- Disable signatures
Whether this is for everyone, behind a paywall or certain members aren't allowed to wear one. This wouldn't get rid of merit beggars, and would actually make it worse. I'm not sure if this is the right approach, and whether it would solve anything. At the end of the day you'll still have people attempting to get merit, and spamming in order to do that. Putting it behind a paywall could work. But, if bounties are promising high returns then they'll likely be willing to invest in a one time fee for a signature.
Why do you think this would make things worse?
If signatures were outright disabled, the incentive to make low value posts would essentially disappear, and the value of a higher ranking account would be little because of the lack of earnings potential a higher ranking account would have, so I don't think the merit system would be necessary anymore.
If people were required to pay for signatures to be enabled, we could outright remove the merit system. We could even have a system in which users each time a user ranks up they will need to pay to have additional signature features enabled. I personally would prefer to use something like this because it gives users more of an incentive to not engage in behavior that will get them banned because doing so would result in them loosing their investment in their signature features. The payment for signatures would essentially be a bounty that users will not post low value posts.
One of the biggest flaws in the merit system is that everyone who was already ranked up was grandfathered into their rank. A good number of the people I have seen posting crap have a fairly high ranking account but have received exactly zero merit since the merit system was implemented.
Also @yahoo a good idea can be to require to have some eth/btc, this it will help the multiaccount hunting for obvius reasons. (even a small amount around 100$ I think is ok)
As a general rule, it is trivial to obtain bitcoin to two separate addresses that cannot be linked to eachother, even if they have transactions. It takes patience, but it is also not difficult to move bitcoin to an exchange in order to consolidate bitcoin inputs if the exchange allows for multiple deposit addresses.
I am also not a fan of forcing people to conduct business a certain way.