Topic: How many astroturfers are here? (Read 1392 times)

I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you.   

No but I'm curious as to how much they go for?

I sell them away from this forum. Selling them in the marketplace here kind of defeats the purpose. Are you in the market for one?

What is your intent with your socks?

That would be the best tactic actually. To first gain credibility and then start to influence people with FUD.

That's not true. I'm a troll hero member trained by the best (love you Matt  ). A quality troll is difficult to spot. They don't start threads saying "Bitcoin sucks" or "why Bitcoin will fail". You need to make people really think and actively engage them. Get some on your side then slap them all in the end.

I have this account and three socks that are all hero. I try to keep each sock in a separate section of the forum and keep them from overlapping. This account mainly posts to bitcoin discussion. If you see posts in other sections from this account it's usually because they were moved by a mod to the correct section after I posted. Bruno has 5-6 socks but I think Phinn and Al the Alpaca are the only Hero's.

You can be away but if you don't make a post every two weeks you wont magically become a Hero Member any sooner. It's not like you could be a noob, leave for a year, log back on and get all those activity points you missed. You still have to earn it. It's a good system.

And I can think of a few troll hero members, but none of them are really malicious, just annoying lol.

That first wave of trolls (paid or not) was amazing, this forum quickly made a massive shift away from productive, "quality" conversations.
There is still plenty of good content here, but it is harder to find now.


You can be completely away for over a year and still have made "Hero", but you are correct that many of them probably have lower activity levels.

I never actually thought about there being paid agents here, but I guess it's very possible, but is bitcoin something they'd want to be spreading fud about at the moment? Maybe in the future it will become a problem to them.


Surely they didn't stick around and make a post every fortnight to become a Hero member. It's rare that you see a Troll Hero member as well.

The first HUGE wave of negative trolls came in June 2011, so when you see "Hero Member" there is no guarantee they are here for positive reasons.

just shut him up

came to this thread to findout what an astroturfers is. haha

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/17/online-persona-management_n_837153.html

Yes, there are government paid trolls over the Internet, and I guess here too(obvioulsly they will deny they are one of them).

But the last wave of bitcoin was created by NSA/CIA was probably caused by a banned user apparently with personal disorders:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/blatant-sockpuppetry-and-self-promotion-of-own-website-using-alt-accounts-727145

I think you hit the nail on the head right there. The king of the conspiracy kooks has spoken and his followers are streaming into the bit coin world. 

One should instead say that conspiracy theories are harmless unless people actually believe them. This goes way beyond conspiracy theorists getting themselves punched by someone they are intent on harassing. I've heard of people actually sabotaging the telephone equipment of neighbors whom they accused of listening in on their phone conversations. Didn't help that there used to be a very easy way for neighbors to do that called "party lines." How many of us would have adopted Bitcoin if it could actually be proven that the NSA created Bitcoin?

But conspiracies themselves can actually be very harmful...especially ones orchestrated by people in positions of extreme power.

whomever invented it does not matter, it wont harm bitcoin at all.

but the reason i try to correct mindless Fud is more about trying to keep history straight and not have people in a couple years quoting liars to then keep the fake history from growing.

it isa known fact that 'satoshi' and a group of others all grabbed different theories and different concepts and discussed different methods. but it was 'satoshi' that combined 256k1 cryptography along with the mining block ledger building, and added the idea of decentralized bittorrent(p2p) to seamlessly combine together to make what we know as bitcoin.

this was not done as a hidden idea pre-designed behind closed doors and then released as a white paper. the discussions of it are publicly available including the reason to use 256k1 instead of r1.. (k1 being more efficient)

so this was not a NSA project released to the public, it was a public project conceived, evaluated and brought together by a group of people from the cryptography and peer-2-peer community. and satoshi was the lucky one to have brought it all together and white paper it.

so yea you will find in the sourcecode references to the MIT licence for cryptography, yea you will find references in the white paper linking to nick szabo, and yea you will find elements of where people like hal finney and gavin andressen and about 100 other people all with little bits that built up bitcoin as it is today.

but none of which means that these individual elements are 'satoshi'.

but as i say it dont matter who satoshi is. all that matters is what he brought to the world and how.

Because conspiracy theories are mostly harmless. Unlike schemes where people lose their money...

I can almost guarantee that the NSA conspiracy theory threads are due to the fact that the "Alex" guy recently somewhat "endorsed" bitcoin. He seems kind of like a nutjob and these kind of theories sound like the kind of thing that he would say. It would be possible that some of his followers had purchased accounts to post these kind of theories, or people could have watched some of his youtube videos and believed the kind of things that he was saying. Regardless of what exactly is happening, it would say it is defiantly related.