Are Government Paid Trolls Infiltrating Bitcoin Development Discussion Groups?

InsideBitcoins reports:

Mastering Bitcoin Author Andreas Antonopoulos was recently featured on a panel discussion at the Bitcoin Foundation DevCore Workshop at Draper University, and he shared some interesting thoughts on the idea of certain individuals doing their best to disrupt the Bitcoin development process via dissent, negativity, and trolling.

The development process has indeed slowed down a bit as more controversial protocol changes have been debated by the community, and some of the language on both sides of the scalability discussion has been downright nasty. According to Antonopoulos, the possible fracturing of the Bitcoin community as a whole could be partially due to paid trolls who work for various government agencies around the world.

The discussion that eventually led to Antonopoulos’s points regarding paid agents was between Bitcoin Core Developer Greg Maxwell and C4 President Michael Perklin. Perklin was making the point that development can stall when you do not have someone making a final call on controversial decisions. Maxwell explained he is worried about outside forces disrupting development more than the process simply coming to a standstill on its own:

“This thing sort of keeps me up at night. I think we are vulnerable to people intentionally trying to jam the process, to jam Bitcoin because they want to take Bitcoin out because they want a competing system to be successful — whether that’s a traditional money system or another cryptocurrency system. So, that risk worries me.”

 Once Maxwell brought up the point of outsiders jamming or negatively affecting the development process, Andreas Antonopoulos was quick to point out that throwing a lot of negativity into development discussions could be one effective method of lowering overall moral. He also explained that there are two very different types of trolls that exist in the world today:

“One way they can jam the system is by trolling, sowing dissent, assuming bad faith, and throwing a lot of negativity into the conversation . . . Some trolls are self-employed comfortably and do that because their personality is that, but I have no doubt in my mind that there are some people — we’ve seen it consistently across many countries — who are paid to sow dissent into a variety of organizations. If it can happen [in the United States] — and it has happened here many times with community organizations getting disrupted by government agencies — I can assure you it’s happening in other countries, which have far less constraint on doing that . . . One of the ways that we’re getting disrupted is not someone compromising the miners but someone compromising the good faith efforts of the development team.”

  -RW