Upon investigation, alia == favours via IP evidence and a now-deleted mistaken bump of one of alia's threads. Info in favours' posts disproves alia's claimed identity.

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My neutral rating was intended only as a statement of fact. alia was verified on /r/GirlsGoneBitcoin. Here are the GirlsGoneBitcoin verification procedures: https://www.reddit.com/r/GirlsGoneBitcoin/wiki/verification . It's intended to verify that the user is not just giving out random images found online and calling them their own, not to actually verify their identity. The person in the verification photos is definitely female, and is extremely unlikely to be 15. Furthermore, alia has had a number of customers for her camgirl stuff on this forum who were apparently mostly satisfied. Therefore, it is most likely that the person behind the alia account was hiring a camgirl to do their camgirl-related work.

Alia was immediately on my radar when they appeared out of nowhere with a clever way to get a trust rating (even neutral) from me. And then they went on to invade every forum trading industry. I was hoping that it was just an impressively ambitious person, but as I kind of feared, I guess it was a setup for a long con or something.

revcback 2 points 17 days ago
Got a tax question - I'm in Singapore where capital gains are not taxed. If someone in the US sold their coins here, would they need to pay capital gains tax? Thank you

So that's why the sudden username change.
http://archive.is/5m3SL#selection-4271.0-4271.75

Ewwww! Nullius likes minors.

Usenet is where people trolled, argued, and insulted each other shared knowledge, friendship, and source code long before the Web was invented.  Though it later ran over the Internet, it originally was distributed through UUCP.  Judging by your mental level, I infer that must have been before your parents were born.

Here, wiki link.  Shiny.  Go read.

It says much about you that you’re more effective at irritating people with LONG, UNTRIMMED QUOTES WHICH WOULD GET YOU FLAMED TO A CINDER ON USENET than with your puerile locker-room insults.

As the only member of this forum who has ever received +50 for an insult, as a shriek from the target of the insult, I grade you as an F in destructive creativity.  No, “F” for failure, you gutter-minded dolt.  Boorish and boring is not a winning combination.

Once upon a time, I seduced a beauteous lady of arts and letters with a running erotic joke about commas, interspersed with intercourse on Byron.  Thence ensued a story more appropriate for /u/GirlsGoneBitcoin than here, wherein she confirmed my reputation as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”.  Thus, I do understand why you’re jealous of my way with words; you should be.

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And your opinion matters, because...?


Shame on you for cherry-picking a quote, and leveraging that to take a holier-than-thou attitude toward someone who has freely given extraordinary amounts of time to helping newbies, squashing predatory scammers, and fighting spam.  I don’t wonder why your reply picked on that, instead of this:


I am also unsurprised that you argued with one line out of a discussion, whilst conveniently avoiding all I said in my own far more detailed substantive response.


Yours is.  Moreover, the whole notion of “empathy” is disgusting.  It is nothing more than an emotional blank cheque demanded by the weak and incompetent on those who are not so.  It is the distilled essence of the Sklavenmoral.  But as all such things, it is a poison which acts only against those who choose to drink it.  Repudiate the concept, and it is as powerless as its preachers.


Nice boast, as a setup for an air of superiority.  But you must be new to the Internet, if you presume that others will do other than take that a grain of salt.  Maybe you’re telling the truth; maybe you’re not.  I don’t care, either way.  You will never know who I am.  In either case, publicly visible actions hold more weight than mere stories.

Now, you’ve popped up in this thread with rude pretension, unjustifiable contempt, and imperious demands unmatched by your ability to argue a point, much less enforce yours on anybody.  What it boils down to is more whining:  So, you’re “actually hating that this thread is still going”.  That’s amusing enough, but also mildly irritating.  Shoo.  If you so hate this, then I think we can agree (or at least concur) that you shouldn’t stick around here.

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I owe others a reply upthread (including squatter’s well-thought response; fancy that, a desire for quantitative data with a sample size greater than one).  Have not forgotten.  TODO.  Meanwhile, I intend to fulfill my promises to anybody who brought popcorn.

Not true.  I will use myself as a handy counterexample.

Counting with a 1-based index unlike a C programmer, I am currently #7 on the list of all-time top-merited users.  My rank is currently “Member”; I already have sufficient merit to skip up two ranks to “Sr. Member”.  Whereas the soonest I can reach the activity threshold for “Sr. Member” status will be on 17 July 2018 at 20:40:00 UTC.

Following is the breakdown of where I’ve earned my merit thus far.  The largest proportion has come from Development & Technical Discussion, where I am proud to have recently become the first (and thus far, only) person yet awarded merit by Core developer gmaxwell.  Here in Meta and elsewhere, I’ve also been trying to contribute to the efforts of DT members who are protecting the integrity of the merit system; but in the ordinary course of discussion, I haven’t been awarded as much merit for that as for my tech posts.


(Percentages do not always add up to 100.0% due to rounding.)

So much for your absurd theories.  The merit system is very simple:  Meritorious posts earn merit.  For example, one of my highest-merited posts, “Bitcoin’s Public-Key Security Level”, is currently +18 (including +5 from the tech forum moderator).  Make good posts, and you will earn merit—or don’t, and you won’t.

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I gave +1 for the rest of your post, plus +1 for that alone.

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You have it backwards, upside-down, and inside-out (as most people who make armchair historical arguments usually do).  Society collapsed (past tense) in large part from a surfeit of “empathy”.  “Society/family/clan” worked by honour and the sword, hierarchy, obedience, group loyalty, and merciless shaming and shunning of social traitors and misfits.  Not by bleeding hearts and sob stories.  The world today is drowning in empathy.  The meek are inheriting the Earth; and of course, they will wail and gnash their teeth over a merit system which stops them from inheriting the Bitcoin Forum, too.

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There, you are wrong; for tradition stands falsely accused of an “empathy” which it never had.  This thing called “empathy” by our contemporaries who use it as a religious byword implies empathy for the weak, stupid, diseased, degenerate, cowardly, incompetent, and outright criminal.  I have never heard anyone cry that we must have “empathy” for superior achievements.  Think about it rationally:  “Empathy” is inimical to survival.  Any species with too much of it will prove to be an evolutionary dead-end.

Nature never had any “empathy”—or for that matter, mercy.  Neither does Bitcoin, whose first commandment is to keep safe your private keys:  If you lose your private keys, then you lose all.  If you fail to secure your private keys, then Bitcoin will reward a thief and punish you.  You may cry, scream, shake your fist, preach about “empathy”—it will not help, and nobody can help you.  The judgment of Bitcoin is cold, merciless, exacting, mathematically precise—and final, without any court of appeal.  It is the judgment of pure cause and effect, a financial law which echoes both physical law and the moral laws of older forms of Hinduism.  And as such, Bitcoin excludes the vagaries of human arbiters, human emotions—human corruption.  For those who are willing to take ultimate responsibility for themselves in exchange for ultimate power over themselves, Bitcoin grants freedom.  For the rest—well, I am surprised to hear people whining about “empathy” in the Bitcoin Forum.


Being a reasonable person with decent premises, you miss the contrary unstated premises of the “empathy” brigades.  The purpose of the “empathy” religion is not to induce people to help others, or achieve any other constructive goal whatsoever.  Rather, “empathy” is designed to create an inverted moral hierarchy with pitiable wretches at the top, and you at the bottom.  Its ultimate end is to destroy the very concept of superiority of achievement, and thus stop all achievement.  The architects of the general class of philosophies which converge as antecedents to today’s “empathy” were and are motivated by one or more of hatred for all mankind, blind jealousy, idealization of primitive hunter-gatherer societies and “noble savages”, and/or psychotic delusions (e.g. Auguste Comte; I categorize Rousseau similarly, on grounds that he frankly admitted being unable to cope with reality).

Please go on actually helping people, for whatever non-empathetic reasons you may have.

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When I was young, I was given the advice that the hardest part of being a boss is firing people.  When you call some incompetent fool on the carpet and his eyes get all wide, and you think a grown man might start to cry as he begins to stammer about his kids and his wife and how much he needs this job, then you yourself are being tested for whether or not you be boss material.

If you give a damn for his sob story, then you are cruel:  Cruel to all the competent workers who also have wives and kids and families, and are breaking their backs carrying the incompetent fool as worse than deadweight.  I myself “empathize” with competence.  If you have a heart, then you must realize that firing the fool makes the workplace more efficient so that you can give everybody else a raise in wages.

Whereas here on the forum, the spammers are killing the goose which lays the golden eggs for them.  Let them rot with their own myopia.  I don’t care if they are (or claim to be) poor, have kids, or whatever—whatever.  “Please, sir, I really really really need to spam” is not an argument which moves me.  Substitute any other crime for “spam”, and the same applies.

(Aside:  I myself have real-life experience with desperation brought by ill circumstance, hardship, hunger, ailing health, and outright homelessness.  I would win any game of one-downsmanship before a jury of bleeding hearts.  I dislike mentioning that, and shan’t discuss it further, because I have something called dignity; and it does not give me any special credibility in this argument, as if only those who have had it tough can pass judgment on wrongdoing.  I bring this up only to point out that in my experience, those who have had easy lives seem most susceptible to catching “empathy”.  I infer from that a misplaced sense of guilt.  Whereas those who face genuine life-and-death hardship either become degenerate beggars, or embrace the lesson that the strong survive and the weak perish.  “Builds character.”)

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Well, here’s a “Legendary” who is unable to distinguish between a user who contributes to the forum and has a sig ad, versus a user who comes here only to spam the forum to make money off sig ads.  F in logic.

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No, not really.  Also, please look up the word “humanism”.  It is one of the words most abused by pseudointellectuals who have no idea what they’re talking about.  I myself would claim (or at least aspire) to be a “humanist”, in the Renaissance sense.  I totally reject the concept of “empathy”.

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You almost hit the nail on the head.  See what I said above about “group loyalty”.  The only part you missed is that to “empathy” advocates, this isn’t a bug:  It’s a feature.  So-called “empathy” is nothing more than a toxic social solvent which forces people to not only embrace the lowest common denominator, but expand it beyond your own village’s idiots to include every poor wretch in the whole wide world.

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Drop the “lot of you” false equivalencies, or else I will stomp my feet and hold my breath until I turn blue.

Yes we're all compensating for [insert deficiency here] and are using our [insert perceived advantage here] to [insert perceived attack here].  But you just sound like Mr. Sour Grapes regardless of what the reality is.   You got busted abusing the merit system, and though I wouldn't personally tag you, I think it's good that some members with power are sending a message.   If you're just here to read and write posts for your own pleasure, the feedback doesn't matter.   It's only if you're here for financial gain that the feedback will sting.  Just suck it up and get over it.  Ultimately this is just an internet forum.

Well, unlike all of you who predicted a Chelsea stroll in the park, I thought Watford would make a good account of themselves and snatch a point with a 1-1 draw. Of course, the Premier League loves to toy with our hearts and the game is now 4-1 to the home side in stoppage time.

Shame I didn't watch the match, but I can see an early red card meant Chelsea played the game with 10 men for at least 2/3rds of the game. Still absolutely no excuse to lose like this. I'll be reading the match details on the news, definitely want to see the highlights.

What were the odds for a Watford win btw? Something like 7x?

As do you, Wendigo.