Just curious after seeing this post from someone saying they were able to register (and receive confirmation) in the airdrop process using only an email address (not even a lightly used social media presence):
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13601490Also, afaik there was not any verification that the email address I used to sign up has been checked that it is associated with this btctalk account, implying that you could claim any social media account as your own (that didn't have a public email), and then supply your own unrelated email address(es) to get an undeserved airdrop share.
I disagree that it would necessarily be a violation of privacy, since people are nominally registering with public social media accounts.
These are all valid concerns. The issue with making participants public is that they did not agree to that. They signed up in good faith and the project has to honour that relationship of trust. Maybe a great many would have no problem with being publicly associated with Decred, but there are people who have signed up and have an interest in the project who want to remain anonymous - and for good reason. There will be tremendous drama if associations are made public. For these reasons, it is left up to the individuals who have signed up to make that public - and it will always remain their decision alone. In fact, a decision was made early on that there will be no record kept of e-mails, URLs, and Decred addresses linked to each other beyond Monday. The project has no way of knowing who signed up after Monday once the addresses are final. Only you will know your association with the project if you possess the seed you verified and saved.
Anyway, I was just asking because I've probably seen at most 500 (and that's probably waaay overestimating) people commenting on this thread, irc, reddit, or twitter, so if it comes out that the number of airdrop participants is in the thousands, either we have to believe that the vast majority of airdrop participants are silent but honest participants, that someone or some people are gaming the system by claiming many more than a single share, or that the developers are inflating the number of users who signed up to keep the extra shares for themselves. The only way I could see that the developers can not just have to say, "trust us", is if the airdrop's social media accounts are publicly released, but apparently that isn't an option...
Decred has been under sustained attack almost since announcement. These attack vectors have evolved over time. Big projects came out against this project when it was still small trying to find its feet without any attempt to communicate with its members or community. To put that in perspective, harsh quotes were given in the media by ETH, NXT, and BitNation directly attacking Decred openly. That is not behaviour you will see from this project in the future - a little project will never be attacked like that. In fact, if the ideas are good, it will be empowered and credit given where it is earned. If the project does that in the future, you can take this quote and call it out on that basis. To simply try and bury a project with years of work put into it is disgusting. And that is just one attack - the point is there have been multiple attacks on the Decred, so what you are saying is absolutely real. There have been DDoS attempts, spamming, and of course, scamming attempts to get into the airdrop.
To dig deeper into the point you made, the biggest round of attempted scamming occurred in the last batch. In fact, the scamming attempts became prolific after the earlier attacks failed to slow the project down. This represented an evolution of attack. The entries were monitored in great detail as they came in throughout the whole process. If you do that, patterns begin to emerge. You start seeing how scammers change and evolve their behaviour. This is not to say every scammer was caught, but it means a larger pattern was stopped near the end when scammers flowed in through large coordinated efforts. This pattern did not exist in the earlier phases of the airdrop sign up. There is a bit of human behaviour involved here as well. The vast majority of people simply have a technical interest in the project and signed up using evidence of that overlapping interest. Most sign ups are just that - honest and clear attempts to help whoever is to review the application.
That is not to say there wasn't scamming, as there were many attempts, but the majority of these were culled. A lot of time and effort were put into that process, but only so much is reasonable without causing significant delays to the project. There is a balance to strike between reasonable privacy, meeting deadlines, and working on the actual software, and the project tries and always will try to do that. It does not mean everything is perfect on every front - such an expectation is not based in reality - but it means the balance can be addressed with integrity. That is part of the reason why the work on btcsuite was presented in extended form. This project is not a run-of-the-mill fly-by-night project. This is long-term and by a group of serious developers and people who care about technology and will always try and address your concerns when they are constructive. It is about building and working together with as little hierarchy and bullshit as possible. Having said that, if the airdrop stayed open for another week, there would have been another evolution and the airdrop would have suffered for it. When the airdrop closed, most scamming attempts were evolved but still dumb - this would not have been the case for long.
