This is a family-friendly blog. While I reserve the right to delete any comment at any time for any reason, I do not normally exercise this right. But I will delete every single comment that contains a profanity.
Today, I deleted two comments that had profanities in them.
And there is already a nutcase who is claiming that "the researchers just did a massive delete of critical comments from their blog posts." He goes on to make other disparaging remarks, all for deleting two comments, both of which had non-substantive verbiage, laced with profanities.
And there were some other interesting comments from the Bitcoin fringe. One commenter on Twitter asked us how much money we received from the NSA. Another accused us of being a member of an academic conspiracy to bring down Bitcoin and prop up fiat currency. There are people who claim, in the same breath, that they don't believe that the selfish mining attack works at all (though they cannot find fault with the reasoning or the math), and that we were irresponsible for publishing it (hey, if it doesn't work, why are you so upset?). One group with whom we had never corresponded before demanded to be listed as coauthors on our paper, and when we told them that this was not possible, let's just say that the conversation turned sour. I used to think that money brought out the worst in people, until I saw Bitcoin.
I'm not sure what my policy is going to be on exceedingly stupid comments. I made a large number of life choices and sacrifices solely to be surrounded by smart people, and consequently, I don't see a compelling reason why stupidity should be welcome on my blog. Yet, to date, I have not deleted any of it.
But this blog does have readers in classrooms, and I will not tolerate profanities. Please behave accordingly.
I now suspect that the person loudly complaining about "massive" comment deletion is actually confused because Discus only shows the top-rated comments. The down-voted, mostly inane comments are not deleted. They just require an extra click or two to unveil. And in any case, this is all done automatically by Discus, a third-party service.
Hacker and professor at Cornell, with interests that span distributed systems, OSes and networking. Current projects include HyperDex, OpenReplica and the Nexus OS. more...
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