Ocean mining astroturfing via a hacked (?) account?

[gmaxwell]

Last month an account made a stupid false claim about me, suggesting I opposed BIP110 because I was not invited to invest in Ocean.  This is kind of fractally stupid: Who would give a damn, as far as I know most people who invested in ocean regret it, and moreover I was invited to invest and explicitly declined and kept my distance because Luke-jr was clearly not doing well mentally.  Plus I've been extremely explicit about why I'm confident that 110 is a horrible proposal and have written about it at some length, so no convoluted conspiracy theories are required.  But hey, it's better than them calling me a pedophile which has been their go to against anyone who has spoken out against Ocean's attempted protocol change.

The writing sounded like a good match for Ocean's marketing director, known to most people as Bitcoin Mechanic.  I blasted luke-jr via signal for the falsehood, but Luke insisted that the account was a 'rando' and not his employee (and so their false claims were not his concern).

Today, Mechanic seem have revealed on twitter that he is, in fact, the operator of the account-- by way of an undercropped screenshot of Bitcointalk:


(and oh look, the Knotzis have reached the "fuck theymos" stage of forker derangement-- of course there is no reason to think Theymos had anything to do with whatever posting difficulties he's having)

Now this would mostly be of just idle amusement-- especially since the consistent dishonesty from that camp is well established as far as I'm concerned--, but what got me to drop the matter is that the spooderman account is a 2013 account clearly belonging to another person.  So that leaves me thinking that it appears that ocean's marketing department is astroturfing on Bitcointalk with hacked accounts.  I'm sure that sort of thing happens from time to time, but it's less common to have concrete evidence of it!

Of course, I immediately brought the situation to Luke-jr's attention--  but he hasn't responded, and I expect like my messages pointing out 110's confiscation issue he simply will not respond.

Given the gravity of what I think happened here, it might be helpful if a global mod could get the timeline on the supposedly (apparently?) deleted post in question.  I don't see anything in the trashcan.  Given that related parties have straight up lied about being 'censored' before then lied more even when they were caught, I have no confidence in what actually happened here.

If they're somehow innocent of this I don't want to accuse otherwise even if their strategy continues to be stonewalling any communication from me.

[stwenhao]

it might be helpful if a global mod could get the timeline on the supposedly (apparently?) deleted post in question

I am not a mod, but there are enough scrapers to see most deleted posts, so I assume it is this one: https://bitlist.co/post/66835411

Anyway, it was just a single link, without a single word of explanation, quotes or anything. So, it could be auto-deleted as well, just like it is done in many other places, where spambots are detected, if they just post raw links, without anything else.

[ABCbits]

Last month an account made a stupid false claim about me, suggesting I opposed BIP110 because I was not invited to invest in Ocean.
--snip--
Today, Mechanic seem have revealed on twitter that he is, in fact, the operator of the account-- by way of an undercropped screenshot of Bitcointalk:

No wonder half of his reply seems to be off-topic.

it might be helpful if a global mod could get the timeline on the supposedly (apparently?) deleted post in question

I am not a mod, but there are enough scrapers to see most deleted posts, so I assume it is this one: https://bitlist.co/post/66835411

So it's just regular case of forum violation, specifically by ignoring Guidelines for Press board.

[(BTC)]

This is kind of fractally stupid

[gmaxwell]

I love the art.

Thanks for finding the post.

The post appears to confirm that Mechanic was operating that account.  It looks like another example of Mechanic intentionally breaking the rules to get a post removed so that he could promote it on the basis of "censorship" -- he's done it before, he even admits to making rule-violating posts on reddit that he expected to be deleted.

He's not the only one in the knots/ocean/110 community to engage in that sort of behavior:

e.g. Greg Tonoski made a rule breaking post on r/Bitcoin then falsely claimed I had removed it. In reality I wasted my time replying to it which I wouldn't have done just to remove it, and I have no ability to remove posts there and never have.  After he got spanked on X for the false allegation he woke up his largely inactive bitcointalk account to try his luck here.  Unfortunately for his self-promotional efforts moderation policy on BCT is quite lax and he didn't get the official smackdown he craved.

Or probably the worst example is the censorship allegations from obvious sock account "Claire Ostrom" who claimed to have been censored from the development list.  Problem was that "she" never sent the message to the list but had only sent it directly to me.  Then "she" falsely smeared me for not warning that the message hadn't gone to the list, but in reality I'd emailed twice. Claire falsely claimed I didn't... but similar to mechanic getting caught operating spooderman, the account managed to expose that I sent them with their own sloppy screenshots.  Of course, "she" did not continue with the proposal in spite of the claimed censorship (or after it was made clear the censorship never happened)-- presumably because it was an insincere proposal by an Ocean affiliate intended to just make 110 look more reasonable by comparison.

(She is in quotes because given the repeated sock-puppetry by mechanic, I think it's a reasonable guess that "Claire" is just mechanic in a dress too-- or some other man larping as a woman to get extra victim sympathy, given that few to none of the identified anti-110 accounts are women. It would be pretty ironic, given that one of their biggest private complaints about bitcoin core is that project accepts contributions from a transgender person)

[philipma1957]

I love the art.

Thanks for finding the post.

The post appears to confirm that Mechanic was operating that account.  It looks like another example of Mechanic intentionally breaking the rules to get a post removed so that he could promote it on the basis of "censorship" -- he's done it before, he even admits to making rule-violating posts on reddit that he expected to be deleted.

He's not the only one in the knots/ocean/110 community to engage in that sort of behavior:

e.g. Greg Tonoski made a rule breaking post on r/Bitcoin then falsely claimed I had removed it. In reality I wasted my time replying to it which I wouldn't have done just to remove it, and I have no ability to remove posts there and never have.  After he got spanked on X for the false allegation he woke up his largely inactive bitcointalk account to try his luck here.  Unfortunately for his self-promotional efforts moderation policy on BCT is quite lax and he didn't get the official smackdown he craved.

Or probably the worst example is the censorship allegations from obvious sock account "Claire Ostrom" who claimed to have been censored from the development list.  Problem was that "she" never sent the message to the list but had only sent it directly to me.  Then "she" falsely smeared me for not warning that the message hadn't gone to the list, but in reality I'd emailed twice. Claire falsely claimed I didn't... but similar to mechanic getting caught operating spooderman, the account managed to expose that I sent them with their own sloppy screenshots.  Of course, "she" did not continue with the proposal in spite of the claimed censorship (or after it was made clear the censorship never happened)-- presumably because it was an insincere proposal by an Ocean affiliate intended to just make 110 look more reasonable by comparison.

(She is in quotes because given the repeated sock-puppetry by mechanic, I think it's a reasonable guess that "Claire" is just mechanic in a dress too-- or some other man larping as a woman to get extra victim sympathy, given that few to none of the identified anti-110 accounts are women. It would be pretty ironic, given that one of their biggest private complaints about bitcoin core is that project accepts contributions from a transgender person)

A shame as the link was interesting too bad it was used the way spooderman used it