This is not simple and fast at all. You're basically letting plagiarists to buy their banned accounts back from the forum for 0.5 BTC and with strings attached (signature not permitted).

First of all, there is no "customer base" for that. Too expensive and too restrictive for shitposters, who can buy another sig-capable account for far less. Not needed for mistakenly banned users who should win their appeals. This appears to be targeted to the elusive "only plagiarized 1 post out of 1000" demographic, of which I've seen perhaps 1 or 2 examples.

Second, even if the "only plagiarized 1 post out of 1000" is an actual problem that we want to solve and we lower the cost to an affordable level, this is a horrible way of doing it. Somebody needs to be the escrow, somebody needs to watch the signatures, somebody needs to enforce the zero-tolerance policy for each previously banned account. It doesn't scale. Yahoo's solution makes far more sense. Don't copy-paste, not even 1 in 1000.

If theymos could implement an actual enforceable signature ban then I'd be ok with it for certain cases. Better yet, make it a max(500, merit_score) merit penalty and if the score is negative after that - permaban stays. That way it can only be used by high-rank accounts and would automatically kill the signature.

I don't see that happening anytime soon though so why don't we focus on solving the shitposting problem rather than helping shitposters.

And who decides all those exceptions?