I just noticed that AnonyMint was banned again, sadly as a result of him posting under a new sock account.

I believe that, as much as any single person could possibly be, AnonyMint (and the forum's historical failure to get him under control) is responsible for a significant fraction of the technically competent people becoming largely inactive.

AnonyMint's posts are almost exclusively jargon-laden techno-babble.  His posts are angry and abusive while at the same time they often fail to even make syntactic sense when it comes to the technical content-- at least to anyone who knows what the words mean.  He relentlessly floods threads with his trademark nonsense and switches to slanderous personal attacks whenever someone disagrees with him.   If that were all there was to it the ignore button would be sufficient, but his multi-posting derails basically any thread he targets because if even a few people fail to ignore him they'll respond (usually disagreeing, sometimes just trying to figure out what the heck he means) and make it nearly impossible for productive discussion to continue. Worse, AnonyMint's abusive but "technical sounding" approach is moderately effective at mobilizing throngs of well meaning but ignorant people to his defense (especially ones who are interested in pumping altcoins and find Anonymit to be sufficient 'proof' for whatever they already wanted to believe). When mobilizing an ignorant mob fails he resorts to the use of copious alt accounts.

People who are really savvy with the technology have valuable time (as is the case for anyone with valuable skills).  It's a waste of that time to spend it in a place where there are decent odds of their efforts being buried under a mountain of abusive nonsense.   Even those few who don't find his dishonest practices extremely annoying are forced to admit that it's just a waste of time to be in the same venue as someone like that.

AnonyMint is not the only example of this sort of abusive ignorance that shows up on the forum, -- it's not uncommon for newbies who are used to being the smartest guy in whatever little pond they came from to show up and say they're going to "fix bitcoin" while calling everyone else an idiot for the couple months it takes for them to realize how little they actually know...  but most of these people are just ignorant and can be educated and they aren't especially relentless.  By comparison, AnonyMint's consistent conduct year after year is especially demoralizing. With some angry newbie there is a least the hope that you'll get through to them or that ignoring them will be sufficient.  With AnonyMint from the moment he takes interest in a thread the outcome is clear in advance-- he's going to post and rant until everyone gives up or flames out and it's never going to change.

I think the people concerned about AnonyMint's "free speech" in this thread are being duped into being pawns in AnonyMint's efforts to shut down the freedom of others to communicate and associate. AnonyMint is clearly free to post whatever he wants on his own site (and any other site that can stand him). You're free to discuss his "ideas" with him there, if they interest you.   But when the forum invites AnonyMint to post without restriction, other people aren't practically able to have the discussions they want to have-- he drowns them out and buries them under toxic stink. If a community can't choose topics and participants then anyone who wants can shut down a communities ability to communicate.

If this isn't obvious to you yet, consider a silly analogy:  I think we can all mostly agree that people generally ought to be able to operate their own bodies as they see fit, without other people restricting how they use them. But then we have a public pool that the community likes to use and since it's a public pool we all agree everyone ought to have equal access to it.  But then comes AnonyMint and for whatever reason he insists on using his autonomy over his bodily functions to deficate in the pool and refuses to cut it out.  Some people can't smell it and aren't worried about pathogens and don't mind. But a lot of people do mind and won't get in the crapped up water. So his "freedom" to use the pool without restriction on his conduct ultimately denies others the free use of the pool that they ought to be able to use. If the pool operator won't keep the crapper out, then people will go off to use other shit free pools... and leave the original one for people who like shitting in the pool and the few who don't mind it.

Reasonable people can usually disagree about exactly _where_ the line should be drawn. But the principle that sometimes you've got to set and enforce limits to create a space that people can actually enjoy should be something we all agree on.  In AnonyMint's case, I think almost everyone would agree his conduct has been consistently far over the line, but I think his abusive conspiracy theorizing rants strike a resonance in some people and blind them to how intolerable the guy actually is...