What do you need merits for?
For the same reason Morgan Freeman starred in London Has Fallen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzJVH6OdqWo![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FMzJVH6OdqWo%2Fmaxresdefault.jpg&t=665&c=EViwHYnyNgDhsw)
As far as I can see, system of merits here is some sort of reputation.
Not really. It's a system to reward posts that are deemed useful or meritorious and to distinguish a shitposter from the rest and prevent them from abusing the ranking system by contributing little to nothing here over multiple alt accounts. There's a huge problem here of people making very low-quality contributions just to farm accounts to use for claiming bounties. The merit system is a way to try curb this.
It serves to distinguish experts in cryptography from inexperienced users, that is quite useful inside the forum, since we know how much we can trust a certain user. And of course, merits can serve as a moral encouragement for the help given to others.
I'm not an expert in cryptography, however, I am one of the most merited users here (not tying to suck my own dick). I got most of my merits in Meta from helping out and proposing solutions to the many issues here. Merits are not an indicator of how trustworthy you are either.
And, consequently, they mean nothing if we got them in a different (undeserved) way. In addition, outside this website, these merits don't mean anything and can not be used at all.
Ranks on this forum mean nothing elsewhere as well, just as Reddit karma means nothing here either. Merits are a system for this forum not any other.
So, why do so many users try to get them from the very beginning of their registration, as if this is their main goal on the forum? It seemed to me that merits should be just a tool, not an ultimate purpose.
I reckon you already know the answer to this, but merits aren't their true goal. Merits are actually in the way of achieving what they came here to do and that is simply to earn money. To earn more money you need a higher ranked account to get a bigger signature. To do that you need merits. That's why they're desperate for them.
Numerous daily posts like "How to get merits", thousands of similar responses to posts only worsen the state of the community and do not do any good, but kill communication, don't they? Or, maybe, I've missed something?
There are bigger issues here than the people creating threads about merits, but practice what you preach.