What is Black hat Seo?

The million dollar question that everyone has an opinion on. What exactly is Black Hat SEO?
The answer here depends largely on who you ask. Ask most White Hats and they immediately quote the Google Webmaster Guidelines like a bunch of lemmings.

So again, what is Black Hat SEO? In my opinion, Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO are
almost no different. White hat web masters spend time carefully finding link partners to increase rankings for their keywords, Black Hats do the same thing, but we write automated scripts to do it while we sleep. White hat SEO’s spend months perfecting the on page SEO of their sites for maximum rankings, black hat SEO’s use content generators to spit out thousands of generated pages to see which version works best. Are you starting to see a pattern here? You should, Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO are one in the same with one key difference. Black Hats are lazy. We like things automated. Have you ever heard the phrase "Work smarter not harder?" We live by those words. Why spend weeks or months building pages only to have Google slap them down with some obscure penalty.
If you have spent any time on web master forums you have heard that story time and time again. A web master plays by the rules, does nothing outwardly wrong or evil, yet their site is completely gone from the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) one morning for no apparent reason. It’s frustrating, we’ve all been there. Months of work gone and nothing to show for it. I got tired of it as I am sure you are. That’s when it came to me. Who elected the search engines the "internet police"? I certainly didn’t, so why play by their rules? In the following pages I’m going to show you why the search engines rules make no sense, and further I’m going to discuss how you can use that information to your advantage.