What's up with crypto "trolling"

The original kind of "trolls" on social media are weak-minded attention seekers with low self esteem. They should not be "fed" with requests for civility or arguments. Most crypto-commenting accounts I call "trolls" for shorthand are not really that kind of trolls.

There are some real people who just want to advertise their favorite crypto and hate on all others. I think of them as shills and/or maximalists rather than trolls. They may believe in their coin or just be working to make people buy their bags knowing their coin sucks compared to the ones they are speaking out against. Some of them get paid to do it and so talking to them may be a useless effort. Correcting their lies (talking to the community) may be worthwhile.

I believe the majority of what I call "trolls" are professionally-guided social engineering agents working to harm crypto adoption. They often claim to support BTC (the intentionally broken crypto) since BTC is really an anti-Bitcoin-dream attack now. They may say 10 true things as a means to promote one dishonest claim or assumption. Sometimes they claim to support the coin they are undermining with real and false concerns mixed into their posts. They often make threads toxic to intentionally make new people turn away from the toxicity. They are on all crypto-related social media and their anti-crypto teams have massive resources for manipulating prices and funding websites, "thought leaders", "news" sites, You-Tubers,... to spread their false storylines. Their attacks on crypto are so widespread and varied they are hard to see until you do. Once you do, you can see the same dishonest belief manipulation going on in many other social media areas such as politics and the many political topics where wealthy people or organizations (that control the social engineering) have strong opinions as to what "The People" should be thinking.

If I am right about the kind of "trolls" we face in crypto, reasoning with them will not be very effective. Ignoring them like recommended for the traditional troll lets them control the narrative to the detriment of the truth. They often only make small lies, but they work as a team to spread a web of dishonesty that builds into a false world view. A view they claim to believe in and call you crazy/ignorant/mistaken if you don't agree with "everyone else".

Things are currently more complicated on r/BTC and for BCH. The trolls successfully worked to divide our community and de-fund development recently. They were very successful at their social engineering attacks because of deep-seated hatreds and real/perceived weaknesses in our primary development team. The community joined in the troll attacks and we split off our primary developers and reaffirmed our reliance on the donation-based development funding strategy (that may or may not be a serious problem still). The trolls success may turn out to make BCH stronger and better as the community believes. I hope so. After the community teamed up with the many troll accounts, those trolls have had to tone down their anti-BCH posts and so a whole new cadre of new "trolls" have arrived to take over the anti-crypto social engineering duties.