Trolling for Fun and Profit

People who are not part of the ethereum community, and who are financially invested in harming it are brigading the /r/ethereum subreddit. This guy eventually went back and deleted all of these comments, but I saved them for posterity. There was more to the conversation, in which I asked him why he shouldn’t be banned, and his response was that he would create ten more accounts and increase the rate of his trolling each time.

The recent price movements are not the market reacting to the fork. The price of ether stayed relatively stable, all things considered. It is the result of people attempting to manipulate markets by creating uncertainty. These are people who don’t care about the ethereum or crypto communities, and are only here to create chaos. As I pointed out before, this is not a zero-sum game. The best case scenario is both chains survive. The global economy has more than enough space for both to grow 100x.

But people who don’t care about, or even seem to fully understand this technology have decided to attack it for a few dollars of personal profit.

They are making it impossible to moderate by using the community’s ideological positions against them, creating double-binds that are impossible to respond to effectively. The first double-bind was the claim that absolute consensus is necessary to do something like a hard-fork. This is, obviously an impossible goal, but making this claim within the crypto space provides some semblance of a moral ground that they can then cite as their reason for attacking.

They are exploiting the dislike of censorship to brigade and concern troll to push the price down. Because of the structure of reddit, it is almost impossible to clearly define and enforce rules in a way that cannot be exploited. If the foundation takes a stance, they will rally against ethereum as centralized. If the foundation is silent, they will say the foundation is weak. If the community itself asks for better moderation, the community will be called hypocrite authoritarians. They are making it traumatic for supporters of the technology to participate in the community. They are carefully goading the community into situations that are lose/lose.

Studies have been done on trolls, and the results were basically that they’re the worst people on the planet, belonging primarily to the dark tetrad of sociopathy, narcissism, machiavellianism, and sadism:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-online-secrets/201409/internet-trolls-are-narcissists-psychopaths-and-sadists

Add market incentives, and you apparently have the perfect shit storm — allowing these people to make money through their pastime of tormenting others.

When the DAO launched, my first thought was that a DAO can’t meaningfully exist until the fundamentals of decentralized governance were solved. I knew there would be fallout, but I never could have imagined this.

These people are not part of the community. They are not invested in its long-term success. They are invested only in their own short-term gains and personal entertainment at the expense of others. They do not deserve a voice in the community, in the development of the technology, or any weight given to the things they say — because they are not part of the community. At the end of the day, they are a problem to be solved, just like any other - and doing so will bring even more value to the ecosystem.