I disagree with you that White Hatters are ridiculous because they end up building long lasting VRE, have a look at people like michael arrington (techcrunch.com) whose one blog post can make shares of google fall down..

As per you he will be one of the “ridiculous white hatter” who does not know what he is missing out on ?

Its not exactly illegal either, but its against google’s rules. However, being a black-hat dose not necessarily involve spamming, because that is likely to have short-term effects.

But if you place links carefully in forums, they not only last longer, they will also be impossible to tell apart from “natual” links, because they are natual links them self, often just recommending another source.

The only place where it becomes a problem, is when SEO-idiots place their links to their useless spam-sites. How to make money online, made for adsense etc. Generally all sites who deceive the users.

Now, buying links dose not necessarily harm your site, given that your site met the big quality tag. Google are very unlikely to hit you, because you buy links, there are many obvious reasons for this, which i wont get into now.

You should always care about the sites that you are optimizing, otherwise you just risk screwing up, and get it devalued (or worse), removed entirely from the index. White hatters are just ridiculous, because they don’t know what they are missing out on.

Besides, there is no reason why you shouldn’t sell a link on your site, if that link is useful for your visitors. Just don’t sell junk, because if you do sell Junk, then you better prepare for the health inspector.