I am now arguing from a business perspective. Any reasonable prospectus on Bitcoin must disclose that Bitcoin’s biggest vulnerability is fork-attacks, also known as
the trust attack. Any reasonable investor should recognize it as in his own self-interest to fight those attacks. The forked shitcoins falsely advertised as “Bitcoin” will, in and of themselves, never amount to anything in the long term; they are purely a negative, which harms the market as a whole by intentionally,
fraudulently diluting the “Bitcoin” brand
and financially diluting Bitcoin’s market capitalization.
and reducing overall investor confidence in Bitcoin’s uniqueness. To invest exclusively in the one and only genuine Bitcoin, and to defend your investment by defending Bitcoin against dilution attacks, is a strategy perfectly matched in both principle and practicality.
Whereas Cøbra is perfectly positioned to stab Bitcoin in the back. He is a trusted party for a vital public relations channel—one to which such well-intended people as LoyceV (and unfortunately, I myself) have been referring newbies. If Cøbra were just some guy posting his opinions on the Internet, it would be a different matter. Whereas the
trusted party exclusively controlling a website with major public mindshare is known to be at best equivocal—
at best:
Wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. These forked coins are not Bitcoin's biggest vulnerability, 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. The forked coins with "Bitcoin" in the name are mostly harmless. As far as I'm aware, basically every place where you actually can purchase Bitcoin is clear to present BTC as Bitcoin, and everything else as "Bitcoin Cash" or "Bitcoin SV", etc. Users don't ever really get confused, they quickly intuitively understand that Bitcoin is what they really want, and everything else is some kind of derivative.
The real risk to Bitcoin was in the hard fork attacks which were supported by most of the major consumer companies and exchanges and were aimed to takeover Bitcoin completely. A lot of the companies that didn't support it explicitly would have also jumped on board once the hard fork actually won. It was essentially a corporate attempt to takeover Bitcoin, with decision making power shifted from open source developers to a handful of big companies. Had they won, Bitcoin would still get developed and worked on, but ultimately it would have been them guiding the development in ways that favor their interests. Over time the community would have also shifted and been brainwashed to accept the new reality.
Bitcoin.org was one of the most extreme and hostile towards these hard fork attacks: like here
https://bitcoin.org/en/posts/denounce-segwit2x, and here,
https://bitcoin.org/en/posts/hard-fork-policy. I was fervently against attempts like Bitcoin XT, BU, Segwit2x, etc, anyone who was around at the time will remember how aggressive Bitcoin.org and I were. We removed wallets from companies that supported the hard forks. We removed the exchanges. We notified users with big notices at the top of the site, had I wanted to "backstab" Bitcoin this was my chance, especially when some of these companies and people approached me in private to try to "turn me", but I still was vocally hostile and did
everything I could to damage them. So did theymos, and he will back me up on this that all my private communications with him showed me to be someone who above all was concerned with Bitcoin being co-opted and fought as hard as I could to resist it. And yet shamefully, people like you with no knowledge of anything are so quick to present me as a risk or threat.
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. 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.
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. Imagine a world in which a user learns about Bitcoin through Bitcoin.org, then goes on Coinbase and buys "Bitcoin", and then hears on Twitter or Reddit that what they bought was not Bitcoin, and then finds out about this software called Bitcoin Core and a community of people claiming *that* to be the real Bitcoin, and then finds an exchange like Bitstamp and buys something else called "Bitcoin" on there which some people say is the
real Bitcoin. Then this user interacts on social media with folks, never knowing which is the real Bitcoin since at that point it would be hard to answer. We got very close to that being our world had me and others not done everything we could to damage these hard fork attempts.
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.
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, and their calls for me to transfer the domain to others are intended to push me out because they fear me. 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. 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).
I handed bitcointalk.org over to theymos because; I trust him and his judgement, and I was not really active on the forum anyway. You can question my trust all you like, but I have been in a position for a long time to screw over you guys if I wanted too, but I didn't. Some users will instinctively understand that and ignore the nonsense you're spouting off, others will get sucked in, but either way I don't really care and I'm going to continue to do my best to help Bitcoin succeed.
I did not do anything out of respect for theymoses mistakes, one of which was trusting you very early on. This is no longer necessary. 
