To be honest, even after 2 years of being around, the "rules" are still confusing to me.

If you read the Unofficial list of (official) Bitcointalk.org rules it has no rules regarding the trading of merit, however, there is another pinned topic FAQ: Everything you need to know about forum 'activity, account ranks and merit

It literally states:


Do I think that is a forum rule even though it's not in the rules' topic? YES. Am I 100% right about it? No clue.

Selling merit isn't against the rules, but could get you red trust. Theymos said not to worry about merit trading too much, in the long run they won't have any sMerit left. Let them spend $100 on 5 Merit, that's not doing them any good, they're just wasting their money.

Merit sales, transfers to aliases, back-and-forth trading, etc. are not much of an issue. All illegitimate merit will decay, and will account for a tiny and very expensive fraction of the total merit economy. It's basically a rounding error; fight it where convenient, but waste no sleep over it.

Isn't it looking like a "new merit cycler" being formed here?