My point is valid, and does appear to be in relation to this thread.

Two very relevant quotes in the OP:

 

It is disappointing to see OgNasty remove his negative ratings against lauda considering lauda's extortion scheme, escrow transaction in which he was not willing to cover losses his incompetence caused, and his separate escrow transaction in which there are millions of dollars unaccounted for.

RE topic: Obviously not. The current implementation of the trust system is basically the same as the chinese social credit score system. One post is not going to change that.

edit:
This quote is especially relevant:

How frequently is this happening? Maybe you can publish a list of who wiped their list (and who wiped all their inclusions) each week on loyce.club

I have found that it is very difficult to create a good trust list, even if you have only a small number of people on your list. There are a fairly large number of people who I have found that I am willing to trust their ratings, but are very bad at creating a trust list of their own. As you have seen with the very large number of trust exclusions in your trust network, someone with a fairly small list will likely come across a large number of people in their trust network whose ratings they don't trust -- if someone is forced to add enough people to their exclusions, they will eventually give up and go back to using DT.

Merit is supposed to be given to posts that are "objectively high-quality" although the forum will not be directly moderating this, except for merit sources.

If the OP believes someone should not be a merit source, they can start a discussion on the matter. The same is true in regards to someone being on DT1. I posted my opinion above, and I do not think it should be disallowed to discuss anyone's position as either a merit source or being on DT1. If you believe LFC_Bitcoin should be a merit source, and/or on DT1, you should give reasons to back up your case for him having these position.

@LFC_Bitcoin -- your post seems to have disappeared before I could quote it, however this thread is not posted in Meta, and the OP may or may not be CH, but I don't think that matters one way or another. If you believe you should have these positions, you should state why. If your posts with actual arguments are getting deleted, you can create a new, unmoderated thread to state your arguments.

Their TOS say that any dispute between you (their customer) and them are governed by Costa Rica law. I would say chances are they are incorporated in Costa Rica, but this may or may not be the case. I am not familiar with EU tax law, but I read this article, and it looks like European countries tax casino's gambling profits very heavily.

Anyway, I would be surprised if Nitrogensports has an actual office anywhere, and their servers are likely hosted by third parties. I would presume they don't want any of their executives/owners receiving parcels in the mail. It is for these collective reasons that I speculate they will not give you a direct answer.

I don't think the OP is saying he believes LBC_Bitcoin is breaking any forum rules. I believe his argument is that he believes LFC_Bitcoin's posts are collectively not deserving of the 600+ merit he has received, his status as a merit source and his status as being on DT1. 

Yes, someone creating a thread soliciting suggestions for services would get around the "off topic" problem.

My solution above regarding forcing threads to remain unlocked for a period of time would solve most of the problems regarding fake vouches.

You can also open a scam accusation, naming the forum handle, the URL of the service and/or contact information (eg telegram handle), so they will show up on google search results. 

I looked at a handful of LFC_Bitcoin's posts he recently received merit on, and IMO they are probably not merit-worthy. A lot of his recent received merit is from posts in the WO thread. Perhaps he received merit from his friends, or perhaps he received merit because he is a merit source.

I haven't looked into the posts he has sent merit to, so I cannot comment on his being a merit source.

I agree it is bizarre he is on DT1.

If you look at that guys post history, I would say it probably is.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Anarcho_Capitalism/comments/bagpv2/this_is_fine/ekdhf0k/

This clearly was not sorted out. OgNasty posted evidence Vod was using the trust system for personal reasons, and Vod, having a history of removing negative trust when threatened with being excluded from the DT system, was forced to remove the negative trust he left for OgN.

I don't know if the threat of manually excluding a person from DT will ever be made good on. Based on how long this has been going on, I think probably not.

The posts advertising, and vouching for the competitor (or "competitor" if they are alts) would be off topic, and should be deleted if reported.

I do agree there should be limits as to how frequently a thread can be unlocked. Perhaps one solution would be that once a thread has been locked twice in one month that if someone other than the OP makes a post in the thread, it can only be locked 4 hours after it was last unlocked.

I think the current algorithm is to prevent people like you from causing this warning being displayed for non-scammer reasons. 

If you are claiming to be right, I would say that a broken clock is correct for two minutes every day.

What happened to bitfinex does not at all match what you were saying.

The biggest problem with your proposal is UBI. You are proposing a "grossed up" figure of what someone would need to receive to live on the poverty line. However someone living above the poverty line would receive government benefits (welfare):

Medicare/Medicaid pay below (well under) market rates for healthcare, but if these programs are eliminated, those who would normally receive benefits under these programs would need to pay market rates. The annual premiums for an unsubsidized health insurance plan is between $4700 and $12,800 per year (for a single person), depending on, primarily the deductible. At the low end, someone should expect to pay about a total of $5,000 in healthcare costs per year, per person. This would include the cost of health insurance and a small amount of out of pocket expenses. This amount would be for a generally healthy person.

The annual food stamp benefit is around $2,000 per person (based on a 3 person household).

The EITC is ~$3,500 with one child, or about $1,175 (rounded up to $2,000/year) per person assuming two parents and one child. It is ~$5,800 with two children, or $1,450/person with two parents. Budget assumptions need to be at least 1 child/person, otherwise the population would shrink, which would cause other budget problems.

The above three programs alone are valued at approximately $9,000 per year, and it is not uncommon for a working family to be eligible for all three of the above programs.

For someone that is not working, or only earning a very little amount, the additional government benefits will far exceed the UBI amount. Most states pay between $300 and $500/week in unemployment benefits. Assuming a $400/week benefit per working adult, or $200/week/person, (based on two working adults and two children) works out to $10,400/year. Someone on SSDI will receive ~$14,800 per year, or ~$7,400/person (based on two working adults and two children).

The above covers the majority of Federal Welfare spending that UBI would replace. In order for UBI to work the cost of healthcare would need to be added to the annual benefit amount.

The problem with UBI when the majority of a population can work is those on the low end of the income spectrum will effectively be subsidizing those who are "rich". The purpose of welfare programs is to help the needy when they are most vulnerable, not to give money to everyone, regardless of need. Ideally, the government will create circumstances in which the need for various welfare programs is short lives and unusual.

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Taxes -

The biggest owner of land is the federal government, which cannot raise money by taxing itself. I haven't looked into your figures closely, but I suspect the claimed revenue from a property tax is overstated.

The Net Present Value of any asset is the current value (discounted value) of all future cash flows the asset will generate. If an asset will incur additional costs it did not previously incur, then its value will decline, all else being equal. Imposing a tax on real property will cause its value to decline, so you would need to either impose a higher tax rate, or budget for less revenue.

A sales tax is also difficult to enforce, and not all sales taxes due are paid by businesses. If someone is paying in cash (or crypto), a business could simply not report this as a sale, or they could report they gave a non-existent discount to pay less sales taxes. The incentives to do this would be large with a 55% sales tax rate.

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Regulations -

I agree most regulations are harmful, but some are not.

Wage and hour laws (regulations) prevent an employer from offering high wages to employees for temporary work, only to not pay them. They also prevent employers who are going out of business from not paying employees for work performed immidiately prior to the business closing. Probably most importantly, they prevent an employer who has vastly more power than an employee from unilaterally changing the terms of an agreement without real (not forced) consent of the employee after work has been performed.

Child labor laws prevent young children (who lack the ability to understand the consequences of their decisions) from being abused in the labor market, and remove most disincentives of young children from completing basic education, which benefit society in the long run, and will benefit the child greatly in the long run, while only removing a very small amount of benefit to the child in the short run.  

Labor safety laws (OSHA) force employers to provide a safe working environment to employees. Employees generally lack the ability to evaluate the safety of their work on an individual level, and employers frequently lack the resources to pay for judgements resulting from injuries/deaths of employees if something goes massively wrong -- the employer would simply go out of business/bankrupt.

When implemented property, minimum wage laws will prevent employees from being abused during an economic downturn, which will make it more difficult for the economy to recover, which is bad for everyone. The current attempts to make the minimum wage a "living wage" is nothing but harmful to workers.

In general, a regulation that protects a person from themselves is bad, and a regulation that meet the all below criteria are good (there may be others):
*Protecting a person from being taken advantage of by someone with great strength/influence
*Does not unreasonably impede on the free market
*does not prevent a person from entering into an agreement with someone they would normally want to enter into when not under duress.

What you describe would be off topic. You should report those posts and they should be deleted.

It might be a good idea to translate this to the local language when this is displayed in one of the local subs.

edit: it appears there are many marketplace subs in the local sections that do not have trust displayed.

I received the following email from bitfinex, and would like to share it with the crypto community:

Vod doesn’t look very good here. There are a number of concerns about him.

It looks like Vod may have been using his position as a merit source to highlight businesses that he was is negotiations with to sell advertising space with, this is shady at best and amounts to selling merit at worst.

Vod is unwilling to do what is right within the trust system if doing what is right is not beneficial to him.

Most bizarrely, according to what OgN posted, Vod thinks of himself as god:

I cannot imagine anyone who makes this kind of statement ever being taken seriously.

In order to reverse a F&F PayPal transaction that you actually initiated, my understanding is you will need to lie (possibly under oath) to PayPal, which I don’t recommend doing.

Hopefully this isn’t a lot of money for you and you can use this as a way to teach yourself how to better defend against scammers.

It looks like the investigations section allows for self moderated threads. I would think the intention would be to make these threads similar to scam accusations in that people are allowed to respond and self moderation is disabled.