Not agree with one merit, it can be bought or trade from corrupted member's. Remove signature is the best solution as you say. My opinion just leave merit system same as now , just disable signature campaign for up to Jr. Members. If requirement small merit, merit abuse will increase. We should try to prevent merit abuse as well.
I don't agree with this reasoning and it's not an excuse to not do it. People can just buy an account as well, but you're missing the point. If someone can go to the trouble of buying however many merits they need then good. It's better than allowing anyone and everyone with zero knowledge of bitcoin to join a signature campaign. At least they've proved they've got the initiative and the knowledge to be able to make a bitcoin transaction or seek out the merit in whatever way they acquired it. Most users who come here don't know the first thing about bitcoin. They just come here to collect bounties and they use websites like coins.ph to cash out straight away. I've literally seen numerous beggars sign up here just to post their bitcoin 'address' and it is in fact their blockchain.info wallet identifier. Some people will buy merit, but most will just try earn it especially those who have no bitcoin or money to buy them. Many users trying to buy merit will just get scammed as well. This is about curbing all those users who come here in their thousands just to have dozens of accounts each to shitpost from. Do you think they're going to be able to afford to buy merit for their dozens of alts? Probably not, but if you can; fair enough. Don't forget about bots as well. Campaigns are literally paying bots to copy and paste. This can't be acceptable. Bots likely wont get the merit. This is all about restricting as many users as we can regardless of if you can bend or break the rules to do so which you can always do with any rule or law, but it's about minimising abuse and policing those who do break them and requiring a small amount of merit to have a signature would go a long way.