Resurrecting Bitcoin Discussion would (in my opinion) be much more important than trying to rescue the altcoin board. But it's not infested by bump bots like the altcoin board, and that's why I made the 1 Merit suggestion there.
I think Bitcoin Discussion needs a moderator with iron fist.
Politics & Society is in a better state now than Bitcoin Discussion (thanks to
Flying Hellfish).
I completely agree on your point regarding Bitcoin Discussion. This is bitcointalk, first and foremost a forum about bitcoin. Bitcoin Discussion should be the main board people are interested in. It's the first board most people will visit when they discover the forum, and it gives off a terrible first impression. As it stands, many senior members won't even venture in to it because of all the spam. The sub needs a dedicated mod that can clean up the spam and monitor any thread that reaches 5+ pages, as 99% of them are spam mega-threads which OP has long deserted.
I worry about the unintended consequences of the 1 merit limit for posting in Altcoin boards, however. Yes, many of them are bump bots, but there are a non-insignificant number of spammers just trying to rank up. Ban them from Altcoins and they will spill over to other boards - Bitcoin Discussion being the most likely.
As I said above, requiring merit to post in the regular boards almost certainly won't happen as theymos is against those sorts of restrictions. It seemed like even requiring one merit for a signature was pushing the limits of what he's willing to do. With that being said, I wouldn't be against additional new boards that can only be posted in once you have a certain amount of merit so that should at least up the quality of discussion allowed in those boards and I have already suggested that here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4854646.msg43759760#msg43759760Bitcoin Discussion definitely needs some dedicated mods and I'm not sure why this hasn't happened yet.
As I stated earlier I don't see the need at the moment.
The ranking up process is locked by the new rules. The total shitposters cannot rank up to Jr. the ones that are more advances will probably reach up to member but not more.
It's not that difficult for shitposters to get a single merit to become Junior. They might not get it legitimately but I'm seeing a lot of shitposting juniors with one suspicious merit floating around. They can also just purchase the Copper Membership for $15-$20 or whatever it is. I still think we should remove Junior's signatures and require ten merit before you can get one. This makes it ten times harder or costlier for them to abuse.