This whole thread seems wrong to me for those who wanted it to keep the changes unnoticed.
Start a new account then. I don't get the point of keeping the same account and not wanting anyone to notice the change, especially considering the squatting risk.
Agreed. I don't think you can get a name change if theymos doesn't recognize your username, and if theymos recognizes it, many others will recognize it too. So there's no scenario in which you can change your name unnoticed.
There seems to hardly be any way to have your cake and to eat it too - I mean retaining some of the benefits of the credibility carried over from the old name to the new name, so of course, there can be some benefits in changing your user name, but seemingly the ONLY way to completely lose the connection of the possible negatives that have come to your old user name would be to create a new account and to really start over.. and maybe not even mention the old user name in connection with the new account.
There is also security through obscurity, too.. and there are likely other means of attempting to NOT draw the wrong kinds of attention to yourself.. and the interwebs are filled with fucktwats.. Well, maybe you ONLY need 1 in a million fucktwats, and that is enough to cause potential real life issues in the meat space.
Any of us who are outspoken forum members retain some of these potential security issues, and yeah, there are folks who have purposefully chosen to be notorious public figures in the bitcoin world or the crypto space, and even many of them (if you really attempt to delve into their personal matters) can tell stories of various kinds of issues or attack attempts upon them.. of course, Jameson Lopp is a known example, but there are plenty of others, too.
Just consider some of the issues that we might have admitted to ONLY owning 1 BTC and given some details regarding that 1 BTC, but fuck all about the god damned BTC price going up to a million and now our paltry amount of BTC has real value in terms of the many normies who had not known about BTC in the early adoptions days that we still seem to be in... just like 2017... holy fuck, even I witnessed the crazies coming out of the woodwork in my real life in regards to the BTC topic, and I had wallets with fractions of a BTC that I had considered as just dust that turned into real and meaningful value.. .. that .05 BTC that I had purchased for $12 in late 2015, all of a sudden was worth $1,000 in late 2017.. and I had not even realized that I was carrying around that amount of value.. because it happened so fast, relatively speaking when we have other things going on in our lives, too.