Due to a mass of trolling, only established posters are able to post in non-newbie sections.
Spam is irrelevant, trolls are inflammatory. This was not an issue of deleting Viagra adds. By the Mods own admission this was an issue of removing unwanted, but on-topic discussion.
Bitcoin.org forum discussion by it's very nature has a considerable effect on Bitcoin prices. It's not like anything clever was done or that journalists are not going to pick up on it- Bitcoin is hot and and they will jump on anything. Why give them something that juicy AND so negative to report on?
Temporary is a meaningless statement without a timeline, everything is temporary. The Patriot Act was temporary. The moderation team is seemingly quite happy with the current arrangement and is showing no particular sense of urgency to transition to a more open solution.
The mods wanted to silence (rather than waste time converting, persuading or simply ignoring) Bitcoin detractors. One of these detractors main arguments was that Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme that rewarded early adopters at the expense of newcommers. So the Mods solution to this argument was to effectively filter out the critical questions of newcomers and limit substantive forum dialog to early adopters.
Brilliant bit of work there.
The question you ask yourself if the goal of a poster is to detract and hurt the community and the system the community is trying to promote is it not in their best interest to get rid of him? If people are going to hurt you do you not protect yourself? I'm not referring to people who say "bitcoin is flawed, should have this change that change this."
And the Ponzi scheme argument was answered there is sticky about it. There is no need to repeat a question over and over again. Then the only purpose is subversion.
Also a Ponzi scheme involves the intention of inevitable crashing. And if you go by the idea what you cited is a Ponzi scheme. Capitalism is a Ponzi scheme.