As it stands now, most sold accounts are used for non-scamming purposes
Do you state this from your first hand involvement in Account trading?
Yes as well as my observations of what are clearly sold accounts.
As of a little over a year ago, when I stopped dealing in accounts, virtually none (probably less then 5%) of sold accounts would be used in scam attempts. I think this number might have increased somewhat recently as prices seems to have fallen by a decent amount (making it cheaper to attempt to scam), but I still think the number of sold accounts used in a scam attempt (not necessarily a successful one) is very low. I also suspect that many of the accounts used in scam attempts were controlled by a very small number of people at the time of their scam attempts.
What are "non scamming" purposes? Presumably they involve a financial benefit, so are you referring to signature campaign income?
Yes, primarily for signature deals, however some people seemed to want to get around the posting limits, and some wanted to use their purchased accounts to start a business (and would eventually wind down the business without any kind of scam accusations and/or major controversies).
if the sale of accounts were disallowed then the buyers who buy accounts for non-scamming purposes would no longer wish to buy accounts
Which would mean that "the non-scamming purpose" market would shrink, or need to be opened up to newbies.
but the number of accounts for sale would remain the same.
No it wouldn't,
it would mean that account farming would be much less attractive because of the danger of all the accounts belonging to the farmer being rendered worthless.This might be true, I am not sure.
I would think of it this way: The forum is not going to ever limit the number of accounts that someone can have, this is simply against it's political beliefs. If for example someone were to start selling accounts on another forum and/or on reddit, then whenever one of their accounts would show up to the admins as belonging to someone else then the seller could simply claim that they were hacked to avoid all of their accounts getting banned. On the other hand, the one sold account could potentially end up getting banned, which would turn off potential legit buyers.
Basic economics would imply that the price would go down, reducing the costs to potential scammers
No, because above: supply would drastically reduce.
Unless you're talking about the $10 loan market,
does the cost of an account really figure in the number of scams pulled? Imo, no, IYO, probably yes.
It used to be that hero accounts without any kind of trust/reputation (or even an avatar) would sell for well over $1,500, however the cost has since come down significantly due to increased supply of hero accounts, and legendary accounts (as well as all other ranks of accounts) have seen similar declines in prices -- at least from what I have seen. When an account has negative trust, it's value tends to go to nearly zero.
I would ask you this; how many people on here would
you the average user, trust with $750 (half of what the cost of hero account used to cost)? How many people would you trust with $130 (the selling price on
this auction for a hero account)? If the value of an account goes to nearly zero after a scam attempt is made public, then a potential scammer will both have to risk a higher amount and need to steal a higher amount in order to potentially profit off of an expensive account. Also if someone has a more expensive account, and people know such account is very valuable, then maybe more people will trust the expensive account with $130, however the owner of this account might be able to make $10 off of this trade, and if they repeat this enough times then maybe they will be able to make back the cost of their account.
Tl,dr:
Pros
More difficult for scammers
I am curious to know why you think banning the sale of accounts will make it more difficult for scammers. The banning of accounts will simply move the sale of accounts to other forums and/or reddit. Both of these places will have trusted members within their communities who can act as an escrow service. I really don't think that creating a reddit account and/or an account on some other trading forum is all that difficult.
If the forum just bans account sales, there will be less people who will go ahead and buy an account. There will be less people trying to sell accounts openly. Less accounts going as collateral for loans. Less spam. Less scams.
That is, the entire market for account sales will shrink (demand and supply, though I can't say which will be more or less).
I pointed out above that legit buyers of accounts would potentially get banned if the sale of accounts were to get banned, while the seller of accounts could claim that they got hacked. The forum will generally will not take action unless there is (very) solid evidence, so I believe that the seller would probably get the benefit of the doubt, while the buyer really will not have any explanation as to what they are doing with someone else's account.
The only problem I see with that is, as you pointed out there will still be trades going on outside the forum which will be risky (very probable that an escrow will not be used and much more likely to be scammed).
Why do you think this? There are escrows on forum.bitcoin.com, there are escrows on reddit, and I assume that there are escrows on other marketplace-like forums. The forum administration of bitcointalk has zero influence on what is allowed on other forums, and influential members of the community here likely has a diminished level of influence of influence within other communities that are separate from bitcointalk.
Well the only reason why accounts are being bought and sold are, directly or indirectly, to make useless posts for a campaign or to scam. So why not?
Maybe BadBear and/or theymos and/or another mod can comment on this, however from what I can tell, the account farmers (eg sellers) are worse with the spam then the people buying accounts for signature campaign purposes.
One other point that I forgot to mention previously, is that if someone is in need of money (who is not in the business of farming accounts) can potentially raise some money via the sale of their account. If this person does not have this option then, if they are desperate enough they may decide to attempt to pull off a scam to raise the money they need.
Suggestion: Ban account sales from 10th June to 10th August and see how it goes?
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