Quote from: justusranvier on May 19, 2015, 11:23:00 PM

Quote from: justusranvier on May 19, 2015, 07:29:42 PM

Quote from: Zangelbert Bingledack on May 19, 2015, 07:28:21 PM

I don't agree with Justus's suggestion that altcoin investors are attempting to subvert the basis of money.

Not all of them.

Some of them, and they do as much as they can to encourage others.

Many of the others could be considered unwitting participants.

I want to expand on this a bit.

Consider the modus operandi of David Johnston's Bitangels/Mastercoin mafia.

They rope in mostly young and inexperienced developers via their hackathons that promise (contracts worth up to) large sums of money, then make sure any vaguely interesting idea that emerges gets bolted on to a otherwise-useless appcoin.

They then spend a considerable amount of time promoting the resulting pump and dump. After all possible value has been extracted from the idea they simply move on like a plague of locusts to the next idea. (when was the last time you heard a progress update from APICoin?)

This process generates a large number of accomplices of varying degrees of culpability:

The developers who get pulled into the system now have their reputations invested in the viability of the appcoin, not to mention the sunk costs of spending so much time on the projects
The aspiring Bitcoin journalists who helped to promote the appcoins and who accepted advertisement money don't want to admit they participated in something shady without doing any due diligence
The conference organizers who accepted money from the appcoin project don't want to admit that there are too many Bitcoin conferences to only accept clean money
The people who bought into the IPO and didn't get out soon enough don't want to admit their money is gone
The businesses who court outside investment know that some of the investors can't tell the difference between legitimate opportunities and P&D scams, and that many of the investors they court get involved in some of those schemes. They don't want the investors to become spooked and leave the space entirely.

I know of at least two different employees of Bitcoin companies who were required to censor their personal social media accounts on pain of termination because they were being publicly critical of scammy startups. In both cases, their employers cited common investors between the two companies as the reason why criticism could not be allowed.

I also heard one episode of a popular Bitcoin podcast where one of the hosts expressed some regret for accepting work from a project that turned out to be a scam and both other hosts immediately leaped into action to stop her attempt to assume some accountability (lest her example illuminate their lack of assuming similar accountability, presumably).

These bad ideas spread like viruses, and it's increasingly difficult to find somebody who isn't infected to some degree or another.

Excellent summary.

I am not surprised to hear about the bold part, but question whether or not this is legal on an employer's part. Employers can (and should) censor employee communication regarding their specific industry (customers, competitors, etc). But they can not censor employee's speech in general. Obviously there are gray areas on where you draw the line and my understanding is from a legal sense the line fairly well defined to a specific & narrow set of firms that an employer interacts with or competes with. Having an investor with an unrelated investment does not qualify.

A bitcoin company does not work with or compete with an altcoin company, they are in separate areas. I would not be happy with an employer who censored me here, and think I would have legal standing to push back on that.