I was privately absent from the forum for a few days and this greeted me. A very bad decision by the forum administration and this is nothing but the introduction of censorship. I have read most of the discussion, and I completely agree with PrivacyG and what he stated here. Well, I won't repeat the same things.
Several people seem to be concerned that the current policy will be too disruptive/constraining. How about I make this modification to loosen it a bit: you can direct people to mixers by name (even in something like a "top 10 mixers" topic), as long as:
- You don't directly post their URLs.
- It's not a paid ad, and you're not representing a mixer.
Would this be sufficient to address the concerns?
The whole idea is wrong and leads to the marginalization of the Bitcointalk community. It is almost certainly leading the forum towards the introduction of KYC and is sliding to become a training ground for Gambling and NFT discussions.
So many loopholes were found in the implementation of this censorship, so it will be very interesting to see how the moderators manage this in practice. Different interpretations will cause new discussions, so it is to be expected that the Meta section will be full of questions about whether any discussion is in accordance with these strange rules. Also, this is expected to cause some new bans, I am of the opinion that for such unclear rules, the forum does not have a sufficiently organized moderation. and so far we have seen that moderators' reactions are only after several months or even years when a ban appeal appears.
Next, LoyceV has already mentioned various threads that contain a collection of scam mixer services. So, the new rule is that they (scammers) can be mentioned and written about, and for example, the mixer who has been here on the forum since 2018 has been expelled.
Should we add an example that the Russian board has a dedicated section for HYIP scams? A separate place for Ponzi, hyip, cloud mining and similar seeds. Nobody got banned for that.
One very important thing. Many non-forum users, when stuck in a problem with a Bitcoin service, come to the Bitcointalk forum to present the problem and ask for help from this community. It has happened in quite a lot of cases that because of the pressure on the forum and maintaining the reputation here, the service is more attentive to solving the problem.
For most mixers, this forum is the only place where they have their official representatives. Now I even think that the investigative authorities do not approve of this decision, because one source of information that they used during the investigation eludes them.
I sincerely hope that the bigger picture will be looked at and this decision will be reconsidered.
3. The service does not collect KYC-type info from all users.
So what's next?
Are you going to ask all members to perform KYC on bitcointalk?
There are plenty of legit websites you can use without kyc, virtual cards, vpn services, casinos, etc.
It is even possible to register on Google without KYC. It's a bit unbelievable to me that this is a theymos statement.