Quote from: Come-from-Beyond on March 29, 2016, 10:52:48 AM

Quote from: smooth on March 29, 2016, 10:30:28 AM

What is your estimate of how many users I looked at to find those 10?

In the list of users sorted by the date of registration? The same order of magnitude. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias and you'll get why your sampling was incorrect.

The sampling was not incorrect for what it was intended to accomplish. I looked at users active in promoting or expressing interest in IOTA to see if their backgrounds have surprising commonality.

Answer: I looked at 11 such accounts. The second or third I looked at was not an obvious hit, so I excluded it, but arguably it too could be included. They are all extremely similar relative to the population of currently-active forum users, and not just in terms of registration date, though certainly that.

Conclusion: The users expressing interest in IOTA are predominantly at best a narrow group with an unusually common background and forum activity history, and at worst a cheaply assembled group of sock puppets.