This is an opinion editorial by Robert Hall, a Bitcoin pleb.
Is It OK To Dox Scammers?
This question has become relevant after the spectacular collapse of Terra/LUNA, Three Arrows Capital and Celsius. On a fundamental level, I think that it is perfectly fine to dox these people[1] in the broader “crypto” industry because they are defrauding middle-income people out of their hard-earned money.
It doesn't matter that the industry is new and lacks significant regulation in the space. Fraud is fraud regardless of industry. Bad actors in the fiat world get the book thrown at them[2]; the same standard should also apply to bad actors in cryptocurrency.
Fraudsters in the wider cryptocurrency industry make Bitcoiners look bad. The average retail consumer doesn't know the difference between bitcoin, ether, dogecoin or the thousands of other shitcoins.
The only thing people curious about Bitcoin will hear in the media is that these bitcoin-adjacent companies gambled away their customers’ money on high-risk tokens and hid what they were doing from the general public. They will take this information and be turned off to bitcoin even though it had nothing to do with it. It's not fair, but that is how people will react.
If we want Bitcoin to succeed, it is imperative to dox the scammers in order to preserve the mission at hand, which is the global adoption of bitcoin as the global reserve currency.
Self-policing should be encouraged as it reinforces good behavior and drives out the bad. If scammers know they can't make a quick buck and run away unscathed, they are less likely to enter the space in the first place. Self-policing also keeps the heavy hand of the government away from an industry still in its infancy. Government regulations kill
