Topic: selling Bitcointalk accounts shouldn't be allowed.. - page 2. (Read 2495 times)

As time goes on, the value of accounts go down. More and more farmers will rank up and flood the market. There's no way you can stop account sales. People even sell other forum accounts even here!

Yes this is true. Account are sold to newcomers to this forum, and for a fee they don't have to be branded newbies.
I agree with you on this point. Look at the economics section, and you'll see pointless drivel posted over and over again
Not necessarily, most search engines are designed to filter out spam/irrelevant content, though this site has a high pagerank.
I do not agree with you on these last points. there is nothing wrong with Theymos having millions of dollars off of Bitcoin. Your suggestion that he is using the donations and the extra money from his own ads to pay the moderators and Bitcoin developers is complete nonsense. this may be a big forum, but there is a Bitcoin community beyond this forum. Sure, the develops post here, but your accusation is just a conspiracy theory.

1. Accounts are sold because the Signature Ads they can run pay more.

2. People post meaningless drivel to get paid for their Signature Ads.

3. More people posting more meaningless drivel means more hits on the site.

4. More hits on the site means Theymos can rake in more income from his own site ads.

5. After taking in millions of $ worth of BTC "donations" from old timers, well, Theymos just needs to suck a little bit more out of this "community".

6. Use raised funds to pay "moderators" who help steer Bitcoin development in the direction his friends at Blockstream want/need it to go.

7. Sleep like a baby, content that you have been an excellent steward of this decentralized and trustless system.

Couldn't have said it better myself.   The bottom line for me is that both parties in an account sale cannot be trusted, much like the people who come on this forum to offer prescription medications for sale cannot be trusted.

I'm on the receiving end of a lot of butthurt because of my negative trust that I'm leaving lately.   Well, that's our trust system.   You can scream bloody murder until your uvula explodes, but I'm not deleting any of it. 

If the forum just bans account sales, there will be less people who will go ahead and buy an account. There will be less people trying to sell accounts openly. Less accounts going as collateral for loans. Less spam. Less scams.

That is, the entire market for account sales will shrink (demand and supply, though I can't say which will be more or less).

The only problem I see with that is, as you pointed out there will still be trades going on outside the forum which will be risky (very probable that an escrow will not be used and much more likely to be scammed).
Well the only reason why accounts are being bought and sold are, directly or indirectly, to make useless posts for a campaign or to scam. So why not?

Suggestion: Ban account sales from 10th June to 10th August and see how it goes?

Do you state this from your first hand involvement in Account trading?
What are "non scamming" purposes? Presumably they involve a financial benefit, so are you referring to signature campaign income?

 
Which would mean that "the non-scamming purpose" market would shrink, or need to be opened up to newbies.


No it wouldn't, it would mean that account farming would be much less attractive because of the danger of all the accounts belonging to the farmer being rendered worthless.


No, because above: supply would drastically reduce.
Unless you're talking about the $10 loan market, does the cost of an account really figure in the number of scams pulled? Imo, no, IYO, probably yes.

Tl,dr:

Pros

More difficult for scammers
Less sig spam
Account farming made unprofitable

Cons

None.

But nothing will change.

anything sold illegally has a higher price, thats the point of the black market. guns and drugs are sold at high prices because oft he risk involved

I actually have no problem with that. People will try to scam either way. It isn't even hard to avoid scammers, and it is quite rare that someone that is 'trusted' engages in such behavior. The spam is the primary problem in this situation, not the scams.

Not doing anything exaggerates the problems the most.

No. The opposite would happen as it would be risky to engage in account trades. Read QS's post.

why do you think prices would go up?

As it stands now, most sold accounts are used for non-scamming purposes, and if the sale of accounts were disallowed then the buyers who buy accounts for non-scamming purposes would no longer wish to buy accounts, but the number of accounts for sale would remain the same. Basic economics would imply that the price would go down, reducing the costs to potential scammers

Yeah



which will reduce sales and bring the cost up for scammers. I say, yeah

even if the mods could make the sale of an account extremely difficult. That would just hike up the price of the accounts and make them far more sought after.

There's no way around it either way,so it's not worth discussing.Account selling will always be an active topic and there will be people buying and selling accounts,either here or somewhere else.That's the current state.

I would prefer accounts not be sold or transferred as well.
Realizing that accounts can be sold, changed the way I viewed the forum.

Typical loggorhea from quickscammer.  By this logic there would be less monetary incentive to farm accounts, and that is a good thing.  But we don't really know until it happens, do we?  And until then, as I have argued before,  account buyers and sellers should be negged till it hurts.

This would also have a lot of unintended consequences.

It would cause the prices of accounts to fall dramatically, which you will say is a good thing, but you will fail to consider the fact that this will make it cheaper for a scammer to attempt to scam with a purchased account and will lower the threshold that a scammer will need to steal before buying an account will be NPV positive for a scammer.

If a purchased account is going to get banned once it is found out that it is purchased then it will quickly have zero value. The problem with this is that this will encourage people to scam with a purchased account because if they are caught trying to scam, then the negative trust they will receive will likely have zero effect on the value of the sold account. As it stands now, if you buy an account, use it for whatever honest purpose then you can potentially resell it for something of value, and if the account gets negative trust then it will lose that value.

It will cause people to become more complacent and trusting of established accounts, which would make it easier for scammers into tricking people into sending btc/things of value without taking any kind of precautions.

All of the above will also encourage people to scam via buying accounts, which will only exaggerate the above problems. 

Badbear has said that pushing the account trades outside the forum would be more apt to scamming. You would reduce seeing account trades on the forum but I don't think that would stop account sales or minimize it that much.

There should be a mechanism that resets (deletes) the positive trust only, when password and email for the account are changed during 24h window.
This simple gimmick would help to solve scam possibility problem. Of course to some extent but still.
However I don't see anything wrong in dealing with accounts. Those higher level ones are really hard to score so they have to be worth something.
And as to spamming, this eventually is spotted and eradicated by campaign managers, and sometimes by users themselves as some campaigns offer bounty for reporting spammers.
Point out the luck in my logic if you care    

I've never bothered to make extra accounts, but the thought did cross my mind.
This forum is an interesting experiment in free markets, and the results are not always pretty.
"Let the children play"

I do agree that there are quite the number of threads on this subject already. Report it and see what happens.

Why would it not make sense? Should I clarify once more? Here: Currently there is no risk when you are engaging in account trades as you are free to do so. You might get marked by a DT member if you get caught, but that is all. In the case where account sales are bannable, anyone who engages in trades risks getting a permanent ban. It's as simple as that?

I wouldn't mind that.

I'm sorry, did that really make sense to you?  Lol

Fuck account sales.  It should be a permaban offense.  In lieu of that, buyers and sellers should get painted by DT members.