Quote from: TerminatorXL on April 27, 2015, 07:34:29 PM

Yes! We're on the same page, never thought this was some sort of a sinister plan to make some pocket change. The fallout is pretty bad tho.
It's not even something I can easily quantify or point a finger at, more of a general "feel" of the forum changing from hanging out with a bunch of friends to that guarded feel you get when scoring dope in a bad part of town.

The bitcoin scene has always been a shark tank, I don't think that there are more bad people than anywhere else, or that the bad guys are figuring out new ways to be shady. If you give a good guy an opportunity to act in a bad manner without getting caught, they might not actually be quite so good. Bitcoin sort of caters to that behavior, hence why I only trust financial motivation like I explained in my last post. Maybe the vibe is just being projected more as of late, but in general I believe that the amount of scams that go on has been decreasing, and by that I mean the petty scams, I have no comment on the long cons, IE Pirateat40, Tradefortress, Tradehill, The GAW stuff etc. For every good thing, there is also a downside. Bitcoin gives people financial freedoms that you can't have anywhere else. The trade off is some of the protections, and sadly one of those tradeoffs is you have to learn how to protect yourself from scams, something that doesn't always come natural to a society guarenteed by buyers protection programs. If you learn how to protect yourself though, you quickly find that without the 10% fees, you start saving a lot of money, and its a great system.

I feel the same way that the feel of the forums is changing, but rather than from a trading/trust point of view, I see it as changing due to spam.

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[...] 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.

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But it's a feedback loop. If something seems scammy, you deal with it as you'd deal with scammy things, you jockey for advantage, and it becomes scammy. That's why seemingly superficial stuff isn't as superficial as it seems. From strictly unhippy, utilitarian perspective, it pays to appear good.
A rewording of Vonnegut's Pretend to be good always and even God will be fooled.

What you are talking about here is the long con. You are right, I have no solution for preventing those. I mentioned them in my last paragraph. What do you have to guarentee that Walmart isn't going to take your payment and run off and scam you? Law enforcement and their own financial self interest. We haven't had the best luck with law enforcement in the bitcoin scene, and thats one of those things that comes along with the financial freedom. Ebay calculated how much they need to take off the top to guarentee against scams. Of their 10%, Id imagine the majority goes to paying salaries and profits. If we learn as individuals how to do the same calculations, that 10% on top that we pay minus the salaries and profits can go just to the cost of doing business.