Thanks for the stats thanthidung. These are much needed data for this discussion to move on a higher and more serious note. In 'Users who received merits' we can exclude some of the older inactive accounts like Hal, satoshi, lazlo and so on and many of them would be newbies who don't have enough smerits to give to others. Another noteworthy point in 'Users who have both sent and received merits' is that there are users who don't merit regularly or who have only merited once in this 2 year period. They are the forum users whom we are speaking about in this topic as even though they do have enough merits they are not really willing to give them away for quality posts or merit might be of a lower priority to them?

If every one of the active poster give away their smerits at a regular earning rate, I am pretty much sure around 20-30 merit sources are enough to do the work of meriting quality posts. I would say that giving away smerits is equivalent to providing feedback either positive/negative. Both are a feature of the forum while the latter helps newbies and others in not getting scammed. Merit Sources give away their allocated source merits and DT provides feedback for successful traders, scammers and trustworthy individuals. Not everyone do use the trust feedback feature in bitcointalk even if they encounter a scammer and the same goes for merits.