Quote from: Quickseller on March 13, 2020, 06:49:17 PM

I think it is very unlikely that intelligence agencies are using newbie accounts to smear the reputations of forum members within bitcointalk.

I would respond to this theory with the question of why would a 3-letter agency want to do something like this?

Most of the forum community is made up of people wearing paid sig ads who talk about bitcoin to earn money from their sig ads. My guess is the worst most of these people have done is not report income on their sig ad payments, but that the majority of them will report this income (perhaps using the incorrect forms, etc, but still paying the correct amount). If this was the case, the amounts involved would be a few hundred dollars in unpaid taxes per person, at most -- not really amounts that intelligence agencies would be interested in getting involved in.

Another large part of the community is those who use bitcoin to gamble. My guess is these people are harmless, and again intelligence agencies are probably not interested in these people.

A third large community on bitcointalk is the altcoin community, however bitcointalk is really not a major platform to launch altcoins, and there are other platforms that altcoins are frequently launched on, and promoted. Certain bitcointalk-specific policies have prevented bitcointalk from being a major altcoin related platform.

The development of bitcoin is largely done off bitcointalk, and most bitcoin devs are not even forum members.

Forum polices prevent really bad types of business from being conducted, such as disallowing illegal transactions that are not legal in the country of the buyer or seller.

I do find it interesting that a newbie account would post something that essentially says to not trust newbie accounts because they might be intelligence agencies.

Who said newbies, and since when newbies are able to destroy reputations.