I wonder if a new market of selling/buying merit will soon appear.
It inevitably will but I'm sure selling merit will be dealt with in the same way account sales/sellers are.
So why not pubic the coin like BTC maybe named MeritCoin to decentralized and encrypted by official bitcoin talk community?
Some sort of bitcointalkcoin is something I've thought of before and a couple of others have suggested in some capacity as well. Maybe coins could be allocated for every activity point you collect and users could use them to microtip others, buy things from the marketplace or use them to buy donator ranks from the forum (ie bigger signatures). Money donated to the forum could then be used to fund worthwhile projects like the development of a decentralised forum, a better ddos protection service like cloudflare etc or some other charitable projects like seasteading etc (which theymos had talked about before).
It would be nice to give merits to me, if you think it would be helpful or make sense to improve the community quality according to above suggestion. 
I think this should be discouraged or even prohibited. It's akin to begging for me and we're probably gonna see a lot of this "if you liked this post please consider giving me merit" etc which I think is redundant and shouldn't be allowed. If a post is great people will acknowledge that without the need of asking for it.
