Is Blockstream's Greg Maxwell secretly u_Contrarian_? New drama engulfs r/btc

Blockstream co-founder and Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Maxwell gets accused of reddit sockpuppeting and ‘playing both sides’ of the CSW debate.

An r/btc user recently noticed that Maxwell - known as nullc on reddit, made the exact same comment on a thread as the popular CSW-basher Contrarian_, before deleting it quickly afterwards:

For many on the r/btc subreddit, this was the smoking gun proving that Maxwell is behind both accounts - and possibly a few others.

While owning multiple accounts isn’t a violation of Reddit’s guidelines in itself, sockpuppeting - or the practice of using multiple accounts to support your own postings - is. Essentially, if one user controls an army of ‘plants’ who parrot his or her opinions and try to sway the narrative, that clearly undermines the value of the discussion.

Digging through both accounts’ history, users were then able to find multiple instances where nullc and the Contrarian_ appeared to have ‘conversations’ amongst each other, now believed by some to be staged:

As a result, calls for both - and other suspicious - accounts to be banned have permeated the r/btc subreddit in the past 24 hours.

This has also prompted a surge in mentions of 'Greg' and 'Contrarian' on crypto social media. According to our Social Trends tool, the two terms have been used over 300 times combined in the last 48 hours:

Some have also accused Maxwell of acting two-faced, as Contrarian_ is a well-known CSW opponent, whereas it was reported that Greg emailed Dr. Wright a few months ago, offering his “discreet assistance”:

“I believe it would be adverse for interests that concern me if your influence or prominence in BCH were in any way diminished.” said Maxwell at the time, “I am not aware of how I could be of aid in repairing this situation, but it seemed to me that it would be prudent to at least offer my discreet assistance."

This whole ordeal has prompted a long debate about Maxwell’s potential motives and endgame:

Others, however, have expressed skepticism that the two accounts do indeed belong to the same person:

Not long after, Maxwell himself tuned in (from his known account) to deny the claims:

While the discussion has since scattered and branched out across a dozen different threads, most of the main talking points can be found in the original post.

Not a dull day in the BCH community this month.