Is Cøbra
seriously pretending not to know the meaning of the term “neutral” in the context of forum feedback?
I myself have been critical of the avoidance of responsibility for substantively negative neutral feedback based on only rumour and innuendo. But that is clearly not what is happening here. Lauda made a well-supported observation, and marked it as “neutral”. Why is Cøbra deliberately confusing the issue by speaking as if she red-tagged him?
Also, it’s always nice to see whom the troll brigade is defending. Anyway, as to the substance of the matter...
They won't ever talk about how much I've done to fight off many attacks, or when people were pressuring me to hand over the domain to the Bitcoin Foundation because it was more "respectable" and legitimate seeming, and I resisted because the foundation seemed shady (back then very few people realized it).
If you showed the foresight and wise judgment to distrust the clusterfork misadvertised as the so-called “Bitcoin Foundation”, then you should damn well know why people are worried about the potential that you may turn out to be another Gavin Andresen.
I so note this as the first and, thus far,
only person who has
red-tagged Gavin’s forum account. Yes, that is symbolic; but if people won’t step up even that much... Anyway, I think my point is clear about why people do not trust you to
exclusively control bitcoin-dot-org:
References:
https://twitter.com/gavinandresen/status/929377620000681984
https://twitter.com/CobraBitcoin/status/1023566782001541120
https://twitter.com/CobraBitcoin/status/1037102542537334785
https://twitter.com/CobraBitcoin/status/1036652944916140032
I
was around at the time; and I do recall that it was
specifically the “denounce-segwit2x” page linked above that gave bitcoin.org sufficient ongoing credibility for me to continue recommending it to newbies.
Should you doubt how hard I myself was against S2X particularly, back in 2017:
Traitors always evoke an intense feeling of horror and personal violation in those who trusted them. Whenever I think of jgarzik, I think of
dooglus’ comment which I memorialized in this screenshot when I was a Newbie, when I had been actively posting for less than five days:
“What have you done with the old jgarzik and how much will it cost us to buy him back?” This was when 2X tried to subvert the Bitcoin P2P network; committer: jgarzik, whose code is
not trustworthy. Read that 28ebbdb commit for details. Underhanded bastard.
Another one of my Newbie posts, from when I had been actively posting for seventeen days:
You fork, you die.Genuine Bitcoin has crushed numerous forks and attempted forks: “Bitcoin XT”, “Bitcoin Unlimited”, “Bitcoin Classic”, and the “New York Agreement”
(misnamed “Segwit2X”; nothing to do with Segwit), to name but a few. These no longer exist. For the current outbreak of forks, if you wish to claim some fork coins, then dump them in exchange for real Bitcoin, and enjoy your free bitcoins. Otherwise, simply ignore. Anything from “Bitcoin Cash” to “Bitcoin Super Diamond Plus2X Plutonium With Ponies” is only a scam; and these scams will die sooner or later, just as did their antecedents.
There are many pretenders to the Bitcoin title. However:
There is only one Bitcoin. That tombstone could also read:
Here lies Jeff Garzik’s reputation in Bitcoinland.Whereas Gavin Andresen is worse, much worse.
Their attempts to takeover Bitcoin would probably have had a much higher probability of success had I sided with them. If you're going to convincingly take over Bitcoin maliciously, you need 3 things: the miners so you can claim to have the most secure chain and have a stable blockchain (they had 80% of the hash rate), the consumer facing companies and exchanges so you can present your hard fork as Bitcoin to users (they had a lot of the companies backing them), and key public facing resources of trust like Bitcoin.org, that give you legitimacy and an endless number of incoming users from people searching "Bitcoin" through which you can gradually rebuild a new "Bitcoin community". The fact that they didn't have that hurt them a lot.
Within the four corners of what I just quoted, it is a good analysis. However, you are drawing a false dichotomy between the threat of XT/BU/2X types of fork-attacks, and the threat of BCH/BSV/“Bitcoin Super Diamond Gold Mauve” types of fork-attacks.
Both are destructive to Bitcoin.
Both are based on lies, greed, and mass-manipulation. This argument is like positing that it’s better for a cancer to metastasize outside the original tumour:
I would actually argue that Bitcoin Cash forking hurt the big blocker movement within Bitcoin pretty badly. Bitcoin Cash basically came out of nowhere, and many big blockers eventually kind of *had* to support it, after all the hard forks they tried in Bitcoin failed. Bitcoin Cash basically removed all the extreme big blockers from the Bitcoin community, it even took Roger Ver a little while to jump on board, but once they all did, it actually made Bitcoin safer as there was no longer a group of big blockers shouting a uniform narrative from within the Bitcoin community. Without Bitcoin Cash, we would have still had these extreme big blockers in the community for a lot longer.
Say what?
The real nightmare scenario is not these coins with Bitcoin in the name damaging trust, but a world in which there are disagreements over the name "Bitcoin" itself.
Have you not been around for long enough to see all the “Bitcoin Cash is the real Bitcoin” arguments?
Signature quoted to illustrate a point: What’s with the martyrdom complex?
ASICBOOSTCOIN has the odour of a cult/sect. Not even one of the fun ones: I mean the boring kind of garden-variety cult whose messiah shears disciples of all their money, whereafter everybody commits mass suicide. As such, it seems eerily appropriate that this scamcoin is fronted by a self-touted “Bitcoin Jesus”, Roger Ver.
That is one of my “Newbie” posts, from the same thread as:
Bitcoin Cash was spawned from the Bitcoin blockchain, and as such, maybe it should be allowed to use the word "Bitcoin" with a qualifying suffix.
No. Bitcoin Cash is nothing other than a blatant scam.
I quote that specifically because
n.b. that Jet Cash is neither a n00b nor a shill. That makes it particularly alarming that he would fall for this type of scam argument.
No matter how much you try to trick users, if the first Bitcoin site started by Satoshi himself, and mentioned in the whitepaper is calling your hard fork a fake, it's really hard to build legitimacy.
Although bitcoin.org is a
very influential site (and we would not be otherwise having this discussion), the set of all people who know that bitcoin-dot-org is “the first Bitcoin site started by Satoshi himself” is numerically minuscule relative to the set of all people who see bitcoin-dot-com as legitimate because it is the Dot-Com.
Ultimately, what has
actively stopped BCH from winning the public-relations mindshare war is that an unorganized, decentralized cadre of Bitcoiners who have pushed back
unequivocally. This set very visibly includes Greg Maxwell, and also his former colleagues at Blockstream—Dr. Back,
et al. It very visibly includes laanwj and harding, whom Lauda mentioned. It very visibly does
not include you, the exclusive controller of bitcoin-dot-org.
And about your screenshots of the Slack chats: I don't really see anything wrong there to be honest with you. It's funny how Adam Back was so hostile to me back then about me seeing some good things in Bitcoin Cash because I always thought a blockchain that sacrifices some decentralization in order to be able to handle more transactions was kind of necessary, and now he's out there pushing Blockstream's Liquid which is literally a sidechain controlled by companies in which your BTC gets morphed and required to be held in trust by federation partners so you can get the benefit of quicker transactions since blocks are more regular.
The day that Blockstream starts pushing Liquid as something other than a private commercial venture that is complementary to Bitcoin, primarily for the handling of non-Bitcoin assets, is the day that I unequivocally condemn Blockstream and everybody involved in it. Whereas there are no indications of any such thing; and as it stands, Blockstream has a stainless track record for promoting privacy, decentralization, solid Bitcoin R&D, and Lightning. (Also as a coder, I appreciate the cleanliness of their open-source code.) Thus your statement is basically FUD on Dr. Back, Dr. Wuille, and their current and former colleagues at Blockstream.
To be execruciatingly clear,
I don’t trust Blockstream! To anyone with technical expertise, their self-evident agenda is,
“Don’t trust us: Keep Bitcoin trustless.” I like that: Keep down the blocksize so that ordinary people can keep running nodes
(I say this with real-world experience needing to run Bitcoin on inexpensive hardware), and promote Lightning as the future of scaling and privacy. For as long as that remains the agenda demonstrated by their actions and their code (not merely their words), I will continue to defend Blockstream’s reputation in public discussions.
(I have been intending to write a forum essay about this. Disclosure: I have no affiliation with Dr. Back, other than that I always liked his cypherpunks stuff, and I first discovered Hashcash in the 90s.)
Whereas, with a different emphasis:
And about your screenshots of the Slack chats: I don't really see anything wrong there to be honest with you. It's funny how Adam Back was so hostile to me back then about me seeing some good things in Bitcoin Cash because I always thought a blockchain that sacrifices some decentralization in order to be able to handle more transactions was kind of necessary
Thanks for clarifying. The highlighted portion is
exactly why people don’t trust you to be the
exclusive controller of bitcoin-dot-org.
More or less the reason people don't trust me is because I said some good things about Bitcoin Cash a while ago, that's all it boils down too. They don't actually have a reason beyond that,
We don’t actually
need a reason beyond that.
and their calls for me to transfer the domain to others are intended to push me out because they fear me.
Fear has nothing to do with it, I assure you.
They'd rather have someone in control of bitcoin.org who is easier to manipulate and who bends to groupthink and public pressure more easily.
laanwj
et al. bend to groupthink and public pressure? LOL. Try pushing them around, and see how far you get.
Edit 2020-04-22: Fixed a very embarrassing typo. Alas, I erred! :-(