Merit: How Reputation Works on Bitcointalk
Before January 2018, Bitcointalk had a problem: account farming.
People would create hundreds of accounts, post nonsense to push them up the ranks, then sell those accounts to signature campaign managers who'd put them on the forum to spam advertisements. The signal-to-noise ratio was getting bad.
The solution was Merit — a system where rank advancement requires not just posting, but posting things other users actually value.
How it works
sMerit (sendable merit) is what members spend when they merit a post. Regular Merit — the number that counts toward rank — cannot be sent on to anyone else.
sMerit comes from two places. Receiving Merit earns you roughly half as much sMerit in return, so the people sending it are largely the people whose own posts have been valued. Separately, a set of designated Merit sources receive their own replenishing allocations to distribute.
When someone sends sMerit to a post, the author receives it as regular Merit, which counts toward their rank.
This means:
- You can't farm merit on your own accounts
- Bot networks don't help (merit must come from real, active users)
- Quality matters more than quantity
How to earn merit
There's no formula. But there are patterns:
High-merit posts often:
- Provide actually useful information
- Cite sources or evidence
- Are well-written and clear
- Solve a specific problem someone has
- Document or explain something the community needs
Low-merit posts often:
- Are short and add nothing
- Restate something already said in the thread
- Are just opinions without reasoning
- Use AI to generate filler
- Are spammy or self-promotional
Long-time members widely credit the merit system with raising the average quality of posts across the forum — knowing that quality is measured changes how people write.
Common merit mistakes
"I'll just post a lot to get merit." No. You'll get less merit per post because experienced users will see you posting low-quality content and ignore you.
"I'll PM Legendaries asking for merit." This is begging. It works against you. Most senior users will refuse and may negatively rate you.
"I'll merit-trade with another user." This is against the rules and gets detected. You'll lose your merits and probably get banned.
"I'll copy good posts from elsewhere." This is plagiarism. Members run dedicated threads that report copied posts, and plagiarists get banned.
The honest path
- Find a topic you actually know about
- Post something useful in that topic's board
- Engage in threads where you have something to add
- Repeat for months
If your content is useful, merit will come. If it doesn't, your content probably isn't as useful as you think — read the highest-merited posts in the same board to understand the bar.
Checking merit
Click any user's merit number to see:
- Who has given them merit
- What posts received merit
- Their merit history over time
There are also community tools (covered later) that visualize merit flow and let you find quality posts in any board.