Topic: Contribute To Bitcoin Economy... (Read 4545 times)

But that's not what's happening. What's happening is people are farming accounts, selling accounts, buying accounts, and spamming & scamming from those accounts.
Not passive, and nothing to do with chatting.


Now imagine that you're running a gun store.
A guy walks into your shop, sets up a table & starts selling child porn. He also regularly shits on your floor, making your shop less attractive to your customers.
Are you obligated to let him keep doing it?
He has an excellent argument for you to let him stay: If you don't let him sell CP in your store, he'll just be forced to sell it in the parking lot, so why kick him out?

If people can make a passive income for their regular discussion, that is such a cool thing. It's an incentive to come and chat, why not earn a few bits? Just because some people are doing it wrong and spamming, doesn't mean we should also punish those who are using their paid advertising signature responsibly. We are taking a stab at limiting what those people spamming can do, while still allowing those responsible enough to not spam.

Yeah I was sort of referencing gun control but not in the crontroversial pro vs against manner, but instead in the sense that publicly and openly trading a neutral object that could be used for good of bad is best done in a safe and open place. I compare the account selling issue to selling guns in a gun store, vs in a parking lot. We can't stop account sales from happening in the parking lot, so why not allow people to do it in the shop.

This pay-to-post thing just seems like the polar opposite of what a public forum (in the old sense of the word) is about. Not everything in the world should be monetized just because it can be. The point is paid sig space leads to account dealing which leads us here - more bad than good. This is a private forum, presumably meant for discussing money, not for making it as we talk.

@Quickseller: Not sure why you want to introduce another hot-button issue into a thread that's already pretty polarized. I'm not a gun control crunchy, I've used the example of sleeping with a gun because I had, because I had to. This is not what this thread is about tho.

How would you feel about me citing forbes? They say that many (40%) of guns used in violent crimes were acquired via illicit means (illegally), and another 37% acquired the gun they used for their violent crime from family or friends (for a total of 77%). They also say that violent crime has heavily declined when gun sales are strongly up.

I know there have been a number of studies that correlates higher gun violence with higher gun control laws, with violence increasing after stricter gun control laws go into effect.

The point I am making is that if you have more guns used in violent crimes when gun sales are (nearly) banned, then why would it not be the case that more scams would occur with purchased accounts if account sales were (nearly) banned.

Citing the Cato Institute is a bit like citing BP re. advantages of offshore drilling. Also confusing cause & effect.
The reason those places opted for stricter gun control is because of violent crime rate. Don't want to go off on that tangent, love guns myself, but not in this thread.

You are right once again, the forums doesn't gain money by allowing advertising signatures, but we aren't really about profits here. The general policy here is to only ban the things that cause issues that can't be fixed, rather than banning paid advertising signatures, we would rather to help fix the issues they cause and continue allowing them, because from the user's point of view, its pretty cool to be able to post regularly and make some bitcoins. The problem is the spam created when it goes beyond just posting regularly.. We all acknowledge that paid advertising signatures promote spam, and we have been discussing ways to limit this for a while now. Freedom of speech includes freedom to promote whoever you want, for financial motivations or not. We are trying to figure out ways not to limit/censor the users here, but put tighter restrictions that hold campaign managers more responsible to reduce spam.

*edit*
The only way I see to remove the incentives for things we don't want to happen, would be to remove the marketplace section all together. There would probably still be paid advertising signatures, and also account trading for that reason.

Personally, I see paid advertising signatures as a reason to legitimize account selling. What could only be useful for scamming before, can now be used to make an honest buck with paid advertising signatures. The spam created is another issue, and thats where we will start.

Exactly. That's why we shouldn't create situations which provide incentive for [thing_you_don't_want_to_happen].

I'm sure this has been covered before, but why does the forum even allow sig ads? The forum profits from them indirectly at best, and possibly loses money on [official] forum ads that theymos auctions. Seems ...counterintuitive? You agree that it's the main incentive for account farms & account dealing, what would be the drawback of banning them?
I know I'm opening another can of worms, but.

The bitcoin scene has always been a shark tank, I don't think that there are more bad people than anywhere else, or that the bad guys are figuring out new ways to be shady. If you give a good guy an opportunity to act in a bad manner without getting caught, they might not actually be quite so good. Bitcoin sort of caters to that behavior, hence why I only trust financial motivation like I explained in my last post. Maybe the vibe is just being projected more as of late, but in general I believe that the amount of scams that go on has been decreasing, and by that I mean the petty scams, I have no comment on the long cons, IE Pirateat40, Tradefortress, Tradehill, The GAW stuff etc. For every good thing, there is also a downside. Bitcoin gives people financial freedoms that you can't have anywhere else. The trade off is some of the protections, and sadly one of those tradeoffs is you have to learn how to protect yourself from scams, something that doesn't always come natural to a society guarenteed by buyers protection programs. If you learn how to protect yourself though, you quickly find that without the 10% fees, you start saving a lot of money, and its a great system.

I feel the same way that the feel of the forums is changing, but rather than from a trading/trust point of view, I see it as changing due to spam.




What you are talking about here is the long con. You are right, I have no solution for preventing those. I mentioned them in my last paragraph. What do you have to guarentee that Walmart isn't going to take your payment and run off and scam you? Law enforcement and their own financial self interest. We haven't had the best luck with law enforcement in the bitcoin scene, and thats one of those things that comes along with the financial freedom. Ebay calculated how much they need to take off the top to guarentee against scams. Of their 10%, Id imagine the majority goes to paying salaries and profits. If we learn as individuals how to do the same calculations, that 10% on top that we pay minus the salaries and profits can go just to the cost of doing business.

I think one thing that should be pointed out is that, in the US, places that have stricter gun control laws tend to have higher violent crime rates. Places like Chicago, Washington DC, and Detroit are all notorious for their high violent crime rates, but they also have very strict gun control laws.

According to the Cato Institute, states with laws that allow citizens to have concealed carry licenses (states that allow their citizens to have a concealed gun) have a 24% lower violent crime rate, a 19% lower murder rate, and a 39% lower robbery rate then states that forbid their citizens to have a concealed weapon.

Yes! We're on the same page, never thought this was some sort of a sinister plan to make some pocket change. The fallout is pretty bad tho.
It's not even something I can easily quantify or point a finger at, more of a general "feel" of the forum changing from hanging out with a bunch of friends to that guarded feel you get when scoring dope in a bad part of town.


But it's a feedback loop. If something seems scammy, you deal with it as you'd deal with scammy things, you jockey for advantage, and it becomes scammy. That's why seemingly superficial stuff isn't as superficial as it seems. From strictly unhippy, utilitarian perspective, it pays to appear good.
A rewording of Vonnegut's “Pretend to be good always and even God will be fooled.”

You have to keep in mind the technology involved here. Trust is non existant on its base level when you are dealing with anonymous people and a non reversable currency. In my opinion, no one can earn trust, its just a matter of what you can trust someone with statistically based on self interest. For example, why do we trust escrow agents? They could just run off with your money just as well as anyone else. Well, self interest is the answer. If they make enough money in fees, there is financial motivation not to scam. If someone gives me 1 BTC to hold in escrow, I could A) Steal the money or B) Not steal the money, complete the transaction, and get myself maybe a .01 BTC fee. Why would I want 1/100th of what I could scam? Because that party that is happy with my service will then recommend me to someone else, and I'll collect more fees. Generally, I trust people who have less to gain by screwing me over than they have to gain by being fair.

The trust system is not an exact science. Its a feedback system. I've traded with confirmed scammers on a regular basis, and I've traded with accused scammers. If I gauge that there is a risk to my Bitcoins, whether it be an unknown trader, or a scammer, I'm going to take appropriate measures. Thats not to say that someone couldn't buy a trusted account. But someone with an account worth 5 BTC, I might only trust them with 1 BTC. Theres no point in scamming me for 1 BTC and losing 4 BTC. If an escrow agent hasn't scammed someone for 100 BTC, because they figure they can make more than 100 BTC by operating legitimately, would I trust them with 100 BTC? Not necessarily. What if someone bought that person's account? Well, if the escrow agent values their name/reputation/service at over 100 BTC, a scammer is going to have to fork up more than 100 BTC to buy that account.

See what I mean? If you want a safer trading experience, use a website created for trading. The forum is first and foremost about discussion. We aren't going to inact any rules that benefit trading, if they could negatively impact the forum's primary objective.

Trust is not only relevant, it's essential for a thriving community. It is the glue that holds communities together, it allows for frictionless commerce, it lets us sleep with our doors unlocked, it lets us not spend billions on armies.

Anything that works towards degrading trust is "bad," is divisive, is not hugs & sunshine & should be immediately killed. With fire.
This is a prima facie truth that shouldn't need to be explained.

The quote above is just your responses, didn't want to clutter the thread reposting stuff. Just want to say I'm glad that we are actually discussing this now, I've got not problem discussing the topic thoroughly, perhaps misunderstandings happened early on.

I mentioned a while ago, that account selling in a way discourages scamming. It isn't a 100% thing, but in some situations, if you can sell your account for 2 BTC, and you are in need of money with no hope, selling your account is a valid option, or using your account as collateral for a loan anyway. Forum accounts gain their sometimes obscene value due to paid advertising signatures, if you can get 0.4 BTC per month just by posting as a hero member, your account becomes more valuable, making scamming a more expensive activity.

You are correct again, Ebay sucks, but trust is irrelevant because of their "buyers" or "sellers" protection, although they still mess that up relatively often. They can use their 10% that they take off the top to pay off people that get scammed The forums is not Ebay, we don't collect any money from account sales, we don't have a team of people to monitor sales and such, and that has never been our intention. As far as marketplace activity, think about sites like Ebay where their sole purpose is selling things, and they collect fees. Craigslist, which is primarily for selling things, but they don't collect fees, and then there is the forum that is not primarily for sales, nor do we collect fees. Staff involvement in the marketplace is very minimal.

As far as your concern about buying trusted accounts to lend trust to others, that is a valid claim too, but you still only have one shot at it, if that. If you buy that trusted legendary account for 5 BTC, and you start trusting a bunch of sleezy people, that trusted legendary account you just paid 5 BTC is no longer trusted. If someone could pull it off so that they give some trust to some other scamming accounts and try to get multiple scams going, there is still an incredibly high chance that some of the forum's resident scambusters, or just regular people will pick up on it, making that 5 BTC investment null. Financial disuasion is the name of the game. Frankly, a scammer is far better off trying their luck with a dicing site, than purchasing an account and trying to abuse people with it or scamming with it.

I will say, how account selling/buying, scamming, and paid signature ads all tie into each other was not something done by design, it just sort of ended up like that.

I dont know if you are Supa or not, he but some of your behavior matched to a tee, and you said something he had said to me quite a while ago exactly. If you were just frustrated because I was misunderstanding you, tis all water under the bridge, lets keep on going with a rational discussion.


See, I don't especially care how it looks, but how it works. We have seen time and time again, that if we just ignore an issue and push it under the rug, it can become way more harmful than it is out in the open. Sure it may not look pretty from the outside, but I'm more against people being scammed, than people thinking something looks scammy. Account selling/buying is a relatively new thing, I think it came around the same time as paid advertising signatures, because paid advertising signatures gave forum accounts a steady income and therefor a value. The thought process is, if we banned it, we couldn't stop people from doing it anyway. If we tried to stop it, people would just evolve better ways to sell undetected. If you are buying a gun or something like that and they are illegal, you can't go have a safe transaction in a bank or at a federal firearms dealer, you have to do it in some parking lot or shady area where the transaction might not go the same way. Same principals applies here, account sales are a lot safer if done in the public, and when people know that its going on, they can prepare themselves more readily.

Exactly. It looks really bad. You're probably been around this long enough for the effect to have dulled, but try to imagine what it looks like to the outsiders. And I don't think I'm unique when I tell you I've been here for YEARS before I knew that accounts are being bought and sold. I've heard about it occasionally, but *sincerely* assumed that it was either someone trolling. It simply hasn't donned on me that it was allowed.
What makes you think that new users know it's happening? (since the "it's better for n00bs to see it happening in the open" argument has been used)

Has it been this bad in the past?

But anyway, banning the sale of accounts *ON THIS FORUM*, and banning those who facilitate such dealing (escrow services, etc.) would do wonders for public perception.
Publicly distancing ourselves from it is also important.

Trust can be either relevant or irrelevant. It's a guide for you to make your own mind up on. You can disregard the entire system or judge feedback and users on a case by case basis. You can probably buy accounts or memberships to the majority of sites on the internet. I can buy a degree from Harvard or fake passport online. Does that make those institutions a charade too? People can only protect themselves at the end of the day and it's most certainly not the job of the staff or admin's of this forum to do so, nor would it be possible, hence the rules we have here whether people like them or not.

Didn't realize it was that much, haven't been following the bitcointalk account market. But yeah, I didn't mean McDonald's.


At the risk of repeating myself, the trusted accounts aren't used to scam directly, but to lend credibility to less trusted accounts. See TAT. Do you really think a n00b going by
"cryptocyprus" would have raised millions on this forum without the help of a trusted member?  Yeah. nah.


In that case, trust is irrelevant for eBay accounts, since, as long as you trust eBay, everything works out.
Bitcointalk accounts aren't backed by a central entity, and the trust you place in them is not a proxy for trust in some central entity.

To be useful, it must be real. If accounts are bought and sold, it is not. It's a charade.
But thanks for taking this thread back on topic.

BTW, do you still think I'm Supa?

Please explain how it has caused damage when, for the tenth time, whether we allow or disallow the sale of accounts it changes absolutely nothing. The beauty of bitcoin is it can be used for everything by everyone good or bad, but what it is used for is up to the individual. Bitcoin gives people freedom and that's what satoshi intended. We've got entrepreneurs to child pornographers using it, criminals to charities, altruistic libertarians to greedy capitalists and everything in between. Don't like one of them? Suck it up and deal with it. And you don't know how satoshi feels about anything. Maybe he's immensely proud that an account on a forum he created is now worth hundreds of dollars. Maybe he finds it humorous. Maybe he's disgusted by it and what he created in bitcoin or what people now use it for. Maybe the opposite. Nobody knows, but one thing I do know is you're projecting your own beliefs onto him and I doubt you're no saint either.

Thank you, you are actually expressing why you think its embarrassing. I now understand what you mean. First off, the Bitcoin forum is not the bitcoin community. It is a forum managed by a single person, not by the bitcoin community as a collective. The larger problem is that people judging the Bitcoin community don't know what they are judging. When Charlie Shrem was arrested, news articles read "CEO OF BITCOIN ARRESTED" my point being, you can't change people's perceptions. If you mean that by officially banning account selling so that people looking in will have a better impression, you might be right. But, as far as the internals, we have explained why it causes issues. It is unenforcable in a fair way. Your argument has been, just because its hard to enforce doesn't mean you shouldn't try, if I'm now understanding you correctly. That just isn't the case in this situation. Officially banning accounts couldn't discourage account sellers in any way. If we ban their accounts, they would just make another. They aren't motivated by a single account that we could ban, they are motivated by a collection of accounts that they own.

Not a little thing.
Sure, the money you get is pocket change, but the damage it has caused to the forum is serious.
If the bitcoin community is judged by this forum, we're nothing but a bunch of  bumbling crooks and inept street hustlers, stealing as much or more from each other than from outsiders.

I realize you're new, but please read some of the posts from the early days of this forum, and compare.
It's an embarrassment. I, for one, am embarrassed. And I'm sure Satoshi would not be proud

I think you'll find you're the one who has been 'shitting it up' from the start and is bizarrely majorly 'butthurt' over such a little thing as account sales, but sure, getting paid to play with trolls is great fun. You know as well as I do that forum accounts are not banned for merely speaking out against staff or for criticizing their policies so you're just using this as an excuse, but if you're only risking a 'decent dinner' then surely you have nothing to lose? I'm sure there's another reason why you don't use your main account(s) (an existing ban, perhaps?). Maybe instead of making childish personal attacks and derailing your own thread you should get back on to the point of the topic at hand. You've still yet to make a sound argument as to why the banning of account sales isn't futile but feel free to get back on track.