The Rules set forth below are here adapted for Bitcointalk.org use from the news.admin.net-abuse.email Rules of Spam, via the WWW version created by Mart van de Wege.  (Hat tip to Bruce Pennypacker for making this findable via WWW search.)  My additions for the Bitcoin Forum are marked out with orange attributions.  I may edit this post to add internal links, add new rules, etc.

These Rules distill the essential wisdom born of long experience by people who had been fighting spam since Usenet and e-mail spam were invented.  I now pass them on to a new generation, in a new medium, who suffer spam premised on widespread confusion over a radically new kind of money.

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Rule #0: Spam is theft.

• Angel’s Commentary: Spammers believe it’s okay to steal a little bit from each person on the Internet at once.
• Nullian Commentary: When a spammer smells free money from ICOs, airdrops, scamcoins, and other P&D “projects” which inevitably rip people off in a zero-sum game, he believes that it would be genuinely unfair for him to not take a cut.

Rule #1: Spammers lie.

• Russel’s Admonition: Always assume that there is a measurable chance that the entity you are dealing with is a spammer.
• Lexical Contradiction: Spammers will redefine any term in order to disguise their abuse of Internet resources.
  
  • Sharp’s Corollary: Spammers attempt to re-define “spamming” as that which they do not do.
  • Finnell’s Corollary: Spammers define “remove” as “validate.”
  • Nullian Corollary: Spammers redefine “crypto” as “free money grab”, “opportunity for the poor” as “destoying the socioeconomic utility of mass communications”, and “dev team” as “spammers with an ETH token or unmaintained Bitcoin clone, a webpage, and the all-important ANN thread”.

Rule #2: If a spammer seems to be telling the truth, see Rule #1.

• Crissman’s Corollary: A spammer, when caught, blames his victims.
• Moore’s Corollary: Spammers’ lies are seldom questioned by mainstream media.

Rule #3: Spammers are stupid.

• Krueger’s Corollary: Spammer lies are really stupid.
  
  • Pickett’s Commentary: Spammer lies are boring.
• Russell’s Corollary: Never underestimate the stupidity of spammers.
• Spinosa’s Corollary: Spammers assume everybody is more stupid than themselves.
• Spammer’s Standard of Discourse: Threats and intimidation trump facts and logic.
  
  • Nullian Commentary: Opposition to spam is racism against non-English languages and non-Bitcoin currencies.

Rule #4: The natural course of a spamming business is to go bankrupt.

• Nullian Commentary: “Pump” is always followed by “dump”.

Rules-Keeper Shaffer’s Refrain: Spammers routinely prove the Rules of Spam are valid.


Nullian Law of the Conservation of Spammishness: Spammers never change.

Across space and time, throughout different media, spammers always exhibit the same characteristics in conformance to these Rules:  They steal, they lie, they’re stupid, their money-grubbing schemes are economically unsustainable—and they always provide exemplary demonstration of the validity of the Rules.

Whether the spam be Usenet spam, e-mail spam, forum spam, weblog comment spam, “SEO” search engine spam, spam with eggs, spam on rye, spam with bacon, spam soup, Internet spam, PTSN phone spam, snailmail spam, SMS spam, red spam, green spam, blue spam, “crypto” spam which is an abuse of that word, or other spam of any kind whatsoever, spammers are always the same.


Nullian Law of Social Opportunity Cost of Spam:  In addition to its direct damage to the usefulness of communications, spam has the hidden cost of absorbing the productive time of spamfighters.

This is a logical corollary to Rule #0, but of sufficient import to be its own top-level rule.

My instant motivation for pulling up the venerable nanae Rules of Spam was the moment when I realized I’d spent most of my past day’s forum time quietly fighting spam behind the scenes.  This led me to reflect somberly (and not for the first time) on people who do far more to fight spam than I do.  What positive contributions would they make, what productive work would they do, what creativity would they work, if their time and energy were not spent keeping the forum usable for everybody?

Since the dawn of time, such has been the unending dilemma of all those who wage war on the ugly:  Create beauty amidst a cesspool, or fight for an environment wherein beautiful things may exist?

“I want more and more to perceive the necessary characters in things as the beautiful:  —I shall thus be one of those who beautify things.  Amor fati: let that henceforth be my love!  I do not want to wage war with the ugly.  I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers.  Lookingaside, let that be my sole negation!  And all in all, to sum up: I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!” — Friedrich Nietzsche