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Accounts should not be considered valid collateral or have any value... End of story.
Why? Accounts have a value because one can sell the signature. High ranked accounts get more coins per post/term/activity/etc. and thus have a higher value than low ranked accounts.
Also since this is the 100. time this topic was brought up by someone let me just quote these:
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Its openly allowed, because there is a very real possibility that 95+% of it couldn't be stopped. Sure we might catch the occasional moron who posts out in the open, but there would be plenty of people using bitmessage and tormail that could make good money off of bootlegged accounts. As it is now, hopefully people don't see 2 year old accounts as any more trustworthy than new members. If account selling was "banned" then people would start to trust that these old accounts are the original owners, and they should be trusted due to their time commitment. When in reality, they probably just bought the account for $20 on ebay, to pull a scam.
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But even with 100,000 votes saying, "No account selling shouldn't be allowed" it wouldn't change anything. It is allowed for the reason that has been mentioned probably over 1000 times now conservatively. Its unenforcable, and to say otherwise is just deluding ourselves. Sure, we can say no account selling, and then people will be caught off guard, as the community here isn't technologically retarded (correct use of the word). It will happen anyway, and people will lose a bit of their suspicion, figuring that all old accounts are their original owners, and that they couldn't have just been purchased off of Ebay for $20. People keep saying, "other forums have detection methods!" A *insert type* forum doesn't have the userbase who knows that they can get around any and all tracking methods, nor do they have 200,000 members.
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There are legitimate reasons to buy accounts as well, for example wanting to skip newbie jail, or wanting the username, or even using it for paid signature advertising.
I'd think that scammers may not have the best of luck around here, even after buying accounts, as hopefully, just about no one is trusted, and if they slip up, they get labled a scammer, and are out their money. As well as if they spam for the paid signature advertising, they will get banned and also be out of the money they paid to you.
Could we catch some account sellers? Probably, but more than enough would get through to do damage. Its easy enough to see accounts that have been inactive since 2011 being sold, however what if you were to raise an account up until mid january, sell it in late january, or even february. How hard would it be for the seller to post on the account once or twice per day to keep it active? They would also be increasing the post/activity count and making it more valuable. That wouldn't be very suspicious, especially amongst the other 200,000 acounts. We need to be able to catch all or none. If we don't catch all, people who have old accounts will be trusted, which they shouldnt. If we catch none, no one is trusted, and thats how it should be.
Are we still seriously talking about this? No one likes the act of buying/selling accounts but we are not going to stop it. The staff have made that very clear.
It appears so. I'm sure this debate will rage as long as Bitcointalk exists itself.
There is an even better one by Salty about how account trading combined with paid signature are a possible reason scammers can rarely ROI from bought accounts, but I cant find that right now.