That’s not Bitcoin, this is Bitcoin.

bitcoincore (25)in #bitcoin • 7 years ago

This became much longer than I originally planned. There’s a lot of information
here that is definitely worth reading, especially if you’re new to the
community. Whether you already agree with me or not, I recommend reading this so
you can pass it on to future members of the community. They are the most
important ones that need to see everything I’ve referenced below. Not us.
Because this won’t end. #NO2X

========================================

“I don’t post on Reddit” was my unofficial motto while browsing Reddit, until
one day I was compelled into lecturing some person over why our grandmas won’t
be securing their own private keys.

“I don’t post on Medium” wasn’t even a motto of mine. Developers post on
Medium…right? People ‘involved’ in this space post on Medium, and I’m
nobody…right? I don’t code, I don’t have a name, I don’t have a following, and I
constantly make mistakes attempting to understand or explain the protocol to
other people. I’m just a user…

“Wait, hold on, what is he talking about? What is ‘posting on Medium’ even
supposed to mean?” -Everyone

You’re right. The fact that I’m posting on Medium means nothing. It’s just the
name of a website, with features that allow me to represent myself in the way I
wish to be represented in this moment. Therein lies the underlying topic at
hand. I said “Medium”* but what I meant *was the avenue that Medium happens
to provide for me at this moment.

“Why is this significant? -Probably Everyone

Allow me to reiterate: I said Bitcoin, but what I meant was the avenue that
the current state of the protocol many of us refer to as Bitcoin happens to
provide for me…as a user.

We’ll get back to that later. Anyway…

Bitcoin maximalists will say “Bitcoin only works if most people run
full-nodes.” It’s a great endeavor, and I wish them the best of luck, but I
personally don’t see our grandmas running full-nodes. What percent of the total
population are grandmas? By the time they’re all running full-nodes we’ll all be
assimilated into the singularity running our spinal-tapped full-nodes over a
wireless decentralized global Internet. Sounds like fun.

This picture serves no purpose other than to not dump you with a big wall of
text.

Can you personally envision a world where most people run a full-node?
Elaborate on the intricacies of your mother’s day-to-day life while she runs a
full-node. Tell me everything she did in a single day, and where was the
full-node in these situations? Did she bring it with her to go shopping? What
is* “most people”*? 51% of 7 billion? 90%? Are we including children in the
total percent? Does this, or does this not count all the automated robots that
will be walking around with their own full-nodes built into their
[bio?]mechanical bodies? The most plausible scenario for the near future circa
the “mass-adoption tipping-point” is one on every persons phone. Is that really
secure? Who’s building those clients? Will Apple have their own
built-in-walled-garden hardware version? Will they point all those built in
clients to a seed node on their server? What implications would that have? Is
it really even plausible?

All of those questions are legitimate questions, but while they are
legitimate, they are a distraction, because **having as many full-nodes as
possible is imperative to Bitcoin, **and focusing on the numbers completely
misses that point.

Well, actually…no it’s not. **It’s imperative to me, *it’s imperative to most
of community, and it’s imperative to most of the developers paving the way for
this technology right now. The *Bitcoin doesn’t care.

Clearly it’s not imperative to some people. Not to a select few developers, or
to some of the people who invested early and already got rich, or those who
happen to be successful at marketing themselves out to be important. It’s also
not imperative to the Ethereum community, but let’s hold off on that until
later…

See how they attempt to differentiate between full-nodes that mine and those
that don’t? Through misinformation, and use of the tactics I used in the earlier
paragraph (asking legitimate, but redirecting questions), they been successful
at garnering a following, and full-nodes are not imperative to that group that
follows them either. We’ve all heard the Satoshi datacenter quote ad-nauseam.
Have you heard it yet?

I’m sorry, but Satoshi isn’t a god, and nobody is perfect. It’s easy to quote an
individual for your cause when you know they can’t clarify their opinions in an
updated context. Satoshi didn’t predict
turning all nodes into a payment channel network (although he touched on the
subject in correspondence with Mike
Hearn).
Every major cryptocurrency is adopting payment channel technology, but you
still see these propaganda pushers try to knock down the technology in the name
of The Bitcoin:

Can anyone source this? I tried, I can’t. Maybe it was paraphrased to fit 140
characters, maybe Vitalik said something else and Ver molded it into something
he never even meant. Maybe Vitalik deleted it. Even if he did, maybe he changed
his mind:

Notice the dates on those posts? Roger
Ver
knows full well about the Raiden Network (Ethereum’s Lightning Network) and
Vitalik’s support for it, yet he still uses quotes older than (presumably) 1.5
years ago, to instill this nonsense into the minds of the constantly growing set
of new & uninformed people joining this community. This type of propaganda isn’t
going to go away. Did you notice the ‘Pro Bitcoin Unlimited’ tag I have for the
user in the old Bitcoin-XT subreddit? Same campaign, different flag: Take
control of the network. Take control of the name Bitcoin.

This is an ongoing propaganda campaign that needs to constantly be shot down.
New people coming into the community don’t know the history, they don’t know the
ideology, and they don’t know about the reoccurring tactics these groups use.

Here’s a great one from the famous “I’m Satoshi” fraud:

Like the caption says, he made that picture. He went on a Twitter spree that day
with screenshots of random arbitrary charts, you can go look for
yourself. Here’s his
Twitter, and here’s an actual image of the
current Satellite coverage Blockstream’s satellite network has, that they
just launched:

Much different, specifically: This one wasn’t hand drawn by a fraud to make
it look like China was exclusively “blocked”, and permanently for that matter…

If they wanted no block-size they could’ve went to Ethereum, if they don’t care
about the average users ability to run a node diminishing over time, they could
go to Ethereum. Or they could go to Bitcoin Cash…but somehow they still push
SegWit2X after already getting their fork.

ProTip: It’s because they don’t really want Bitcoin to succeed. They are
dividing, and attempting to conquer.

If you still for some reason want no limit to the block size, here’s a real
world example of a chain that doesn’t have one. The Ethereum data directory
size is growing exponentially for them because of the
absent cap, but they just don’t care, and that’s totally fine because they
aren’t trying to hijack our system:

For reference, here’s the two links /u/senzheng provided:
1,
2.

The issue is mentalities like these bleed over into the Bitcoin community and
cause divides that lead to an obvious fallout: Chain splits, and the fight over
the title of The Bitcoin.

So what happens when there’s an ideological split among the community? Other
protocol implementations that are used to muddy the waters and sway public
opinion are well known: block-size cap, total supply cap, miner version-bit
signaling. What happens when a group of people decide that they want *The
*Bitcoin to remove (not just increase) the “arbitrary” limitation on block
size? Is anyone for removing the 21 million coin cap? No? Don’t be surprised
when that becomes a target too. Ethereum already took both of those away…

How much weight do your ideologies really hold against the 7 billion people who
have no idea what we’re even talking about right now? 7 billion people who are
easily influenced by misinformation. Are you prepared to publicly make the claim
that 7 billion people don’t know what they’re talking about, and that they
should be listening to you?

So what exactly does the name ‘Bitcoin’ mean?

What does it mean to be an
American?** —
Scholastic**

“It is great to be an American. We get to play sports and eat lots of food. We
get lots of toys, all because we are free — the best thing of all.”

-Austin B., 11, Wisconsin

Do you think Austin knew about the USA Patriot Act that Congress signed into law
less than a year from when Scholastic
asked
children to send their opinions in?

Also notice how Austin said “America”, but what he meant was the avenue that
the current state of his country provides for him as a citizen** **to play
sports and eat lots of food? Not really, but do you get the point?

Sparing any 1984 analogies, what happens to the definition of America should
sports and excess food no longer be an option for Austin? What happens to the
title his ideology currently goes by? What will represent freedom in 500
years? What does it mean to be a
Roman?

This is what really drove me to Medium, because a Reddit response isn’t
sufficient enough to address these reoccurring debates that* *meddle with my
ideology, in the name of The Bitcoin, which props up in a variety of ways from
many different perspectives. Here’s one:

First and foremost let’s actually address the technicalities of the above
argument: Chain reorganizations are not protocol
changes, and the phrase
“longest valid chain” refers to the former, not the latter.

Even then, the size of the *‘difficulty sum’ *of all blocks in a chain
determines validity in re-orgs, not block height:

Using the ‘LVC’ argument to try and justify why the fork you’re backing
should/will hold the title of The Bitcoin is a fallacy akin to justifying why
you skipped out on school today with the excuse “I couldn’t find my schoolbag”,
as if breaking your normal morning protocol somehow renders school itself
useless:

Bitcoin = [wake up→shower→grab schoolbag→walk to school]

Queue the analogy Nazis.

“I’m glad we cleared all of that up, now I finally get it. So that’s all, right?
The longest chain measured by the sum of the difficulty of all the blocks is
Bitcoin, correct?”* *-BTC-101 Student /
GMTH-203 Student

Nope.

See what I did there? I mirrored the response of someone who either didn’t get
the point (don’t worry, we’ll get there), or is ignoring it and just trying to
leverage their argument for the fork of their choice with arbitrary technical
merit. Yes, arbitrary technical merit**. **I could name some Core developers
who wouldn’t be too happy with that statement, despite the fact that I’m on
their side, but I don’t care because it is arbitrary, given the overarching
point.

Let me make this clear: It doesn’t matter what stance you take on any
proposal, if you do this you either don’t get it or you are being deceptive.

In other words: Technicalities don’t define The Bitcoin. Social consensus
does, because language is an inherently social construct. Furthermore, my
ideology doesn’t define The Bitcoin either, because social consensus may not
always align with what I currently want out of all of this, or my ideology might
change in the future.

This a blatant admission of my point about deceptive tactics. Using the block
size to spur division among the community when the reality is they want to take
control away from the developers. On top of all of this, Vinny is a proponent of
Ethereum and the CEO & co-founder of a company with a token on the Ethereum
network. Can you guess where his incentives align? Don’t you think he would be
better off if Ethereum was successful and the Bitcoin community was divided?

To be fair, Vinny’s response to that leaked email was to share more emails,
here’s an excerpt:

So basically, he’s still (or was in August) in support of SegWit2X going ahead
with it’s dead in the water chain split,
because if Bitcoin works as planned, it won’t matter…While other companies
continue to back out of
the agreement they originally signed with the intent to keep everyone
together, but now because of Bitcoin Cash, the whole agreement is moot.

Tangentially, 1 CPU / 1 Vote was a phrase used when everyone actually mined with
CPUs while running their nodes. Another famous Satoshi quote that can’t be
defended because he’s effectively out of the equation. The entire environment is
different now.* *How you can even justify using that line is beyond me when a
single entity controls (conservative estimates) ~20+% of all the hashing power,
continues to mine empty blocks but complain about not enough space, created
Bitcoin Cash and forced the network to fork once already…

…Moving on…

The following is an example of a person who gets it, but tries to leverage the
technicalities of the protocol while ignoring the broader scope of the argument
with Charlie. Deceptively conflating client reorganization with protocol
change/upgrades, and claiming UASF’s have no effect on The Network (see what I
did there?) by using technicalities as leverage for their argument:

Other Realities: Civil war, peaceful secession.

Much further down this thread, after some work, this person admitted to not
caring what the masses eventually called The Bitcoin, claiming it doesn’t
matter. It was the only thing we agreed on, and renders the whole conversation
they had with Charlie moot, but readers don’t know that if they don’t follow
through with the entire dialogue. The initial top level comment is all that
matters because it gets the most visibility.

To reiterate, chain reorganizations are not protocol changes, conflating the two
for argumentative benefits is deceptive, and if you still don’t get it here’s a
few examples:

When Bitcoin activated SegWit, it was a protocol change, not a re-org.
Bitcoin Cash was a protocol change, not a re-org.
If Jeff Garzik’s baby-child SegWit2x actually gets off the ground and forks
away, it will be a protocol change, not a re-org.
**Ethereum **was a protocol change (that happened to involve creating an
entirely new transaction database)… …not a re-org.

“Re-org-shme-org! SEMANTICS!” -Craig Wright, Boy Genius / Not Satoshi

No, not really. Re-orgs happen all the time without any change to the protocol.
It’s a built in client mechanism that has nothing to do with upgrades, or claim
to the title of *The *Bitcoin. The key is understanding that some protocol
upgrades try to leverage re-orgs (soft-forks), while other protocol upgrades
attempt to supersede re-orgs (hard-forks), and that neither of them are
intrinsically bad for le Bitcoin, they just have their own use cases.

Hopefully by now you’re starting to catch on here. Protocol upgrades are
inherently social in nature. The naming conventions assigned to those
changes are also inherently social in nature. Re-orgs are inherently *not
*social in nature, or whatever the silly term is for network logic. I could
look it up, but not doing so helps drive the point even closer to home, it
doesn’t matter. Protocols don’t evolve on their own, and a billion re-orgs
wouldn’t change a single line of code, so using it to justify your fork is a
fallacy.

So where am I really going with this all of this?

Well, for starters, if you share my ideology, **you need to share this post.
**The community will keep growing until everyone is the community. Education
will never end. You can’t get frustrated, you need to learn how to properly
source, reference posts & quotes, and ask the same basic thought provoking
questions **without being rude **and saying/thinking “not this again”. Everybody
is new to the community at some point, and this won’t end. Ever. Period. Will
you tell your kids “not this again, just look at the github”? No.

I don’t expect everyone to do this. I don’t expect everyone to have the time or
the energy. That’s one of the reasons I put this post together and sourced a
bunch of quotes from various members of the community. The least you could
do is reference this when someone asks you “what do you mean” by misinformation
and lies.

Equally important, and the original underlying theme this post was supposed to
have, is understanding that** at some point, Bitcoin might not represent itself
in a way that aligns with your ideology.** If these misinformation tactics prove
to be successful, they’ll own the name Bitcoin. The developers are gone if that
happens, they’ve all been pretty vocal about it too, either by moving on to a
different projecting or continuing to support the chain that wasn’t stolen from
us by the corporations, whatever name it winds up getting called (*I’ll *be
calling it Bitcoin).

Screenshots courtesy of John Newbery, Bitcoin Dev:

Reddit
thread.

Twitter chain.

Bitcoin Core Blog
Post.

I don’t know what’s going to happen if the network splits again, but I know that
if we lose the name Bitcoin (because that’s what this whole propaganda
campaign is about) it won’t be good. Maybe I’m over concerned, maybe not.
The only thing I can suggest is you take a look at what Bitcoin Cash’s most
prominent miner said about the recent chain BCash split:

Bitcoin Cash is not Bitcoin
England = Bitcoin
America = Bitcoin Cash

Now take a look at what Bitcoin Cash’s most vocal user said about the recent
chain split:

Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin
England = Bitcoin Cash
America = ???

Did that help clear things up for you? They can’t even agree between themselves,
because all they care about is stealing the name or dividing the community.