Lol, I'm not trying to play games with your mind.  Sometimes when there's a lot of information displayed in a post I have a hard time assimilating all of it and drawing the correct conclusions from it--and when it comes down to a case of whether I'm going to give someone a neg or not, I want to make sure I'm clear on the facts and make the right decision. 

There are a LOT of very smart people on bitcointalk who do a lot of hard work collecting information, and my brain sometimes resembles a snake pit wherein all the snakes are not working together to process the info.  Thus, I will sometimes ask for things to be clarified like I did here.

As I said, I'm going to keep an eye on the accounts in question and see if there are any password or e-mail changes, and if there are any unusual merit transactions.  Those things would be good evidence that an account was sold, even if it's not rock-solid proof.

I agree with this wholeheartedly and have said as much in thread like this and this.  Where bitcointalk rules fall short, or they're not being enforced, DT members become useful for tagging.  Merit abuse and begging has always been a gray area that I don't want to touch, but I'm delighted when other DT members don't have misgivings about neg-givings.

Just clarify this for me, and it's OK if you explain it to me like I'm an idiot:  The suspected accounts for sale are Danydee and foroplus based on the information provided by the account seller, even though the information provided by the seller doesn't exactly match those two accounts.

I know the first sentence here is true.  I'm not so sure about the second one.  This could very well be a legitimate account sale, but there's no way to tell for sure.

It wasn't my impression that OP was trying to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt but to identify accounts that might be up for sale.  As to the part of your post that I snipped out, I agree and wish someone had done that.

Either way, I'm going to keep an eye on the two suspect accounts and watch for signs of either one changing hands. 

Nope, you don't sound like an ass at all--what you wrote was solid advice for anyone to follow.  One thing I'd have to add is that even with long-time bitcointalk members, you have to watch out for sold or hacked accounts.  You might think you're dealing with a green-trusted Legendary member who presents a solid investment opportunity when in reality it's a scammer who's not the person with the reputation and experience you think you're dealing with.

I'd be very careful about doing any sort of business with new accounts on bitcointalk.  I wouldn't trust them with PayPal, loans without collateral, or pretty much anything else.  And remember that a good con man will be very convincing when proposing something he wants you to invest in.  Always do the due diligence before handing over your bitcoin to anyone, but be doubly cautious when dealing with a newbie.

No, I wasn't going to look at the links hunting for members to give red trust to, but to see examples of what's happening.  Anyway it doesn't surprise me that people are doing this for what I imagine are extremely small rewards.  These members would be better off just claiming from faucets than wasting their time getting worthless tokens airdropped to them.

Or am I mistaken about the value of these airdropped tokens?  Assuming you get what you signed up for, can you actually sell the tokens for a decent amount or what?  How much is the average airdrop worth?  As I said, I've never participated in one of them but I know they're extremely popular, but my understanding has always been that the tokens are essentially garbage.

I apologize for my ignorance, but I've never participated in an airdrop and I'm not sure exactly what's required to do so.

Can someone explain to me like I'm 5 years old how this new type of fraud works?  A link to an older account member's profile is given to the "airdrop manager" and thus the fraudster gets more airdropped shit-tokens how?  By using different ETH addresses but lying about who the account owner is?  Is that basically it?

Edit:
Ah, you must've posted this while I was writing my post.  I'll have a look at those links and see if I can figure out what these idiots are doing.

In crypto, I would be extremely skeptical of basing your trading behavior on news of what other investors (whales) are doing.  Certainly it could be fake news to begin with, but trying to follow the herd and being a momentum player has failed many a trader. 

At least in the stock market business news is pretty easy to verify the accuracy of.  With crypto news coming from sites that look like they value rumor just as much as real news, I'd be very uncomfortable using that kind of reporting as the basis of my trading strategy. 

I don't hear much about contrarian investing around here.  Seems like everyone is trying to be momentum traders instead of following the "buy low/sell high" strategy.  Buying low sometimes entails buying coins that are unpopular at the moment, and my impression is that many crypto traders are extremely fearful of doing so--they're instead chasing what they think the next big thing is or buy what they think everyone else is buying.  It's no wonder so many crypto traders lose money.

I did comment in some of those threads, but I just took a look at what's available and a lot of the threads deal with politics, and I detest politics so much so that I stopped watching television around 2001 and have never followed political discussion on the internet and barely keep up with what's going on in the world.  That's just me, but I am a hermit and enjoy my blissful ignorance of the assholes in power and what they're doing to destroy us all.

Other topics in Ivory Tower dealing with tech like "bricking" a phone or the New Zealand digital strip search I read with interest but didn't feel qualified enough to comment on. 

Not sure why Ivory Tower and Serious Discussion haven't caught on like I thought they would, but there are some good threads there from time to time that I post in.  Maybe it's too political?  Maybe the amount of discussion being had is too thin?  Who knows, but I shall kiss your bald head in appreciation of your efforts to keep the Tower alive.

Glad Vod made the call to tag this guy, because I got a PM from OP about this and I'm not tagging people for merit abuse/begging.  But in a case as blatant as this, I do think he deserves some sort of censure.

Members who don't want to earn merits like everyone else has to annoy me to no end.  And if this guy is a bounty manager, he's basically asking for a bribe in exchange for giving someone work.  I've heard that's common in a lot of places in this world, but that shouldn't be happening on bitcointalk. 

I don't know the whole story about this guy or this project, but how these bounty managers get their positions is beyond me when they're pulling crap like this.  They probably bribe the project devs with kickbacks (but that's just speculation on my part).

Have you really been a member here since 2014?  Seems to me that you'd kind of know the answer to the question you're asking by now.  The admins have decreed that scams will not be moderated, so yeah anyone is free to announce any scam ICO they'd like and bilk as many people as they can sucker into investing in such projects--and they do exactly that.  Frequently.

Couldn't agree more.  Not only do the bounty participants spam the shit out of bitcointalk, but they do it on social media as well and they're basically professional spammers.  Not exactly a career to be proud of.

I've noticed that, too, and it's unfortunate.  There were a lot of bitcoin-paying campaigns with projects/exchanges/services that were actually worth paying people to advertise.  But I've said it before:  this land of limitless bounty-spamming opportunity is going to come to an end once people wake up and figure out that these tokens and projects are designed solely to enrich the devs (if it's an actual project) or scammers (which is usually the case nowadays, with the ANN section being filled with scam projects having photoshopped founders and plagiarized whitepapers). 

I'm not quite that pessimistic about bitcointalk, but if it gets any worse the part of your statement above WILL be true. 

For the same reason scammers get tagged.  Sold accounts, especially high-ranked ones with green trust, can and have been used to scam people.  Selling accounts also exacerbates the spam problem bitcointalk has, because people buy higher-ranked ones just so they can earn more money through signature campaigns.  From what I've seen, more often than not their post output is as bad as any typical illiterate bounty spammer.  It's inherently deceptive to own someone else's account, particularly if there's a trust history.

As I said recently in another thread, bitcointalk has rules but those sometimes differ from community standards, and right now it is very much frowned upon by a lot of members (myself included) to buy or sell accounts.  DT members sometimes have to step in when the rules or the enforcement thereof isn't enough.

It's been suggested that buying & selling accounts be banned on the forum, but Theymos doesn't want to do that with the reason apparently being that it'll just happen off the forum.  I don't agree with that, and I don't think account sellers or buyers are trustworthy (for the most part).  At the very least they harm the health of the forum, and that's why I've been negging them for some time now.

Yeah, but I'll bet the account is still worth something if it has any sMerits available to be given out.  I forget how many sMerits Sr. Members got airdropped, but I know it wasn't much.  In this case, I think it'd be enough to rank up a few Newbie accounts at least.

Thanks for the notification about this.

Do you have any specific examples of members you're thinking of?  I don't disagree, but I know there are members like minifrij, rizzlarolla, and a couple others whose names I can't remember who don't post here anymore.

It's amazing how you see the problem so differently.  I think a lot of people stopped posting here once the forum started to become overrun with shitposters from signature campaigns, but that had started before 2016.  Once that happened, it became apparent that most threads weren't real discussions at all, but a collection of boring, generic statements that were usually just in response to a thread's title.

I don't think any power-hungry status-seekers drove any members away (or at least not in any great numbers) in 2016, but I'd be interested to know what examples you're thinking of.  And as you well know, scams haven't ever been moderated here, so I imagine there's always been people acting unprofessionally.

Well take your complaint to Theymos if you feel that strongly.  Flying Hellfish was selected based on the number of good reports in P&S if I'm not mistaken, and a lot of members voted for him. 

I swear, not even noobs who get their posts deleted whine this much about moderation.  Politics & Society was a cesspool in dire need of a strong moderator, which Flying Hellfish is proving to be.  All I can see is constant attacks against him by you and TECSHARE that apparently spilled over into the Reputation section because they'd be off-topic in P&S.  It's not even clear to me what the original issue was, but from what I've read in the threads started by you and TECSHARE, Flying Hellfish is trying to keep his own politics out of his moderator job and at least realizes the potential conflict of interest. 

If you find a better candidate for a P&S moderator, take it up the chain.  Flying Hellfish doesn't deserve this shit from you two whiners.

Well that unfortunately rules out a lot of options as far as opening a business that accepts bitcoin.

What was your major in college, if you don't mind my asking?  What did you study?

The two things you mentioned as possibilities (starting a business and/or trading crypto) are both extremely risky.  Don't know what country you're in, but in the US I believe most new businesses fail.  The big corporations can offer products and services at much lower prices than a small business can, and big companies have eliminated a lot of their competition because of that.  Depending on what you studied, you might want to seek out a job first and get some real-life experience in the workplace before starting your own company.  We've all seen geniuses like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates establish extremely successful companies right out of the gate, but those instances are rare.

As far as crypto trading/investing goes, you could do that with the capital you have if you find a job that pays your living expenses.  Jumping into that now is way too risky IMO, and I have a feeling the ICO market is going to come crashing down to the ground--and sooner rather than later.  Investing in bitcoin might not be a bad idea, but you'd still be taking a huge risk.

Good luck on whatever you decide.

Words of wisdom right there.  Newbie members who make threads like this expressing deep concern about earning merits/ranking up usually are the ones who don't do any reading and only want to earn more money by attaining a higher rank.  Once they figure out how difficult it is, they'll either get frustrated and quit, resort to plagiarism, or engage in merit trading. 

It's possible to earn merits by posting in Meta (which is where I think I've earned the vast majority of mine), but you have to know what you're talking about--and being able to express yourself clearly helps a great deal.  A lot of noob posts in Meta are near incomprehensible and most are just attempts to earn merits.  If you don't speak English well, sticking to the local boards is probably the best advice you can get.

Nah, just another batch of new users from faraway lands who heard about the amazing money-making opportunities bitcointalk provides.  I'm telling you, that grapevine they hear about the forum through ought to include some facts about the merit system and how to earn them. 

There's no secret and no magic advice anyone can really give to someone about this.  You either have a knack for writing (or very useful knowledge to share) or you don't.

Any rank can be guilty of plagiarism, but it's extremely frustrating for me to find out that a noob who I was about to give merits to plagiarized the post--and that's because I badly want to merit newbies who write good content like Mister99 did. 

If bitcointalk attracted new members who could write intelligent, well-thought out, and interesting posts, it would be like a beacon of hope.  That's not happening however, and in fact the exact opposite thing is happening.  The forum is attracting people willing to do only the bare minimum to satisfy bounty requirements, and some of them can't even do that; hence, they copy/paste material from the internet.

My suspicion, too, is that when a Hero or Legendary account gets busted for plagiarism, the account has probably been hacked or sold.

I sort of try to do that when handing out merits, though usually I give merits out one at a time just out of habit.  My source sMerits aren't getting replenished as fast as I figured they'd be, so I've been using up my own supply of sMerits lately.

Just speaking for myself, of course, but I haven't lost interest at all.  It's just that I haven't been very motivated lately to visit sections like Economics and go through posts there.  I also wanted to check out Bitcoin Discussion, too, but since I know that's going to be an exercise in frustration I've been putting it off.

The problem remains as it's always been:  there aren't enough posts worthy of merits, especially by lower-ranked members, and it's a pain in the ass to find the good stuff.  Good posts are the middle piece of meat in a World Trade Center-sized spam sandwich in most threads in those sections I mentioned. 

And I was just about to give a Newbie a merit earlier today, and guess what?  His post was plagiarized.  It was Mister99 in case anyone is interested.  So there's always that problem to deal with.  It's a lot more work than you'd think to be a conscientious merit source.

I've done business with gameristo many times, and I recently was in a situation with him where he owed me PayPal funds for some bitcoin I'd sent--PP reversed the payment gameristo sent, but it wasn't his doing.  He ended up paying me back in full with no problems.

Sometimes he's slow responding to PMs and such, but I highly doubt he's going to scam you.  Just be patient and (I'm 99.99999% sure) you'll get your funds.

I'm having a hard time figuring out what this thread is about, exactly, but I did want to at least comment on the above.  It's only the illiterate, spamming, alt-account farming, and trust/merit abusing noobs who are going to be stuck at the lower ranks.  That's exactly how the system is supposed to work.  There are newbies who've ranked up since the merit system got started in January, and they deserved to.  The shitposters who are only motivated to post incoherent garbage are the ones who will never achieve even Member level unless they resort to buying merits.

Can't argue with this since I wasn't around when bitcointalk was created, but even if it wasn't a "paradise", I've read enough posts from the early days to know that discussion was much more focused, more passionate, and wasn't motivated by the need to increase post counts for a fatter signature spampaign paycheck.

Yep, it was much different back then from what I've seen, but those days are long gone.  Hell, they were already gone when I registered in 2015.  Signature campaigns are a very clever way to advertise things, but their effects are extremely toxic.  I think of sig campaigns as more of a social/psychological experiment than the merit system.