A side question, how do I make the image on page show directly without click the link?

By popular demand, newbies can now pay to have some of their restrictions lifted. If you pay the fee, you become a Copper Member, and you can post images. That's the main point of this: allowing newbies to post images. Additionally (and these might change depending on how things go), Copper Members currently have these bonuses:

- Some of the same permissions as Member-rank members, such as reduced signature styling restrictions. (But none of the PM-related restrictions are currently lifted, such as the style limit or per-hour PM limit.)
- Your "you must wait ____ seconds between ___" counter is reduced by 75%. So if you're naturally of Newbie rank, you only have to wait 360-75% = 90 seconds.

If you paid an "evil IP" registration fee, then whatever you paid (in BTC terms) is subtracted from the upgrade fee. If you paid a registration fee a long time ago, you might even get a free Copper Membership due to the increase in BTC price. Just visit the link at the bottom of this post to check whether you have it already.

I am aware that for most people the benefits of this membership are pretty lame. This membership is only intended to fill a specific niche; if you don't need it, don't buy it. It is not intended to be the lower-cost Donator/VIP alternative which I've talked about before as a possibility.

I wrote the system so that I can easily add additional paid memberships in the future, but I might not ever do so. Not sure.

You can buy it here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=credit;promote

You don't necessarily need to pay for the $25 membership. You could manually rank up to Jr member without paying for anything. The $25 membership just exists for those who don't want to spend time in ranking up but instead want to go the shortcut route.

How do I rank up? Just keep posting?

I'm hoping that this system will increase post quality by:
 - Forcing people to post high-quality stuff in order to rank up. If you just post garbage, you will never get even 1 merit point, and you will therefore never be able to put links in your signature, etc.
 - Highlighting good posts with the "Merited by" line.

While we will not be directly moderating this, I encourage people to give merit to posts that are objectively high-quality, not just posts that you agree with.

Up

13. Bumps, "updates" are limited to once per 24 hours per thread. Bumping multiple threads at the same time is allowed if it's not annoying. [2][e]

21. Old bumps should be deleted. [2]

On the other hand the btc price in USA is relatively high compared to other countries. Guess this is due to more stringent AML monitoring in US. As a result people are willing to pay more to use BTC.

Yes I agree method of payment matters here. Probably a lot of US payment methods have higher risk of chargeback (for example paypal). Thus people selling btc in US are asking for higher prices to compensate chargeback risk. I will probably try to do some analysis on cash payment price: cash payment btc price in US vs in other countries. Not sure how many data points are available though.