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Comment by kibwen

4 years ago

If your argument hinges on the premise that being either a police officer or a politician makes someone either a paragon of morality or wholly incapable of committing crimes, then I'm afraid I have some bad news for you.

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kibwen

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digitailor  4 years ago

My argument hinges upon the fact that Mr Nagle has been waging a FUD campaign for some time without much contest here, through leveraging his reputation. It's become tiresome, very few LEO support his concerns at this point, yet he continues unchallenged. It's mostly cherrypicking and well below the quality of his other posts.

All of us who've been around enough know what FUD campaigns look like on well-managed Internet forums. I am middle-aged and find this worthy of countering as it appears obsessive. Younger technologists are constantly having their efforts defamed needlessly on this leading technology forum with nothing being added to the conversation.

  • acdha  4 years ago

    > Younger technologists are constantly having their efforts defamed needlessly on this leading technology forum with nothing being added to the conversation.

    Speaking of nothing being added to the conversation, it’s somewhat conspicuous that you are attacking the source rather than engaging with the argument. His criticisms are valid and shared by many technologists of all ages and skill levels, surely you can explain why they’re mistaken — for example, you could point to extensive use of Bitcoin in a legitimate non-speculative economy. You’ve been promoting it for many years, surely you must have examples?

    • digitailor  4 years ago

      Indeed I have, appearing later in this thread due to how it became organized by moderation. Digital assets aided in stopping a predatory crime this year. If this kind of usage doesn't satisfy as a rebuttal to a negative parent post containing no supporting information, you may want to examine the fact that this entire thread is meant to explore some technologist's fear-based need to publicly associate digital assets with crime alone, in this forum especially. Emotionally-driven posts meant specifically to steam-roll any and all positive discussion by simply shouting "But Crime!"

      Tracking the making of negative generalized statements using FUD techniques is something I have been involved in algorithmically tracking professionally and am countering not in the pursuit of karma or sycophantic agreement but simple public commons maintenance. (The data was often used to identify FUD campaigns of short sellers in finance forums and resulting sentiment analysis feeds are available via subscription through financial data providers.) These comments never mention the continual reigning supremacy of the US dollar for crime, ever, and never provide any evidence that bitcoin has a higher crime usage ratio than the dollar with less prosecutability. This is because law enforcement generally haven't advanced that position while enforcing and in earlier posts I've explained my extensive experience in detail as to how and why they haven't. There has been no direct engagement with this factual information.

      In my view some on this forum are intent on spreading classical FUD on the subject and countering FUD is an occupation for some. After a decade of particularly questionable behavior coming from the technology sector involving unfathomable amounts of US dollars, we run the risk of portraying an image of incumbent ideological corruption instead of supporting meaningful technological discussion. This slide has been happening for years IMO and it saddens me. Younger technologists have considerably less opportunity than we did, not more, and the frontier is much smaller. Ruthless negativism doesn't serve them.

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