Merit sales, transfers to aliases, back-and-forth trading, etc. are not much of an issue. All illegitimate merit will decay, and will account for a tiny and very expensive fraction of the total merit economy. It's basically a rounding error; fight it where convenient, but waste no sleep over it.
- I guess theymos never thought of the aggressiveness we see for selling/exchanging merits from the abusers.
Think of the direction the forum was taking before the introduction of merit. Compared to that selling/exchanging merits is a temporary problem which will soon fade into insignificance. The most blatant abusers of course will be caught and tagged.