And here we have a Member, registered last October, who is greatly concerned about merit--but apparently not enough for him to read any of the dozens of threads about it, not even when the system was created in January, as he was celebrating his 3-month bitcointalk anniversary.
And the idiotic misinformation from OP's peers (not mine) who share the same shallow understanding of this. If ever anyone was looking for a couple of reasons why bitcointalk is so shitty, there you go.