The merit system is excellent as it is in my opinion. It prevents spammers and scammers from creating accounts and flooding the server with unwanted messages.
As it is though could there be a possibility that it could demotivate a long time lurker and take away from the creative process?
If someone has been lurking for a long time and has suddenly got a lightbulb moment where they have an excellent crypto related idea but they would have trouble sharing it because they can't easily do so, because of the high barriers to entry.
I was always under the impression the Bitcoin philosophy meant the barriers to entry are supposed to be extremely low to empower and give financial freedom to anybody who seeks independence.
Could there be a way to reward lurkers and other people who contribute to the cause while still differentiating them from spammers?
Before I signed up to the forum in 2013 I was lurking for quite a long while. I was writing a dissertation at the time for my business management degree at university. I signed up to this forum because I was interested in asking a question about academic writing.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=147652.msg1568102#msg1568102I did write the dissertation about bitcoin. The title of the dissertation was "Bitcoin - The Wild West of finance or the future of Money". The dissertation and the defence for which I held a presentation with prepared powerpoint slides went rather well. The university professors advised me strongly to not write about Bitcoin because at the time it wasn't well known and was only used by geeks or dark web markets. Against the advice of the professors I still went ahead with the dissertation.
I was desperate to ask my question about the dissertation here in the forum and I remember having to post in a special section for newly registered users first. All other forum sections were locked for newly registered users.
Doing something off-line like writing a dissertation or anything else to help the cause will obviously not get you any merit points. In this case you could be a legitimate person who has been religiously following the development and who has contributed to the cause in other ways. In this case you are useful but there is no way to determine if you are legit or not in the eyes of bitcointalk.
Sometimes I think back to the times when I would walk into Pizza Hut on buffet Wednesdays without a single dime or a way to pay for the food. I would take my laptop with me and start searching for work. I would have enough time to eat, receive work from clients all over the world, receive bitcoin nearly instantly and load up my Xapo Visa card with bitcoin and still have more than enough time to pay for the bill. There was nothing else around at the time that was comparable to bitcoin. Being able to receive transactions nearly instantaneously from any location in the world without barriers to entry is the very reason why I believe in bitcoin.
We all have fond memories of bitcoin transactions, I am sure.
Important aspects of bitcoin in my opinion include awareness, philosophy and understanding. A lot of people just like to speculate or invest into crypto without understanding it whatsoever. Maybe there can be some fun interactive quizzes or games that test how well someone understands the technology, philosophy and the economics of bitcoin? Would it be a possibility to earn some merit when playing these games?
Thank you for reading