Ah...now I get it.  I think I might have been sleepwalking when I made the last two posts in this thread.  That's my excuse anyway, lol.

It isn't that big of a deal if I didn't understand, and I didn't mean to make it one so I apologize if it came off that way. 

There were a lot of members who ranked up this past month, and they must be humble ones since they're not posting in this thread.  I want to congratulate them anyway, and publicly, because it isn't easy to earn enough merits to get to the higher ranks here.  Everyone who's even gone from Jr. Member-->Member has worked hard to do so (and, though I hate to be a party-pooper, it only gets harder and harder from that point on).  Viva la merit system!!

OP, are you familiar with the history of the merit system, i.e., when it was implemented, what the forum was like beforehand, and why Theymos created it?  It doesn't sound like it, but you'll probably get all the answers you need from the replies here and I suggest you read them all. 

My answer to the above is that there were tons of Legendary members prior to the merit system (before Jan. 2018), and they didn't have to earn merits to get there.  Any member who was below that rank on the day Theymos came down from the mountain and bestowed upon the shitposters, account farmers, and all the assorted reprobates his tablets of merit requirement, they immediately had to earn merits in order to get there.  If you were a Hero member the day before and were right about to rank up, you then had to earn 500 merits to get to Legendary. 

Obviously it was, and still is, much worse for newcomers to the forum.  But to your second statement above, anyone can contribute whatever they want, whenever they want.  That's not exclusive to Legendary members.  Nobody needs to rank up.  That's a requirement people put on themselves, usually because they want to maximize their campaign/bounty earnings.

Not sure what sections you frequent most, but there are plenty of Legendaries posting all the time.  Sure, many of them who've been members for years are less active, but that's to be expected.  People lose interest or have less time to participate in discussion forums all the time.  And once more, it isn't necessary for anyone to post, earn merits, or anything else on bitcointalk.  Members you see posting very rapidly or very prolifically are usually shitposters trying to hit their campaign's post quota for the week.  Again, those are usually the members with the least to say.

I think there's an ANN thread somewhere, but their website (or at least for the fundraising part) is here.

I've gone over the contents of the entire site, but as I was just doing a proofreading and making suggestions, I didn't retain details about the overall picture of how much money they're trying to raise.  10BTC is indeed a lot; I'll have to go back and look to see for myself what their goals are as far as that's concerned.  

What they want to achieve is all spelled out on their website, though, and probably in their ANN thread (I think one exists, anyway).  They're trying to start up a crypto casino review site and form partnerships with, I think, advertisers.  The fine details of their business plan, I have no idea about.

Same here to the first part, and though I'm not part of the team if I suspect anything scammy, I'll blow the whistle faster than a ref with his eyes on a goofy NBA rookie.

Edit: CC has their IBCO page where they're looking for investors (revenue-sharing partners), but I don't see where they've laid out a goal of how much bitcoin they're trying to raise.  Maybe I need more coffee--and I also haven't re-read their website, either.

Full disclosure: I've been helping to edit the Casino Critique website, and although I'm not part of their team I am involved in this, and therefore my reputation now that I've announced it.  I'm not fact-checking, just editing for grammar and the like.

IMO making a big deal out of who's behind the official CC account is a waste of mental energy, because as I said previously the team members (in other words, the people who'd have their feet under the fire if the project turned out to be a scam) have made their identities known.  If you're going to focus on anything, it ought to be who has control over any funds CC has received so far--and I don't have an answer to that.  To my understanding, no decisions are going to be made about use of funds without the 2-of-3 sig security thing in action, so if you're already starting to point fingers, the targets of said fingers are already there.

Also: I happen to believe that there's no intent to scam investors with the CC project.  I think the members behind it really do want to create a casino review site that's going to succeed.  That said, I do understand the skepticism by OP and others (though I think it's overblown given that the team members are listed by name on the CC website).  This isn't exactly like that case we had a while back where some relatively trusted members misused charity funds.  This a group of forum members whose reputations are worth something to them and likely worth more in potential or actual money than they could get by pulling off a scam by colluding to pull in investment money for a fake casino review site.

I've been wrong before, but my gut and my experience is telling me I'm right on this one.

To be fair, I rewatched it recently so it was fresh in my head when I made that post.  But I'll tell ya, I rented that movie when it came out on VHS at a Blockbuster Video near me.  Anyone remember them?  Anyone?  *crickets*

You can't possibly leave Theymos out of any list of influential forumites, now can you?  As much as I've shouted into the void at him in the past, he's one of the only old, old-school members of bitcointalk I know who's still around, and that's not even taking into account the fact that he's the site's administrator.  Maybe that goes without saying, but pops definitely deserves his props.

Sadly, for as long as I've been interested in bitcoin and been a member of this forum, I'm one of the ones with a "tiny wallet".  I wish I was joking or just being humble.  I'm not sure what that has to do with the number of scammers on the forum, but I just thought I'd publicly declare my poverty.  Lol.

The whole team is listed on the Casino Critique website, no?  If not all of them, IIRC most of them are named, Hhampuz among them, and Little Mouse.  I don't get the feeling that they're not being transparent enough or are trying to scam the community.  I think it's just a question of them getting enough funding to get the review site off the ground.

As far as the Casino Critique forum account goes, it would make sense to create one to represent the service regardless of who's behind it, no?  I think I've seen examples of that before, but damned if I can remember specifics.

Any of you remember when Circle used to be a company that made it incredibly easy to buy bitcoin at a reasonable price using fiat?  Man, the new Circle sure ain't the old Circle--but I've known that for years.

And yes, regulators are overdoing it in this case.  But as much as I hate Coinbase as a company, I give them much respect for not just caving in to the Treasury Department, which is probably what a lot of other exchanges/services would do.  I think fair regulation can only come about by challenging regulators in court when they start forming opinions that might just affect thousands, if not millions, of people. 

Also, the US government (or any government for that matter) doesn't want anybody's financial transactions to be private.  They'd love it if they had access to every single bit of information on every citizen in the country, constitutional rights be damned.  There have been recent examples of that with Edward Snowden's ordeal and many in the past, including J. Edgar Hoover's reign of the FBI and his hunt for communists. 

Fight, Coinbase, fight!!

Bro, this forum turns people who started out naive and innocent as a newborn child into hardened, jaded, and completely cynical ragemonsters within months at most, assuming they're fairly active.  I'm not sure it's a reflection of our world so much as a function of bitcointalk and/or the crypto space in general. 

It's as if we were all to line up side-to-side and after doing so, either the person on your left or your right is a scammer--if not on both sides.  And that being the case, newcomers to the forum are treated pretty harshly, rightly or wrongly.  Don't take it personally.  This is why reputation is so important on the forum.

If replacing a hardware wallet is cost-prohibitive, then I'd guess that you don't have a whole lot of crypto stored on it--or that you seriously don't have enough reserve cash or crypto to spend on such a contingency.  The cost of buying a new Ledger or Trezor or whatever HW wallet you use is kind of a minor issue when we're talking about "being your own bank" on a grand scale.

Also, keeping your seed phrase or other form of backup safe is also kind of a small, if not trivial, problem.  A seed phrase engraved or stamped on a piece of metal just needs a safe place to be kept in, no?

I haven't reviewed all the updates to this thread, but am I correct in noting that there have been a lot more members ranking up each time?  I do recall several updates where there were only a handful of members who'd ranked up, and this time it seems like there are more than usual.

Hopefully that's true, because as I've been saying for a while now it's just a wee bit too difficult for members to get enough merits to reach even Sr. Member, much less have a reasonable shot at Legendary.  If you've started the ranking-up process after the creation of the merit system, earning 1000 merits is hard.  I know some people will disagree with me, but based on what I've seen in this thread alone, I think I'm right.

Anyway, props to everyone who ranked up!

Oy.  It figures there would be at least a few scammers trying to take advantage of all the chaos the ETH merge is causing in the GPU mining space, but I wouldn't have predicted any of them going this route, i.e., counting on people misspelling a website's name.  It's deviously clever, but hopefully anyone who's been involved with ETH will be wary enough to avoid this kind of crap.  In fact, you'd think most altcoiners would have CMC bookmarked and thus wouldn't even have to worry about getting scammed by whoever's behind this.

Thanks for posting this, OP.  Not sure how many potential victims you've saved, but it's always good for people (especially newcomers to crypto) to see what kind of shenanigans people are trying to pull.

I don't want to go way off-topic here, but this is the first time I've visited this thread and I just want to say welcome to the world I've been living in since I started offering post history reviews.  Nobody reads rules, people expect merits for shitposts, and it's just a giant pain in the ass having to deal with people who either don't read or have unreasonable expectations.

But I'm glad you started up a thread like this, especially in B&H where newbies and others can see it.  I wish more merit sources would do things like this, especially the ones who applied for the position (many did not).  Good luck, fillippone!

May I make a suggestion?  Don't include a huge, unnecessary portion of any post you're replying to like you did with the above.  It just causes others to have to scroll more than needed and it's very annoying when people do it.  If you're looking for merit, you might not want to piss off merit sources or other potential merit-givers.

Bitcoin is king, and the king of kings when it comes to cryptocurrencies as far as I'm concerned.  The best thing about btc is that there's no person or group running it like you see with so many of the shitcoins out there, especially the PoS ones (which I used to be a fan of). 

Just take a look at all the truly awful shitcoins that have taken a beating in the past day since ETH went PoS.  None of them even come close to bitcoin in terms of dominance or usefulness.  Is that going to be the case forever?  Maybe not, but damned if I know of a challenger with any serious credibility. 

On a side note: mm2543363580, you've been reported for burst-posting.  These 1xbit campaign idiots are like cancer.

Several?  Man, if anyone is curious as to how many times merit has come up as the sole topic of a thread, just search the Meta section for "merit" and take a look at everything going back to January 2018.  Threads like this one have thankfully become less common in the last year or two, but there was a time when the Meta section's first page was full of them.

OP, if you ever find yourself wondering how to earn merits (because it isn't as easy as some people would have you believe), look at the post histories of some of the highest merit earners and pay close attention to how they write, what they're writing about, and--this is also important--what section they're posting in.  All of those factors in addition to how often you post will be a pretty good indicator of what it takes to earn merits.

Dammit, this info and more has already been stickied in Meta.  Don't people look before making threads like this one?

I doubt it.  There have been members exposed so fast that it'd make me slap my head again if I could remember where to find examples to link to.  Good catch.

Yep, that was before my time and before the times of many members here, I'm sure--but I know about that period and what happened with the stock market once the inflationary crisis was over. 

This time around, however, we're having a spike in inflation along with a stock market that's been on a bull run for well over a decade.  That hadn't been the case in the 70s.  The massive bull market that followed the inflation started somewhere around 1982 and continued up until 2000, when the NASDAQ (and subsequently the other indexes) crashed.  If and when inflation decreases to acceptable levels, I'm not sure what's going to happen to the markets, including crypto.  It's kind of scary.

Another thing is that in the 70s, interest rates were much higher than they are now, IIRC, so people could actually hedge against inflation somewhat simply by opening up a savings account at their local bank.  That hasn't been possible (at least in the US) for a long, long time.  I'm not sure how people have been trying to hedge, if they've been doing so at all.  Precious metals?  Maybe, but that market has been relatively stagnant since 2011 when it peaked.  Stocks?  Probably, which is why the bull market has lasted this long.  But man....the result is that most stocks right now are overpriced, and I've been predicting a massive crash for a few years now.  I still think it's coming, and it's going to be brutal.

The best way to fight food inflation IMO would be to stock up on as much food right now as possible (nonperishable foods, obviously).  Everything else is a crapshoot.

It should be debated and more hotly contested than it is or has been, because the IRS and their many agents have their hands in as many pockets as a human is capable of having.  It's no wonder houses don't stay in families for generations anymore--people are taxed to death during their lifetime and then even after death they get hit with a tax bill.  Jesus-H-Christ.

As far as the royal family goes, big surprise there that there's a law making them exempt from death taxes.  If you have the power to make laws (or basically control the people who do), there's rarely a case where some kind of laws aren't passed out of self interest.  It's a shitty thing, too, because I think they should have to pay that tax if it's basically what everyone else in the UK is required to do.

Agreed, this thread doesn't need to exist and should be locked so as to avoid attracting shitposters.  Satoshi isn't coming back as far as I can see (and just as well; bitcoin works best without its creator, unlike so many shitcoins out there), and if he did I'm pretty sure he'd resurrect his own account.

It is, especially creating threads dedicated to a single one unless it's important (like with cryptohunter a few years ago).

Yeah, I've been seeing their name pop up on CMC for a long time when I'm just screwing around, looking at altcoins and what exchanges they trade on.

I don't know what country they operate out of (and I'm too lazy and tired to check), but I'm wondering if they got pressured by regulators to comply with something that they either can't or are unwilling to.  There's always been a need for exchanges that list all of those shitcoins OP showed screenshots of, and I can't imagine they weren't making money.

I don't doubt that for a minute.  There's volume inflation going on across most of the exchanges, and I think it's probably much worse with smaller exchanges liike Crex24 and the like.

Interesting, I've never heard of those methods being used to measure economic activity.  And if you think about it, analyzing satellite photographs of used car lots instead of whatever data is publicly available about said sales seems like an unnecessarily difficult method.  Why go the high-tech route when there's probably an easier way?

I'm not sure how you're making connections between buying crypto vs. buying video games or phones, but even if there was a correlation (which I doubt), I don't think there's going to be any extended periods of time where new games or phones are released.  Those industries are enormous, constantly pumping out new products.

I've heard of the Ramen noodle index and was going to include a link, but for some reason I can't find anything except a Reddit discussion.  The theory is that you know the economy is hitting a rough spot when Ramen sales increase, as it's a very cheap food.  Anyway, it's not surprising that things like lipstick and all that other stuff are also economic markers.

Nope, there's no harm, although that's the kind of feedback one would hope could get removed before the person who left it died or abandoned the forum. 

Views on genocide aside, this is one of the reasons why I think the trust system needs an overhaul.  It's acceptable to leave neutral feedback for disagreements like this one between TECSHARE and OP, but the fact is that they're notes that should only be viewable to the member leaving the feedback.  Why have the ability to broadcast something about someone for all to see on their trust page?  Sure, most people won't care....but you never know.

Anyway, what's the point here, OP?  I don't think that feedback is going anywhere.  I can't remember the last time Theymos or a moderator stepped in and deleted a feedback.