I get OP's frustration in Bitcoin Discussion, because it's really bad right now.  Autolocking threads will basically have no effect on spam whatsoever for the reason you mentioned. 

Not only will they create new threads asking the same tired old questions, the spammers are already creating new threads when they already exist.  They're doing that in other sections, too, and it would be laughable how little they read if it weren't so irritating.  Most of the time I suspect they're not genuinely asking a question with these topics--they're creating threads so they don't post multiple times in the old ones and thus their spamming doesn't stand out as much.

He tagged you because he suspected you of trading merits, and it's pretty obvious that's what you were doing.  You apparently just admitted it, so it's an open-and-shut case, no? 

People who abuse the merit system deserve negative trust, and apologies aren't worth anything.  The trend seems to be to apologize as soon as you're caught doing something wrong and promise you'll never do it again.  I don't buy such apologies.  The trust should stay, as a punitive measure for you and as a deterrent for anyone else who might be considering doing what you did.

I think that might have been digaran, who said he resigned as a merit source.

None of this is surprising to me, and people who are allowed to just keep doing what they're doing after they apologize will continue doing it.  I'll be interested to hear what Anon11073 has to say about this, assuming he stops by this thread.

You're probably right, but I haven't seen any data on that.  The thing is, older folks probably remember the time when the US was on the gold standard and still harbor some nostalgic but irrational feelings toward precious metals. 

I would say the market has probably for gold has probably shrunk since 2011, which was the end of the most recent gold bubble.  I think that scared a lot of investors off, and I'm sure at least some of them have discovered either stocks or crypto or both, because while both of those assets have been booming since 2011, gold has languished--silver, too. 

Warren Buffett nailed it when he described gold as something that doesn't have any earnings, doesn't pay dividends, and doesn't represent a business which employs people and produces goods.  It will just sit there in your bank safe and do nothing.  It doesn't even serve a purpose, except perhaps as material for jewelry and coins.

Also, even though gold has been sideways since 2011, that hasn't stopped the gold permabulls from hyping it.  Look at some of the linked articles on Coinflation.com, and you'll see the same hype over and over.  Gold is always poised to explode IF stocks crash, IF we go to war with N. Korea, IF the dollar implodes....it's always if these events happen, and that's how they appeal to people's emotions in order to sell you gold.  I don't buy it at all.

On your end, I think you'd have to pay the tax whenever it is you normally file your taxes.  If I were to buy or sell bitcoin in the US, I'd declare it in April as either capital gains or miscellaneous income.  I don't know how it works in Latin America.  I don't think you have to immediately pay the tax.  But the bitcoin you have from mining is income for you, so your government (I assume) expects you to pay taxes on that.  Most people don't, but when you don't you're risking getting fined for not doing so or possibly going to jail. 

Yes, I'd advise you to talk to an accountant.  Don't rely on me or anyone else here for rock solid advice.  I'm not an accountant and certainly don't know the rules for where you're at.  Good luck.

Yep, it's totally legal at least in the US, as long as you pay taxes on it.  If you don't, that's a problem in the eyes of the IRS but the buying of it from a person in S. America (or anywhere else) is legal.  Bitcoin isn't illegal in the US as you probably know, and in fact there are US-based exchanges like Coinbase that are major dealers.

I just looked at your merit history, and I find this claim to be laughable.  You've been well-tagged, IMO.  He gave you merits for every consecutive post in that thread, and those posts absolutely did not deserve merit.  There is no doubt in my mind that there was some sort of arrangement beforehand--don't know what it was, but it's either you bought those merits or that's your alt account.  Don't know, don't care.  If I were you, I'd be a bit pissed off at oscar2000 but you don't seem to be.
I'm failing to see how this is relevant to the merit you received and the trust you got from Vod.
That's a bit of a contradiction right there.  You're coming off as extremely disingenuous.  You said at first that he might have sent you the merits because he likes you, and now you're saying he told you beforehand.  Well, did this individual give you a reason why he'd be sending you all those merits?

This makes me very happy that you tagged these guys.  I haven't seen many of the obvious merit buyers & sellers getting any consequences, and I got the impression that DT members were backing off of doing so.  Not tagging them IMO gives them the confidence to keep doing it, and they will.
Well you know, scammers and other dishonest people are known to deny it when you catch them performing their dishonest acts.  
It's still good you reported it and again, I'm very glad tagged these users. 

This has been suggested before, and I supported it too.  If I recall correctly, I also suggested that when posting in the sub-board, members not have their signatures shown and not be able to earn merit in them.  That would pretty much shut all the noobs bitching about merit up. 

The proposal went nowhere, which is where I suspect your proposal will go.  It turned out not to be very popular with the senior members who responded in the thread.

There have been quite a few threads asking this same question, and I have mixed feelings about the concept and the question itself.

Having a job gives you much more than an income.  I totally get that there are some jobs that suck and I understand how much you want to quit your job after a while.  However, it's a dependable income; it gives you some structure and routine; it increases your social interactions, which is a healthy thing; and, depending on what your job is, you can actually do some good for other people and society as a whole.

The big drawback I see about not working and trading crypto full-time is that you really have to know what you're doing--and I don't think many people are talented enough to derive an income from doing it.  I've said it before:  Back in 1998-2000 there were a lot of people who were quitting their jobs and day trading in stocks.  The stock market was absolutely on fire at that point, and a lot of people made money.  But when the market crashed in 2000, these people who were basically riding the momentum of a huge bull market didn't know how to trade in a crashing market.  A lot of them were wiped out.

Crypto is even more volatile and unpredictable than stocks are.  My advice would be to keep your job and trade crypto part-time, and to not go all-in.

It's not surprising to me at all, and these jokers probably need to be banned.  I've seen the exact same thing in the past in the altcoin ANN threads, where a given thread keeps getting bumped with idiotic "great project, good luck" posts by newbies.  It's obvious to me that they're alt accounts, and the last time I visited that section I reported a whole bunch of these posts.  That's what I recommend you do, and perhaps mprep will ban those accounts you listed.

This is all a common tactic among those who are promoting ICOs.  They don't care about bitcointalk at all.  They just want their thread on top so everyone can see it.

I agree with this, but you're asking way too much of the average Jr. Member who only wants to crank out the maximum number of posts for his weekly altcoin bounty.  There are even buiilt-in spellcheckers on a lot of devices that could be used, but the fact is that most members who are only here to earn money could care less about spelling.  It's a major achievement if they even get the grammar correct in one of their typical sentences.  I really don't think they're interested in improving the content of what they write, much less the little things like spelling, punctuation, and the rest of the variables that make the written word beautiful.
And I'm so happy those days are over.  Let the noob shitposters bitch and moan about the system, but they'll either adapt to it by upping their game or give up.  Either outcome is a win for the forum as a whole.
No, it wasn't just last year that it turned to shit.  One of the first things I noticed even before I registered here in 2015 was that a lot of writing sounded like it came out of the Bizarro-Superman planet, and also that no one replied to any post other than the OP in a thread.  It was obvious very early on that there was less discussion going on than people churning out posts without reading anything in turn.  There are a lot of threads that ask a basic question, and if you read the replies you'll see the same answer duplicated dozens of times--and it's not necessary.  That's been going on for years.

Yeah, I don't understand the "use smerit as a metric" thing or what exactly you intend to do with it.

Merit is already being used somewhat by campaigns managed by Yahoo62278, but not in the way it seems like you intend to do.  He offers higher rates to users who have more merits (not smerits), and he has his own campaign where acceptance into it is based on a minimum amount of merits.

DarkStar_ keeps track of Chipmixer participants' merits but doesn't use it for any purpose beyond bragging (rightfully so) about the quality of their posts.

If you come up with a clever idea, go for it.  I don't understand exactly what you're planning here, but if it's a good idea I'm sure other people will emulate you.  Maybe you can explain a bit more.

Those are two ways of basically saying the same thing, IMO, though I agree ATH is probably more appropriate.

Props to anyone who sold at $20k and got in at a reasonably low price--you guys are fortunate.  Whoever you sold it to at that price was likely a huge loser.  I'm just eagerly awaiting the time when we get back to that price, and it looks like we're slowly creeping our way back up there, though we're down a couple hundred dollars in the past few days.  That's normal for bitcoin, but I have mixed views as to its long-term growth.  I'm not as sure as I used to be that it's going to $100k or higher.  But we'll see.

That's true, but have you also seen the eroding of discussion quality by the low-ranked, bounty-hunting shitposters?  

I agree this place is rife with all sorts of toxic elements, but how do you think this "bullying" evolved on bitcointalk?  It's not because everyone here is just trying to voice their opinions on crypto--it's because idiots are here just to earn a paycheck and have NO interest in discussion or anything else aside from getting paid to spam.
You said it, bro.

I'm way out of the loop on this, but what is ALU and what is Lauda's connection to this scam?  I'm going to go back to that other thread if I can find it, one of the last places aTriz posted.  Just ignore my question if it's an obvious one.

I did watch that video, and snakey (no offense intended) sounds like a drunk Sesame Street character--but it looks like he's got a valid gripe with Chrysos and it definitely sucks that he got scammed out of that kind of money, which I know is probably a lot in his country.  This is precisely why people need to really do their due diligence before plopping down their life savings into anything crypto-related.

aTriz I can definitely see having involvement in this, and I changed my positive on him to neutral, and I'm going to sleep on whether to change it to negative after him not paying snakey back.  His feedback is already flaming red so it doesn't make much difference.  I thought he would at least keep his word and pay this guy back in full.

I just saw a good one about dividend reinvestment investing--it's not active trading by any means, but it's a solid way to invest in the stock market:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i_3KAY1ZMo

Note:  This is not my video and I'm not promoting it.  I really did happen to come across it the other day when I was basically looking for videos by people who've been doing what I've been doing for years.  It takes a lot of time to reap the benefits if you don't have a lot of money to invest initially, but it pays off in the long run.

Be very careful what you listen to when you're watching investing videos on youtube.  There is so much crap by people who should never have access to a webcam that you can lose faith in humanity before actually getting solid advice.  That's especially true of people who subscribe to chart analysis, aka Technical Analysis, which I think is a bunch of voodoo religion bullshit.  But good luck in your travels and may you find great wealth.

Apparently you know absolutely nothing about bitcointalk.  Not surprising that a scamming bounty participant wouldn't read anything here and couldn't care less about what goes on in the community.  

There have been farming rings with hundreds of accounts, and enrolling them in signature campaigns is a common tactic.
What are you trying to say here?  What were you working on?  Who intruded on you?

Also, please don't quote the entire scam accusation and all the images unless you really need to.

Solid advice right here.  If I only had $1500 to invest, I most definitely would not buy any altcoins.  Bitcoin perhaps, but with shitcoins you might as well take that $1500 and buy scratch tickets or go down to the casino and play poker.  Hell, you might as well burn it in a fireplace.

That may sound like heresy on bitcointalk, but right now I have serious doubts as to the future of not only altcoins but bitcoin as well.  I think the stock market is looking pretty damn inflated right now, too, but I'd much rather buy a blue chip, dividend-paying stock to hold for years than some altcoin that probably only 200 people will ever own--and own only in the short-term as well.  You can kiss that $1500 goodbye investing in that shit.

So my picks for spreading $1500 around:  One 1/4 ounce gold coin, probably an American Eagle or something Mexican.  $700 worth of Coca-Cola stock in a dividend reinvestment program.  And the rest I'd buy bitcoin with.  That would be enough diversification for $1500.

I'm not going to criticize mprep, as he's probably got a job that's worse than hilariousandco's, but man...I think at least 90% of users who post in Altcoin Discussion are alt accounts, and 95% of posts across the board are spammy garbage.  You read threads like this hold or sell thread which has gone well over 100 pages, and the vast majority of posts in it are insipid, repetitive nonsense. 

The only reason I can see why anyone would post in it is for a bounty.  And I guarantee you no one is reading anything in a thread like that.  Everyone replies to the OP and not to each other, which is exactly what a discussion forum shouldn't be about.  In addition, the English is so bad that even if you did want to read the posts it's maddening to find ones that you can actually understand.  On top of all that, I've found many posts in that section that are straight-up copy/pastes.  That's why the above member doubted whether Altcoin Discussion is being actively moderated.