Whah??  I have no clue as to how this relates to this thread, and those quotation marks you used are baffling to me.

Seems like in the past week, ban appeal threads have exploded in number and although I find them to be annoying (but sometimes amusing), I'm very glad mods are banning so many members.  It'd be a much worse situation if the plagiarists and assorted rule-breakers got away with stealing content and everything else they did to earn a ban.

But no, I'm pretty sure Meta couldn't go a week without a new appeal thread or one about merits.  That's what Meta has become lately.  It's interesting OP referenced Meta's pre-merit history.  I don't think I've looked through old Meta posts from the early days of the forum, and I honestly don't remember what it was like when I registered here in 2015.  Think I'll have to spend some time going back and reading the earliest posts--thanks for giving me the inspiration to do so, OP.

How about:

16.  Don't create merit-begging threads thinly disguised as help manuals for newbies on bitcointalk, which state obvious facts that anyone with an ounce of common sense should already know.

Seriously, this is a ridiculous thread.  Members need to stop worrying about how much they're "growing" on bitcointalk.  I know of no other forum where such a thing is a priority for anyone.

Or better yet, the trash can.

I suppose that would be sound advice for something that could only be purchased with crypto.  If that's not the case, using fiat makes a hell of a lot more sense.  Spending bitcoin just to spend it has always been a silly concept to me, but I'm one of those folks who believes bitcoin is more an investment asset than a currency.

And that thread also demonstrates people were being bitches to each other on bitcointalk even back in 2012.  Everyone seemed a lot friendlier in the first couple years of this forum's existence from the threads I've read from that time period.  

Edit:
Aw man, I was a lurker here when MPOE-PR was still active, and I thought he wrote some of the best posts.  He was a complete bastard and used to mercilessly give people the smackdown, but MPOE-PR knew how to write.  I think by the time I registered in 2015, he'd already been banned, and I don't know the whole story behind that.  He had a great avatar, too.

I don't know, maybe TMAN's post was inappropriate but it made me chuckle.  That's a rarity around here.

As far as the deleted post goes, don't fret too much about it and don't start threads whenever it happens to you.  LoyceV thought it was off-topic, reported the post, and apparently the mod agreed with him.  This happens to a lot of members here, and I suspect you'll have posts deleted in the future with no reason given.  Just move on--and it's not like what you posted was so important that the forum is poorer for its absence. 

"Unreadable and boring" isn't how I'd describe using red text for normal posts.  It's annoying and makes me want to put the member on ignore, kind of like the ones who consistently start threads with all-caps titles.

I've mailed something to a very well-known, very well-respected member here who did not offer to give me his name.  On the shipping box, I just wrote his bitcointalk username along with the rest of the information--and he received the package just fine.  Are you averse to providing your address to someone here?  Can you have it delivered to a friend?  

I'm assuming you're in the US, of course.  If you're not, I don't know how any other country's postal service works.  And I understand wanting to be anonymous, but sometimes it's not completely possible and you have to make compromises.

Edit:
Really?  I had a P.O. box once when I lived in a rooming house where the mail for the residents was delivered all together, usually in a big pile, and I didn't trust that my mail wouldn't get stolen.  That was about 16 years ago, but I think I recall having to show some ID at the post office.  I could be mistaken, though.  In any case, P.O. boxes are a great idea if you value the security of your mail.  I wasn't aware of the anonymity factor.  That's damn cool, too.

OP, looks like I never gave you any merits (had to check the bpip site to verify that), and that's probably because of my bias against giving merits to low-ranking members posting in Meta--but having just looked at your posting history, your posts are actually pretty decent.  I gave you 2 merits as my way of apologizing for the prejudice and oversight.  Don't have many more sMerits to send, else I would have given you more because your post here was excellent. 

Congrats on ranking up.  Frankly I didn't realize that Ivory Tower access was rank-restricted, but I don't think you've missed out on much by not being able to post there.  And I forgot about the avatar issue.  I thought you had to have at least Member rank to have one, but I have avatars blocked in my settings so no surprise I've forgotten the way that works.

And yeah, it did take you a while to rank up to Full Member given that you've been here since the start of the merit system, but on the other hand you haven't made as many posts as a lot of other members who've been here less than a year and who've earned far less merit than you did.  You compare your progress to that of a turtle trying to get somewhere, but getting to Full Member in 10 months with 865 posts isn't all that bad.  It's supposed to be a slow process, even though I think for a lot of members it's turning out to be too slow.

I'll keep you on my radar, and I'm sure I'll be coming across your posts since a lot of them are in Meta. 

OK, so you're saying someone else was using your genuine information in a bounty in order to frame you?  I'd be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt if it made sense to me why someone would do that.  In cases like these, it's seems to be always more likely that the person actually is enrolling alt accounts to earn more money.  And how do you explain that you posted the same Twitter link as nguyenthanhhieu did AFTER he'd already posted it?  Had he done this previously?

Can anyone find any more info that would link the accounts in question to mdayonliner?  I'm not a good blockchain detective by any means and not a great detective in general.  

As to the part I bolded above:  if you were to find evidence of something like that happening, I would expect someone to bring it forward and challenge me on it, and I'd expect a neg as a result.  But since I don't participate in bounties (just the Chipmixer campaign), don't use social media, it would be very hard for someone to frame me like that.

What month are we working on as far as being in the $6000 +/- $500 range?  Seems like bitcoin has been stuck somewhere between just short of $5k and not much over $6500 for quite a while now, with no real action that would suggest any sort of trend.  This very much reminds me of not long after I'd gotten into bitcoin--the price was stalled at around $420-$450 for what seemed like forever. 

Thankfully that time around when bitcoin started to move again it was in the upward direction.  Hopefully this time when we get out of the range we've been in, it'll also be a move upward.  I don't trade bitcoin actively on exchanges, but this lack of the usual volatility has got to be murder on those who do.  Buy-and-hold (and hope for the best) seems to be the best strategy right now.

The only time I'll remove feedback I left for account sellers/buyers is after a significant amount of time has passed and the member has done something (usually gained trust feedbacks with valid references) that proves they're trustworthy.

In your case, you claim you were new but 6 months after registering on bitcointalk you were trying to buy accounts at a time when members were consistently being tagged for such--and you should have known better.  You haven't done anything in the 5 months since I left my feedback on you that would convince me to remove it.

This isn't the thread to appeal negs I've left, by the way.  PM me if you've met the above criteria.

I like that idea in spirit, but in practice it's way too complicated.

The better solution is for me to right the wrong and with no bargaining or expectation from iluvbitcoins or anyone else.  My feedback will be removed, and not only should I not have left it in the first place (my instinct told me not to), but I should have removed it before the situation came to this. 

My apologies to iluvbitcoins for any problems my neg caused him, and I'll leave it at that.  This was one of the tougher calls I've had to make, and I made the wrong one.

Wow, those members who gave him neutral trust for that were being extremely kind.  I recall getting a PM some months ago from a noob with a request just like this one, and I gave him a neg for it--and I don't think I was being too harsh.

Also, people should be reporting these PMs to the mods when they get them.  I'm not sure if that can or will result in a ban for the merit beggar, but I know PM spam isn't tolerated.

Dammit, you beat me to it!

I still like the idea of having a child board, but the above suggestion would probably help.  It would be even better if banned members were given an example of what they copy/pasted, which I think is usually provided when someone reports a plagiarized post to a moderator.  That's probably asking way too much if the current system for mods issuing bans is as clunky as you say (and I believe you), but showing someone exactly what they plagiarized would likely cut down on ban appeal threads even more--or at least we wouldn't get all the stupid "what did I do wrong?" posts.  Those are unnecessary and waste people's time, because invariably someone goes digging to come up with an example.

But even if a reason and an example were provided in the ban message, I would bet money that these people are still going to keep making Meta threads asking for mercy, giving excuses, and lying through their teeth about how their dog stole their laptop and somehow managed to copy someone else's content.  That's why I think the child board solution is a better one, and I disagree that Meta would be empty without ban appeal threads--if anything, it'd be easier to find actual discussion threads.

That's not the best solution, but as I said I do think the reason should be provided in the message.  It's a start.

That was suggested before, and the main problem with it is that most banned members won't read it or will still create an appeal thread begging for mercy, complaining about the ban, or whatever else.  I don't think a pinned topic would help at all.

So it looks like mdayonliner abused that Ambassador airdrop/bounty with alt accounts?  Does that sound about right?

I would advise you to be a lot less ambitious in your dealings on bitcointalk if you go that route.  I never thought you offered to do that escrow deal so you could run away with the money, but you most likely would have had the temptation to, and given that you didn't have a reputation as an escrow, it was an ill-advised offer.  My impression was always that you were trying to build a reputation here too quickly, and that got you in trouble.

So what about the apparent alt accounts you had participating in the bounty I mentioned above?

Not only do I agree with OP, but I recently posted much the same idea in another thread:


It was a bit off-topic in that thread, so I'm glad OP started a new one for the suggestion.  

Most of these ban appeal threads are much the same--same excuses, same lies, same reasons for getting banned, same replies from members, and the same outcomes.  If you're looking for decent threads in Meta, the ban appeal ones are just clutter.  I'm not sure if a child board would require another moderator or not, but at least if you're sick of people appealing their bans you can put the child board on ignore.

There's another solution, which is to require all appeals to be done via e-mail and not in a Meta thread.  The threads seem to be useless anyway; I think I've seen only one of them in the past few months where a person was erroneously banned, and it got reversed--and I'm sure that could have gotten resolved via e-mail.

I still have the PMs from iluvbitcoins he sent me after I tagged him, and I can't speak for Lauda but iluvbitcoins didn't try to blackmail me into removing my feedback.  He explained his situation and requested that I change my neg to a neutral, but he wasn't threatening and was polite throughout the entire exchange.

That one was a very tough call, because I did look at his trust page and I didn't then and don't now think iluvbitcoins is a scammer, just that selling accounts is untrustworthy behavior.  I made the call to be consistent in giving feedback, but I waffled on it for a bit.  I'm fine with the feedback he left me--believe me, I'm the last person who's going to complain about getting negged, even if it's by a DT member, but this case was one where I second-guessed myself a couple of times and I regret that it's come to this.

I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't at this point.  If I were to remove my feedback now, everyone would accuse me of doing it for my own interests, and if I let it stay in place I honestly feel like I'm not being fair to a member who probably deserves to have the neg removed by now.  I've removed feedback on members I've tagged for account selling after a period of time (which isn't set in stone) if they've shown evidence that they've done something that gives evidence of their trustworthiness--usually getting positive trust with valid references.  iluvbitcoins doesn't actually meet those criteria from the time I left my neg, but it's hard to ignore all his other positives.

I wouldn't mind hearing some thoughts from people about this, whether I get lambasted or not. 

Heh heh, you're probably right about that, too.

Theymos just started a thread that's pretty much like this one.  I don't watch the news--are the pundits predicting a global economic crash or something?  Is there some really bad news coming out or rumors floating around about some impending disaster?  As I said in Theymos's thread, the stock market has taken somewhat of a beating in the past week, but I'd been waiting for that to happen for a while now.  It's not unexpected and not unhealthy for the market, but it also doesn't mean the economy is tanking.

What?  The Dow is still at 25,000 as I write this, and less than 10 years ago when we had our last financial meltdown it dropped to around 6000 if I'm not mistaken.  What's happening now is just a correction IMO and not anything more than that--and I also don't think it's going to take 2 years to recover from the relatively small drop in prices that we've seen.  Don't know what orifice you pulled that number out of.

I agree with all of that wholeheartedly.  Diversity is the investor's best friend.

Really?  We just got done recovering from the 2008-09 disaster, which to me doesn't seem that long ago.  I'll admit that I don't exactly have my finger on the pulse of the global economy, but what signs are pointing to another recession?  The stock market has been due for a correction, and a lot of stocks have dropped quite a bit lately, but that's ultimately healthy for the market.  Stocks have been booming ever since 2009 and there hasn't been much in the way of a crash or correction.

The question of what happens with bitcoin if a "great recession" happens is an interesting one, since it hasn't been tested yet.  I have a feeling that if a global meltdown occurs and mass unemployment is a component of that, people are going to sell bitcoin en masse and the price will probably fall significantly--and all of the altcoins that people are now hoping to get rich on today?  They're going to fare even worse.

I don't see bitcoin as a safe-haven asset like gold or silver.  It's way too volatile for investors looking to preserve the value of their money when markets go haywire, and if we do get an economic disaster a-knockin' at our door my bet is that metals will start rising again.

Can't say I'm surprised by any of this.  I only follow one banking stock, Bank of America, and it's taken quite a hit over the past couple of days, and it's down 1% today as I'm writing this. 

I'd love to see some heads roll for this, but it's always been the case that they can escape the consequences of their actions, and the sad part is that their actions can have very bad effects and can affect a LOT of people.  The problem is that they have too much political leverage and way too much power.

And yeah, the problem of money laundering using cryptocurrency is so much smaller than what these banks did/are doing.  Compared to the banks, laundering money with bitcoin is a tiny drop in a very big bucket.

Thanks, that was my impression as well.  The only account I see so far worthy of tagging is OP's, which I've already done since he admitted to buying/selling an account. 

These people drive me nuts.  Normally it's an easy matter to neg someone who's either buying or selling an account, but then along come threads like this where everything is sideways and ass-backwards.

I'm now completely confused as to what's going on here, and I did read the imgur (mostly gibberish) chat link.



My ADD is flaring up and I've yet to finish my coffee.  Can someone give me their tl;dr opinion on this?  LoyceV? xtraelv?  I'm having a hard time making heads or tails of this.