I hate quotes like the above, since that kind of writing uses big, fancy words that don't mean a hell of a lot and IMO are just used to stop people from thinking about it any further.  You see crap like this in financial journalism all the time when people get asked about things like price declines--and you see it in earnings announcements every quarter.  The language is designed to confuse and obfuscate.

I didn't know this guy had a prediction of $25,000 by the end of 2018.  His explanation ought to be "Well, we just didn't get there".  End of story.  You can't blame anything but the fact that people stopped buying bitcoin like bubbletards in 2018.  Maybe next year.

I removed the tag on sumangs, since I've seen that type of arrangement before (with aTriz, if I'm not mistaken) and I'm too lazy to contact the CEO of his boss.  If anyone else feels like doing that, go for it, but it's not worth it to me.

When arrangements like that are struck, it'd be nice if it was disclosed so that people aren't guessing--or leveling scam accusations.

Allah has shut the door, now get the fuck out so take care.  Hopefully behind the next door you'll find a better way of earning that doesn't require you to shitpost in broken English all over the place.

I'd give you a merit for your post here, but unfortunately I don't have any smerits.  It's not that I agree with everything you wrote, but at least you wrote your argument coherently, unlike many of the foreign fucktards who've posted in this thread recently.  They can stay noobs until their activity reaches 10k+ for all I care, and in fact I hope they do.

Maybe someone with some merit to give will see this and see your post and merit it.  If not, suck it up and move on.  You people who are so concerned about ranking up make me want to puke.  No one gives a shit whether you do or not, because you're only here for a paycheck.  Very few people here respect that.
No need whatsoever to apologize for having high standards.

Um, yeah.  Can you imagine if a publicly traded company tried to get away with that shit?  It wouldn't happen, not in the US, not in the poorest country in Africa.  If you wonder why the US banned its residents from investing in ICOs, look no further than this one.  Is this actually legal anywhere?

It's bad enough that these scam ICOs are stealing photos of real people, but this tactic is just insulting to all potential investors.  Developers should not be anonymous, and for good reason.  Do you want to give money to a random stranger who's hyping up a project that's probably useless to begin with?  No sane person would do that.

No, it won't help one bit.  Why?  Because it's of no consequence to the person whose merit is going to decay.  Do you think anyone really cares if they run out of smerit?  I'm a staunch supporter of the merit system and I've tried to give my smerits out judiciously, but if I lose them it's no skin off my back.  And do you think the average bounty shitposter is going to care?  Probably not unless it means he can't sell them, and that's not going to help the people who deserve to have their posts merited.

I think having smerits decay is a silly idea.  The only thing it'll mean for sure is that there's less to go around, and there already isn't enough.

That's an example of integrity right there, which I highly doubt most of these altcoin bounty managers have enough of in order for them to do the same thing if this situation presented itself in a bounty they managed.  aTriz was very trusted as a campaign manager right up until the point where he went along with the scam his campaign project was trying to pull off.

So yeah, it all depends on what the bounty manager does once the information about the scam becomes known.  The same thing holds for the bounty participants.  If the project is known to be a scam and they continue to advertise for it (assuming the manager hasn't pulled the plug), they'll probably get negged.

I'm kinda meh on most of these, but as for #6, I used to think having a "like" function would be useful but now I think it'd be silly.  While certainly not all decent posts deserve merit (or at least there's not enough merit to go around), if we had a like button it'd be confusing and also would detract from the importance of the merit system. 

Also, from looking at Youtube videos recently, it appears that people hit the like button indiscriminately to the point where I don't even look at how many likes a comment has.  My brain has just become burned out on likes, and I don't think it'd be a good feature here.  When you don't have a limit on the number of likes you can give, the number becomes meaningless--that's why the merit system is so novel.

You got your answer, OP.  Yes you can get banned for doing this, and don't think that people won't report spam PMs.  I've gotten a number of them and I think I've reported them all.  That's one of the things the mods take seriously on bitcointalk and one of the things that'll earn you a ban.  Just don't do it.

I've probably received less than a dozen spam PMs in the 3+ years I've been here, which actually isn't too bad.

No kidding. 

"Oh, there's so much wrong in the world.  God forbid we should watch a movie!!".  I didn't bomb those soldiers in Afghanistan, and I don't watch the news so I wasn't even aware of it.  Now that I am aware of it, I still don't care.  There are billions of people who died before I was born, more that died while I've lived, and countless more will die after I'm dead.  Everyone dies, and I have a very narrow circle of sympathy and of who I expend emotional energy on.

I'm going to keep watching the superhero movies, because that's a positive aspect of life.  If I just focused on how fucking bad the world is, I'd be pulling my hair out.

Yep, same here, except I get 'em deleted a little more frequently.  I just had a post disappear without a notice, so I assume it was one from a thread that got nuked, probably in Bitcoin Discussion or Economics.  I've had posts deleted by mods and in self-moderated threads.  I never thought enough of it to start a thread, however.  People pay waaay too much attention to their post counts on bitcointalk--and we all know why that is.

Unless you're consistently getting posts deleted by actual moderators and you receive PMs notifying you of the deletion(s), I don't think you're at risk of getting banned because of it.  And if you're a spammer, you've got to be aware of that fact and wouldn't even need to ask that question.  On the other hand, spammers tend to be extremely stupid.

Crazy to think about, isn't it?  But no, I don't think merits are going for that much.  I think $5 is what I've seen them going for, and even that is way too frigging high.  That just reinforces the point that having a high-ranked account is amazingly lucrative for a certain segment of the world.  It's unfortunate that I'm living in a country where sig campaign earnings don't allow me to live like a pimp--maybe if I enrolled 20 accounts in campaigns I'd be onto something....

It's a good thing that merits aren't anonymous, else we'd have much, MUCH more abuse going on.

The big thing is to not overinvest in bitcoin.  Don't ever buy bitcoin with money that you're going to need in the foreseeable future--I've seen way too many people do this and they're usually the ones who then come here with sob stories, saying they want to kill themselves.  It's a bunch of avoidable nonsense.

Other than that, have some patience.  Stop checking your investment every 10 minutes.

I don't use Tor and I've run into situations like this when my wi-fi connection is lousy.  You really have to stay logged in to avoid this problem altogether.  I understand that not everyone can do this, because of being on a shared computer or whatever, but I don't think Theymos is going to do away with this particular security feature when the overall security on bitcointalk is pretty bad as it is. 

We used to have a real problem with bots that would create new accounts and post total nonsense, but that was before the captcha was implemented--so I think it has certainly helped things.  It's an inconvenience, yes, but it's one of those things we all just kind of have to suck up and accept.

I've heard of this, but I never understood how that works.  A captcha pops up on my screen when I go to log into bitcointalk--how the hell can someone else solve it?  How does someone solve captchas for money?  I'm probably being dense and missing something obvious.

I don't think this is a good idea because it'll inconvenience every single user who posts here, not just the shitposters and bots.  Second, I don't think it'll do any good whatsoever toward suppressing....whatever.  People here are dedicated to posting shit and won't let a silly little captcha stand in their way.
Word.

No, no, a thousand times NO.

As much as the account farming spammer population drives me batty, instituting a KYC policy would be so much worse and would be against what much of bitcoin stands for.  There are ways to combat spam that have yet to be implemented--like tougher rules for bounty managers and project developers and so forth--and this forum does not need people's dox.

TL;DR Fuck that.

Forgot to add: How many times has bitcointalk gotten hacked?  There's no way I'm going to trust this forum with any of my dox just to be a member here.

I don't know how you arrived at that value--seems to be pretty arbitrary.  Also note the hundreds of other altcoins which can also function as a store of value.  There's definitely not just bitcoin in the crypto world.

There's a paradox (as I see it) involved with this question:  in order for bitcoin to be a good store of value, it has to be stable.  Or it has to have a value growth that at least tracks inflation--right now the price is extremely volatile, and there's no way in hell it qualifies as a store of value.  The paradox is that if bitcoin ever achieved price stability, it would likely cause people to lose interest very quickly and would tank.  I don't see the store of value moniker being an apt one for bitcoin anytime soon.  It's an excellent speculative asset and it's kind of a currency, but that's about it.

Yep, and this is another example of the huge clash of cultures here on bitcointalk.  The people who use "sir" when applying for a sig campaign or asking for their well-deserved feedback to be removed are not just being polite.  They will say anything to get a spot in that campaign or to get a red trust rescinded, and the constant "sir" is just an extension of being disingenuous. 

I use "sir" as an informal sign of respect at my job, much the way a prison guard might call an inmate "sir".  That is much, much different than what we usually see on bitcointalk--and no matter how many times this gets pointed out, they still keep writing it.

Does it even matter?  As soon as you clear up that question, he'll find another way to attack you and the rest of the DT members in Blazed's trust list.  His trolling has gotten to the point where I've put him back on ignore--I had the impression that he's a harmless troll with no filter between his brain and keyboard, but I'm starting to get annoyed with the volume and tone of his trolling. 

He's clearly fixated on the idea that there's some grave injustice being done by DT, but from everything I've seen it appears he's deserved the trust he's gotten.  In addition he's trying to pit DT members against each other, much like that person recently who claimed I tried to extort him by asking for cash for feedback removal.  I would suggest that if we all ignore him, he'll wither and die.  I think that's the last I'm going to write on this.

I don't see enough evidence that these two accounts are controlled by the same person.  There wasn't even a significant amount of merit exchanged between them, and as suchmoon said, certainly just because one person sends crypto to another person doesn't prove they're the same person.  
It's not enough for DT members to take action, as evidenced by the fact that no one has yet.