Ethereum Private Message Ads on Reddit

[Sentinelrv]

I’ve been getting multiple PMs from different people on Reddit about switching to Ethereum from Bitcoin. Some of them even disguise the advertising as if they were asking me an innocent question about Ethereum while linking an article about it. Has anyone else been getting these? It’s been going on for a couple weeks now.

Here are the ones I’ve received so far…

You seem to know a lot about bitcoin, can you give me your thought on http://reddit.com/420syn

Blocksize debate forces people to Ethereum

Tired of waiting an hour for your bitcoin transaction to get 6 confirmations? In Ethereum it takes about 20 seconds for a confirmation.

With Ethereum the dream of having a truly decentralized financial system will finally happen. All real life applications of cryptocurrency can easily be implemented as and Ethereum Decentralized Application. There are tons of these special apps over at dapps.ethercasts.com .

I am sending you this message because the crypto community is too heavily censored, please read carefully.

The original of idea bitcoin is to create a decentralized money system that prevents censorship and being shutdown. Proof of work seemed like a good way to achieve that. The real power in the bitcoin world is helt by the miners, as long as the mining process is properly decentralized bitcoin will be decentralized. But real world competition caused many cracks to appear in this model, the first flaws that appeared were pooled mining (centralizing power with mining operators), then came ASICs (Centralizing power with mining operators with good industry connections), then came cheap electricity + latency issues (Centralizing power with mining pools with access to cheap electicity and low latency to others big mining pools). These pressures has essentially caused mining to be centalized mainly in China because there they have cheap electricity, good industry for creating ASICs and low latency to other chinese mining pools (and high latency to the rest of the world).

One important thing to keep in mind is that bitcoin itself can evade capital controls and move seamlessly accross borders. But mining equipment cannot. It would be easy to confiscate all mining equipment in the country and use it to destroy bitcoin.

So what is the solution to this problem? Proof of stake is the solution because it removed the physical element and allows network voting power to move seamlessly accross borders too. Traditional Proof of Stake contains some flaws like the Nothing at Stake problem. But the new algorithm designed for proof of stake in Ethereum solved all these issues.

The bitcoin developer community has proven that it is unable to make even small changed to the consesus algorithm. So completely switching to a different model is never going to happen.

If you are willing to open your mind and learn about how Ethereum will beat bitcoin by being far superior to bitcoin watch the videos of Devcon1

Bitcoin is doomed and Ethereum will replace it.

[tomjoad]

Yup I’ve received a few messages too. A few people in /r/BitcoinMarkets were complaining about them and requesting that all Ethereum discussion be banned from the subreddit.

[Sentinelrv]

I just updated the op with all the ones I’ve received. Annoying people like this can’t be a good way to advertise their network.

[Nagalim]

I had an interesting conversation with an eth dev about this. Basically, no one in their community thinks its their responsibility to actually do anythjng about the spam, and there’s a general statement of ‘one bad apple’. Meanwhile, they are enjoying their pump and dump spamcoin. I had several responses that were very pro-spam (because any advertisement is good advertisement right?). It’s kind of sad, I had high hopes for the eth communuty. Sucks they’re going the road of paycoin and the like, all bark no bite.

[zoro]

I don’t give much attention to some people or community of a coin but rather to coin’s technology and dev teams.
Ethereum is something different like NU and has a future. We have to cooperate with it in some way.
Of course, if community is in a high level (like we are here) then so much better

[jooize]

I don’t see how any community could do anything about people doing things like this, beside asking them not to, which isn’t guaranteed to be effective. I wouldn’t condemn the whole community. Imagine if people were to do this to intentionally cause bad reputation.

[zoro]

Can we do something like this for NU?

[Nagalim]

When we were accused of spamming we made a post on our forum and discussed how that is detremental to our image. Their community talks about how any exposure is good exposure. I very much believe the community is important, the communuty crafts the tech. Without the humans the coin is meaningless.

If this were happening in our community you can bet we would have a thread on our forum calling them out and specifying exactly why it’s bad for us. I would start compiling a list of every post and effort we make to inform the attacker that they are only doing us harm. Then, i would make the only possible conclusion: the attacker is outside the community. And if anyone started talking about ‘one bad apple’ or ‘any publicity is good publicity’ i would have a very long winded discussion to help them see the light: that fair play and reputation is vastly more important than pumping the price.

Anyway, it’s not my community, so in the end i just join everyone else in shrugging my shoulders and going ‘oh well, such a shame’.

[Nagalim]

Lol, i just got a pm from the spammer apologizing in the form of spam so we can all have a pitty party for a stranger’s wounded ego.

[willy]

Can we do something like this for NU?

Hire a bunch of people on fiverr and make a video about it?

[Sentinelrv]

Lol, I did too.

[zoro]

Hire a bunch of people on fiverr and make a video about it?

I didn’t know about fiverr!
I thought that this had been done by their community, free of charge

[willy]

I thought that this had been done by their community, free of charge

It sure doesn’t feel like that to me

[DavidMc0]

I agree, though the Ethereum community has almost unanimously condemned the action of the spammer (3 of 6 top threads on Ethereum Reddit are about this), so I’m not sure there’s more they can do.

It is rubbish, and I hope the spammer is being sincere in his spam apology message, but I’m guessing he’s just being incredibly annoying & winding people up!

[Nagalim]

unanimously condemned the action of the spammer

Yah, 2 weeks later. You shoulda heard them when the first wave of spam created a pump in eth price. Everyone was all ‘what can we do? May as well buy some eth and profit off of underhanded strategies’. Now, finally 2 weeks later, people are saying “hey, this isn’t cool” and lo and behold the spammer goes “oh, I guess it’s not cool. Ok, I’ll stop, wish you guys had told me sooner.”

[DavidMc0]

So you think the spam was significant in causing the spike in price?

My first spam message was on the 18th, and the price was certainly a lot lower at that point, though it got a lot higher around 25th Jan, and I’m hoping due to reasons other than the spammers?

I guess we’ll never know what impact the spam had, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned a lot of people off, rather than causing the rapid price growth. It’d certainly be disappointing if this kind of behaviour became more common in the crypto scene.

[Nagalim]

The first response to the spam attack was a sticky on their subreddit posted on Jan 15th. As far as I can tell, no one ever even discussed the spam in their forum. So therefore, the Nu community has talked more about the ethereum spam attacks of january 2016 than the ethereum community itself. So yah, they were totally complacent in a pump and dump scheme.