I tend to agree with this, except right now there really isn't a clear trend as far as bitcoin's price goes.  It's fallen quite a bit in the last few weeks, but for the most part for the past 4-6 months it's been trading kinda sideways.  And even though I'm against technical analysis, I'd be against trying to draw the conclusion that bitcoin is headed lower just because it's taken a serious beating lately.  If you thought the trend was downward, the smart thing to do would be to sell some bitcoin short, but it's risky as hell to do that.

As I've said in other threads, if I had the money I'd be buying right now.  I see bitcoin at $3700 as a fire-sale price.

Some months ago, somebody brought this up before--that bitcointalk would somehow be made better by having a chat/trollbox, and the responses were overwhelmingly negative if I remember correctly.  I was one of the members against it.

I'm sure some people would use it, but I really think it would end up getting abused by scammers and spammers looking to promote their projects.  Plus it would need some sort of moderation, and with Theymos basically doing nothing (except the merit system and the most recent adjustment to it) about the spam in the important sections like Bitcoin Discussion, I highly doubt he'd be willing to hire a moderator for a trollbox.  Nor do I think a chatbox is what bitcointalk is lacking right now.  The forum very badly needs help in a lot of areas, and a spambox is so low on the priority list that I would suggest that it's not even on anybody's list of priorities right now.

Yeah, I doubt that's going to happen.  I also doubt bitcoin is going to be near $1500 by the end of the year, nor do I think it's going much further in that direction.  These TA people drive me nuts with their predictions, and more often than not they're wrong.  Bitcoin prognosticators are even less accurate than weather forecasters, and that's saying something.

Tagged all the new finds.  Keep reporting them here or PM me with links and I'll keep negging these idiots.  This forum needs to seriously wake up and learn how toxic account selling is for the community as a whole.  I keep my fingers crossed that some day Theymos will start seeing things my way, but I keep my expectations low.

I've expressed my opinion on TA many times before:  I think it's a load of garbage, looking at past price patterns in an attempt to predict the future.  It is akin to trying to create a crystal ball to foresee the future, and I'm pretty damn sure that can't be done.  Sometimes if momentum (up or down) is very strong, it's easy to make accurate predictions for the short-term, but in general I think TA is a load of voodoo horseshit.

Bitcoin is at $3371 as I write this, and it's anyone's guess whether it'll continue downward or rebound.  I have a feeling it'll rebound eventually, but I'd stare blankly at you if you asked me for evidence for this feeling.  Bitcoin is very hard to analyze since it's not a stock but a currency and not a widely-adopted one at that.  Where the price is going is just guesswork.  Some people get it right, but I think most people don't. 

As for the $1500 prediction, I don't think we're going to go that low.  Possible, yes.  But that would be one hell of a drop, and I don't think investor sentiment is negative enough to drive it that low.

First of all, mods aren't responsible for giving out merits--the community as a whole is.  Second, whether you earn merits or not depends on basically two factors, 1) Whether your post is good or not, and 2) Your post has to be seen by someone with sMerits to give.

If you're posting in a thread that has many pages of replies, and I don't have a hard number for this, no one is likely going to even see your post.  Certain sections like Bitcoin Discussion and the entire altcoin section are full of spammers just posting to get paid.  Since anyone with either a brain or sMerits to give is going to avoid those sections, posting there isn't likely to do you any favors. 

You're fortunate to have gotten as many merits as you have.  Many members with your rank and post count have gotten ZERO merits, and they're not likely to earn any for the rest of their miserable careers on bitcointalk.  It's not supposed to be easy to earn merits; that's the whole point of the system.  If it was easy, it wouldn't prevent shitposters from ranking up and the whole system would be useless.

I wouldn't agree that the merit system is useless, but I definitely would like to see an end to account sales.  There is certainly abuse happening, not only with merits but with trust too.  If a green-trusted account falls into the hands of a scammer, it can be disastrous for unsuspecting newbies looking for deals with trusted members--or anyone else who thinks green trust means more than it does.

Yeah, I'm sure Theymos will get right on that.  This forum doesn't even take any action against scammers when they're discovered, so it's unlikely anything is going to be done.

There are two ways this sentence could have been interpreted, and now that I'm reading it again and reading your response to my response, I'll admit I misunderstood it.  I thought you were accusing me of derailing the thread, but I can see now that you weren't stating that.  My apologies.

I can tell OP is idealistic and wants blockchain technology to solve a real and serious problem....but environmental protection won't be accomplished by a tax on crypto.  Governments already have the power to alleviate the problem through legislation and law enforcement--it isn't a lack of funds that's keeping the world from being polluted, and governments could tax people all they want, but it just isn't going to help anything. 

This is "ICO thinking" in my opinion, that is, trying to crowbar bitcoin/blockchain tech into problems that need solving but where crypto won't help to solve the problem at all.  If there really is a problem that anything crypto-related can solve, it'll be adopted pretty quickly.  I haven't really seen that happen yet.

So this guy Soy was a legend who did any or all of these things?  Guess I must've missed it.

I can't either, but it seems like a lot of people are taking the lazy way out as far as posting things, likely in languages they don't fully have a grasp on.  An older member ought to know by now not to do this, and it's not like the offense that was cited here was all that long ago.  It was at the beginning of 2018.

You keep making that argument, but people on this forum keep telling you it's not acceptable.  

I would suggest you not try to auction anything on bitcointalk and stick with those auction houses where they allow you to bid on your own auctions.  It's either that or there needs to be a rule put in place in the Auctions section that this practice is acceptable.  I think there need to be some guidelines put in place there anyway since it's basically a free-for-all right now.  And believe you me, I would never bid on anything auctioned on this forum should that rule come into effect--not that I bid on anything now.

Giving you any sort of power, e.g., adding you to DT1 would be an idiotic move on Theymos's part, and although I don't understand some of the decisions he's made thus far, the man is not an idiot.  Just forget about your suggestion--and about this battle, because it's pretty clear it's not one you're going to win.

Edit: Anduck, don't PM me, and I'm not derailing your thread.  You're requesting to be added to DT1, so any discussion of why you shouldn't be would seem to be fair game here.

I haven't been here as long as the old-timers, but I haven't seen anyone request that status yet.  It's particularly odd coming from a member who was just barking about how the DT system should be abolished because he has a beef with Vod.  And a member who believes bidding on his own auctions is acceptable--yeah, just the kind of person this forum needs on DT1.

Regardless of what happened with the PM and posting exchange between Anduck and Vod, Vod's feedback is correct.  You either set a reserve on your auction or you let the real bidders decide what the item should go for.  You don't bid on the auction yourself.  It's the same reason shill bidding is wrong, too.  Anduck doesn't seem to grasp what he did wrong, and he certainly shouldn't have any influence as to who gets added to DT2.  Bad idea, dude.

Not only that, but even if ETH doesn't crash and become worthless, there's absolutely nowhere to spend it.  I think this is absolutely moronic to pay people for a job like this in cryptocurrency--even if it was bitcoin.  Crowdfunding could just as easily have been done with cash, and I have no doubt the local Filipinos would rather get paid in their local currency than in ETH. 

This is a job that's important enough to do right, and I don't think that paying people in ETH is any advantage to anyone.  Sorry to be a negative Nelly, but if you're working all day for fucking $10.50, at least you should be getting paid in fiat.

So what you're asking for an opinion about is whether to "buy the dip" and giving the advice to "buy low, sell high". 

Sure, great plan IF bitcoin continues to fall and IF after it bottoms out it rebounds to the point where you can make a profit.  Lots of traders do this; some make money, others don't.  Ultimately since nobody knows where bitcoin is headed, this plan of yours is risky at best and there's no one on this forum or anywhere else who can tell you if it's a solid plan.  If any of us had functioning crystal balls that could accurately foretell the price of bitcoin at any time in the future, it'd be a sure shot idea.  Unfortunately none of us have those crystal balls, just a talent (or lack thereof) for figuring out what other traders might do in the future..

It's all guesswork.  If you think that's what's going to happen in the bitcoin market, go for it.  My advice would be not to sell anything right now and to just hold until the market rebounds.

Well gold is up $41/Oz since last I checked it about a month ago, so there does appear to be a little bullish sentiment in the air.  I'm not sure if that's going to be a long-term trend or not, but the precious metals market has been pretty damn dead for years now, since gold & silver peaked in 2011.

I don't follow politics--global or even local politics, and I barely follow what's happening with the economy outside the stock market.  I don't even know what "Sino-American problems" means, and I'm not sure how much the brexit thing is going to affect the global economy.  It'll be interesting to see.  

If the stock market starts to fall--and I don't mean just a correction but a bear market that lasts a year or longer, and if interest rates start to rise--then we'll probably see people starting to move money into precious metals again.  Gold has been beaten down quite a bit for years, so it might not be a bad time to buy a little.  I wouldn't count on making a big profit, though.  I don't expect the metals market to start approaching 2011 levels again anytime soon, and if you over-buy gold or silver, you'll probably be sitting on an investment that doesn't do much for you.  

I still haven't lost faith in the stock market or in crypto.  Those are the areas where I'd put my money.

Oh yeah, I always forget about real estate as an investment.  That might not be a horrible idea right now, either.

I don't understand this argument; what OP has suggested is like cutting a pizza into more slices, not making a bigger pizza.  A moderator ought to be able to moderate a bunch of child boards, since it's not likely that creating more subsections is going to increase the number of posts in each one. 

This is the reason I'd love to see child boards of Meta for discussing merits and for ban appeals.  Already a mod is handling posts about those issues and all the other ones.  To me it's just a simple problem of organization, not one of needing more moderators.  But hey, apparently Theymos either doesn't see it that way or doesn't give a crap. 

He did say that, and he also alluded to booting people off of DT if they neg people for "light" merit abuse.  Not sure if he'd really do that or not, but I'm sure that's one reason why you don't see many DT members tagging merit abusers.  And you are correct; eventually the abusers are going to exhaust their sMerit supply and most of them aren't going to be able to earn any more via legitimate means.

It's basically a waste of time starting threads like these calling attention to merit abusers.  Unless a case is very blatant or it's a merit source who's doing the abusing, I wouldn't bother reporting people like this.

People have called me a nincompoop, unintelligent, ignorant, and lots of other things and to an extent I can see how I can come off that way when discussing certain things--and man do I feel completely stupid for not knowing a lot of these things posted above, like that TMAN & owlcatz were removed from DT2 or that nullius and aTriz were even on it. 

I also didn't fully realize how small the DT1 list is.  I know I've seen it before, but for some reason I had the impression that it had a lot more members on it than it apparently does.

If a DT1 member trusts someone for whatever reason, I think the DT1 member is fully justified in adding the member to his trust list, thereby making that member a DT2 member.  It shouldn't matter in the least if the newly-anointed DT2 member is active or leaves a lot of feedback or anything else.  The point is that the DT2 member can be trusted.  He's not required to be a scam buster or to use his DT status for anything if he doesn't want to.  Hell, I don't recognize half the DT2 members on that list, but I wouldn't argue that they should be removed just because they're inactive. 

What I worry about is inactive accounts getting hacked or sold.  If you could get your hands on a DT2 account, you could probably work a decent scam and make a good chunk of change before you got caught.  Wasn't there some allegation that the Master-P account was sold or something?  I know it wasn't that long ago that he pulled his exit scam, but I forget the details.

I like this thread.  Thanks for posting all of this data, coinlocket$.

I'm not upset and I'm not even trying to discourage you, though I can see how my post could be seen as an attempt to do that.  I just wanted to state a truism about bitcointalk, which is that the majority of members here are bitcoin investors and don't like to spend it on things they could buy for cash and second, that there's so much free porn on the internet that bitcointalk is probably the worst place you could pick to advertise your services.

I do in fact wish you luck.  There's nothing wrong with erotic literature, though I still contend that it's an outdated mode of one-handed entertainment.  Most people have moved on to the harder, more visual stuff--and just as an aside, I find most porn disgusting.  Not my thing.  But if you can make some bitcoin here, more power to you.  If you do, I'd love to see evidence of it.  But I've seen threads like this being opened before, and they get bumped for a while and then just die a slow, quiet death because no one is interested.  All my best to you.

If all of that is true, then yeah that's a case of merit abuse.  There's no way you should be giving your "wife" (which I highly doubt is the case, but who knows what goes on in Russia) as any sort of present or incentive or whatever.  People shouldn't be giving merits to their friends unless they make outstanding posts, and even then it's a very gray area.  

I would agree with that only if you could really prove those two accounts are alts.  They might actually be husband and wife caught up in a pathological relationship whereby both of them are spamming on bitcointalk, abusing the merit system, and plagiarizing.  If they wound up robbing liquor stores sometime in the future, it wouldn't surprise me.

The Jonezhols and kalunomics accounts don't seem to be abusing anything, but who knows.  There's just not enough evidence to tag them even if Theymos didn't state that he doesn't want minor merit infractions punished via the trust system.