[beager]

There’s no “right thing” here. These companies will do what they legally can to ensure their bottom line is as healthy as possible. If that means making broad strokes, cutting corners, and inflicting collateral damage on customers that are situated in fraud-laden landscapes, they’ll do it.

What if there were actual Nigerian princes who truly wanted help with currency exchange and were offering a real mutually beneficial business opportunity? Would you expect Gmail to hire a team to weed out those emails from spam? If they don’t, are they “lazy”?

[stoev]

How many people do you think there are who are genuinely interested in hearing about opportunities to transfer wealth out of Nigeria for an unknown prince? I bet it is not a very common interest, so Google are not being lazy for not investing more manpower into it.

However, millions of people are searching about blockchain tech and are reading blockchain-related publishers every day. That is why any company which decides to censor them instead of investing resources into moderating the content is being lazy. Those companies' focus should be on their users' trust because without it they would have never achieved their bottom lines.

[beager]

> How many people do you think there are who are genuinely interested in hearing about opportunities to transfer wealth out of Nigeria for an unknown prince?

Depends on whether they’re doing it on the blockchain!

[SlowRobotAhead]

That seems like a false equivalence.

There are no legitimate Nigerian prince emails. There are legitimate coin emails.

Blocking all coin topics like Facebook and ICO emails like MailChimp goes beyond “spam filtering” into big brother territory.

These companies are free to do as they please - and I’m going to boycot and avoid them. There is a line between “we’re helping!” and censorship and Silicon Valley is definitely crossing it.

[kimolas]

FYI, MailChimp is based in Atlanta, GA. Maybe you mean to use "Silicon Valley" as a catch-all for tech, but I don't think it's fair to associate SV with anti-ICO attitudes in this way. The anti-ICO sentiment is coming from everywhere, and I think it's pretty legitimate.

[SlowRobotAhead]

You don’t think Google, Facebook, Amazon are setting the stage for what is acceptable? Ok, replace with Big Tech if you want.

And yea, I get it, you can’t possibly understand something that doesn’t directly effect you - yet. When something you consider good is censored maybe you’ll get the idea of acceptible precedent? “First they came for <x>” and all.

FWIW, I hate ICO and consider crypto commodities a waste in general; but I know “nudging” when I see it.

[kimolas]

I bought a fair amount of crypto to flip in the short-term, but on the other hand I don't believe the technology has proven itself to be anything more than a fad. I'd like to see a lot more regulations put on it.