This has puzzled me for years, in the crypto community having a LinkedIn profile seem to be the communities way of saying "Yep you're a legit person".

A couple years ago someone told me I didn't have a LinkedIn account so there was no way of proving I wasn't a scammer hiding behind a false identity. So I created a LinkedIn account and of course once you've got one you need connections. I connected with people I knew in real life and then the next day I saw some connection requests from people I didn't know. I accepted them just to see if there could a benefit for me.

It then hit me! If I get over 500 connections on LinkedIn (LinkedIn only shows 500+ and not the actual number of connections) it would some how prove to the community that I was "legit". So 24 hours later I got over 1,200 connections and yep I am now an honest legit person to their eyes. A friend of mine said to me "Wow, how'd you get so many connections so fast? You profile looks professional".

If that's all it took for me to show that I'm a real person imagine how many fake accounts there are out there.

The point I'm trying to make is I don't think LinkedIn (or others alike) should be used as a way of proving that someone is who they say they are.

What do you just think and how do you guys verify someone is legit, say if you want to collaborate/invest in their project?