Another idea is to get back merit rewards. Like spending 2 merits, the receiver will get 1 spendable merit. And the sender will get back 1 merit to their profile. And both should be spendable merits.
This idea should be a subject to review to the merit system by theymos, because if sender of merit have a refills of merit base on the merit a user sent to another, many people will not hoard sendable merit any longer. We have a merit scarcity in this forum because most of the people award a merit to people they know and the same people will return same values or amount of merit to them as exchange
The system is corrupt, most of the merit source doesn't merit a post base on a quality, majority award a merit to a user base on relationship, so if the suggestion of Cryptovator can be consider, that will help to reduce some level of merit trading in the forum, because both senders and recipients is a beneficiary to the merit and you will see that they will be high level of merit circulation in the forum.