Place your bets.

The umpteenth thread complaining about the merit system?

The umpteenth thread complaining about how bad the forum or one of its sections is?

A shitcoiner scammer complaining about being banned and having suspicious links removed?

The umpteenth thread on banning signature campaigns?

An application to be a merit source that is a joke?

An AI spammer publishing an AI generated complaint thread and people replying to it seriously without reading the posts that show it's a text generated by AI?

A Hero, almost Legendary member asking a BS question?

A guy who begged for red tags and achieved 13 complaining about how wrong the DT system is?

A scammer, spammer and ban evader who doesn't understand what is going on?

An application to be a merit source for shitposters?

A BS merit source application?

And I think I could have listed a few more, but I'm getting tired now.

Let's have a friendly discussion.

The hottest topic on the forum where people post nonsense is the one mentioned in the title. It is very easy to write generic garbage after you have watched a couple of Saylor's videos.

I'm creating this thread as the basis for my report because, in some other issue I had a report marked as bad, and after a while another member reported the same issue for the same reason and action was taken. So I prefer to give a detailed explanation here as a basis for my report now because I think if I just give write sentence on the report box, action probably won't be taken.

Having a report market as bad doesn't bother me, what concerns me is that appropriate action is taken.

To summarize briefly, on June 1, Strategy reported that it had sold 32 bitcoins, and shortly thereafter the price began to fall rapidly. One could debate whether there is a cause-and-effect relationship or not, but the most likely explanation—and the one on which there is the greatest consensus—is that the announcement of that sale triggered the price drop to $60,000.

Well, here we have a guy who starts a thread with a wall-of-text OP on the basis of the exact opposite:

Don't mistake the move from Microstrategy as Panic selling.

This is a low-value thread that, if it starts off with that kind of nonsense, is going to be filled with BS low-value comments.

I think that, at the very least it should be locked if not trashed directly.

Ok, so I want to ask the community about something that happened to me recently.

I deposited $50 to try out a casino. I started playing slots at $0.40 per spin, and after just about 20 spins, I got lucky with some free spins and had $270 in my account.

What would you have done?

Keep betting to see if the streak continues?

Withdraw it all?

Or withdraw part of it and keep playing? If you chose this option, please specify how much you would withdraw and how much you would leave to play with.

I'll run the poll for three days. When it finishes I'll tell what I did.

I put the word “achievements” in quotes because I've never been one to pat myself on the back for so-called achievements on the forum. Recently, in another thread, I reflected on my history here and my possible “achievements” on the forum.

I also hit my 10,000th post this year. Since I tend to think in terms of orders of magnitude, the next significant milestone would be 100,000 posts, which I won’t reach.

I think the only milestone I’d still have a shot at reaching would be making it into the top 100 in earned merit. Same thing there—for me, the next milestone would be making it into the top 10, which isn’t going to happen.

Reaching 20,000 posts or being 90th in earned merit is cool, but it’s not nearly as cool as when you move up an order of magnitude.

On February I wrote my 10,000th post.

And now I've realized I've reached 100th position on earned merit:



I know I might temporarily dip down to 101, but I think the trend will be to continue going up.

So, rather than a celebration, it’s more of a reflection. I don’t have much technical knowledge, though I know quite a bit more now than when I first joined the forum. I’ve been in many heated debates, and I’m not exactly the nicest person to debate with. I’ve defended political ideas that aren’t very popular these days, and that’s exactly why I changed my username.

And even so, I think I’ll leave my little mark on this forum.

So if anyone sees the journey on the forum, accumulating Bitcoin, or any personal project as a mountain, remember: slow and steady wins the race.

So, let's address the elephant in the room here.

Bitcoin is a digital asset that was created as a peer-to-peer currency and as an alternative to governments and central banks' debt-based fiat money.

I often see people talking about Michael Saylor and his company, Strategy, with little understanding of the subject, but without addressing what I believe is a crucial point: what he is doing is completely contrary to the very purpose for which Bitcoin was created.

I haven’t seen anyone address this issue, and I think it’s high time someone did.

Bitcoin has a hard cap of 21 million coins. Period.

In contrast, what Michael Saylor is doing is creating a debt system (using so-called “digital credit”) based on the Bitcoin he buys. Not only that, but based on the Bitcoin he buys, he’s printing shares like there’s no tomorrow, just as central banks do.

Currently, his company holds 843,738 bitcoins, but let's see how many shares his company has issued so far:

https://www.strategy.com/shares



Notice that those are in '000s. So, when you see 332,056 class A shares, there are actually 332,056,000, so 332 million shares. Those are only the class A shares and in that picture preferred shares are not included. Notice also the growth in each reported date. In other words, he’s taken a finite asset and is printing shares in a potentially infinite manner—and based on faith, too. At first, that faith was that MSTR would always trade above 2 mNAV; then, that Bitcoin would have a 30% CAGR over the next 20 years; and lately, he’s scaled that back to 2 or 3%.

In other words, in the end, faith boils down to the fact that no matter what happens, Saylor’s move will pay off.

His latest move—the STRC preferred stock he’s been promoting so heavily—is the ultimate expression of this. It involves issuing more and more STRC shares. Currently, there are over 100 million shares outstanding.

So, I am arguing here that no matter how much Bitcoin he buys, printing potentially billions of shares to buy Bitcoin is totally contrary the original intent behind Bitcoin's creation, and the same goes for digital credit, no matter how much he wants to praise Satoshi.  

If anyone wants to see the best critical analysis of the company that has been done recently, they can watch these two videos.

How MSTR Can Go To Zero

More Thoughts On Michael Saylor and Strategy

The guy who makes the videos isn't just anyone—he's a hardcore Bitcoin enthusiast with extensive technical knowledge who was once praised by Saylor and who conducts a thorough mathematical analysis of the company, while also highlighting Saylor's many contradictions.

If anyone wants a summary of the videos, just enter the URL into Gemini, and it'll summarize them for you in a flash.

If you don't know much about the subject, it's normal to have thoughts like that from time to time. What isn't normal is starting threads on the topic without doing any research at all and then acting all high and mighty when someone calls you out on it.

Just looking at here, and a bit of reasoning you wouldn't ask such stupid questions.

https://www.strategy.com/purchases

Point 1: Strategy currently holds 843,738 bitcoins.

Point 2: The cost basis vs current price is at about break even. Average BTC cost is $75.700, whereas current price is $76.500.

Point 3: Weeks with particularly strong buying activity Strategy reports 20,000-plus bitcoins bought.

Point 4: If the price drops, you’ll be able to buy at a lower price, but your holdings will lose value as well. No matter how much you buy in a really good month—say, 80,000 bitcoins—your total holdings of 843,000 will be worth much less. So, if the price falls by 50%, you will buy 80K bitcoins cheap but your total bitcoin holdings will be on an unrealized loss of 45% or so.

Point 5: It is precisely when prices fall that Strategy has the hardest time raising liquidity to make purchases.

Conclusion: you are a retard.

If we look at the end of the chart, I think it clearly indicates FOMO, and as we might expect, it seems that this is at least partly due to AI-related stocks.

Nasdaq: Composite Surges to All-Time High of 26,247 as AI Stocks and Strong Jobs Data Fuel Record Rally

The problem with a chart like this is that you don't know when that near-vertical trend is going to end.

In comparison, if we look at Bitcoin’s price chart over the past few years, it has underperformed slightly, and there’s no sign of FOMO anywhere.



But in any case, it breaks with the past trend in which Bitcoin outperformed the Nasdaq over five-year periods.

What do you think? Could there be a bubble in AI stocks that might burst in the future? If that happened, would it benefit Bitcoin?

So, a guy appears on the forum with the following thread:

CryptCard — Virtual Visa/Mastercard | No KYC | Instant Issue | $1

Several forum members raised objections, which you can see in the thread. See this one for example:

Why are you claiming to have service operating for 7 years since 2017, when we can clearly see your domain is registered just few days ago?
There is also some bogus claims about ''trust bank'' and claims about connection with trust wallet.
I see so many red flags with this websites and I would suggest everyone to stay away and not connect any wallets.

The guy hasn’t bothered to reply, despite being active until the 24th, so I think the best course of action is to create a flag so that newbies and unregistered users are warned.

The flag: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;flag=3524

[Fundraising to benefit a community has been permitted on the forum without requiring prior approval.]

Following on from this thread

CHILDRENS DAY OUTREACH PROJECT.

The question occurred to me. I stated the following:

Every charity program or project should be approved, to avoid future legal cases.

It was very likely not allowed as when yahoo62278 made his thread, initially he did not ask for donation and there was no donation address in his thread, but later community supposed him to add the donation address. He did added it, but hours or a couple of days later, forum admin or moderator PMed him and asked him to remove the donation address.

My story and where it is now.....

Locking this now. Was sent a pm by a mod asking me to remove the addresses. Unsure where I broke a rule, but not worth the argument either. No longer in the hospital and any bills that come i'll figure out. It's not the forums problem. Thank you all for reading and to those who helped TY!!!! Biggest thing to take from this whole thread is make sure you are keeping up on your health. You never know what you might detect early just by getting regular check ups.

The difference is that yahoo62278 was asking for money for himself, not for other people, which is considered begging.

Fundraising to benefit a community has been permitted on the forum without requiring prior approval.

Is what I've put in bold correct?

Because I'm sure I'm not the only one who's received it.

Hi, can you loan up to 0.2 btc?
If yes what collateral do you require?

I've anonymized the username of the person who sent this to me because, he doesn't break any rules and offers collateral, but a PM like this seems suspicious as fuck.

Let’s just call a spade a spade. STRC is the hot product from Strategy, Michael Saylor’s company, which is currently paying an 11.5% dividend based on a fairy tale.

The premise when the product was launched last year was that Bitcoin would appreciate by 30% CAGR over the next 20 years, and of that 30%, Saylor would use his Bitcoin purchases to smooth out volatility, allocating approximately 10% to pay dividends on the preferred shares—including STRC—and the remaining 20% would go toward increasing the value of the common stock.

This is total BS for one very simple reason: with the buying strategy Strategy has executed—which has consisted of buying heavily when the price skyrocketed and little or nothing when it fell—the return on those purchases is much lower than the asset’s return. Currently, Bitcoin’s cumulative return over the past 5 years is 16%, which is just a 3% CAGR (far from what Saylor is predicting) while Strategy has a negative return on its Bitcoin purchases of 12%.

The numbers are just too shocking, which is why I've started a separate thread.

Saylor can keep paying that dividend as long as there are people who buy whatever he issues without thinking much. Do you know how it can pay dividends? From new investors who buy more STRC or MSTR. In other words, he needs new buyers of STRC to pay the dividends to those who already own the stock. Does that sound familiar to you?

You can see an example of his usual salesman BS that people swallow without thinking much here, where he makes a shoddy comparison of STRC with assets that aren't comparable.

Lately, I've come across a few cases of people writing things that lack basic requirements of proper posting to the thread discussion, which is not uncommon in this forum, but they also get paid for them because they are participating signature campaigns.

I think we could centralize all such cases in this thread for actions such as neutral tags.

The latest case I've encountered is this one:

It pains when your money is locked up in place where you can't access it, and  frankly speaking $5,000 is a huge amount, so I feel your pains. But there are things we need to consider before accusing a casino of anything. Although I don't gamble with betfury but am sure multi accounting is not allowed on their platform, and this was clearly stated on their platform too.

According to you, you opened an account before and forgot it, and you went ahead to open another one on the same betfury that clearly stated on their platform that multi accounting is not allowed. Please note, am not here to defend betfury, instead to educate you on how casinos operate.

From the casino's end what you did is called policy violation. You broke one of their rule by opening more than one account, even though your intentions was clear. And despite you never deposited on that account nor gamble with it their rules were clear, multi accounting is not allowed and you broke the rule. So Instead of accusing them wrongly there are others ways Case like this can be handled. I will leave with this thread I created few days ago.

He is basically writing the second comment on the thread to something that the OP has not said. The OP did not say that he personally had $5K at the casino, nor did he say that he had registered beforehand; quite the contrary.

I deliberately drew his attention only to the first point, he came back and edited the post, but missed the second point. Here is what nutildah says:

It seems he kind of skimmed the post without fully digesting it. This person has a habit of drive-by shitposting. I'm surprised they actually returned to edit the post, but its still wrong.

According to you, you opened an account before and forgot it, and you went ahead to open another one on the same betfury that clearly stated on their platform that multi accounting is not allowed.

That's also not what was said.

So, I was thinking of going through his post history and if I see other similar cases, I'll tag him as a shitposter. But first, I'd like to ask the community what you think.

Another recent case was this one:

in a subsequent time the price of Bitcoin will decrease more because...

It is almost certain that Bitcoin will continue to fall when the stock market opens tomorrow...

Those are great shitposts. You couldn't bother to look at the price before writing? I guess you are used to getting paid for writing garbage so it doesn't matter to you.

When the bombings began, the price fell by 4%, but when it became known that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed, the price recovered and has remained flat compared to before the bombings.

You should be ashamed of writing like that.

However, in this case neither of them returned to the thread to edit the posts or anything.

I'm sure that if I look through their post history, I'll find more garbage posts like those.

But here I'm wondering the same thing: if I just leave them a neutral tag, we'll have drama with PMs and/or in this section, and since I'm quite fed up with it lately, I can't quite make up my mind.

That's why I wanted to open this thread to see what you think. It could be approached in a positive way: if someone gets exposed here but edits his posts and improves in the future, nothing happens, but initially, with three such shitposts, he could be given a neutral tag as a shitposter.

Come on, for those of you who hate Trump, here's a thread where you can vent to your heart's content. Let's go.

It is not that Trump has directly sold Bitcoin that he personally owns, but rather that a company controlled by him and his sons has done so.

Donald Trump’s WLFI Sells $5M Bitcoin, Vitalik Buterin Sells $7M Ethereum — Why Are Bulls Not Buying?

Let us recall what he said in the past.

Trump says "never sell your Bitcoin" #hodl

Let's remember that Eric Trump is friends with Michael Saylor, another guy who's widely known for spreading the same message although a few months ago he also changed his stance on this.

In the end, it's clear that you can believe at most half of what a politician says, and the same goes for someone who is trying to sell you something.

With little time left before the end of the year, I hereby name Satofan44 the biggest moron at Bitcointalk.

Over the years, I've seen people of questionable character, scammers, liars, conspiracy theorists, etc. on the forum. But when it comes to being a moron, Satofan44 takes the cake, and by a long shot.

The good thing is that in the end it's turning out to be fun. I'm enjoying making fun of this idiot and then not even reading the nonsense he replies with.

Some people say “don't feed the troll,” but I think it's much better to make fun of the troll, especially a clown like this one.

I'm opening this thread so you can get it off your chest about this jerk.

It goes without saying why he's the biggest moron, but in case anyone isn't familiar with the case, here's a summary: he's a guy with an oversized ego who insults a lot, is racist, and has also dedicated himself to red tagging half the forum, in many cases completely unjustifiably and giving lessons on how the DT system should work when he hasn't even made a trust list himself.

So, I’ve been hearing about a theory that would explain why this year Bitcoin hasn’t gone up despite almost everything doing so (gold, silver, real estate, stock market).

According to the theory, large Bitcoin holders are selling call options on Bitcoin to obtain income. This is how it works:

Let’s say I own 20,000 Bitcoin and want to obtain income. I can take 10,000 Bitcoin and sell covered calls. Today, BTC price is around $88K. I sell covered calls with a strike price of $100K with a 1-month expiry. If the price keeps below $100K I keep my Bitcoin and earn a premium. If the price reaches $100K I must sell my 10,000 Bitcoin stash that I put for the covered call.

This may seem risky thinking that I only have 20,000 Bitcoin but I may have 50,000 or 100,000 Bitcoin and sell covered calls with just 10 or 20% of my holdings. Only the 10,000 Bitcoin that I put up for covered calls are a part of the trading volume, thus affecting the price. The rest of my holdings don’t affect the price.

You don’t need to make a great mental effort to see how this suppresses upside price action.

I have seen this theory commented on different places but just to provide a link as reference here is one.

Bitcoin Long-Term Holders Suppress Price Through Covered Calls, Says Market Analyst Jeff Park


What do you think about it?

Sorry for the clickbait, as he is not my alt but when I've seen the merits I've remembered that my friend AB de Royse777 had suspicions about us being alts.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5268322.msg54980851#msg54980851

Between these 14 and one I've gotten later on, I see that I have the round figure of 3,000 merits, which looks nice.

I don't know why you decided to give me 14 merits for that post airfinex, but in any case, thank you. It reminded me of my first tag on the forum (which people can see in my next message in that thread).

I don't know if anything similar has ever happened to you, receiving what I would call weird merits. The closest thing that has happened to me would be discovering that JJG recently gave me a merit for a post written like six months ago on page 4 or so of a thread.

Since I see many people with a pessimistic view of this forum, I'm going to give mine.

I first registered on a forum a couple of decades ago. During this time, I have seen forums degenerate, and even some die, yes, literally die. I started to visit a forum like a decade ago, and I could see it dying. One day you notice fewer posts being written. Another day you notice that the last post in the main section was written three days before. A few months go by, and you can see that the last post was written ten days before. It was someone asking a question and obviously did not get an answer. Then, you never visit the forum again and just suppose it no longer exists.

In contrast, the traffic on this forum shows it is very much alive

But this forum isn't just about traffic; it's also about quality if you know where to look. I don't know if some of you think a forum is a dissertation on a doctoral thesis. There's garbage on forums because in many cases people say the first thing that comes into their heads without thinking too much or reading much of what has been written before. But if you want quality discussions, you find them, or you can start them yourself.

But there are many complaints about this because the general belief is that if someone is paying you, you must write high quality content. That's not necessarily the case. If the company paying is allowed by the forum administration and both the manager and the campaigners follow the rules, I don't see a problem. And if the company is paying for advertising that supposedly does not give it a return, that is its problem.

If you see problems with this forum, you'd better check out shitcointalks to compare, as it seems you're losing perspective.

This forum has allowed and continues to allow people who are simply curious about Bitcoin to learn a lot over the years, interact with others, and even make friends.

A very important feature here is that there is no censorship, let alone by algorithms, which means there is a sense of freedom that you don't find on other sites.

The most important thing for me is that the level of engagement I have achieved in discussions here is something I have not achieved anywhere else. Nor has the feeling of belonging to a community. And it probably has a lot to do with the fact that here, if you meet certain requirements, you can get paid to write. They pay you to write, you spend more time here, you get more involved, you learn more, you contribute more, and when you realize it, you see that you've been here for years and that the forum has influenced your way of thinking and become part of your life.

I still visit some other forums, and I can tell you that this one is at least as good as any of them. I personally think what I’ve said in the title: this forum is fucking awesome.

Well, I've gotten that off my chest now. With so much pessimism around, I wanted to take my time to express what I think because sometimes I see your opinions and it seems to me that we're two different forums.

So, history keeps repeating. Some of you who have SODL recently are the same type of wimps who SODL in similar times in the past.

Yes, this year is proving disappointing in terms of what was expected due to the supposed regularity of the cycles, but the price drops a little, you panic and rush to sell.

Do you think those who sold after the Mt. Gox bankruptcy were thinking about the regularity of the cycles? No, they panicked just like you did without thinking about the bigger picture.

The same thing happened in 2018. In December 2017, the price almost hit $20K after starting the year at less than $1K, and you wimps started buying at the peak because it looked like the price was going to reach $100K in two months. But those two months later youse started selling in panick.

Same thing for 2020.

Just look at the history and you'll see that people that benefited the most are those who HODL during these times or even BYU.

With the recent price behavior, which many people say is the beginning of a bear market, I wonder if you've already shit yourselves and are thinking about selling. Especially the short-term traders.

The truth is that we are entering uncharted territory because what is happening this year breaks the pattern of previous cycles.

It would also be good to know if anyone is going to short Bitcoin.

With the ray of hope brought by victories such as that of the great leader Zohran Mamdani, it is high time that Bitcointalk took a step towards social justice. It is unfair that some privileged members of the forum, who've had some unfair advantage, earn so much and others so little or nothing. To address this, the most reasonable solution is to impose a fee system for signature campaigns and avatars that exist on the forum so that this money can be redistributed to the most disadvantaged forum members.

The system I propose is as follows: a minimum exemption of $20, on which no tax is paid. From $20 to $50, a 30% tax is paid. From $50 to $100, a 45% tax is paid. And anything in excess of $100 pays a 60% tax.

These are reasonable income tax brackets that resemble those of advanced countries with a high quality of life, such as Denmark.

I hope my left-wing friends on the forum will lead by example and enthusiastically support the idea.

Now, how about redistribution?

Some might consider establishing criteria to prevent abuse of the system, such as requiring recipients of redistributed income to have a minimum level of merit and/or activity.

But to those who think that, I say you are fascists. No human being is illegal. Therefore, the forum must remain open so that anyone can register and benefit from this redistribution.

I am also sure that my friends who support open borders policies will logically also support this great idea. The massive influx of new accounts to the forum can only be positive.