Losing control over your own account is stupid. You may need it in the future, for many reasons. If someone wants to sell some account, it is much more profitable to sell only posting space. Which means for example publishing things, written by someone else, if you consider them valuable. In that way, you can still control your account, and the "buyer" can remain pseudonymous, and use your account as a proxy to share some content.

Because there are some anonymous individuals, who have brilliant ideas. They don't care about merits, but they care about publishing their content. And then, if done properly, you can fill their needs, without losing control over your account. And usually, you can get a lot of merits from these posts, if they are written by some great hackers.

For example, now I received some unpublished drafts about DLEQ proofs, and something about getting started with RIPEMD-160 analysis. But the time delay to publish it didn't expire yet. And also, I need to do some stylometry on top of it, to properly hide the original author, by rewriting some parts of that with my own words, or make it more similar to the style, used by other people from this forum.

Judging by that history, you had much less luck than me. It is hard to find good content makers, and this user is definitely not one of them.

Selling merits is clearly against the rules. Even doing things, that would be perceived as if some merits were sold, is very suspicious, and can put sources in trouble (negative feedback, losing rights to create merits out of thin air, and other punishments can be applied).

That's why it is much better to sell the posting space. Then, you have always full control, and you can reject any draft, which would be below some quality standards.

Nice! That kinda proves my point, that after becoming Legendary, there is not much more to achieve. And it is usually a good idea, to start from Newbie again, and to build the whole reputation from scratch. Maybe all Legendary accounts should have "make me newbie" button, to solve it? Or, if that's not going to be implemented, then it may still be done at 1st of April in the future, just as some kind of social experiment.

True, but it doesn't block sources from selling their posting space. Because by having influence over the content, which is posted by some source, doesn't allow you to send any merits from such account. And because having alt-account, or posting someone else's content is not against the rules, then selling posting space alone is not restricted.

Also, if someone will buy just a posting space, then all merits will be received by the account owner anyway, and the buyer won't get a single merit out of it (also because he may not have any account at all). Which also means, that some sources can remain hidden in that way, when they spend their month allocation, but they receive enough merits, to avoid being detected as sources (because if you don't send more than half of what you received, then you can't be outed as a source that easily, and you can delay your coming-out).

It depends mainly on your traffic. If if is low enough, then you can enable messages from newbies, and you can always turn it off, if there will be too many spammers, or only block those, who will send too many messages.