While it can increase the perceived value of the account... on the other hand if someone can easily earn merits then they can also "burn" one on a loan and then farm another one. Not sure what the "cost" of the effort is and how it compares to e.g. earning from a sig campaign.
Making a very rough estimate; current signature campaign rates for Member status pay 0.00007
BTC max 0.00002/600 satoshi min. on Bitvest; and 0.25$ per post (
source) I don't take into account shitcoin sig campaigns because shitcoins be shitcoins. The first campaign allows 60 posts per week and the second one 20.
So we have:
0.00007
BTC*60=0.0042
BTC on max tier of the bitvest campaign; 0.00002
BTC*60=0.0012 on lowest tier; 0.00036000
BTCwith no tier
Or, 0.25$*20=5$ (0.0004697
BTC @ current market rates)
Now for the merits; I don't consider myself an extraordinary poster(yesterday I found out that I am on SMAS blacklist
), so compared to an account farmer scammer; I think the stimate may be similar. Since I've come back to the forum, I've earned 32 merits (if I'm not mistaken), and I came back a month and a little ago; so I'll take 1 merit/day as a reference.
Newbie needs 10 merits to achieve rank; so 10 days.
Each one can draw its conclusion; but on a single month; user could earn 15$ or more. Since no one will give a no collateral loan to a recently created account; I think it's way much more hard work to create an account, far it a bit so that it's not "suspicious" and the default a small loan; than farming an account a bit and starting doing sig campaigns