Can someone please take a look at this thread and the claims that the OP is making and then specifically take a look at this reply of mine?  I've done a lot of chemistry mathematics in my life, but it's been a hell of a long time since I've done calculus and although I took a course in econometrics in college, that also was a long time ago and it didn't teach me much about TA and how calculus is applied to stock market analysis.  I suggested that the chart he presented wasn't inflation-adjusted and that the Dow components have changed over the years.  I'd like to hear some smart people's opinions on that.

Specifically, OP is claiming that the DJIA is linear from 1989-present and that
...and if I'm not mistaken, that's completely wrong, as I explained in my last post there.  I'd like to know if I'm correct from some people who know how to do serious math as it pertains to the stock market.  I know we've got a lot of brilliant folks here and I'd like to know if what I'm reading in the linked thread is a bunch of BS or if it has some validity.

Since Economics is full of spammers, this is going to be self-moderated.  Shitposts will get deleted, while thoughtful posts that teach me something will most likely earn some merit.  I'm a merit source but I'm not sure how many sMerits I have left.  If I run out and think someone who posted here deserves merits, I'll keep track and merit him when I get topped up.

Did you look at the article I linked to and see the chart of the inflation-adjusted DJIA?  From 1916-1994, the market was NOT linear.  After the internet boom, the DJIA shot up to the moon, but it still doesn't look linear to me.  I am no mathematician, but I think you'd have to do a linear regression on the data and see what the r² value is with the best-fit straight line is (it's been a long time since I've done that) to see exactly how linear the market behaved.

In addition, I mentioned that the components of the Dow get changed and that also affects things.  Poorly-performing companies get dumped from it, good ones get added.  I'm not sure how a broader index, i.e., one with way more than 30 stocks, would look as far as your hypothesis goes, but I'd be curious and I think it'd be a better test.

Also, you're saying that the slope of the index (price vs. time) is the % gain.  That doesn't seem right simply from a unit analysis [slope = d(price)/d(time)], whereas % gain is p₂/(p₂-p₁)*100 .  You'd have to do linear regression to get a curve and then take the derivative of that--and the result isn't the percentage gain.  Maybe someone with a stronger background in math could give some input here.

Yeah, and I'd also like to read a response from OP (or anyone) to the post I made in this thread pointing out that the chart is not inflation-adjusted--but meanwhile, OP has begun a new thread ranting about how the Fed is rigging the markets.  Makes me wonder if OP really wants a discussion on this or not. 

But hey, this is Economics, right?  The section that's almost as bad as Bitcoin Discussion, where very few people read posts.

Yes, because it's not your forum or your rules. 

It's not honest for you to do so, and that's not what the rules are suggesting except maybe inside your own head.

Surely you're not exaggerating just a little here, even if Vod did come give you a conjugal visit with you on the receiving end.

Go watch some porn, have a beer, smoke a joint, get away from the computer and bitcointalk in particular.

I'm sure it's in the works, just like your next ban evasion is.  We're all relaxed here.  Nothing but peace and potato chips and swirling zig-zags in our collective peripheral vision.  Maybe Reddit might suit you better.

So in other words, it would be extremely smart to buy index funds with those savings.  Seems to me you're saying the markets are rigged in such a way that an average person can make money in stocks.

I assume that chart isn't adjusted for inflation.  Do you have data that shows what it would look like when the DJIA is adjusted for inflation?  

Also, I'd like to point out that the companies that comprise the DJIA can be added or deleted to make the average look better.  The list of DJIA corporations today looks a hell of a lot different than it did when the DJIA was created, and you can check this link to see what I'm talking about.  That doesn't mean the market is rigged, though, just that the indexes can be tweaked to buff them up.

Edit:  Just found this article, haven't read the whole thing yet, but it does have some interesting charts.  Looks like the 1989-present graph isn't quite as linear as OP presented it, but the explosion that happened around the end of the gold standard certainly does look real.

If I'm not mistaken, I think I voiced some disagreement about that feedback on mdayonliner.  I happen to believe he wasn't intending to scam but wouldn't rule out the possibility of it happening if someone actually sent him that $100k (or whatever the number was).  I also think he's learned his lesson about doing stuff like that and don't think that feedback removal by hilariousandco would be a bad idea at this point--but there's also the ponzi stuff that other members feel strongly about, and I don't think that feedback is going to be removed.

Most of you may not believe this, but I do believe in second chances and removal of feedback if the member has learned his lesson.  I've removed lots of negs from account buyers/sellers if they've not repeated the behavior and have shown evidence of being a valuable member of the forum. 

I may not have made myself clear in my previous post, but I am not arguing that LoyceV should remove his feedback.  I'm saying I don't understand the explanations given by bountyhunters.io enough on a technical level to judge whether what he was doing was the only option (which is what he initially seemed to be arguing) or whether he was caught in a lie.  I get that asking for private keys is a no-no.  I also get that a member with no escrow history who's not on DT offering to escrow $100k is a no-no.  Both of those things are huge red flags.

In my previous post I said that if bountyhunters.io changed their method to one that doesn't require private keys and if they haven't scammed anyone, LoyceV's feedback might be worth removing.  But suchmoon's point I hadn't considered before writing my post:


If they've got a bunch of people's private keys, they still could scam if they wanted to.  It does make sense to me now to leave the neg intact.

I don't mind this either, but I don't think every neg needs to be discussed and voted on.  If you're on DT, you ought to have good judgement to begin with and faith in the strength of your convictions--at least enough such that you don't need to seek advice for the feedback you leave (but there are times when it's necessary, and I've done it myself).  This issue is more complex than other ones IMO and it's good that advice is being sought.

In this case, I think LoyceV was pretty justified in giving a neg to someone asking for people's private keys.  That, in my opinion, is an even worse offense than being a newbie and asking for a no-collateral loan or to buy bitcoin with PayPal, both of which can and do earn those newbies negative trust (usually from Vod).

However, my ignorance of all things ETH-related kicked in pretty quick while reading that scam accusation thread.  But what grabbed me is that if this post is true (which was responded to by bountyhunters.io in the next post), then I would say the neg is completely justified and should stay because that would mean bountyhunters.io outright lied.  But the explanation they gave sails right over my head.  I do understand quite well that asking for someone's private keys is a big no-no, but in this case it seems like the suggested solution of creating a throwaway wallet would solve that problem.  The only thing with that is that we (and certainly bountyhunters.io) know not everyone will do it.

My current understanding is that they've fixed this issue now, is that right?  People no longer have to give up their private keys?  If that's the case and it's also true that they haven't scammed anyone, then feedback removal at this point might be appropriate.  It could be a case of them being naive about how their initial system that required private keys would be perceived, i.e., that people wouldn't think they were scammers.  Unfortunately it's impossible to know someone's intentions; we can only judge people by their actions. 

Holy crap!  I know you've received a lot of personal merits, but how do you still have that many sMerits to give out?  I've been a merit source for a couple of months now and have also received quite a few earned merits as well and I haven't even come close to having that many sMerits to give away--and I don't think you're a sMerit hoarder by any means.  Are all the merit sources getting the same amount every month?  Do we have to use up our source sMerits before we get replenished?  That's a little bit off-topic, but I don't recall ever reading an answer to either of those questions except maybe the second one and I can't recall the answer.

I made a post or two about Venezuela citizens using Dash a few months ago, because I thought the situation was an interesting one and that their hyperinflation crisis might be benefited by crypto and had read that more merchants were accepting Dash in that country since the whole debacle began.  I was curious about the extent to which Dash (or any cryptocurrency) is being used in a real-world example of hyperinflation, and I think I asked for some input in my post, but nobody answered my question.  I'm not looking for your merits, but you might want to check the threads I posted in to see if any of the replies deserve some.  Those were in the Economics section, where the posts tend to be better than what you typically find in Altcoin Discussion.

It's one thing to hear that merchant acceptance of Dash has grown by X%, but I want to know how much it's actually being used.  I tried searching the internet for that data, but all the google results spit out Dash-pumping websites or news sources that didn't answer my question.  Jet Cash, if you come across a thread or post that has anything about this, keep me in mind and drop me a PM if you would.  I have Altcoin Discussion on ignore and might miss a new thread about it (I did search that section when I was trying to read about the Dash/Venezuela thing).

You ended up meriting a lot of shitposts in that thread.  People quoting huge blocks of text or only the OP in threads may be annoying, but giving out merits just because they didn't isn't a very good way to distribute your sMerits IMO.  That was a stupid thread to begin with (but hey, it's B&H, right?), and I bet that at least some of the replies were by alts of the OP. 

Hopefully your new year's resolution isn't to lower your standards as much as you did in the linked thread.  I don't know how many sMerits you get as a source and from other members, but you'll run out of them pretty damn quick if you keep doing that.

What did the ban message say?  Did it say what the ban was for or if it was a temp-ban or a permanent one?

That will make the system even more inefficient to the point where I bet DT members would stop tagging anyone.  What am I supposed to do when I find an account seller and want to tag him--drop a PM to another DT member to request that he cosign my negative trust?  Wait for a response and if the answer is no, then move on to another DT member?  What if I get scammed myself?  Am I then not allowed to leave a neg unless I have approval from someone else on DT?

There are so many problems with that suggestion that for me it's a non-starter right from the get go.  DT members aren't paid staff.  The ones that do tag scammers do so on their own time, voluntarily.  The ones who've shown themselves to be untrustworthy or use bad judgement when leaving feedback (or for whatever other reason) get removed.  That's a fact, as evidenced by all the ones who've already been removed.  

The people I see railing the hardest against the system are the members who've been tagged by DT members for their untrustworthy behavior.  

And Anduck, you can argue that self-bidding in auctions is allowed by certain auctioneers, but it is not a commonly-accepted practice and I think you learned the hard way what the bitcointalk community thinks about it here.  The only thing you have going in your favor as far as that goes is that there wasn't a rule against it here, but Vod wasn't alone in thinking it was very shady of you to do it.  I do recall some sort of attempt at bargaining that Vod did about feedback removal (I don't know where that thread is now), and I do recall thinking that it wasn't something he should have engaged in and isn't the behavior he typically displays.  

Even if he was wrong in doing that, I think his feedback on you about the self-bidding is absolutely correct.  If I wasn't familiar with the situation, I would definitely want a visible warning that you might be bidding on your own auctions.

Edit:
Yes, sorry about that.

Fair enough, but I would like to add that I do think the trust system needs to be revamped and I've always said it was broken as well.  If Theymos were to make changes that affected the weight of my feedback, I'd be totally OK with that except for the fact that all the negs I've left wouldn't be much of a warning to anyone else.  I don't like the trust system the way it is, but there should be a mechanism by which members can be warned about scammers and so forth.  Unfortunately I don't have any great ideas on how to improve the system we have now, and the vast majority of suggestions I've heard so far either wouldn't help or would make things worse.

But here's the thing: I don't think big Wall Street players want to own actual bitcoin, because the market cap is too small for any big investment bank or hedge fund to own a large chunk of it.  Why?  Because the buying and selling of it can move the market too much, probably even if they were to do so OTC.  What Wall Street wants is a way to gamble on the direction of bitcoin, and for that there needs to be a futures/options market. 

Do you think commodity traders actually want to own barrels of oil or physical gold/silver?  Hell no!  They make money by just betting on where the price is going to be at a certain time in the future and don't have to actually own the underlying asset.  Thus I think until some sort of derivative bitcoin/crypto product is created and approved, the big Wall Street players won't start actually doing anything as far as trading crypto goes--but you can bet they're still interested in it and are trying to predict what's going to happen.

And OP, I forgot to mention:  Can you please not include huge pictures that don't add anything to the thread?  I'm getting tired of people doing this.  Just quote the relevant parts of the article you're sharing and forget the silly picture of the street sign.  Thanks.

Oh, I think it's a pretty reasonable assumption that OP is somebody's alt account and that he's fishing for merits here.  Nobody just registers on a forum and writes a post like that as their first one, not even if they were lurking for a long time.  

And I have to be honest, it's a horrible first post anyway.  For one thing, it's nearly incomprehensible and hard to follow, and for another it's basically saying obvious stuff that most members who read posts in Meta already know.  If this guy is aware of how bad the spam problem is on bitcointalk, there's no reason whatsoever to define it for the rest of us.  There's no reason for this thread at all, actually.  It probably should either be moved to B&H or trashcanned.

Edit:
Ah, I didn't even look at his registration date.  That actually convinces me even more that it's an alt.  OP, you're not required to do so, but would you care to say whether you have other accounts on bitcointalk?

So I guess that makes me the alpha negger on bitcointalk--that actually surprises me, because this is a statistic that I've never even thought about before.  If you'd asked me to guess who'd given out the most negs, I would have said either you or Lauda.  Interesting.

If I'm not mistaken, I think most of the red trust I've given out has been for account selling or buying, so this just goes to show how bad that particular problem is on the forum.

That's probably an accurate assessment.  And I'm not disappointed that Wall Street is backing away from involvement with crypto (if that's actually the case).  Investment banks tend to wreak havoc on everything they touch.  Look what they did in 2008 with all of their derivative mortgage products and their use of leverage--they nearly crashed the entire banking system.  I'm afraid if they started to develop crypto derivatives and related instruments and started to overleverage their investments, they could destroy bitcoin.

I tend to think of bitcoin as "the people's money" but I'm not naive enough to think that when something appreciates in value like btc did in 2017 it wouldn't attract the big money.  It would have been inevitable.  If they're getting scared off now, I say screw 'em.  I like bitcoin just fine and that's enough for me.

Anduck, that makes zero sense at all--not surprising since you think bidding on your own auctions is OK.  We've just agreed that DT members get removed if they prove to have bad judgement.  What you're arguing is basically like saying "there have been some dirty cops (and they've been fired); let's get rid of the entire police force because obviously it isn't working".

DT isn't even a voluntary "service".  There are just some DT members who actively tag untrustworthy members.  You'll notice a lot of DT2 members don't.  They're just members that either Theymos trusts (DT1) or that members of DT1 trust (DT2).

There are a lot of members who've been tagged just for making scammy offers.  Vod, for example, tags a lot of people who ask for loans with no collateral.  I tag account sellers primarily.  Neither of us have been directly scammed by the members we've tagged; it's a warning to others that the tagged member might not be trustworthy.  That's what happened in your case when you offered to escrow that insane amount and got tagged by hilariousandco, and it's not much different than what some DT members have been doing all along.  If you're going to be honest with yourself, you never complained about the trust system before you got tagged.  

In fact, IIRC you reported a lot of abuse/wrongdoings by other members that never affected you directly but which led to members getting red trust.

So given what I just pointed out, how is it you're now being "bullied"?

That's demonstrably untrue--look at how many merits you've gotten.  Hell, even though I don't agree with most of what you said in your post here, I gave you 2 merits for it since you obviously put some effort into it and wrote it clearly enough to understand.  And the fact is that I haven't seen you a lot around Meta lately, so if you're making fewer posts you're going to earn fewer merits (don't know if you're posting in any other section I might not visit).

There's no way of knowing, because it's up to Theymos.  I'm pretty sure he reads threads like these and knows what people are expressing, but if or how he's going to respond will remain a mystery right up until the time he changes something.

Back in January, actmyname and I were tagging shitposters because the problem had gotten so out of hand that it seemed like there was nothing else a DT member (or anyone else) could do--and no, it wasn't a good use of the trust system and I had to delete all those feedbacks eventually.  Then Theymos introduced the merit system essentially out of nowhere.  I certainly didn't see it coming.  So my guess is that Theymos has some ideas of his own in mind, and the changes that get made might be a fusion of those plus what everyone else has suggested.  But who knows? 

That would take too much time, coordination, and effort to get DT members to come to a consensus about something as simple as a feedback.  DT members don't get paid for tagging people, you know.  I think most DT2 members are either inactive accounts now or don't actively tag scammers.  There's only a handful of DT2 members who actually try to bust scams and various other forms of untrustworthiness, and there have been many disagreements among them.  Personally I don't have the time to waste on participating in a referendum for each feedback that's up for consideration.

Please note that you've just been shown to be a liar as well as a plagiarizer.  Both of those populations tend to think the rules are too strict when they're facing the consequences of breaking them. 

Those statistics are crap, BTW.  Guaranteed a lot of scammy sock puppets voted and obviously a lot of members didn't vote at all.  This forum doesn't need to go easier on liars/thieves like you IMO and if it does, I hope it's in the form of a permanent signature ban instead of a permaban.

Yeah, mostly it's a bunch of blowhards who got tagged by some member of DT and you can't expect those members to be happy with the trust system--having said that, I've always said it was broken from the beginning and still do. 

Funny how people whine hard about the trust system and what they see as unfair trust by DT members who likely are doing their best to keep the forum clean, and yet they don't whine about the simple fact that Theymos allows scammers to use this forum however they like.  It's not against the rules to scam someone here, in case anyone here hasn't noticed.  If there wasn't a system whereby some trust feedbacks counted for more than others, how could anyone get a reliable warning about a scammer? 

As broken as it is, I have yet to hear anyone come up with a better alternative to the trust system we're stuck with except to create your own.  And just because incorrect feedbacks are sometimes wrongly given by DT members, that's no reason to scream that the DT system should be scrapped.  There have been miscarriages of justice all throughout history, but if there wasn't a justice system there would only be anarchy.

This is all up to Theymos, however.  He did mention that he's thinking about making some changes to the trust system, but I'm hoping what results from that doesn't resemble anything most of the whiners are suggesting.

And I'd also point out that if a DT member is thought to be abusing the trust system, he'll get removed from DT.  That's happened numerous times (you got removed, but there was never a reason given that I saw).  The DT list is not set in stone and I've already been removed once, then reinstated.  Other DT members have been removed for scamming as well.  I don't know if there are any members right now who are using their DT status for their own gain, despite accusations being made.  Mistakes?  Sure?  But everyone makes mistakes and mistakes don't mean a bad feedback is abuse.