It would be interesting to see how merit awards and posting habits have changed over the past few months, especially for members who were previously high merit receivers. I know I have gone from being the first member to receive the vulpine order of merit, to being lucky to receive a couple of merits in a week. I realise that this is probably the result of reduced posting, and the fact that I have given up on starting projects. I think this is the result of a reduction in the number of members who are interested in Bitcoin and crypto, and bad moderation. Deleting posts and moving threads which were created to try to stimulate the forum, just indicates that the emphasis in the forum is moving away from education and the broadening of interest in Bitcoin, and the changing world economy.

I'm still a merit source, and I'm finding it increasingly hard to find posts to reward and encourage. The technical help board is one good place, but many of the topics are repeated, but this is still useful in my opinion. However, I get the feeling that many of the newer members don't need a help board, as they aren't really interested in the concept of Bitcoin.

I don't believe that the halving will be the major influence on new membership. I think the failure of the fiat system, and the imposition of banking sanctions will be far more important. We could anticipate this by encouraging posting on the relevant boards.

I've never rented a signature on any of the forums where I am active. I use my signature for personal messages, links to my sites, and sometimes I promote services that I use and trust. I would never promote as site that I didn't use just for payment. I'm aware that my signature affects my reputation, and I don't want to entrust that to some possible scam.

There are a variety of alternatives that are gaining popularity. LoRa is one, and I had hopes for software controlled radio, but that may be a bit limited inits use.

SHA256 is one of the fundamentals of Bitcoin, and one should have an appreciation of it in my opinion. Most members here will have a more advanced knowledge about cryptography than I have, but I believe that I understand its purpose in Bitcoin, even though I don't have a deep knowledge of its nuances. If you don't know why Bitcoin incorporates SHA256, then you don't understand Bitcoin. This is why i thought it would be a good discussion topic for the beginners board. This is especially true with all the talk about Quantum computers, and their effect on Bitcoin.

Maybe discussions about links in signatures is more important for the current direction of Bitcoin Talk.

Maybe it is time to introduce a beginners' tech board, and moderate it to keep out the sig spamming.

Well that thread was a waste of time - it's been moved into technical, and no beginners will be visiting there. I don't know why I bother to try to stimulate research by beginners here.

I've tried to start discussion threads on the beginner's board, and have had mixed success. It's quite difficult to think of suitable topics though. Here is one that I've just started as an experiment.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5216645.0

This question was asked in this forum back in 2010in this thread
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1713.0
In view of the massive increase in hash power and computer technology since then, I wondered if it might be worth reconsidering this.

I appreciate that this is probably a topic for the technical forum, but I've started it in the beginner's board to encourage members who are new to Bitcoin to research SHA256. If view of this, please don't be discouraged from asking questions, and making constructive comments.

As a newbie, you don't have to answer questions if you aren't sure of the answer. However, you can always start discussions around some of your ideas, and members can be really helpful. I can remember having fairly long discussions about reducing the block generation interval when I first joined the forum, and I was wrong because I didn't understand the problems resulting from the creation of orphan blocks.

I think that one of the differences in the current forum is that I was chasing knowledge rather than merits then. Somehow we have to put merits behind us, and return to the ambition of self-improvement, and not try to harvest chocolate crypto coins.

Well Satoshi seems to have managed to remain anonymous, so maybe we can learn from him.

Alias the old user name to the new one. Solves all the problems above, and reduces confusion.

I think recycling some topics is better than bumping old threads, but this really only applies to Bitcoin news, or political or economic events. I agree that the forum should move away from self-flagellation or masturbation over topics like merit, trust, or reputation. It is also a bit redundant to keep starting topics about Bitcoin being digital gold, or Bitcoin will replace the dollar. Maybe these topics should be combined into one mega thread somewhere.

The scam busting is a more difficult problem, and I've often though that it would be best to have a specific board for this. People who are new to Bitcoin, could then use this as a reference. Allowing questionable projects to be advertised here is a much more difficult problem.

I think it was John Bolton who said that the US could bring a country to its knees by changing its climate. I believe that they experimented with California to develop this, and now it is being used on Australia. The fires there, and the loss of groundwater don't seem to be natural. The use of Plutonium that than Thorium for nuclear powwer seems to have been driven by the weapon grade output from Plutonium plants - good for India for starting to switch to Thorium. Fracking is extremely destructive, as it messes up the groundwater. It's another example of Washington exploiting the US with no regards for the population.

Thar sick Greta girl would be better served by drawing attention to the so-called medication that gave her Aspergers, rather than trying to promote the bird blenders that are used to generate power from wind, and trying to destroy farming by reducing ruminants which are an important part of the life cycles of the environment.

It was probably an American anti-missile missile that went off course.

Isn't it surprising that the Iranian missiles weren't intercepted? And they gave the US a one hour warning before they launched them.

Government and political action is geared to climate change, but are they working on the wrong trend, and making things worse for us. We are entering a period of global cooling, but all the publicity is about global warming. We are destroying carbon sinks, and pretending that we are making things better by trying to reduce carbon dioxide - the lifebreath of the oxygen producers. Out world is based on carbon, and we need to recycle it to maintain life as we know it.

So what will happen when the public realises that the whole of the climate change industry is designed to reduce food production, and to reduce life as we know it?

I'm starting to see new mining operations rated in MegaWatts, and I'm not sure of the reason. There is a lot of FUD being pushed about the energy consumption by miners, and I wonder if this rating is intended to reduce the creation of new mining operations. I can understand that MegaWatts are significant when calculating the running costs of mining operations,but is it an important consideration for the Bitcoin economy? Surely the MegaHash rating is more significant. I'm aware of the importance of the efficiency of mining rigs, and the recycling of the energy used in running mining equipment, but this doesn't seem to be a consideration in these reports.

Why is he sending you 3.5 Bitcoin? Did you sell something, or is it just a variant of the Nigerian scam?

It looks as if you are the only one who thinks he was telling us that his cat has fleas.

I worked for Shell international in the 1960s, and they developed a product to do this. The greatest problem they found in turn deserts into arable land is the shifting surface, as this prevents plants from laying down roots. They developed a sticky fertiliser that they could spray over the land. Once you have trees and bushes with roots, then they help to retain the ground water. They had to give up though, as the locals pulled up all the plants and burnt them to warm themselves in the cold nights.

If you want to increase exposure, maybe you could put a link in your sig.