Quote from: TerminatorXL on April 27, 2015, 06:38:06 PM

Didn't realize it was that much, haven't been following the bitcointalk account market. But yeah, I didn't mean McDonald's.

At the risk of repeating myself, the trusted accounts aren't used to scam directly, but to lend credibility to less trusted accounts. See TAT. Do you really think a n00b going by
"cryptocyprus" would have raised millions on this forum without the help of a trusted member? Yeah. nah.

In that case, trust is irrelevant for eBay accounts, since, as long as you trust eBay, everything works out.
Bitcointalk accounts aren't backed by a central entity, and the trust you place in them is not a proxy for trust in some central entity.

To be useful, it must be real. If accounts are bought and sold, it is not. It's a charade.
But thanks for taking this thread back on topic.

BTW, do you still think I'm Supa?

The quote above is just your responses, didn't want to clutter the thread reposting stuff. Just want to say I'm glad that we are actually discussing this now, I've got not problem discussing the topic thoroughly, perhaps misunderstandings happened early on.

I mentioned a while ago, that account selling in a way discourages scamming. It isn't a 100% thing, but in some situations, if you can sell your account for 2 BTC, and you are in need of money with no hope, selling your account is a valid option, or using your account as collateral for a loan anyway. Forum accounts gain their sometimes obscene value due to paid advertising signatures, if you can get 0.4 BTC per month just by posting as a hero member, your account becomes more valuable, making scamming a more expensive activity.

You are correct again, Ebay sucks, but trust is irrelevant because of their "buyers" or "sellers" protection, although they still mess that up relatively often. They can use their 10% that they take off the top to pay off people that get scammed The forums is not Ebay, we don't collect any money from account sales, we don't have a team of people to monitor sales and such, and that has never been our intention. As far as marketplace activity, think about sites like Ebay where their sole purpose is selling things, and they collect fees. Craigslist, which is primarily for selling things, but they don't collect fees, and then there is the forum that is not primarily for sales, nor do we collect fees. Staff involvement in the marketplace is very minimal.

As far as your concern about buying trusted accounts to lend trust to others, that is a valid claim too, but you still only have one shot at it, if that. If you buy that trusted legendary account for 5 BTC, and you start trusting a bunch of sleezy people, that trusted legendary account you just paid 5 BTC is no longer trusted. If someone could pull it off so that they give some trust to some other scamming accounts and try to get multiple scams going, there is still an incredibly high chance that some of the forum's resident scambusters, or just regular people will pick up on it, making that 5 BTC investment null. Financial disuasion is the name of the game. Frankly, a scammer is far better off trying their luck with a dicing site, than purchasing an account and trying to abuse people with it or scamming with it.

I will say, how account selling/buying, scamming, and paid signature ads all tie into each other was not something done by design, it just sort of ended up like that.

I dont know if you are Supa or not, he but some of your behavior matched to a tee, and you said something he had said to me quite a while ago exactly. If you were just frustrated because I was misunderstanding you, tis all water under the bridge, lets keep on going with a rational discussion.

Quote from: TerminatorXL on April 27, 2015, 06:53:42 PM

Exactly. It looks really bad. You're probably been around this long enough for the effect to have dulled, but try to imagine what it looks like to the outsiders. And I don't think I'm unique when I tell you I've been here for YEARS before I knew that accounts are being bought and sold. I've heard about it occasionally, but *sincerely* assumed that it was either someone trolling. It simply hasn't donned on me that it was allowed.
What makes you think that new users know it's happening? (since the "it's better for n00bs to see it happening in the open" argument has been used)

Has it been this bad in the past?

But anyway, banning the sale of accounts *ON THIS FORUM*, and banning those who facilitate such dealing (escrow services, etc.) would do wonders for public perception.
Publicly distancing ourselves from it is also important.

See, I don't especially care how it looks, but how it works. We have seen time and time again, that if we just ignore an issue and push it under the rug, it can become way more harmful than it is out in the open. Sure it may not look pretty from the outside, but I'm more against people being scammed, than people thinking something looks scammy. Account selling/buying is a relatively new thing, I think it came around the same time as paid advertising signatures, because paid advertising signatures gave forum accounts a steady income and therefor a value. The thought process is, if we banned it, we couldn't stop people from doing it anyway. If we tried to stop it, people would just evolve better ways to sell undetected. If you are buying a gun or something like that and they are illegal, you can't go have a safe transaction in a bank or at a federal firearms dealer, you have to do it in some parking lot or shady area where the transaction might not go the same way. Same principals applies here, account sales are a lot safer if done in the public, and when people know that its going on, they can prepare themselves more readily.