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Comment by studentrob | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. You're even getting down voted here without explanation. EDIT: Well you used to be grey and at the bottom. Now you're up top.

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There has been an enormous and coordinated effort to disrupt the Bitcoin community, and many of the actions have been far from subtle. /r/bitcoin has been subject to spam attacks, sockpuppets, brigade voting, and a huge number of manipulations.

The moderator team tried to control it, honest people became victim to heavy handed moderation, and a lot of damage was done.

The grandparent comment really does not seem genuine. Maybe I am disillusioned, but bitcoin's news aggregate presence feels like it's being very distorted.

The moderators of /r/bitcoin should explain why they automatically change the sort mode of specific threads to "Controversial" which effectively reverses the rank order. And why they have custom CSS which affects what comments appear hidden or not.

No other subreddit that I am aware of engages in this form of comment manipulation. I am not even a Bitcoin user but this sort of behaviour was extremely unusual.

You are wrong about the CSS. What was happening was: the brigades of pro-fork users would downvote anyone who disagreed with them.

Reddit hides posts that score -5 or lower. So, the moderators changed the CSS to show all posts (even < -5 posts) as an anti-censorship tool. The reddit.com administrators are aware of this.

As for sorting by Controversial - same concept. The pro-fork brigades would force popular posts to the bottom, now the moderators use the built-in Reddit sort tool to make those appear higher up, in threads where vote manipulation happens.

Because reddit lets anyone create an account in about 3 seconds, it is easy to game and control what gets seen and what does not. Hacker news does the right thing by not giving everyone a downvote button on the first day.

The group that is promoting the network fork is extremely good at social media.

A clue that it is not genuine, is simply that nobody cares this much about a small technical change to a protocol. Yet these constant, daily, aggressive attacks against the developers have been going on for at least 10 months now.

All anyone has to do is read the pro-fork subreddit, /r/btc, and see how toxic and hostile they seem. It does not seem genuine and I cannot imagine anyone spending so much time writing the same things over and over for nearly a year.

It reminds me of the “Putin troll army” story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_brigades

> small technical change to a protocol

I have no horse in this race, but isn't that understating the impact a bit?

Yes, the pro-fork group say they simply want to change the limit of megabytes per block from 1MB to 2MB. Somehow this is worth forking the network over.

This may not sound like much, but also keep in mind eight months ago it was 20MB, with an eventual jump into the GB range, that they were pushing for. Also, recently they are talking about removing any limit altogether.

This change seems small but the consequences would not be, since it limits who can run a full client and centralizes control to those who can (companies, not individuals).

There are better ways to achieve the same goal and keep the decentralization, but they are not so simple, and need to be fully tested before rolling out. One exciting thing in the pipeline, is a caching layer that sits on top of bitcoin, which allows instant, true microtransactions. In the short term there's "segwit" which also brings all sorts of other advantages.

Honest Question: As an individual what incentives are there for me to run a full node? Currently the storage/bandwidth requirements are not outrageous, but high enough that they will cost $20-$50 depending on how many connections I allow. Why would I bother?

It's possible to run a node in pruned mode, where you set the amount is space which is used by blocks. Older blocks are then pruned to stay within the space limit. You can run a node in this way for $5 a month.

If you support Bitcoin, much in the same way as people support many open source projects, this isn't a lot of money to fork out. Compared to the amount of time contributors spend writing software for free for the good of the world.

> small technical change to a protocol

Given the fuss that Bitcoin Core itself makes about this change not being possible, it is surely not a trifling matter.

This is disingenuous, anyhow. The limit on how many transactions the Bitcoin network can handle is fundamental to growth, of course it would be a big issue.

> All anyone has to do is read the pro-fork subreddit, /r/btc, and see how toxic and hostile they seem. It does not seem genuine and I cannot imagine anyone spending so much time writing the same things over and over for nearly a year.

This is what happens when a group is cast out from the main community (in this case by moderation policy).

I recently had to wait several hours for a transaction to confirm, this materially effected me.

People actually using bitcoin wanted the 2MB increase months ago.

That sounds like a lot of conspiracy theory with zero evidence. Mind producing some actual evidence of brigading, sock puppeting, etc, preferably before theymos started banning everyone and was downvoted to -1,000 by the bitcoin community, not by whatever your paranoid head imagines.

Moreover, didn't theymos say he would ban coinbase from r/bitcoin. I suppose coinbases is a sockpuppet too right and maybe they out to destroy bitcoin because it isn't bitcoin that gives them their business.

All we get from small blockers is conspiracies and conspiracies, all the while you engage in ddosing, banning, censorship, changing of sorting orders, secret honk kong meetings, backroom deals with miners and on and on.

There is an attack going on and that is the insanity of the small blockers - a tiny minority of only 10% - crippling bitcoin by keeping network capacity limited, creating a huge backlog, unreliable transactions, and now we on HN discussing it.

Congrats - nutheads.

So we're supposed to believe that same side that supposedly disrupted the community through sockpuppetry is also at the mercy of DDoS attacks?

Seems like anyone capable of orchestrating DDoS, can also organize sockpuppets.

> /r/bitcoin has been subject to spam attacks, sockpuppets, brigade voting, and a huge number of manipulations.

How do you know it's "sock puppets" and the like, and not real people who are expressing real opinions?

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