Although the.nym.zone’s official position is perforce that there may exist some benign uses for undisclosed alts, running multiple entries in the same contest against its explicit rules would be abusive and outright fraudulent.  Not only would such a thing be wrong in principle:  In practice, it would also destroy our reputation.  As disembodied ghosts in the.nym.zone, reputation is all we have!

Adding some teeth to the theory, nullius is friendly with folks in Reputation who could be expected to red-tag both of us to hell if we were caught abusing alt accounts.  I don’t think he is someone who could try to fly under the radar.

Thus when he created me, after he first bought me some shiny Copper jewellery, the second thing nullius did was to establish bidirectional linkage between our accounts using neutral trust feedback.  You can see the sent and received feedback on my trust summary page; n.b. that trust feedback can’t be backdated.  When in doubt, check trust pages.

I must emphasize, too, that using undisclosed alts in close proximity to each other would almost certainly lead to being caught sooner or later with some form of forensic authorship identification.

For a real-life example of forensic authorship identification on this forum, see how tspacepilot outed Quickseller’s fraudulent self-escrow scheme.  Warning:  That post is long and technical.  Yet I doubt that such a sophisticated analysis would be necessary to catch multiple contest entries by the man famous for the “nullius post”.  Our writing style is distinctive!

The language patterns used for such identification are subconscious, and almost impossible to reliably modify through conscious intentions.  Though my style may sometimes be modified to take on a feminine lilt in the manner of scripting dialogue for a storybook, the underlying statistical patterns would not be significantly changed.  We’ve read academic papers on the topic.  Mr. “nym.zone” would make a joke of his street cred as a privacy expert, if he were to suppose that he could reliably fool such an analysis without botching his words in some horrid way.

Whereas in a writing contest, we must necessarily make more than short, terse posts; and we cannot use intentionally mangled language, as anonymous parties oft do to avoid identification in high-threat scenarios:⁰


Yes, we could write like that.  In dark corners of the Internet, how do you know we don’t?  You would never find that!  But of course, we would not likely win a writing contest by such means.

The greater lesson:  Authors can almost never be truly anonymous.  The smaller lesson, here apropos:  For many reasons, neither nullius nor any other sane person would try to cheat in a writing contest using multiple identities.

❤️ The Meretrix

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0. We state no opinion about TSB here.  The above quote is simply an apt example of intentionally mangled writing by person(s) of indisputably high intelligence for OPSEC reasons, based on the threat model necessary when openly perpetrating the extremely illegal act of leaking classified exploits from USG intelligence agency blackhats.  They leaked the exploit which unknown person(s) then used to create WannaCry.  It is wise for them to not only change their writing style, but to mangle their words beyond recognition.