Trolls: Detrimental or a Net Positive?

Bitcoin Cash has an annoying issue that plagues it near ceaselessly; and unlike some of BCH's competitors, the problem isn't within the functions of the coin itself. Bitcoin Cash has come down with a case of the trolls, the influenza of the internet. Gross.

Hi, my name is Lex, and I'm essentially saying that we need to carry around hand sanitizer to kill any power these bad actors may have to try to hurt us and confuse our potential allies and infrequent media consumers. A lot of the people I've spoke with about this don't really take trolls seriously; as a successful coin, trolls come with the territory, right?

Technically yes, but also wrong. These aren't just "they hate us because they ain't us" types; these are motivated, methodical, pathological liars that have a monetary stake in insuring (by whatever means necessary) that our community is demolished and ruined beyond all hope of repair. They are a coalition of merc sockpuppets; many likely employed by Blockstream themselves in order to insure the delay of adoption of Bitcoin Cash.

Why go to all of this effort?

Bitcoin Cash users are idealists with a concrete set of goals, the technical know-how to achieve those goals, and a defiant attitude that makes us resistant to a centralized power grab. In short, we were a wildcard to start with, and now we've shown ourselves to be the King of Hearts, rather than the Jack of Spades. We've proven ourselves to be hard-working, hard headed, and hard to kill. We've dealt with more bullshit than any other coin, and it's because we're way more than just the underdog; we're Leonardo DiCaprio in The Man in the Iron Mask, born in the shadow of his evil twin, finally ready to take the throne and restore kindness to the kingdom!

Bitcoin Cash is good. Blockstream lost their soul years ago, and can only function like some Crypto-Smegle, trying to injure us before we rise in market share because they're solely motivated by greed, and little else. There's no vision there, except maybe to create more of the same old exclusivity that has perpetuated the world's economic class structure of inequity. Keeping all of this in mind, how could these bad actors have any sort of use to our data community?

For one, for each lie they tell, they give us a chance to explain the truth again for everyone to see. I cannot refute this, it's absolutely true. They also oust themselves as negative influences, and instead of having to sort through myriad of sockpuppets, we can keep an eye on those particular accounts, and jump on them as we see fit. Yeah, I totally get it when people bring these points up to me, but I have to ask the question: do these trolls do more damage or good for our community? If there's a possibility they might be doing more bad than good, is there more we can do to tilt the scale in our favor?

I'm not talking about banning them. Au contraire, I want to shine a big, fat, white-hot spotlight on them.

There are a few different ways to go about this, and whichever media medium we're talking about surely matters when consideration comes into play of which version would work most affectively. Since I use Reddit more than I use Twitter and the like, what I'm effectively trying to do is to find a way to paint these trolls bright pink for all the forum to see. I'd like some sort of semi automated dossier of their past sins of troll-dom and a brief explanation of who we think they are and why we think they're doing this, to automatically comment under them everytime they try to spread misinformation in our subreddit.

Everytime I mention this, the lower level trolls lose their shit. The higher troll boys just shut up immediately when I bring it up.

Because of this, I think I'm onto something.

Reddit's karma system is a disadvantage to them, because if they abandon their high level sockpuppet accounts, they have to start at stage one again, and that makes their jobs annoyingly harder because as soon as they start trolling, they're going to get downvoted to oblivion, and that limits the amount of times they can post on our subreddit in a day. We cause them inefficiency, and that costs them money. That is my strongest argument for forcing these parasites out of their favored accounts, and back into sock baby accounts. Yes, BCH'ers will have to be more vigilant when observing newbie accounts, but again, that's where the old downvote onslaught comes in, and we can document who among their numbers should be tarred and feathered next for all to see. There's also the good, old crypto checker, which has its place within the subreddit.

One panicked guy (who I later found out was a prominent troll) aggressively brought up that we're no better than Blockstream if we pick and choose who to target in this way; in his argument we would just be acting like r/bitcoin, whose mods bans dissenters like some dystopian dictatorship. This is where an open and transparent voting forum comes in handy. Direct democracy saves the day! We could spend a day every couple of weeks voting on which cases are definite 100% proven bad actors. It wouldn't take too much once we ironed the kinks out of the system by allowing our enemies to try to break the system so we could see where we could improve upon; no function of democracy should ever be set in stone, we need to evolve it just as Bitcoin Cash evolves to suit the needs of the times.

I really think we can do this guys. There's other versions of this idea already out there by some of my fellows, and I absolutely encourage you guys to think amongst yourselves to come up with all sorts of different versions for different types of media forums.

These guys aren't going to stop because we're not going to stop evolving to help our world. Greed versus Love, let's show them what we've got.

Mini Author Bio: Hi, this is my first article, and definitely not my last. Writing is my main form of communication, and perhaps the biggest love of my life. I'm in college right now for a Communication major, and although I'm not a starving artist (thanks to my family teaming up with me so we can all try to thrive here in Appalachia), I am trying to switch to becoming a full-time writer, so I would appreciate your patronage and/or verbal support, whether it be constructive criticism or just positive energy. I believe in Bitcoin Cash, and I believe in monetary freedom. We still have a lot to learn, but we're all learning together, isn't that great?