This is nothing confusing & weird.
1. merit is not equal to reputation, it is only used to encourage high quality posts, which is similar to a compliment to others.
People with more merits don't mean that has a good reputation,there are always some merit abusers.
2. The merit that you can use to send to someone else is called sMerit. When you send sMerit out, it won't reduce the merit you own.
3. You get merit points when someone sends you some for one of your posts. Additionally, when someone sends you merit points, half of those points can be sent by you to other people.
You can check your Merit and sMerit here:https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit
For example:
Now your merit is 0, when you receive 1 merit, your merit will be 1, and sMerit will be 0.5, but your merit system can't display this 0.5 sMerit, and it can't be sent, because the minimum sMerit that can be sent is 1.
If you check your Merit system, it should be like this:
If you check your Merit system, it should be like this:
Nice explanation I was also thinking that we lose merit when we give merit to somebody but now I really like this merit system and Lammie is wrong,this forum have really good system against spammers.