I consider people who say they don't like Bitcoin, enjoy lemons, or disagree with me on any personal matter trolls.

What is and isn't a "troll" is so incredibly subjective that its only definable in the worst of cases, and those people are banned. Being arrogant and telling someone that they can't code isn't trolling, its just like, their opinion man.

I've seen a number of these emails lately, with slightly different flavors. The #1 thing that gets me, is where they say that they have accessed all of your personal data and will release it if you don't pay X in BTC, and then go on to tell you how to buy Bitcoin. Come on now, why would they need to tell you how to buy Bitcoin if the know you've accessed the Bitcoin forum, exchanges, crypto news sites, etc, 27,961 times in the past two years.

If it was worth actually talking to them, I'd say something along the lines of that you are an aspiring porn star, and hope that they can help you advertise or something, maybe some cross collaboration to get your career going.

Theymos' proposal is definitely a step in the right direction I agree, but that doesn't really address the larger problem. It'd be great if people were willing to accept the differentiation between "This person scammed" and "This is a warning sign" categories, but I'd be willing to bet there will still be the same complaints. You'd essentially just be taking all of the controversial negative feedback people have received to this point, and shifting it to the warning category, except in the cases where actual theft has occurred, but I don't see many people contending that type of feedback anyway. I'm under the impression that most people read the type of negative feedback in question here already as warnings and not proof of someone being a scammer, but I could be wrong.

I agree that telling people what they can and can't leave feedback for completely ruins the point. If you can think of a system that allows people to still send negative feedback for spamming, abusive language, or whatever things may be considered "untrustworthy" in some people's opinion, yet isn't weighed the same as, this guy stole my credit card info! That'd be a step in the right direction.

Not that I think its a great thing, but the major rift thats been occurring between the factions of what I'll call forum police and people who don't like the forum police has been interesting. Its been forcing custom trust lists which is a positive thing in my opinion. Default trust really needs to be just default, and then unnecessary after a few months of being here. A guideline for newbies shouldn't be the end all be all that its become for trading with people. I've been a supporter of the default trust system for a long while, and I still am, but thats just because I use it how I imagine it should work.

I wouldn't worry about loading it at all. If its just supposed to be a commemorative coin, just have a design made and voted on or whatever you end up wanting to do, then find someone to mint them for you. Depending on the metal you want to use, and the size, and the quantity you want to produce, I can point you in the direction of a handful of mints.

Part of what makes Bitcoin collectible's outrageous premium is the hassle that is funding each coin. If you aren't looking to make money on the venture, I'd probably recommend against going through the headache.

This is a pretty good example of how all of these theories start. Ohms law is very specific to simple circuit theory using physical conductors. It doesn't apply when you start adding E&M into the mix. P = I*V is power dissipated when moving through a resistive load. You are looking for power from a blackbody source. It doesn't apply when you throw E&M into it. You don't need to trust a physicist on that one, talk to an electrician.

Besides that I'm following the rest of your points. Curious though, where do the neutrinos and muons from the sun come from?

something else to note, earth's magnetic field is an effect of inductive currents through a spherical earth with an iron core, so no the flat earth doesn't have a magnetic field.



All nukes are a hoax? Like, do you believe in the ones that we've detonated on earth?

*edit* One final side note, before you cite any more formulas, do make sure they don't include a 4/3 pi r^3 in the derivation that explains where they come from.

One of the moderator's guidelines is to consider especially carefully before deleting an old post, in other words, unless there is a very good reason to delete it, leave it alone. You probably will be disappointed with your report accuracy score going down. Plagiarism in the way that is against the rules wasn't really something that happened pre signature advertising, so unless you happen across malware or someone posting about selling crack, it'll likely be marked as a bad report.

Right, but my point is that, lets say I agree with you. What about CNSA (China's space agency), JAXA (Japan's), ISRO (India's) etc. Do all of those countries have any ties to Masons, Judiasm, etc? The Nazis were the ones who put a lot of effort into early rockets as people keep posting strange infographics about, why would they be partnering with whoever you are claiming.

On a side note, are they on Richard Branson's side or against him? If Virgin Galactic is offering $250k tickets to space, people will probably be pretty shocked to see that there is no space. It'll be hard to keep the conspiracy going when a trip into space costs the same as a plane ticket.

As I said, I don't care, because it doesn't matter. You are saying NASA is able to control all of the world powers' space agencies, even those that loathe the U.S? Does that include all universities, both domestic and abroad with sophisticated astronomy departments? Do people not see how insane that is? Do you think there is any sort of leader competent of that sort of task, and where would the budget for that come from? Whoever is in charge of keeping that a secret deserves a raise, no matter what their pay is already.

We can't get along with others well enough to be sure we aren't going to nuke each other over a tweet. The world doesn't have the cooperation required to keep people in the dark about something any airline pilot or attendant could let out of the bag.

The only reasonable explanation is that I'm in charge of this conspiracy. It all makes sense if you see how I said that person (me) should get a raise. Alright, I claim responsibility, I am the shadow hand that controls NASA, the astrophysicists, astronomers, weather stations, universities, airlines, model rocket industry, and drone hobbyist. Not evil though, we worship aliens.

(facetious)

Doesn't exist, people don't actually have brains, they have spirit cores that are just a partition on a giant hard drive. Psychology and neuroscience are myths created by the system admins (country leaders) to make you believe in human psychology so that people will attend their state owned universities to learn it. I've never seen a brain, and I'm absolutely not going to believe that those ice cube loving brain surgeons aren't just photo shopping pictures of the flat spirit core to look like a brain.

Prove me wrong?

No, I don't think NASA is evil. I was just conceding a point for the sake of getting onto the next part. I know why they "photoshop" their pictures. Its the same reason why magazines airbrush models. To point out key features and clean up the image so people can focus on what they are supposed to be focusing on. A lot of NASA photoshop is brightening stars so people can actually see them, correcting the colors to make up for red/blue shift, and such. Believe it or not, objects 8.7 billion light years away don't appear all that bright. They don't photoshop the Loch Ness monster in.

Its not really dishonest, but if I wanted to spend all day arguing why their use of photoshop is acceptable, we just get further away from whatever the key issue is, which at this point I've actually forgotten what it is. So I'll just agree that NASA is evil and move onto the other space agencies that no one seems to acknowledge exists. Its reaching the point where any guy with a GED and $200 can observe the shape of the earth, but we'll still have people argue that the sky is brown.

Science cannot coincide with religion, though that doesn't mean they can't coexist. Science doesn't rely on faith, so if you start making assumptions based on faith, there is no point trying to prove anything with science. People are absolutely free to believe whatever they want, and I'm not here to change anyone's mind. I've posted a few times in this thread for the people who are genuinely skeptical and would like some information. I don't debate flat earth believers anymore than I attempt to convert Mormons to something else.

If anyone has any real unified theories that can be tested and prove that the earth is flat, even if its not, you are probably going to win a Nobel prize for accidentally discovering something in applied mathematics at the very least. Stay crazy and stumble across something useful!

There is no point in voting on forum polls when people have multiple accounts. But it'd be more effort to remove a default feature from SMF than to just leave it. Polls are fine as they are for topics that don't matter. For example,

"Hey guys, I might sell some of my mining hardware, I've got X. Would anyone be interested in it? If so, I'll go pick it up."

People probably aren't going to spam fake answers just to make the guy drive to wherever their mining hardware is hosted just for a laugh, so the poll results could be a good indicator of whether its worth going to pick them up.

On the other hand, " Hello, this is an official vote to see who thinks that this person is a jerk" probably wouldn't be a very useful poll because people will cheat the system, vote on multiple accounts, etc.

If you want more accurate results, you need people to actually post, so you can selectively interpret individual input. Being able to filter by rank, merit, and trust would do pretty well at identifying individuals who voted, so why not just require them to post.

I'm curious why everyone is always talking about NASA. Lets just agree that they are evil and move onto the next point, what about the dozen other prominent space agencies in the world, and all of the less prominent ones? Then we can move onto astronomy departments all over the world, and then the slightly smaller ones at universities, and then the hobbyist ones.

Which ones are evil if you don't mind me asking?

So your grievances are:

1) DT doesn't have rules and people abuse that
2) Merit is all owned by a handful of people
3) Lack of Moderators and only "unofficial" rules to go by.


I've never personally been a huge fan of DT or Merit, however it all does have its uses. First off, you make claims that DT has harmed more people than it helped, but what are you basing that off of? Are you basing that off of the 50 threads in meta where people are complaining about the DT system, versus the 0 you see about newbies who have avoided scams and are so grateful that they posted about it? How do you know that DT isn't helping people out?

I'm personally of the opinion that DT should be completely ignored by the time you've spent a year here and have formed your own opinions on who to trust. The fact that 5 year veterans here still care about it is a problem with the community, not the system itself. If you've done 50 BTC in trades, who cares if you get negative feedback for getting into a fight with some guy. If you are an honest trader, you are an honest trader, if you aren't trading then what does it matter anyway? If you get labeled as a scammer wrongfully before you have a business history built up, use escrow. Thats how things always were before DT, it shouldn't be any different now, just because theres a tool in place to help out newbies who don't know any better.

Merit and account rank are 100% absolutely nothing problems. Account ranks are a SMF default setting, and they probably got carried into this forum just because its customary for forums to have rank designations. With the exception of the post limitations on newbies that aren't all that hard to remove, what is the difference between a member and a legendary member? Is it negligibly more difficult to send 50 pms over the course of 30 minutes, yes, but besides that your account rank means nothing. If you want to point out signature advertisements, once again thats a community issue not a forum issue. Why are we fighting for brownie points one way or another, just carry on and discuss bitcoin, and your post will eventually be of some use to someone, who'll thank you with a merit.

Sometimes the moderation team gets swamped with reports. Sometimes its so tedious sifting through the people snitching on each other because they used the H E double hockeysticks word, that legitimate reports get buried. Report something for illegal content and its removed quickly. Report someone for slandering your good name, and it'll most likely be ignored, or take a while if its real spam that a moderator needs to read four pages of discussion to figure out if its spam or if there is any grounds to the claim.

The list of "unofficial" rules are in all sense of the word, the official rules. They are called that so people can't just try to bypass them on technicalities. If one of the unofficial rules was that you cannot use Satoshi's name in vain, people would say S@toshi, or use some code word or whatever. Under steadfast rules they might get away with that. Give the moderators some room to use real human reason, and they'll say, saying Satoshi and S@toshi are the same thing.

I get it, its probably frustrating to end up on a little posse's bad side. I see weird groups of people forming and it escalates. People like conflict, otherwise you'd just ignore them when the fighting started.


TLDR:

1) DT is only useful for newbies, otherwise ignore it.
2) Merit is also only necessary for newbies to lift PM and Post restrictions. No one cares if you are a full member or legendary member, and if you care about signature advertising, thats your problem, its not an official sanctioned feature of the forum.
3) Moderators are busy, stop reporting petty bullshit and snitching in retaliation someone says something you don't like, and report spam, illegal activity, things in wrong sections, etc if you actually want to help clean up the forum.
4) Unofficial rules are the official rules, think of them like that and you'll be fine.

If it doesn't sell, we'll talk. I've got about another week until things are operational.

I'm tempted to buy the 100 oz bar and make a 100 oz finger out of it...

The problem is people with not enough information, interpreting things incorrectly and then spreading their incorrect conclusions to others who can't interpret the information. I can walk someone through every single step of the MM experiment with an explanation of why each part is done and how it works (I'd be happy to do so for those actually interested!), but there will still be misunderstanding about it if you aren't at least a doctoral candidate. Relativity isn't something you can understand on your own unless you are a Hawking/Einstein level genius. Universities do not have full time staff teaching Relativity because its such a complicated subject, there are not many people who are qualified to teach it. Then people screech, well! Its an inside scheme by those professionals to keep us from learning the truth! The same can be said about surgeons and other professions with high levels of training required. You can't watch 20 hours of youtube videos and perform surgery.

I don't claim to know it all, but MM can be explained with a basic understanding of 1. Why Galilean transformations do not apply. 2. Why Lorentz transformations are required. 3. A bit of math 4. A bit optics. If you have have had Newtonian physics and understand transformations, you can understand why the MM experiment confirmed that there is no ether, why E&M waves do not require a medium, and I guess by some derivation from there why the earth is round?

@notbatman No worries, believe what you want and just ignore my posts, I'm just chatting with the people who are skeptics or those interested in confirming their own understanding. Find what works for you.

Right, which is why I'm asking, what corrections can we do to make sure that the observed event is mutually agreeable. Come to me with a list of must haves and we'll see if we can't get it done.

Can we as people from this Bitcointalk thread just launch a high altitude weather balloon already? If I offer to build it, and get clearance to release it under mutually agreed upon terms, can we just all take a look at what it'd show, or would it call into question whether I doctored the photos?

If its possible for us to come to an agreement on this, what needs to be done to make it acceptable proof of whatever we end up witnessing? If no one will trust me to not throw a special lens in or to doctor the footage before showing it, any skeptics interested in building their own to prove it to themselves and posting results?

https://www.wired.com/2010/02/spacebridge-diy-balloon/

It'll cost about $200 all in to build a balloon like this for anyone interested. This is really sort of ridiculous, this is something that can be confirmed with $200 and a Youtube education. Its more expensive to experimentally determine the melting temperature of copper than to get a camera high enough off the ground to look at the earth.

Merit sources are the only ones bound to rules, people are free to do whatever they want with their own merits if they are not a merit source. If User A wants to give User B 500 merits for liking lemons (sorry had to do it) they are free too, because they earned the SMerits they have. If they are using the Smerits given to them by the forum as a pillar of the merit system to award to people for reasons laid out before applying as a merit source, they are held to higher scrutiny.

Example: Merit sources cannot sell merit. Non merit sources can sell merit, but people will negative tag them.

Are any of these people merit sources? Otherwise, merit "rules" don't apply.