There has been a problem ever since theymos made the change for Newbies, higher ranking members have been sending a single merit to Newbie accounts in order to allow them to rank-up without earning it. Each of these users have only ever received merit from the suspected Alt, The sender has not sent any merit besides these couple merits and all of the posts that have been merited are now deleted.

It is definitely suspicious, especially when some of these accounts do not have a single post that is visible to the public.
I don't know if they're alts, but I'd be pretty willing to bet that this is abuse.

Only anecdotal evidence. I had my account shut down in this way, BayAreaCoins had their account shut down in this manner and there are many others that I'm unsure if they'd be excited about me sharing their name have been in private conversation with me about their parallel experiences.

They used to send a message like this

At least allowing some time for withdrawal, but recently they've been restricting accounts and funds without any such messages. They were making requests of their customers such as producing 3-months of bank statements for the associated bank account. They were requesting KYC documentation and then still restricting accounts after such documentation was produced.

Long-Story Short, I don't really have a source, but I've been affected personally and I know many others that have as well. I lost an insignificant amount of coin, but there are others that have lost much more.

Silver Finger lot 0.007BTC
Silver Loaf lot 0.007BTC



Nobody likes the number 5, this is how I know you are lying.

Whenever you first wander onto a section of the forum (or any forum) it is often helpful to take a read through the stickied threads.

Please read the following :

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=404191.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=577765.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=119896.0

This should answer all of your questions about this section of the forum. Your question needs to be more direct, because of the open-ended nature of it we are unable to point you in exactly the right direction.

Nobody lends to newbies without collateral, and newbies receive negative reputation for asking without valid collateral.

This user has gotten a handful of negative trust ratings and I doubt they will be bothering anybody in the near future. Thank you for your participation on this one, DT members. I'm sure hilariousandco has taken action on the PM as well since they haven't posted since that day. Locking this thread, not much else to see here.

Silver Finger lot @ 0.005BTC
Silver Loaf Lot @ 0.005BTC

Hopefully I won't be posting any invalid bids this time around. How many Satoris can one person have stashed away?
Any particular reason you're doing them in batches of 5? I can understand doing two batches, pre/post, but why not batches of 2-10 or 3?

If you caught me a few months ago I might be interested, but ever since they started shutting down accounts randomly without explanations or releasing funds I have grown wary of Gemini.
Raffle it off for $1.25 per ticket, I'll buy a couple tickets just for the fun of a raffle.

There is no chance this negatively affects the entire market. I don't even know why you would say something like that. I'd like you to substantiate your claims or don't expect anyone to take them seriously.
Discrimination is necessary, without it there can be no discernment.


Wrong. Almost everybody has given away all of their Merit, which is why there has been a decline in merit-sending in the past few months.
To counter this in an appropriate manner, theymos added more sources and increased the amount many current sources can send.


This tells me you do not understand how Merit works. sMerit and Merit are different.


You're free to try and make money, but you don't get to ruin the forum and community while you do so.
Stop Double-Posting.


Yes. I agree.
The people walking away from this site though, are the people we're happy to see go.

I swear I looked at your quoted highest bids and then incremented above them. Must have just been in a rush, apologies for the invalid bid. Does that make coincrag the winner?

EDIT: I see what I did, for some reason I was just looking at the bottom of Page 1, without realizing the thread had a Page 2, oops. Congratulations coingrag

I'll go ahead and throw down a bid, but I'll be away while the bid ends so it's fair game I suppose.

Pre @ .023BTC
Post @ .019BTC

Fingers crossed, been interested in pocketing a couple Satoris lately.

It might be an interesting experiment if an "anonymous mode" were available or enacted (even temporarily) as an experiment to see how interactions change. This anonymous mode would hide username, trust, merit, activity, post-count and any link to the profile. I wonder if newbies would get treated more fairly or would be dismissed even sooner. In all honesty, members that have been here longer are generally held to a higher-standard to some degree. Whether they are expected to have an elementary understanding of Bitcoin or a more nuanced conceptualization of the rules it is still easier to be a newbie. As long as you are not doing anything malevolent, such as spamming, plagiarizing, scamming or breaking rules then Newbies are treated pretty well, IMO. The only thing they get a bad-rap for is occasionally trying to get involved in auctions or attempting to sell something, but the second they verify they have the funds/goods then they are treated equal. In other words, what I normally see is respect where it is earned, but cordiality at all times unless there has been a misdeed. I think the anonymous mode would work against the newbies, because most do allow you that learning curve.

That being said, too many people are drawn here for the wrong reasons and a lot of they time these users expect the entire forum to change to fit their personality and desires. You can only be so nice.

I am aware there are already dozens of threads addressing this issue, but most of these threads seem to be venting-threads for these newbies. If you are unaware of the new changes, the official announcement thread can be found here : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5030366.0 . In summation, any Jr. Member without 1-merit has been demoted to Newbie and Newbies cannot utilize the signature feature or personal text feature without Copper Membership.

Now, I've already seen endless seas of Newbies complaining about the changes and this to me is a positive sign. Any Newbie with good intentions getting involved in this forum will not mind the changes, especially if they fully understood the situation we've been dealing with. We are only hearing from a loud minority of users that have malicious intentions of abusing our forum for economic gain and these people should be disregarded. Any Newbie concerned about this change can relax, as all you need to do is be a genuine member of the community and you will receive merit. There has been an increase of about 40% in the amount of Merit Sources, and many current Merit Sources have received an increase in the amount of merits they can distribute. 36-New Merit Sources and an increase in the amount of Merit many sources can distribute happening simultaneously with this change tells me something; theymos is not interested in leaving behind Newbie that are genuinely interested in getting involved on the forum. These restrictions will almost exclusively negatively effect those currently abusing the system. The new Merits will then be much more likely to end up on your posts, because your posts will no longer be buried in a sea of spam as those posting are mostly those genuine community members.

Long story short, theymos has shown real initiative towards dealing with our spam problem without harming newcomers, and in fact making their path a little brighter. This is nothing but a good thing for everybody besides those looking to abuse our system. There's nothing for Newbies to complain about. Convince me otherwise

Since you are brand new to the forum and this is your first post it is of utmost importance that you get your book reviewed by at least a couple of people around here. Are you willing to handout a vouch copy to myself or maybe a few others with higher trust and more reputation? I would be willing to read through it and give an honest review that could potentially draw people in, at least they will trust the integrity of the contents more. Being able to predict the market direction 99% of the time and guarantee that permanently is quite a claim that many people would happily buy once they believe it.

In my personal opinion Ravencoin should get a quilt of it's own. Could replace one of the Kings in a few years, if they're not careful. MJ needs to be careful standing on a rolling chair like that, he's going to fall real bad one day.

Let's start the auction off right with no minimum, no reserve and a nice low bid increment; you know it's going to do well, so let us have our fun. Will certainly be watching and hoping to get involved in the auction tomorrow. Are you going to reveal the "Silver" item when you launch the auction or is that going to remain a mystery until the winner receives it?

A huge problem with the campaigns is that the campaign managers being chosen for many of these spamfest campaigns are unaccountable and have low-standards. There needs to be some kind of standard when it comes to campaign management, and that would fix a large portion of it. This is seldom found within the campaigns run by extremely reputable campaign managers, and once it has been sniffed out it is eradicated quickly. Some kind of accountability for campaign managers, standards for being a campaign participant or something along these lines would be very beneficial to the situation.

Centralizing signature campaigns entirely sounds pretty rough, but maybe some kind of regulation on either the participants, managers or campaigns themselves would do equally well.

Before there was paid signature campaigns there was economic incentive to farm accounts. I don't see how you can honestly believe this statement. The opportunity to scam with a Legendary account is economic incentive that will remain with or without paid signature campaigns.

Granted, it would certainly remove a large amount of the economic incentive, but no where near all of it.

The amount of accounts that have earned 1-2 merit is very insignificant when compared against the amount of accounts being registered. The 1-2 merits are already operating as a "check" to some degree. I think it would do equally as much damage to the economic incentive of spammers to remove the ability of Junior Members to have a signature.

I know a couple of extremely talented artists if we are serious about getting some cards made. The artists I know are not members of the community, so I am unsure if that is a demerit. It might be more wholesome to keep the design and manufacturing within the community, but I am unsure how feasible this actually is. If cards are made they should be limited to the most renown, definitely not more than the original 151 Pokemon, maybe some expansion packs can be released in the future.

If nobody else has big plans for this kind of thing I would certainly be interested in heading the project. I wouldn't be able to do it alone, but it is something I'm seriously interested in.

This has happened to me in the past and DT was very good about tagging the account.

I recently received a PM from user (haconghoan89), https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1339290 It reads :




Begging for merit through PM in an attempt to abuse the system. I'm going to mark the account with negative trust, but it may be more efficient for a DT member to do so.


Link to similar situation: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3256586.0
I have reported the PM to Hilariousandco as unsolicated, but I am unsure if this leads to a ban so for reference/action I have posted it.

You could strangle every individual that has a higher rank than you, not necessarily to kill or maim, but just severely enough to leave them incapacitated for 14-days (give or take). Wouldn't that give you a better chance at moving up the Activity rating Ranking? Not a suggestion, but uhh, I wouldn't say there's "nothing" you can do.


You say this as if it is an unlikely scenario. Every activity period increases the chances that those above you will miss an activity period. Once they do, you have an opportunity to gain some traction. This happens very regularly, vacations, disinterest, account sales, illness, etc. The list of reasons that would cause inactivity are endless.

There is a tremendous difference between selling the domains individually and selling the domains as a list. I've already explained why I prefer one over the other, so you are talking nonsense. You think there is no difference between selling a single domain and selling 100's of domains in a single sale and this shows ignorance on your part.

Your post barely makes sense, pretends to suggest something and then acts like my premise is invalid. Do some critical thinking and actually think about what I'm trying to accomplish. You say that I can purchase the domains as if this is some epiphany, when really it's just annoying to hear redundant suggestions that I've already addressed.

I will most likely purchase a handful of the best domains, but that still leaves thousands of high-quality crypto domains without a home or an owner. Your post was so confused and clueless that it is physically hurting me right now.