Congratulations on the birth of your child, hope mother and child are perfectly healthy. Great to see Bitcoin being used in real life situations and accepted by different professionals.

It would be a cool story to tell your kid in a few years the circumstance around their birth, and maybe how expensive it would prove to be, if Bitcoin continues to rise and does a ×10 or more. Teasing them with how much it costs.

Might be better to keep names and other details private as this forum is privacy designed, except you particularly wish to reveal such information.

I'm in agreement here. Exchanges should never be used as a medium to store bitcoins. You can buy and sell through them, if you do not mind sharing your personal details, but if you're holding for the long term, get a non custodial wallet.

Not in any way I can think of, newly minted coins function as coins which have already been involved in multiple transactions, except in some scenarios their value could be higher by virtue of the fact they are newly mined.
Exchange wallets are just wallets controlled by a central authority (for centralized exchanges).

• I can't think of any others, besides risk of hacks, data leaks and sales of details to the government.
• It should work exactly the same in my opinion.

Feel like giving up on what exactly? Ranking up? Getting merits? No user should be fixated on these metrics.
How about just enjoying discussions and actually leaning a thing or two from the contributions of other members? That does not seem overwhelming at all, or something you need to take some days to calm down from, and it actually benefits more that merit hunting.

Disagreement is not a challenge.
Filter information you get, pick out useful corrections and discard the rest. Also, grow a thick skin along the way.

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P.S, best to edit your second reply into the OP, rather than creating a quote down. Consecutive replies are against forum rules.

I'm in agreement with the bulk of responses here. Sorting replies by merits would be a very bad metric and make it quite difficult to follow discussions, as not all topics are questions requiring answers. It would also be misleading as many replies and topics (helpful or not) go without receiving any merits at all due to where they were posted or how far down the thread they are.

Userscripts are one solution. Another community generated one, would be the OP quoting the most helpful reply to them into the topic. This would be down to the discretion of the thread starter and may not be overall accurate, but could be a pointer to what posts to check out. Or just read through the discussion and filter the replies yourself.

Signatures are like unique characteristics of an account, same as personal text and avatar space. They are being used more often for paid advertising these days, as it is a great way to market a company or business to other forum members.

In time past avatars could be animated and signatures contained images, but with the rise of advertising and all, it made the forum look quite clogged and had to be disabled. You might still see some members with animated avatars, and that's cause they've not changed their avatars since the change was implemented.

• Yes, you can get your unique signature designed for you to match your rank and apply it
• It is only profitable when used to market your business or for paid advertising through signature campaigns on the forum.

This has been suggested many times in the past, IIRC.

How I have come to view the situation; These members who were here before the merit system and before the forum was 'as popular' are partly the reason there's a forum for newer members to register later on.
I had not heard a thing of Bitcoin in 2010 thought to 2016, but yet users kept discussions going on here, donations, moderating, reporting many of such tasks which came with no reward.

Airdropped merits is sort of proof of the effort put in before a certain time and scrapping it out is an extreme action, imo.

Some would argue that there are tons of merit worthy posts made before the merit system which did not get any, cause it was not a thing.
Members went back to merit popular posts and members, but many more replies in random threads went without notice.

For this suggestion to be practical and unbiased, then it would have to apply to all ranks and the perks that come with it;
• One would have to earn 100 merits to be able to wear a avatar regardless of their airdropped merits,
• A member would also need to earn 500+ merits to be able to wear a hero/legendary member styled signature.

This would come with lots of intricacies and unnecessary drama. Meta would likely be spammed with regular tons of garbage complaint posts, plus is would be confusing to explain why a member with a certain rank cannot act in the same capacity as others; This then opens up a discussion about whether or not they should be de-ranked, and by extension de-merited.

A random shitposter joining a scam campaign is not a worthy reason for the admins to open the can of worms that you're suggesting, imo.

Cause the blockchain is completely transparent.

If a hacker breaches a centralizes exchange and transfers Bitcoin from the coldwallet of the exchange into an address the had created, this particular transaction can be tracked as well as the wallet the inputs were sent to, from then on, any other transactions those inputs were used in can also be monitored.

You can do this yourself by visiting a blockchain explorer like blockchair.com

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• Theoretically, you should not get into any trouble as long as you can prove that you had nothing to do with it, with proof of transaction and communication with the other party.
• How to avoid such situation would be by keeping records if your transactions should they be needed.
Also, do not trade directly (physically) with someone except you explicitly trust this person.

When introduced to something, one tends to act according to how it was presented to them until taught otherwise. That seems to be the case here;
Many users are on this forum only for bounties and spam to earn. That is all they know about the forum. If they presented the forum to people, they will teach them to act along those lines. They could even tell them that other sections of the forum does not offer much, and they could even get bashed by other members and tagged merit hunters for posting there, further pushing them to the spam grounds.

This doesn't make them bad newbies per se, they just need re-direction. We all started somewhere and probably saw the forum to be something different from how we view it today.

Firstly, posting consecutively is against the forum rules.

Secondly, learning and earning are all possible here and there are many members who do it, including myself; however during your early stages of the forum, it's advisable to shelve the idea of earning and focus only on learning and growing your knowledge base.
Do not be to desperate to rank up or earn merits, just read and learn as much as you can, find an interest and genuinely enjoy this forum, anything else can come later.

Precisely.
During the era of door to door sales; salesmen have to knock on the doors of tens or hundreds of people, majority of who are not interested in the product being put on sale. Fast forward to today, companies can simply collect datat of what user searched for what product, or who said what in a conversation, market that data to retail services with location of the potential customers and this is just a pinch of what data could be used to do.

I had to quickly use my device to translate the name, and it's quite an odd choice of a username.

I would not however hold it against the user as much; On registering; many users are not familiar with the permanency of their username and consider this to be just another social hangout where you can act on all your whims. Nothing wrong in anyone on those assumptions, except if the user does not actually try to read and understand how the forum works and how it's different from regular social platforms.

If in a couple of months OP applies for change of display name to the admin, they have my support.
Or they could just never log in again, like many newbies who have popped up.

Anyone who needs a decentralized currency to be used on a centralized platform inorder to gain "confidence" could as well keep on using fiat.
Bitcoin is not running a marketing campaign, if you read about it and understand the concept and it interests you, then by all means buy some, of you're not as interested,  do not.

Governments can do what they want. Individual users can choose to use Bitcoin as they wish. There are a many channels through which one can maintain pseudo anonymity.

"They" and "Them" can possibly be used as a singular person pronoun and not only for more than one person. It fits perfectly when you are unsure of the gender of the person you are referring to, be it Satoshi or any other member on the forum.

If I was discussing about Satoshi in a reply, I would start of by mentioning the name somewhere in the beginning of the text and then use "they" or "them" subsequently. For example;

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"Satoshi created a revolutionary technology in Bitcoin, and they did so by combining finance with the blockchain tech, making it possible for them to come up with Bitcoin as it is known today".

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If you are certain of the gender, it's easier to just insert the appropriate one and would be much more understandable to non native English speakers.

Governments do not make sure to secure exchanges, they give you the impression that you are secured by setting bogus regulations and entry barriers to certain industries. The objective of Bitcoin is to give users financial Independence rather than depending on third parties, using centralized exchanges means you are submitting your assets and personal details to a central server, from where it can be stolen or sold.

Once personal data is shared, it should be considered to no longer be personal, regardless of what the other party claims they wish to use it for.
Data is one of the biggest markets and social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google and the rest have loads of it by collecting presumably harmless data to fulfil whatever sign up conditions they set. It has become so much of a norm now, users barely care what is collected and how it is used, or rather they fail to see any danger in their phone number, or web history being tracked and stored.

This is a trend that is not going to stop anytime soon, best to take precautions to protect yourself if you do not want your details shared.

You cannot verify anything with with centralized exchanges, they reserve the rights to change their ToS at anytime and as a user, you have already agreed to any such changes made.
The biggest risks posed by centralized exchanges is not in the case of a downfall, or theft. They could also run an exit scam, or have isolated cases of stolen user funds with no action taken after reports.

The best advice is to basically avoid centralized platforms, particularly for holding funds. There's a much more secure and independent way to store funds in non custodian wallets which gives users full autonomy.

It happens quite a lot; a sort of rehashing of posted content in the hopes of getting merits. We see it with introductory posts being made wey often especially when one seems to be working (by working I mean getting merits). This makes is extremely difficult to decide which member is being genuine with their posts or inquiries.

What I usually do, if I find myself in such a dilemma is to go through the user's post and find out if the user has other useful content on their history and merit those. It might not seem as much, but avoiding meriting a spammer who needs that to rank up and join bounties feels good.

A recovery phrase can be anything between 12 - 24 words in groups of 12, 15, 18, 21 and 24, and not just 12 words. Some wallets only allow recovery in 12 or 24 words only, and there can also be extra customized passphrases added.

I do not think members of the forum would be much bothered about such talk shows or rants, neither are they the target audience. Such naysayers usually target individuals who are not savvy on Bitcoin and who have become so into the traditional system and playing it extremely safe (even though that poses risks).

And I'm not too bothered about such talks; I have a weird opinion that it might actually be good for those who listen to it; If one would blindly believe a TV guest without doing their own research then maybe they should not be into Bitcoin at all, as they would sell out at the slightest bear threat and blame whoever may have introduced them to it for their ruin.

I understand you better now, but I still think theoretically it could be possible for a blockchain version of USD to exists along side the first version.
For such to work, it may be required for transitions between both to be seamless, maybe a built in function on banking apps where one can switch to a CBDC wallet and transfer directly on the blockchain. It would also be possible to use ATMs as normal on a blockchain version.

This of course is a hypothetical scenario and it would be more difficult in actual practice