Just want to make this as clear as possible. Throwaway account, so I won't be replying or ever using this ever again, but let me run through a few things. * Wh

Just want to make this as clear as possible. Throwaway account, so I won't be replying or ever using this ever again, but let me run through a few things. * Whomever is running this auction knows everything that has been mentioned in these threads already, and they're probably a few steps ahead of us all. There are multiple indicators that they know what they're doing from a technical standpoint and that it's very likely that these 'weapons' indeed do what they claim. * On the other hand, there's a lot of reason to believe that these could potentially be faked, since the whole auction is just designed to generate income. Equation Group is a real group. They do exist, they get paid really well to operate, and a couple things jump out as obviously being bait. If you were to place a bid, (I plan to bid a couple dozen BTC or so, but I want to see what other people do first) then they say they'd contact you with decrypt information and then you'd have the rest. The real Equation Group is a group of intelligent individuals, rumored to be a group of several dozen people, and so they realize that they all have to operate under the same standards, and resist being correlated. These guys know that every so-called elite hacker that we know about, we know about them because they fucked up. We know that EG exists because their tradecraft WASNT good enough. The real question is whether or not they wanted us to find out. Bitmessage isnt perfect, i2p isnt perfect, none of these tools are perfect and the entire idea of a group that might not even exist contacting a bidder after they may or may not have bid the highest bid is just ridiculous. There is reason to believe that if EG actually exists, that there might be subdivisions within whatever larger collective they belong to (NSA, CIA, etc) that seem to learn from approaches that can be correlated to work that EG either wanted us to find, or didn't. Regardless, these guys know enough to not get in trouble over this. Even if they're NSA contractors, or permanent employees, or some sort of secret operatives from some crazy Intel firm, whatever the case is, they aren't going to make some stupid mistake and ruin this. I'd give this like a 30% chance of being real. Doesn't seem likely.