Topic: Decline of Marketplace activity/trading - page 3. (Read 1057 times)

As per your signature, I cannot officially accept your thanks.   

At vod thanks for the apology.

As long as the electricity and pollution have no cost.


I apologize for misreading.   I hope apologizing doesn't make you trust me less...  

No .

There were No takers so I am mining with it . It is now day 23 I earned over 102 and since I held the coin it went up 🆙 to about 125 back against my cost of 500.

Please correct your mistake.

Trades are simply moving to other platforms.  Theymos did an incredibly insane job of making so much out of this old forum software, but it doesn't have the infrastructure or stability for hundreds/thousands of trades per day.   As much as scammers will try to convince you that spreadsheets are just as safe as the blockchain, these spreadsheets tend to vanish when the scam is revealed.


Trading with your alt, leaving your alt a DT1 vote, escrow scamming and exchanging merit with your alt are the reason you are off DT again.  But hopefully this time your trust cannot be saved by returning 500btc.  Trading BTC is increasing (I'll have the data to prove this in about a week or so) and I have never been off DT.    


And you resealed it and tried to sell it as new?
(Edited to stroke out incorrect info)

I had suggested the forum do more to encourage LN use. It is good you are accepting LN (and other altcoins), but if few people have LNbtc to spend, few people will be able to pay you via LN. The same is also true with regards to the other altcoins you were offering -- some offer lower fees to use, but my guess is that very few people have dogecoin for reasons other than financial speculation.

What policies do you think should be changed to fix this problem? I know that theymos is very much opposed to implementing regulations, probably to a fault (moderate regulations can be a good thing, and can help ensure you don't have quazi-government like entities from doing bad things to the free market).

Interesting. Your experience seems to validate the point I was making in the OP. Do you have any suggestions that you believe may attract more buyers to the forum?

When the price is high is exactly the best time to spend coin you have. The price being at ~$35k versus ~$14k a few months ago should make people with coin be able to afford more/expensive goods/services with their increased wealth.

The purpose of this thread was to solicit suggestions from forum members. I am stumped for suggestions.

Covering escrow fees or shipping is probably something that would end up getting abused. I don't think theymos wants to be involved in individual transactions.

The value of bitcoin is higher now - doubly so - than it was back then so people are probably even more reluctant to spend their bitcoins.


It's a discussion forum primarily not a marketplace, but either way there's nothing the forum can do about it or promote it. What would you suggest? Offer to cover escrow fees or offer free shipping or something? There's nothing you can do if people don't want to trade here and the forum shouldn't get involved in that just like it doesn't get involved with many other things like scams and such. It's a niche market and always will be for numerous reasons.


There should be another rank as many people got to Hero before the merit change. The new rank should require a large amount of merit to distinguish it from others and so it's hard to achieve, or maybe just make Legendary require it and fix the activity to 780.

There's less new people coming into the forum, older members, if they like, probably have all the collectibles they want.

And, again, some people been leaving the forum since a good bunch of years. I found nicer crypto communities for example.

It isn't about high prices or low availability or tight pocketed buyers.  We all likely have more money than ever and eBay is selling GPUs plenty fast at insane prices.  It is a very simple issue of atmosphere.  A very straightforward and simple example of this was given here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.56243800

You can choose to ignore the problem and continue thinking everything is fine with this sort of behavior, or you can do something about it and watch as your reputation is destroyed, hence the problem.  Currently those who seek influence instead of honesty are succeeding in accelerating this place towards irrelevance and I fear it will be years before those engaging in the destructive behavior even realize they are the bad guys...

As for the honest traders trying to make a few bucks offering great deals for crypto, I'm sorry.  I guess you should have gotten here sooner.

Still don't believe me?  Silver demand is at insane levels globally and you'd be lucky to sell it at spot price here over the last year.  It isn't demand.  It isn't price.  It isn't cheap buyers.  It is atmosphere.

That would be nice to think. But the card is listing from 829 to 1129 on ebay.

A new sealed one with an invoice for six hundred should be jumped on. It was not.
Basically the buyers don’t come to the site like they used to do.

I actually thought I was being generous with the offer I made.

As I said I just mined with it for the last 20 days and have earned back 4 a day.

It will be paid off in around 105 days. Maybe I will sell it then.

I offered BTC, LTC, DOGE, Lightning & BCH
Even if I am just playing around or even if I was a serious vendor doing much more then that just becomes a management nightmare. How many coins can your really take without going through a payment processor and taking a hit on their commission? Yeah I can have a separate coinomi wallet but listing all the payment options and tracking all the coins and then figuring out what to do with them can very quickly become a lot of work. Do you really want to have $18 of peercoin just sitting there because that;s what someone paid you with?

This is something as a group we should probably spend a lot more time discussing and figuring out before it all comes crashing down around us.

-Dave

yep I myself I encourage LTC and Doge as fees are good.
Although Doge went nuts in price and frozen transactions are now common on the doge blockchains (trezor)
As my signature shows I am more of a multi coin believer as long as the coin is well backed by gear.






I saw Dave's raffle.
I can have some of those pieces I got them from him.
I simply don't do raffles.

Telegram and Discord didn't exist back when this forum was created, I would bet a lot of crypto activity has moved towards those platforms. The vast majority of new crypto users simply don't care about Bitcoin, they care about making a buck, which means they aren't going to check these forums out and if they are, they likely won't be contributing.

Towards DaveF's point (how I saw this thread) -  I was going to participate until I saw BTC TX fees. All my LTC is tied up in long term storage and I wasn't about to pay Coinbase $2.99 to get some more. That essentially free raffle would have cost users over $150 in Bitcoin TX fees for a $30 silver piece.

This could be an argument to add additional ranks. Over time, there will obviously be more hero members as members gain additional merit and activity.

This is another reason to encourage people to use LN. The costs to use an existing LN channel is near zero and would reduce the costs associated with micro-transactions.

I have edited the OP to suggest adding incentives for increased LN usage.

I'm not sure about other subforums, but I've been noticing this activity drop in the lending section for a long time now.

I feel like a huge reason is because people are simply no longer able to make microloans feasibly with BTC being this high - average tx fees would eat into the loans pretty steeply (think lending 0.01 BTC @ $400/BTC v.s. 0.0001 BTC @ $40,000/BTC).

Another reason is that forum trust has been diluted to a great extent. Previously, hero members could get no collateral loans easily, but now, even the highest ranking accounts will struggle to get any sizable loan without collateral. Perhaps lenders have matured and tightened their lending standards, but I think the abundance of high-ranking but not necessarily reputable users is to blame as well.

Other sections benefit from first-mover's advantage, I'd also prefer to post in a dedicated section since more people peruse them, but I also wonder how much would activity decline if signatures were to disappear overnight.


They do, they use nicehash with the GPU(s) they bought when the prices were lower, or with the overpriced GPU(s) to offset the cost of high prices they paid for them.

generic you. not you specifically.

I offer to take ltc and or doge to save on fees. I get some takers now and then.
Basically small miners don’t exist. There were far more back in the day.

This could be a sign of a larger issue with the availability of GPU equipment versus demand.

The USD cost of transaction fees is currently very high, primarily due to the high bitcoin cost. Even without an escrow fee, the cost to send coin to an escrow, and for the escrow to the seller can be high. It may be beneficial if steps were taken to encourage people to use LN, where fees are a small fraction of on-chain transactions.

I am not sure if you are referring to my trust rating or my merit score. I very rarely trade on here, and my only negative rating is from someone unwilling to discuss said rating. I don't make posts with the intention of receiving a trust review. I put a lot of effort into my posts, which is reflected in the merit I receive, and I send merit to posts I believe that also have a lot of effort put into them.

Well the computer/mining goods section no longer has much action for a lot of reasons.

Gpus are unobtainable everywhere unless you over pay by a lot.

So when I listed a new sealed quality gpu at a 100 usd markup.
600 vs 500 no one wanted it.

Why is that. Must people left here  that would buy gear want bargains. So marking a new sealed 500 card for 600 is not a bargain.

So I am mining with it clearing 4 dollars a day.  Which means in 150 days it is free.

So sellers like myself say fuck it I will just mine with it.
This is true in many ways.
I spent two weeks talking to a new guy with 100-200 k to invest.

I found three decent deals for him and he did not purchase any. why he wants a bargain. Guess what many will simply mine the gear and not care about his need or desire to get a deal.

I also stopped most escrow on many deals as making ten dollars on a two hundred dollar escrow is just not worth it. So I do minimum escrow fee of 20 usd . and at a thousand I switch to 2%.

What this does is discourage small sales as no one wants to use paypal and get a charge back.

and no one wants to pay 20 dollars for a 200 dollar escrow.

I could list more reasons why things are slow.

in mining section the mod deletes and alters posts a lot.
so i post les their many said fuck it I wont post there.

I wont discuss the boost your points by your trust list as I now don’t give and new feedback with this account.
I use my cellphone account.

But frankly most people post on btc to do a signature.
I used to do that. And then give the funds away in my give away but btc was 100 a coin back then it was a different world.

Fair points that some companies have created efficiencies in selling things that used to be traded on some of these subs. These companies have also (mostly) ironed out problems related to scammers.

We have had bull markets in the past that has caused bitcoin to go up further than it has in the past several months. All of your other concerns have always been a problem with trading on this forum.


Well the price has gone up significantly since the start of 2019 so it's inevitable that people won't spend more in bitcoin. [/quote]In terms of USD, revenue is down by ~70%. It is down by more in terms of BTC. I think this is an indication that advertising on bitcointalk may be less profitable. The fact that bid increments are so high when compared to the selling price may also push the final price down.

I am trying to start a conversation.

Merit could be a factor if people responding to offers/threads have difficulty communicating, and don't want to pay $35 (for a copper membership) just to talk about a trade. If threads are not getting a lot of responses/sales, additional sellers will not want to create additional threads.

If it appears that traders do not have accurate trust ratings, it may make people uncomfortable to risk their money to a stranger.

I think the administration should care about how much trading goes on around the forum. I believe it is an indicator of the forum's influence, and an indicator of how many 'real' people are using bitcoin because of the forum.

It appears that buyers (and people that respond to marketplace threads) have also declined.

The last round for the ad slots brought in a total of 0.02 BTC, which is worth around $620. There was a round for the ad slots that ended on January 12, 2019, which bitcoin was trading at ~$3653, that brought in a total of 1.44 BTC, or around $5,200. I may have actually looked at other auctions when I made my statement because the difference between these rates is more than 70%.

There might be an argument to either lower the threshold to become a full member, or to add an additional rank with a lower merit requirement.