There have been straight-out conspiracies that have been exposed and admitted to. The whole Climategate saga happened while I was a research assistant in climate science. It was a huge deal, both in academia and publicly. The premier experts in the field, in the UK primarily, were blatantly falsifying data and results.

Edit: apparently you were still talking about bitcoin and monetary economics there. No, my colleagues are just very dumb about many things, but I also have seen little to no evidence of malicious conspiracy on the bitcoin front.