Here's another topic which indeed confirms I'm not talking through my arse, and that option does exist.


I had a feeling that it was tied to higher accounts, and that's why I did offer the advice of maybe looking at custom filters on an Ad Blocker extension. I'm not entirely sure why something like this would be restricted though to be completely honest with you.

If you are going the Ad Blocker route I believe theymos does change the code to prevent this from happening, and it would require ongoing manual work to keep on blacklisting the ads. I've never tried this, so you'll have to figure it out for yourself if it can be done. Plus, does it really warrant the work that has to be done just to prevent seeing the ads? I barely notice them, and giving enough time your brain will likely ignore them automatically anyway. theymos has some pretty strict guidelines on what can be displayed as a ad so it's not likely that you'll see obstructive ads.

The perfect solution doesn't exist. The only thorough 'solution' would be to impose restrictions. Whether, that would be completely removing signatures, bounties, and campaigns or limiting certain sections to certain ranks. I've made this clear a few times that I'm normally against restrictions, however this particular issue is effecting the forum in every aspect. Therefore, restrictions may well be justified in this case.

The thing is about the other solutions we could ask the campaign managers to set stricter rules until we are all blue in the face, but they aren't going to do anything, unless there's punishments for their actions. The advertisers which hire the managers aren't interested about those who spam, and only that their name gets out there. So convincing them would to request stricter rules would also be a lost cause.  

Effort? If they put in a effort there wouldn't be a problem. I'm not against people who want to make a living off the forum if they can. But, breaking the rules, and making the forum unpleasant for others isn't something I tolerate.

The fact of the matter being is they put in minimal effort even though they claim they can make a living from the payments they receive from campaigns. I don't know about you, but if I was getting paid well I would be motivated to further my skills, and keep that job. It's well known that money is a good motivator, and is often offered as an incentive. For example, promotions are often chased after by existing employees resulting in increased workload from them.

So what I can't understand is why these very people don't work on their posts, and language skills. But, I guess we already know it's a lack of moderation from the campaign managers. If there was much stricter rules put in place on who gets accepted only the best of the best would be accepted. Resulting in a cleaner forum, better posts, and legitimate people who put in the effort getting selected.

Currently, the majority don't make any effort at all. All they make an effort in is ranking up their accounts, and getting accepted. Then they are set, and spam throughout the forum.


This could be stopped if there was restrictions imposed. Although, I don't think this is the best solution it's definitely a option right now which I'm hoping theymos is at least considering if the other options don't work.

There's also more moderation, however this also has it's drawbacks, but I would prefer to have a few more mods that complete restrictions.


Alright, yeah I can agree on you with this. I think it's worth mentioning that KYC wouldn't completely prevent it either. There's several ways that someone could submit faked documents, and the process would require quite a bit of manpower to verify this sort of information as well as storing it securely which is probably one of the biggest concerns. KYC would never be implemented on Bitcointalk, but campaign managers might go down this route.

I don't see why KYC would actually help the spam issue really.



1/2. Ideally posts would be restricted to a merit system which you would be required to earn a certain amount of merits per period. However, I understand that many great posts don't receive merit so this could be an issue as it's then based on RNG especially given that some of the payment periods are 1/2 weeks.

3. Probably hard to do if they haven't already been tagged. Quite frankly most campaign managers don't do any research into their participants other than looking at their first page of history.

4. This is very difficult if you don't speak that language yourself. It can be easy to spot Google translations now, and again. But, sometimes Google translations can be surprisingly accurate as well. You would have to speak the language yourself or have someone on your team able to speak it which kind of defeats the point of hiring someone to translate posts then. Translations are based on trust which unfortunately gets abused due to it being difficult for the non speaker to verify if the translation is accurate.

5. Several lists exist. The fact of the matter being is campaign managers don't care about who they employ to spread their name as long as it's happening. To them the more the merrier.

Every system that's imposed to prevent those from registering multiple accounts will be bypassed. It's simply to hard to determine whether an account is connected if the proper measures are taken. Plus, I don't see the problem with alternate accounts. Many people have alternate accounts for many different reasons. I'll give a few examples; 1. Bot accounts to scrape data from the forum, or post charts. 2. To access the forum on a insecure connection/device. 3. Separate their personal opinions from that of their business.

There's probably many more reasons to have alternate accounts that I'm not listing here. Alt accounts fundamentally aren't malicious.

You can disable forum ads via Profile>Forum Profile Information, and check the box: "Disable ads:". Although, there's a message in brackets after this that asks you politely not to do this. Whether you have this option might be rank dependent, but I don't think it is.

You could probably add custom filters to ad blocker extension, and do it that way if you haven't got the option.

Don't accept accounts as collateral. Seems that the OP of that thread was willing to lend it to friends for a few years so recovering the amount wasn't the priority at all.

I wasn't against the idea of account sales a few years ago, but it's obviously a massive problem now, and has been for a year or two now. Before, it was just recommended to use escrow with everyone to avoid 'trustworthy' members that had exchanged hands from scamming. It's way to wide spread of scamming, spamming and other kinds of abuse which accepting accounts as collateral isn't recommended.

I would disagree completely. I think I would only agree on there's not enough mods in certain areas of the forum. Other than that though there's a lot of moderation going on. You only have to look at the Modlog to verify this. If you refresh it now, and then you'll soon see that there's hundreds of posts/users being dealt with every hour.

Scams aren't moderated, and that's one of the reasons why the trust system was introduced. Note that this isn't limited to the DefaultTrust. I personally think too much emphasis is placed on those who are on the on the DefaultTrust. Anyone can leave a feedback.

Unless, you are breaking the rules that TheUltraElite stated, then it's likely you'll be giving multiple chances before any action is taken. Anything listed on the Unofficial list of (official) Bitcointalk.org rules, guidelines, FAQ could eventually result in a ban if breaking it more than once.

For example, if you are posting spam then depending on the spam you may only have a few of your posts deleted at first. This would result in you receiving a message in your personal messages stating so. You should take these as warnings.

If it was still 2015 sure. But, this isn't really an accepted thing to do anymore, and I would of thought they would of known that they wouldn't be able to shift this on if the loan was defaulted. I know they state that it was defaulted on a few years ago, but the only thing that matters is that they are trying to sell it now.

At the very least the account being sold needs to be revealed to the public so that negative feedback can be left for the defaulted loan. Because, at the end of the day even if an account changes hands legitimate or not, they need to be left trust according to their history.

I'll admit censorship was a poor choice of word. But, you are preventing them from doing something that everyone else on the forum can do. Not every self moderated thread is going to be with malicious intent, regardless whether they are untrustworthy or not. These days it's probably expected that someone would prefer to moderate their own threads from the spammers.

The thing is about the newbie restrictions is they can removed these limitations by ranking up. I'm usually against most restrictions, and especially in this case when there's alternatives such as creating your own thread outlining the abuse, or not creating an alternative discussion without self moderation.

Username: Welsh
Post Count: 3610
BTC Address (must be SegWit): bc1q9c5qxch9spwhq90yh95dr6qw69fcwzx2pdcdnx

Meh, it would be sort of censorship, and against everything this forum stands for; Free speech. The forum doesn't really moderate scams, and I don't think limiting a scammer of creating self moderated threads is fair. Creating a new thread, and referencing it us probably good enough in the majority of cases I think.

They well be a scammer, but censorship is censorship. If you don't want to get your comment deleted open up a thread where others can also share their thoughts.

Report them in the future using the "report to moderator" button found on the bottom right of the post citing the original source or alternatively post on this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1926895.0

When presenting any type of evidence which could easily be hidden/removed through what ever means.. You should provide backups to the evidence provided. You can do this by archiving the post in archive sites. Screenshots aren't generally considered proof.

For example, archiving this thread before I submit this post: https://archive.fo/AZPh2

As you can see it takes a copy of the webpage at the time of archiving it. Any changes will not show up on the archive copy.

Some of us users are the nodes which are rejecting the current fork, and wish to continue on the existing one without the spam, and bounties. Then there's the newer generation supporting, and contributing to the "problem". I would agree that there's several issues right now, but I must say merit fundamentally changed the way people go about their business on Bitcointalk, and I see it as a generally good move.

You could still very easily go there at certain times, and report up to 50 posts within the first 20 pages for breaching the rules one way or another. This isn't just referring to spam though. I don't think they've migrated to other sections it's just that there's a lot more of them venturing out into other areas of the forum on the hunt for merit.

Nah, I'm not a merit source if I were I would have pumped out a lot more merits than I have done. Plus, Jet Cash  is right I wouldn't need the list. I normally jot down the url of any posts I find interesting or whatever, and then review them later on once I have merits to spend. But, there's simply too many current posts that end up sucking my merits from me.

First of all there's several reasons why a majority attack isn't viable, and quite simply isn't worth it. I'm not sure where you've got the 6 billion figure from, and I haven't done any math to support or go against that claim. So, I'll just ignore it for now.

For a 51% attack to be effective a majority attack would have to be maintained constantly to be effective.  Not only that but, several people wanting to protect Bitcoin would likely increase their computing power to protect from a majority attack whether this be 'normal' miners or other countries which support the movement of Bitcoin. For example, there's multiple pools which normal users could band together to reduce the computing power of the malicious attacker. This could be a community driven effort which the majority of worth well users would contribute to one way or another. Whether that's funding or actually providing their computing power.

A 51% attack isn't that effective, and there's probably better ways to go about 'attacking' the Bitcoin network.

If you are interested I've currently got around 100 posts saved to a text document that I plan on revisiting at a later date when I have the required merit. Unfortunately, I just keep adding to the list, and there's some pretty good posts that haven't been merited at all in there. My policies of what should be given merit might differ from you, but you might find it useful for a few of them. There's a lot of higher ranked accounts in there though, and that's because I don't tend to care about what rank the user is, and only care about the content they are spitting out.

It's not against forum rules. However, this isn't evidence that it's ethical. Legality, and ethics are different. It just so happens the majority of laws are based on ethics. Judging it's ethics in relation to the forums stance on whether or not it's against the rules is a moot point really. The forum doesn't moderate scams for example which are certainly unethical.

I'm not comparing the issue here with scams, however forum rules or how theymos interpreters the matter really doesn't make a difference because he isn't the one that left the feedback. This is why these sort of cases are so complex when ethics are involved there's 'bout to be people who disagree strongly. We all have different opinions on several different matters. Some people may have opposing opinions on the death sentence for example, but none of them can be arguably proven right or wrong. It's the same case here in that it depends on the individuals reviewing the case. I have generally mixed feelings about this scenario, and normally offer the benefit of the doubt. Would I personally bid on his auction in the future? Probably not. But, I haven't added any trust rating for a reason. Although, I understand why someone would.

Alright. I think it's time to address the key facts , and certain things which could of been misinterpreted. It's incredibly difficult to keep up with all the information which has been presented, and remembering it all when presenting an argument. I'm going to try my best to address the issues, and my personal opinion about the facts, and accusations. I'm not a lawyer, and it seems that the self bidding is a somewhat complex issue. So let's try, and look at this diplomatically instead of claiming abuse.

First of all let's address the topic subject; "Trust abuse"

Vod left you the feedback of: "Scammed other users by bidding on his own auction. States he does not believe this is unethical. Also admitted to me in PM he lied about this matter." Ref: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1399824.0

So let's dissect this:

"Scammed" this is actually subjective. I've already voiced my concerns about the practice of auctioneers bidding on their own auctions, however I'm willing to concede that in some auctions this is an accepted practice. Although, having said that it's normally specified in the original terms that the auctioneer can bid themselves. Let's make this clear that this isn't a requirement in some jurisdictions, but more of a courtesy.  

This is all depending on the country/state you live in. In some countries, and US states it's prohibited to self bid, unless disclosed prior to the auction. So, depending on how you view this it's very difficult to know which laws/rules to follow when the forum is home to such a diverse amount of people with various different nationalities, and cultures. There's no one rule that we could possibly follow so it's probably better to follow your own personal ethics. I do believe Vod has likely followed his own ethics when leaving the feedback that he left.

In short. I personally would be willing to say that you haven't scammed anyone per say. TheNewAnon135246 was the one that maybe should have won the auction, and may feel that he was scammed, but they have been largely nonvocal to my knowledge on this whole thing. (possibly because it's since been sold to them)

Vod then goes on about it being "unethical", and that you do not believe it to be so. Well, let's just pinpoint he is saying "unethical", and not illegal. Therefore, this is subjective, and leaves a lot to be interpreted by the individual leaving the feedback.

Now, Vod could potentially back up this claim if he wanted (he doesn't really have to due to it being subjective) in saying that the self bid was made somewhat close to the end of the auction. Possibly in an attempt to: 1. Prolong the auction in attempt for higher bids 2. Not sell at the going price.

These two points could be argued further, because of your admittance that you should have set a reserve price or higher starting price.

Okay, so looking at the personal messages exchanged between the two of you I'm finding it very difficult to understand from a external point of view, and therefore can't come up with a logical, and accurate opinion.  There's one thing looking at messages, and another actually understanding them. None of us on the outside were there at the time, and therefore have no idea of the factors which may have played a part in the exchange e.g stress, tension, past dealings (you've previously claimed you ran into problems with Vod prior to this). What it looks like to me is that both of you may have been playing tactical tennis at first, and hoping the issue would resolve itself, but none of you were willing to make the first move. Maybe, Vod did by reducing it to a neutral, but you didn't think that was enough due to the word "scammer" in the rating. I'm not sure about this, and it's more of an assumption than anything else.

I know you tried to summarize the messages sent in one of your posts, but the thing is you've also included your personal opinions/explanations which lead to bias opinions being formulated.

If we were to look at the claim of "not factual" then the only argument I see is that the word "scammed" might be subjective, because you might get off on a technicality that self bidding is allowed in certain jurisdictions.  

My personal view point was made clear in one of my previous posts in another topic that I personally don't consider self bidding ethical if it's not clearly disclosed prior to the auction start. I also made the point that I wouldn't of had too much of an issue if someone wasn't already winning the auction, and quite close to winning it. I wasn't actually aware that self bidding was common practice when I made my reply a few weeks back.

I've since looked into it, but the consensus is that it should be disclosed publicly. Not legally, but as a ethical stand point I would agree. I expect you are willing to disclose this in the future, because you've repeatedly said that you acknowledge that it's generally not accepted, and you willing to disclose reserve prices etc.  

However, you did suggest here that the coin was sold to the highest bidder:

I'm not sure if you mean the actual high bidder which was you or TheNewAnon. However, even if it was sold to TheNewAnon this didn't seem to be your initial intention. I say this because you were accepting offers for the coin after the auction had ended. Unfortunately, I can't quote this effectively due to it being in a locked topic. However, anyone can read through the replies to verify this.  At this time the coin wasn't sold per your own words, and that you were accepting offers in PM.

Let's try to wrap this up as this is a headache to try, and digest and figure out what is factual, and what is fiction. Generally, speaking this isn't a problem legally, or anything like that. It's more of the personal viewpoint of the person leaving the trust. I would back up anyone that says self bidding without a disclosure is unethical. However, I'm prepared to admit that this is rather subjective, and could be easily be interpreted the other way.

However, at the end of the day it's up to the person leaving the feedback, and I personally don't believe Vod is abusing his power. Maybe, his feedback could be worded differently considering the technicalities mentioned earlier,but in all honesty This has escalated into a personal problem between the two of you.  

My personal view point is I don't consider what you did ethical. I think I've made that more than clear. However, I concede that you may have an argument that self bidding is an accepted practice. Although, this doesn't translate into being ethical. In cases like this I would personally consider past history, and attitude of the issue.

You have a good history in general, and would of probably been considered trustworthy before all of this. Your attitude is harder to determine. It's hard to look at the feedback you left on Vod, and consider whether it was retaliatory or not. You also seem to push the ideas that self bidding is legal, and is used in a wide variety of auctions. You've also conceded yourself that in future auctions you shall take on board this learning experience, and alter them by including a reserve price etc.

I would disagree. If a signature/bounty manager is knowingly 'employing' spammers then they should be hit with repercussions too.  

I would assume the merit system would stand in their way. Using your words "keep spamming" they won't earn any merits, and thus won't rank up.

They maybe should be disabled for all ranks. However, it's hard to deny that Jr members are more prevalent with spamming because of how easy it is to make a jr member account.

If we are basing our assumption on their posting habits then they're life isn't hard at all.

I think it's apparent now that it's to fund the goat brothel. I'm from Wales, and  I can personally vouch that goats are expensive, and we use the much cheaper alternatives; sheep.