Well, since I am posting right after, "I'm surprised this thread is still active", I am partly to blame.  The airdrop is over, we're still here, VoteCentral is up and running, the entire crypto market, Onion included seems to be running about par for the course.  People will be screaming "scam" until their lungs bleed I suppose, and if that makes them happy or satisfies some other urge they have, I guess good for them (?).

DeepOnion is no more a scam than any other currency or crypto is a scam, I mean, have you really looked at what backs up the US dollar lately?

Yeah, true, I was kind of trying to tiptoe around that I guess.  It's always the people, that do not take the time to read the article, that take the misleading clickbait kind of headline, in this case, the "Unlimited" part, assign their own meaning to it and run with it.

Bitcoin Unlimited probably could have been named a little better, to avoid confusion from the implication inherent in the name.  No matter what naming convention, language etc., though, there will always be some confusion about what is actually meant.

It's fairly straightforward and easy to understand as long as you remember to read passed the headline.  The "unlimited" part references the transactions, not the number of bitcoin.

I wish I could have shorted Ripple, that would have been awesome.  I'm just now (I'm always late to the party) looking at putting a small bit of XRP towards diversity.  Seems like, with this low, it might be good timing, but the low makes me hesitate.

I'm definitely beyond hope then, lol, but I bet you figured that out already.  For one, those numbers are inaccurate, and for another, "Ponzi", named after the first guy to start one, hasn't changed it's definition because crypto came around.

What you call a Ponzi may be different than the literal textbook, as it is taught - because Ponzi is used as scholastic examples - but that does not magically make what you call a Ponzi to actually "be" a Ponzi scheme.  YOu could get all philosophical aobut it I guess and try the "A rose by any other name" line, but, it still won't change what the legal definition, there actually is one, of a Ponzi scheme is.  I simply intend to call a Ponzi a Ponzi, and some other kind of scam by the name that best fits it, and not make up a new definition for a well-established term.

BTW, you make a good argument, and if that's your graphic, nice job, I'd merit your post if I still had any myself, even though I disagree with you, you still debate very well and that is "meritorious" in my opinion.

I would love to know where you could purchase Onion before it was available on any exchange?  I mean, I'm not gonna say you're nuts if you claim you could have written a dev a check and mailed it to them, but I find that scenario highly unlikely.  Please note, I was here before the first airdrop and did a little bounty work for some of my first Onion before then.  Perhaps that is what you mean by "purchase"?

I mined a bit too with that kawaiipool, and yeah, the hashrate went very high very fast, so it wasn't really worth it to me and I make more staking now than I did mining.

People have memories that are far too short.  BTC is not over, you're just not making ridiculous amounts of money, only slightly crazy amounts of money.

THink back, the end of 2017 everyone was hoping it would hit 10k, then it hit damn near double that, now it's kind of leveled off a bit at 11k, so you should still be well ahead of putting your money in a bank.

I wish I knew the answer to that question, and then had the power to make it happen (within ethical means, of course).

Seems like there is too much profit taking right now, maybe by the second quarter?

Not even going to try to wade thru the "intelligent" discourse that I've just briefly skimmed thru, but I do have a serious question.

I purchased a physical 2fa dongle thru Paytopia from Cryptopia a couple of weeks ago, then the seriousness of the delays hit, and it has only just in the last couple of days shown as "Completed".  Originally they claim those will ship out in three days, however has anyone gotten one lately or seen how long it is actually going to take to ship to the US?

We're speaking at cross-purposes.  When the airdrop first started, no initial investment, as I said, was needed.  The coin wasn't even on an exchange, and couldn't be purchased, so again, it doesn't follow the definition of a Ponzi.  If you participated, you received some Onion, and it was only much, much later that the holding rule was removed.  The team literally gave the crypto away based on the rules laid out in the original signature campaign.  As I said, it was "just a little typing".  You could not buy Onion in the beginning even if you had wanted to do so.

As some others have pointed out, a "Ponzi scheme", by definition, requires initial monetary investment, which is then used to pay the first investors, so those entering last are burned.  No initial investment, other than a little typing was required.  If you're going to call DO a scam, at least be more accurate.

There hasn't been a mandatory upgrade of the wallet in quite a long time.  You may still compile the code from GitHub and have a working wallet.  Later, non-mandatory, upgrades to the wallet, after the introduction of DeepVault are closed to review, however if you do not wish to use that proprietary DeepVault, then, yes, the code is open source.  I think I've used DeepVault once, not a feature I really need, so, if I wanted to simply stake or hold Onion, I could use the open source, if I cared to compile it myself, from GitHub.

I dislike misinformation being spread, and I would like to know if anything I've typed is factually inaccurate.  Once I investigate your claim, I'll happily correct myself.  Now, just for arguments sake, making statements like, "I feel DO is a scam...." is not something I'd even entertain, your feelings have nothing to do with it, neither do mine.  What I want to know is, can you compile a functional wallet from open source for DeepOnion?  Yes, you can.  Therefore it is effectively open source.  Was a monetary / fiat investment required to initially join the "modified airdrop"?  No, there was not, I was here at the beginning.  A minimum is required now, with, nine, I think, rounds left to go, so, break out your Funk and Wagnall's but that fails the definition of a "Ponzi scheme".

Closed versus open source and "Ponzi scheme" seem to be the arguments thrown around the most, and they appear invalid.

That was the last of my merit, but you pointing out the failure of the "one more reason to not trust Onion" lack of research was worth meriting.  Honestly, I'd like to play chess against some of these fellows making these accusations, because they never look more than three moves ahead to actually see if what they are saying is correct, and it is always nice to grab a quick fools mate.

Vod is handsome, to the point of his beauty denying the flowers that dare bloom near him the benefit of the sun.

Ahh, the wisdom that is Chapelle!

I'm neutral on trust, but I feel that it is a flawed system, if for no other reason in that humans are involved and none of us walk on water.  I lurked around this forum for a long time, off and on probably for years, like a lot of others, and then when I got involved in my very first signature campaign here (I had retired and had the time) the very first issue I had was Lauda and I going back and forth over them neg-trusting the campaigns manager.  There has been very little consideration given to those few people who have been slandered.  It seemed to me, that over time the DT system had become a means of a few dictating who and what the users of BTCTalk should see, ostensibly "for their own good".

The trust system has been a very centralized mess in a community that generally touts the buzzword of "decentralized".  Awarding anyone negative trust without first having been in an actual interchange with them, those neg ratings with "I feel" in them, for instance, should be automatically removed and, probably in a perfect world, anyone that uses "I feel" as an evidenciary basis for pruning accounts they don't like seeing in the forum should be removed from Default Trust.

[/quote]Any given forum has to be one language, else it's chaos.  The language here is English and that's not a knock against anyone who doesn't speak it.  But it stands to reason that if one cannot  use the language properly, one will not make good posts and hence will struggle with the merits.  Users on the local boards don't necessarily have to rely on merit source members.  Any high ranked member should have sufficient sMerit to spread around.
[/quote]

Appreciate you reminding me, as I was more thinking of the initial outlay of sMerits we received based on current rank.  Once that supply mostly drys up, or is  at least halved, then I believe we will see a serious stagnation of ranking increases.  Even with receiving the occasional sMerit, this is just an estimate, I'm fairly certain I won't see my next forum rank for about three years.  I'm uncertain if that is the intended result.

Stephen King, a favorite author personally, sells books by weight it seems to me often, and I think he might be merit challenged the way things stand now.

AH sorry, I admit I didn't understand your post at first.  What you are saying is, and please correct me if I am mistaken, is that unless each local language forum, which may be the only place a large number of native speakers post in, has at least one active and engaged merit source, then, the users of that sub-forum will never have an opportunity to gain in rank.

So, I'm sure there is a word out there for a system that is unintentionally biased against non-English speakers.  BTCTalk does give them a local sub-forum to interact in, but then takes away, unless they learn English, their ability to rank up.

I'm old enough to remember when French was considered the international language of diplomacy, and actually was, for a time, the "official" language of the United Nations.  So, if BTCTalk were French in the main, perhaps some of those calling for pushing out speakers of other languages might re-think that. 

I hope, that there does exist, at least one sMerit source in each language that BTCTalk already supports.

"Merit farming", "trust farming", "sig farming", but does anyone actually grow anything anymore?

It's my impression, now that more time has passed under the merit system, the power to award merits is limited to too few people with too narrow an interpretation of what merits being sMerited.  Two sides of a discussion can be meritable, after all, it takes at least two to have a conversation, even if the other side of the conversation is entirely skewed in their opinion from what you believe / know is right.  Objectively, there is merit in disagreement.

That attitude, though I am loving seeing you stretch your usage of English so well, kudos, is precisely what is wrong.  I sincerely hope that you are not a merit source.  To be bigoted against someone because of a language barrier that they are endeavoring to overcome and broaden their horizons is possibly the most non-meritocratically aligned agenda.  Personally, I am a huge proponent of meritocracy, but the very idea of "merit" is subjective and now, destined to be defined by a very limited number of people who are sources in this forum.  This concentration of sMerit power is creating more of an oligarchy than the Default Trust system.

A drip type of system, where every active user generates sMerit over time would be preferable to concentrating sMerit in such a small group.

Of course, we're having a conversation, and in a purely Platonic system, merely the fact that a conversation is taking place is "meritorious" and sMerit sources should, according to the systems design, seek out our posts in this conversation and award them merit equally.  Not because the sMerit source agrees or disagrees with one position or another, but because we add "merit" to the forum by discussing the system.  

(As a funny aside and a jab at myself, I accidentally put Plutonic in place of Platonic, wouldn't Freud have fun with that slip, corrected now though.)

To address a couple of your points, because I find them, confusing.  I certainly did not attempt to shame your mastery of English, on the contrary, I applaud it.  I really thought I was clear on that.  Illiteracy is certainly not a measure of "virtue", and I think I hammered that point home with mention of  Plato in response to your use of the word virtue.  I do not doubt that Platos defining of virtue and my mention of your use of the word is understood.  If you take that as insult, and I can't really see why you would, unless your values are inverted as you state mine seem to be.

I am beginning to get the feeling that if I diagrammed out the double negatives in your response, I'd be more certain I was being "trolled", but as long as my point is not deliberately convoluted and my stance clear that I think the sMerit concentration is ill-advised, then I can handle a little trolling.

Though I am appreciating a lot of the etymological discussion that has gone on before this comment, it is missing something...oh yes, the "Hot for Words" person from YouTube.  I'm going to pretend one of you are her in what I hope, is a disturbing image for that person to be thought of as.

There seems to be a lot of prejudicial thinking against those who lack an absolute or near absolute mastery of the English language.  I hope that impression is not accurate, but seeing the last few pages really harping on "let's get rid of those non-English speaking newbs trying to make a buck, we don't care if they have to start somewhere" indicates to me that it is.

Oh no, a run-on sentence, I am doomed to be judged harshly.

That is the combined hashrate of 15 workers, so, if I had to guess then that is a pretty decently sized farm (and I honestly hope they are able to use biogas to fuel it as that would be truly awesome).  30 to 34 Mh/s for one GTX 1070 and you can work up from there how many cards they are having to run to support the total hashrate.

I don't see why it would be "impossible", as the workers could actually be several different rigs.

Ok, maybe "decently sized" is an understatement, as that would be around 580 GTX 1070's.