theymos has shown a dislike to the newbie jail which was implemented several years ago, because it restricted too many legitimate users, without too many benefits associated with it. They're unlikely to implement something like this that would pretty much have the same effect.

Although, $10 is nothing when they can earn that back in a day. Most of these alt farmers are likely earning a pretty penny. I think it was somewhat recently discovered a alt farm was participating in a well established signature campaign, and were earning massive amounts of money per week. Then, there's the plethora of bounties they can abuse, which might be hit, and miss, but can earn users some money on the side.

They definitely use bots. I see it everyday now I'm more exposed to it. I wouldn't think it would be far stretched to say some are in the thousands. They're likely using bots in an attempt to earn enough merit, to then earn from the accounts, which might mean once they've done that they'd use them properly all of sudden. I don't think the latter happens much as it simply doesn't happen with the merit system, but I imagine that's their line of thought.

Otherwise, I don't know why. Hundreds of accounts like these are nuked per month I'd say. You find its either low quality or they're copying it from another post. However, in most cases because of the way they're doing it, connecting the accounts is almost instant. For a few months I was battling a thread bumping system, which used the same sort of words, and sentence structuring. They have somewhat disappeared recently though, at least that group of them.

Unless, I haven't caught onto their new techniques yet.

I don't want him to retire because quite clearly he still has five rounds in him, against some of the best fighters. What I don't want him to do is keep going to the point where he's just getting beat downs. A bit like the concern with Ferguson recently, although I'm not sure he's even finished in terms of ability, just unlucky with the last fight.

Joanna has been at the top of the game for a long time. I think she said twenty years right? I didn't realise it was that long, obviously she's talking about her MMA career, and not UFC.

Shevchenko didn't look invincible as she usually does, and I'm pretty sure she's feeling it. After every fight she pretty much dominates in she does that spinning dance move that she does, but I don't recall seeing it after this win against Santos. Could be telling, could be that the broadcast didn't capture it, but I'm wondering if there's more to it. Could be I'm completely off the mark, and just reading into things too much.

Shhh, you're going to start the "merit sources are people too" movement. Nobody wants that.

In all seriousness, I don't think its too much of a issue. I try to just merit those that are posting quality content, but at the end of the day it does feel nice meriting someone who might actually need them, and its even better seeing a newer user that you've merited in the past, actually get motivated by it, and turn out to be a top quality user.

If I was in the predicament which I'd nearly exhausted my conjured merit source, and it was between a merit source with a very good quality post or a newer user with a slightly less quality post, but good quality I'd probably give it to the newer user, because it might encourage them to continue. I can always go back to the merit sources post at a later date, which I typically do revisit a lot of old threads, and replies to merit. I've also seen this behaviour from other sources too.

Well, it's very unlikely its going to be quick, i.e a few minutes. Besides, you'll have a gradual build up to this. We aren't anywhere near the capability of doing it right now, and even when you factor in exponential growth there's going to be a long, long time before something is capable of doing it within minutes. Despite, the exponential growth, it'll still we somewhat gradual in the time that it takes to break it.

By the time something is capable of breaking it within minutes, Bitcoin could have well have moved on so much, that the old chain is considered obsolete, or alternatives people themselves might have found an alternative to Bitcoin. What I'm saying is there's just too much unknown factors to even realistically talk about it. Hence, why the discussions around it have been what ifs, rather than anything substantial. We'll get there, when we get there.

Ultimately, if there's an incentive for account farmers then you'll likely see alt farmers on mass. If there isn't any incentive, there would be less, but ultimately the wider forum users would suffer from this. For example, removing signature campaigns would undoubtedly reduce spam, farmers, and some scam signatures, however ultimately that means restricting legitimate users, which I'm not a fan of.

I personally think the sort of economy we've got going on in the forum is a good thing. theymos has made it more difficult with various changes, for example the merit system makes it harder for low quality farmers from ranking up accounts, and therefore reducing the incentive without too much impact on legitimate users. Then, the bumping changes on the altcoin announcement sections was implemented, which in turn reduced the amount of projects participating in fake bumping groups.

So, ultimately theymos has already implemented things which have been rather effective. However, I'm sure there's other things that could be introduced, although none spring to mind. Although, what we have to remember this will always be a problem, when there's an incentive for doing it, which at the moment, there's plenty of incentives.

Which should in theory mitigate the effect of the short term price hit, due to panic, and the fact there's new coins being reintroduced to the economy. However, it likely means you'll see a smaller effect, for a longer time since they'll be gradually taken, and reintroduce rather than all at once.

Depending on your perspective, both scenarios have their pros, and cons. Ultimately, the very long term probably isn't effected.

It would have been quite something if you did find one, since that would've cemented the idea into users minds that, even if you aren't looking for someone else's brain wallet, you might accidentally stumble upon it like this discussion, which is a bit of a outlier no doubt, but I could see someone thinking "that's pretty random", of course its not, anything you derive from something you've read is in fact, not random, but I can see how someone might come to that conclusion.

Not many people think about what could happen to them that's out of their hands. Most users here probably don't have a inheritance plan, and simply forgetting or god forbid worse ill health, is a legitimate concern.

People have had accidents, and didn't even know his own family, but even if it's not to that extent. Going through a traumatic experience means you could lower the priority of remembering your seed or private key, which ultimately has the same effect.

At least we now have a challenger for her. I feel with WMMA at times, there can be one person that just dominates. We saw it with Nunes, Cyborg, and we're seeing it with Val. Now at the very least, all the top dogs have either already lost or have got some decent challengers. It's nice to see. I do find that a lot of the WMMA are a lot more technical on the ground, so it kind of breaks up the fights like Jake vs Fialho, as that was literally just a boxing match if it wasn't for Jake spamming the leg kicks.

Santos did well, a lot better than I was expecting. Honestly, I think that head clash was the defining point of the fight unfortunately.

Yeah, those kind of announcements are made in the Meta section, since they're forum related. The important announcement section that OP refereed is located in the Bitcoin Discussion section, which generally means its more Bitcoin related stuff to go in there, rather than forum announcements. According to the guidelines theymos posted, albeit potentially outdated, that would echo that sentiment.

I can't really answer why that section isn't used much any more though. I guess over time users here have come accustomed to each section more, and announce these types of stuff like compromises etc in the relative section. Probably, also due to the forum now being a bit more organised than it originally was. For example, Electrum vulnerabilities tend to get posted in the Electrum section.

I guess it would be useful for someone to quote the text, with sources in the important announcements section, to help condense the information a bit more.

The main event probably was the fight of the year, but tonight I think we might have had multiple contenders. Apart from the Allen fight, I think we had a really good night of fights. None of them really disappointed except for the Allen fight.

Which is pretty weird to me, since I thought Jiri was the one gassing out. Glover basically had free shots at his face for much of that round. It was the highest amount Glover managed to land in the stand up the entire fight, and Jiri wasn't reacting well. I guess, that opportunity gave him a second wind.

I'm not sure if it's just handled differently these days. For example, theymos used to post about vulnerabilities about Electrum, and other Bitcoin software a few years ago. However, I do believe he now uses the "news" header for these sort of announcements, and links to a discussion thread about it, rather than posting it themselves.

So, I don't think it's a lack of important announcements, but rather being handled a bit differently through the news header, as there's definitely been important announcements conveyed through that feature in more recent times.

Yeah, if it's a valid accusation, and everything is provable. Then, yeah for me that site would lose reputation. Doesn't mean their reputation would be completely gone, if they've been operating for years, this could be a result of mismanagement or dropping the ball rather than malicious intent. However, I do find that certain gambling companies seem to play on their terms of service a lot, and they've written it in such a way that it can pretty much get them out of any situation they find themselves in.

There's been a few examples of this with the big fiat operating gambling sites, where they've actually been taken to court, and lost.

Fialho is great, and I love seeing a fighter go after it, and staying active, However, he probably did need a rest, and was getting ahead of himself. However, there was a clear difference in the ability last night. Jake being agile, good kicks, whereas Fialho is a bit of a one trick pony. He looks for the knock out, and even when he gets hurt, he doesn't look to mitigate that by diving for the legs or trying a take down, he just starts swinging. His style is more akin to heavyweights.

I do like him though, I just think he needs to work on his overall game if he wants to get anywhere near the top, and most importantly stay there. Boxing doesn't win you titles.

Also, Allen annoyed me. I didn't think he won that fight, I thought he was largely dominated, and the only saving grace is he did do a little more damage when he did get positions. I don't think it was a robbery, but more of a lucky win for him as it could have easily gone the other way. Obviously, I didn't mind since he was on my accumulator, but that didn't end up coming in anyway.

There's been debate through the years, and some users have even run some challenges to try, and prove that they can be secure. However, generally brain wallets introduce additional risks, which if you aren't aware of could potentially compromise you. Plus, as suggested humans are generally absolutely horrible at entropy. We tend to think similarly, and follow patterns. It's very much what makes us human. Most living things have patterns.

The above challenge was never claimed, however this is a rather flawed challenge since we don't know exactly how it was generated. The question isn't about are brain wallets inherently insecure, it's more the human factor when it comes to generating the entropy. LoyceV, has a nice little thread there that demonstrates this weakness.

So, even if you believe you've made a completely random password, it likely isn't. Our thought processes are flawed for entropy. Computer generation of entropy is almost always better.

The forum statistics were disabled a long time ago, hence the reason page views, and posts sort of stops around 2017. I think its safe to say that looking at those time online stats, it's very broken. Some stats appear to be still tracking, but others aren't. Think it goes without saying, take those statistics with a pinch of salt.

I do believe they were disabled due to a ongoing DDOS attack at the time, and the resources required outweighed the benefits. At least, that's what I recall from memory.

Nothing is stopping someone from doing this themselves, but being implemented natively in the forum? Very doubtful.

Instead, someone could build a scraper externally, and then maintain a thread here on the forum, that would be fine. Although, it'd probably be difficult due to the varying different formats that projects use when they post their announcement threads. You'd probably have to monitor other websites other than Bitcointalk too.

It's very much a part of the forum now, however it definitely isn't without its problems. I don't even know how much spam is removed every month there, but I'd say it's well in the thousands minimum every month. Some months it seems that the altcoin section dominates the reporting statistics. Although, these are now mainly older posts. I think we're playing catch up, but I do think we're making some progress. I think most of the reports I receive these days are from posts back in 2017/2018, during, and after the ICO craze.

Although, the bounty section is a little wild. That's probably the hardest of them all to clean up.

Plenty of trusted exchanges or wallet hosts have gone either rogue or been compromised. I don't like the idea of trusting someone else with handling security, as even some of the biggest security focused firms in the world have made some awful, amateur mistakes. So, personally I believe blindly trusting someone you don't know, but only has a reputation from other people, is a no go.

If I were you, I'd be moving my Bitcoin right this second. I do understand, some users have different views, and threat models, but it just doesn't sit right with me. Being online, you're basically adding an entirely new attack vector too.

Damn, what a night. I was in for 3k until Jake Matthews stopped Fialho, I actually had that fight going the distance, as I felt Jake was underestimated. However, he really turned up. That's probably the best I've seen him fight, and against Fialho of all people.

The main event I nearly had right too. I went for the fight to go the distance at like 5.00/5.50 odds in the end, I was very nearly right. I thought the main event was good, with Jiri looking good at times, but overall I felt Glover was the one winning come the last minute of the last round.

Val nearly slipped up, and honestly I was quite impressed by Santos. If it wasn't for that accidental headbutt which caused the swelling on her eye, I think she could have won that, and probably should have based on the performances. Even with the eye, I thought it was very close, and could've gone either way. I have Santos for the win despite those later rounds.

Well, their offers were massively low balled, but saying that we got Thiago from them for a pretty sweet price. Maybe, they were expecting us to return the favour. Although, Mane still has a few years left in him, and is one of the best forwards in the game. That's not discrediting Thiago mind, he could easily be considered a top five player in his position.

I don't know what Bayern were thinking, but that initial offer was almost insulting. Mane is worth a lot more than that, and if there were others in for him, I imagine they wouldn't have even offered close to that. I kind of wish we were in a better position, and just declined further meetings until they reached our specified figure. However, Mane does deserve better than that, I don't want to lose him as he has been fantastic for us, but if he wants to move on I'm willing to give him his wishes, since he has been a brilliant player, and ambassador for Liverpool.

Acquiring the knowledge of your investment, is an investment in itself. Granted, the majority seem to neglect that. You don't need to be the next Einstein or even know the ins, and outs of it. You just need a good enough understanding to know why it'll be successful, how to use it, and how to secure it. Those things should be enough to convince you that even with blips in the road, you'll have the confidence that it will recover.

I consider Bitcoin really unique, since it's the only investment I have absolute faith in. No other investment do I have the level of confidence in. That comes with its own risks, and ultimately I might be wrong. However, confidence really does help you when the market takes a downward trend.

Now, don't get it wrong that confidence doesn't come from nothing, it comes from having enough knowledge to know why Bitcoin will be successful, and most blips will just be that, bumps in the road. Unless, something truly significant happened, Bitcoin should continue to rise in the near future. There's likely a ceiling, but no one truly knows what that might be. Also, depends on the technology, and concepts that come out in the next few years, we could see something that ultimately improves Bitcoin, whether or not that means it gets integrated or coincides with Bitcoin.