It’s a very simple system for merits. It’s just a reward system. You can those from the high ranking members here in bitcointalk. All you need is be helpful and knowledgeable as possible in order for them to reward you as they were able to gain something from your post or simply like your post. High ranking members have SMerits. Those are merits for rewards. I think those SMerits are not counted as their own merits, instead that’s for rewarding members who needs merits that are deserving. The only question I have to is how they earn SMerits.