections, and it got to the point where actmyname and I were negging the spammers.  Not a good use of the trust system, as I've said before, but we were just so frustrated and didn't think we had any other mechanism by which we could combat these fools. 

I was absolutely ecstatic when I woke up that day in Jan. 2018 and discovered that Theymos had created the merit system.  If I hadn't had the flu at the time I would have been break dancing in my living room all day.  It was immediately clear that it would seriously cut down on account farming, since newly-created accounts would have to earn those merits in order to rank up--and I assumed (correctly) that it was going to be hard for the average shitposter/account farmer to do this.

The merit system doesn't seem to have caused much improvement in certain sections like Bitcoin Discussion, but I've seen people trying a lot harder to post constructive things as a result of it, and that's a great thing.  Overall, I much prefer having the merit system on bitcointalk even if it's far from a perfect fix for the bounty spammer problem, and that's because I remember what things used to be like before merits.  It has done its job, too.  The good posters have ranked up, while the shitposters have learned to live with being a Jr. Member for the rest of their lives here.  That's a victory.

Say what?

DT members haven't been consistently tagging suspected merit abusers, and part of the reason for that is because Theymos doesn't really want us to.  Begging for them by PM'ing members crosses a line IMO, but others may disagree.  There are no rules as far as tagging merit sales/trading/begging, just Theymos's opinion on it.  I've received maybe a handful of PM requests for merits, and I'm pretty sure I've negged each one.

Also, there's a difference between someone just saying "can you pls give me merit" vs. a member asking that you review one of their posts to see if it's merit-worthy.  The latter case doesn't deserve a neg IMO, and it's something I'm actually quite happy to do (review a member's posts).

Neutral feedback is useless in these cases, because it doesn't send any sort of message to the beggar, doesn't prohibit them from continuing to beg, and doesn't punish them in any way for doing something wrong.  Most of us know why Newbies need 1 merit and why it's so important to them--it's so that they can start advertising in their signature, and that usually presents in the form of shitposting.  If a member has to resort to begging for a single merit, their post quality is probably going to be very sub-par.

2tf did get a single merit for this post, which is on a local board.  Can anyone translate it and perhaps check to see if it's plagiarized?

I do find it very suspicious that one minute he's PMing people begging for merits and the next minute he actually gets one.  And yes, I do think begging for merits via PMs is neg-worthy.  That's been the standard for some time now.

Don't leave a neg for that, that's my opinion.  The whole point of self-moderated threads is for individuals to have control over what gets posted in them.  If you don't want your posts deleted, don't post in a self-modded thread started by someone you think might delete your posts.  IMO regardless of the reason they decided to nuke your posts, it's their choice and not something to be punished.

There's no reason why anyone would have to buy a bitcointalk account in order to trade bitcoin.  Jet Cash, you've been here long enough to have read all of the explanations as to why account dealing is toxic to the forum and thus why those who engage in buying or selling of accounts get tagged.  If you don't agree with that, don't tag 'em.  Me, I'll still be happy to.  There are exceptions, of course, and I don't think every single account seller is an evil person or even has bad intentions necessarily, but this is one of the issues where the forum rules haven't caught up to community standards--just like scamming, which isn't tolerated either.

Edit:
I agree with this completely, but like I said it's a case of the forum rules not reflecting what's acceptable practice here, which is why DT members have stepped in.  I've got nothing against alt accounts per se as long as you're the one who created them from the start.  The problem with buying an account is that the account's reputation/rank/merit history/etc. doesn't reflect anything the new owner did and that new owner could easily try to deceive someone when asking for a loan, trying to buy bitcoin, selling something, and probably a lot of other things.  If someone got their hands on an account with green trust, it'd be very easy to scam someone. 

Anyway, we're probably on the same side of the issue so I don't feel like writing a huge essay condemning account sales.  I've done that before, and I'm sure you've probably read a few of my rants.  Theymos isn't likely to prohibit account sales anytime soon, so tagging members engaged in that activity is really the only thing that can be done to discourage the practice.

Definitely just report posts/threads/whatever like that to the mods.  Funny you did this on the anniversary of the merit system, because tagging shitposters was exactly what was being done right up until January 2018.  DT members aren't doing that anymore, and it's generally been accepted that it's not a good use of the trust system and that nobody should be tagging morons for their low-quality posts.

Happy anniversary to the merit system!

Reading that page, it sounds like a bunch of financial/marketing gobbledygook.  It also does not seem like it's in any way tailored for escrowing bitcoin transactions--and even if it were, there would be no need for you to be involved in the deal.  Seems like BoA could act as the escrow itself, but there's still not enough information given in the link you provided to really know. 

At best, I don't think what you're offering here has any advantage over using a trusted forum escrow.  At worst, you may not know what you're doing or might be trying to pull off some sort of scam.  The answers you gave to the questions I asked were vague and honestly sounded like you were being purposely evasive. 

You might want to seriously give a more detailed description of how your method of escrow works and why involving a bank offers any advantage over forum escrows.  And I'm pretty sure two parties could find an escrow who charges less than 1%.  Some even do it for free if I'm not mistaken.

Got any official info from BoA about this type of account and what the contractual terms are?

I've never done a real estate transaction, so I wouldn't know how escrow is used there.  I do understand what escrow is and how it usually happens when bitcoin transactions are done, but I'm still not understanding how BoA is involved with this.  It's not BoA who's doing the escrow, right?  It's an account you have at BoA that you're using to hold the cash, correct?

So what's Bank of America's involvement with this?  Are they aware of your escrowing activities?  To me this seems shady and that you're using BoA's reputation as a way to instill confidence in people where it might not be justified.  Care to explain exactly how this would work?

Probably the usual thing, plagiarism.  Even if it isn't that, your posts are all typical bounty hunter shitposts, and on top of that I suspect you either bought or hacked the account.  You posted mainly in the altcoin mining section up until Sept. 3, 2018 and the next post after that was on Oct. 25, 2018 and was a bounty application.  That wouldn't get you banned, though.

Didn't the ban PM tell you what the reason was?

Thank you for pointing that out, because if you didn't I would have.  The statement that "bitcoin increases day by day" or words to that effect get parroted all over the forum, even when it's obvious that it's not true.

When I used to frequent the old JREF forum (for skeptics, in case you never heard of it), some of the members there used to call bitcoin a solution in search of a problem--meaning that it doesn't solve any current problems the world is having.  While I don't completely agree with that, it does not surprise me in the least that bitcoin hasn't been more widely adopted than it has.  The average person isn't looking for a new form of currency and would not see the purpose of paying for something in a currency that you'd have to buy somewhere and hope that volatility doesn't cause it to lose value before you can spend it.

As far as blockchain in general, I don't hear anything in real life about how it's changing the way people do things and I'm not sure if it's going to solve any problems that need solving.  Granted, I'm not an expert in blockchain tech--not even close--but it's been around for 10 years now and you'd think that corporations/governments/individuals would have latched onto it by now if it would be to their advantage.

Haven't read the article OP linked to yet, but I'm going to right now.

Edit:  Read it, and I liked this quote:

That's exactly what all these ICO projects are doing, promising that their tech will revolutionize whatever industry they're targeting, and the only ones who make money from them are the devs.  Everyone else loses out when they're stuck with a token that's not even traded on an exchange.  Can anyone show me a successful ICO where the project is actually benefiting something/someone other than the project developers?

Interesting.  Had I wondered about what such a list would look like before this thread got created, I would have predicted much different results.  I don't even recognize most of the members who are scratching each others' backs, which makes me think that there's a lot of possible merit abuse happening with accounts that had a lot of airdropped sMerits, but that's just my speculation. 

A lot of shitposters tend to accuse well-known senior members of circle jerking and sending merits back and forth to each other, and other forms of merit abuse, but from what I see here that's not the case--or at least that it's not the huge problem that the shitposters make it out to be.

If he's the one who requested this data, I'd be curious to know what he thought the results might show.

I won't feed the trolls, but this is just another piece of evidence that we've got a serious troll problem going on.  I can guarantee you that OP has no grudge against anyone tagging those morons who keep cranking out the scam ICOs with fake team members--it's a non-issue, not only in his eyes but in the forum's.  Nobody has ever complained about people like ICOethics or Coolcryptovator or anybody else exposing identity theft, except for the scammers who got caught doing it.  This thread is just trying to get a rise out of everyone.

As far as the above quote goes: if OP had evidence of anything, he'd present it instead of threatening to present it.  Cryptohunter did much the same thing when he said he'd start a thread in Meta exposing me for doing....whatever.  But it was just an empty threat--just like OP's is, and that's all it takes for the troll to accomplish his goal of getting a response out of the target. 

Do the right thing: put OP on ignore and don't look back.

Yeah, but he wasn't tagged for this particular issue.  But seeing as how OP doesn't seem willing or able to show that VINSIN was actually involved in this, I don't think he's going to be tagged.  It would be nice if VINSIN stopped by to clarify this, but nobody's forcing him to do so and it would be more of an issue if there was actual evidence presented in the OP.

If you can't prove your case, you should lock this thread, OP.  The 'lock thread' button is on the lower left hand corner of your screen when you're in this thread. 

I guess there's a miscommunication here.  I wasn't suggesting that a judgement be made beforehand, but only after a manager has proven his incompetence as far as regulating the participants or a participant has proven to be a chronic shitposter.  There are some altcoin/token bounty managers who will accept anyone with two thumbs, and who obviously don't care about post quality (don't ask me for names.  I know they exist because of how many bounties I've seen with obvious alts enrolled and how many shitposters are accepted into their bounties). 

There's no perfect solution to these problems, not even the ones I've supported or suggested myself.  Every possible solution is going to have drawbacks and I know this.  One thing I will say is that it's fortunate that Theymos doesn't make changes on a whim, and if he does attempt to curb this issue with lousy bounty managers and bounty hunters, it'll most likely be effective because he'll have thought about it a great deal.  I'm just hoping he does make some sort of restrictions on the campaigns that don't pay in bitcoin, since those seem to be the main problem.

Two newbie accounts registered a day apart in November 2018 offering the same advice to break the rules, posting back-to-back, and using ellipses at the end of their sentences.  You wouldn't happen to be alts, would you?

In any case, OP's 'friend' isn't allowed to create new accounts.  A permaban is a ban for the person behind the keyboard, not just for the specific account that did the plagiarism.

I don't know about other countries, but the US got rid of denominations over $100 years ago, and as far as I know they don't have any plans to do away with $100 bills.  Hell, they can't even stop minting those stupid pennies and dollar coins that no one uses.  Also, I think the reasoning behind doing away with high-denomination currency is to combat drug money being transported so easily, and probably money laundering to some extent--not because the governments inherently hate cash.

While I support bitcoin fully, I don't want to see an end to physical cash.  One of the reasons is definitely a fear of not being able to pay for something if a store's credit card reader is down, or the electricity goes out, but the main reason for me is that I don't necessarily like my bank (or the government) being able to look at every purchase I make.  Cash is still the most anonymous method of payment I know of--and there may be cryptocurrencies with pretty good anonymity characteristics built into them, try finding a merchant who accepts them as a form of payment. 

You mean good posts from bad ones, or do you mean good campaigns from bad ones?  If you mean the former, I don't see a problem with mods having to judge post quality, which is something they basically do anyway when they agree with a report or not.  Pugman's suggestion of nuking someone's signature space based on a "report post history" isn't a bad one, either.  You have no idea how many individual reports I've made against single users, one by one, for shitposting.  Usually someone is either a chronic shitposter or someone who may have occasional low-quality posts. 

If you mean the latter, I'd tend to agree with that except I don't think mods would be judging the merits of any given project but instead the quality of the campaigners' posts and/or how poorly the campaign manager is running the campaign with respect to that post quality.

I like the idea of a merit requirement in such a case, though I think 30 merits might be too easily obtainable.  50 merits or so might be in the ballpark.  And yes, I do realize that a lot of shitposters aren't even getting 30 merits, but we all know that if they had to in order to be able to wear a signature, they'd be able to get them from friends/alts/buying them.  50 merits might seem like a high bar to clear, but it really ought to be--for the forum's sake.

Yep, and we've discussed this before and never could find a solution that didn't include Theymos hiring more mods who'd be more aggressive in deleting shitposts, which would be a difficult job anyway even if mods were added.  The garbage comes in at a rate such that you'd need mods working around the clock to monitor all the new posts for quality.  Either that or by implementing some serious sig campaign reform.

This past year was kind of crazy in terms of new things being done here.  I'm hoping the insane trolling dies down in Meta and that the numbskulls learn that they have to obey local rules regardless of what section it is.  A better solution would be to allow self-moderated threads in Meta, because it's way too easy for a single troll to derail what would otherwise be a productive thread.  How many times have we seen that in the past month?  I haven't read any reasons why members shouldn't have the option to moderate their own threads in Meta.