r/bitcoin has gone full North Corea
I've talked in a few posts before about the censorship that happens on the biggest crypto subreddit r/bitcoin. Lately with Bitcoin Cash gaining more popularity and being added to more markets it seems like the moderators on that subreddit are having a full-time job banning users from voicing their concerns about the blocksize, the backlog of unconfirmed transactions and the future of Bitcoin with Blockstream leading its development.
Here are a few screenshots of posts they have removed and users they have banned from discussion.
Since many of you are aware that the hardfork resulted in every Bitcoin holder receiving both tokens, I think its needless to say that you can remain pretty neutral on these debates - unless you've sold any of them for the other. I personally feel a lot like this user in the first screenshot, although the censorship on that subreddit has been something I've known for a very long time and is what drove me away from Bitcoin in the first place.
That post now looks like this.
Reddit user Sovereign_Curtis got banned for these mild comments.
After getting banned it looks like this.
They are even going so far as to contact newcomers in messages on Reddit.
This user got banned on r/bitcoin for his thread he made on the Bitcoin Cash subreddit r/btc.
When users were complaining that the fees are really high to transact with Bitcoin
This even though altcoin discussions are against the rules in the subreddit, I guess Litecoin is an exception due to Segwit...
What's even worse is that this gets upvoted...
Funniest comment I've read lately
To end it all off, I wanted to present you with a piece of information I found to be quite intriguing.
Posted by Rick Falkvinge who has his own Steemit account @falkvinge.
Based on Blockstream’s behavior in the Bitcoin community, I have become absolutely certain that Segwit contains patents that Blockstream and/or their owners have planned to use offensively. I base this not on having read the actual patents, for they can be kept secret for quite some time; I base this on observing Blockstream’s behavior, and having seen the exact same behavior many times before in the past 20 years from entities that all went bankrupt.
I was a representative of Microsoft. I would meet with people from Nokia, Ericsson, AT&T, and many other corporate names you’d recognize instantly, in small groups to negotiate standards going forward.
One thing that was quite clear in these negotiations was that everybody was trying to get as much as possible of their own patent portfolio into the industry standard, while still trying to maintain a façade of arguing purely on technical merits. Some were good at it. Some were not very good at it at all.
One of the dead-sure telltale signs of the latter was that somebody would argue that feature X should use mechanism Y (where they had undisclosed patent encumbrance) based on a technical argument that made no sense. When us technical experts in the room pointed out how the argument made no sense, they would repeat that feature X should absolutely use mechanism Y, but now based on a completely new rationale, which didn’t make any sense either.
The real reason they were pushing so hard for mechanism Y, of course, was that they had patents covering mechanism Y and wanted their patented technology to go into the industry standard, but they were unable to make a coherent argument that withstood technical scrutiny for why it was the preferable solution at hand, with or without such encumbrance.
and here is a link to pending patents of Blockstream
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160330034A1/en?assignee=blockstream
I wanna end this post, like I have done in my latest ones with saying that there is a lot I may not be aware of since I have not followed Bitcoins development actively in the last couple years, but the heavy censorship that is happening towards anyone speaking against Blockstream leads me to believe there is something they are trying to hide from the general public which may very well be in their self-interest and not about Bitcoins original idea about being next to free to use globally for anyone.
I am thankful of the Steem blockchain being immutable to censorship where anyone can state their concern and voice their opinion about anything, for free.
(in case anyone was wondering about the title, the developers on Bitcoin are called Bitcoin Core developers and the censorship reminds people of North Korea, hence the combination: North Corea.)
This is where your story end for me.
You have absolutely no respect for the hundreds of volunteers that contribute to Bitcoin.
Look at this table of core developers support for the various scaling paths (segwit2X = bigger block)
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support
Now please add another column to that one and tell me what % work for Blockstream.
So why not make a post specifically about this and share it on Reddit and save these people from vote manipulation and censorship by bringing them over to Steem ?
I do have respect for them and the work they've put towards Bitcoin, that's why I hate what Blockstream is doing to it and what it is becoming.
As I've stated I haven't followed it that precisely, but according to this
it seems like that % is getting bigger each day if they keep kicking developers for no reason.
What? How does that not make it more clear that most are working for Core (which most developers have been co-opted by Blockstream) and are not supporting segwit2x which Bitpay is and are now being threatened by Core because of it.
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-segwit2x/2017-August/000259.html
This is what I found on wikipedia:
Since my story ended at that part yet you quoted the last part, did you miss the part about the patents? Even though it seems like they aren't directly patenting Segwit they seem to want to patent the sidechain which enables Segwit.
I did share this post on Reddit and the main point was to prove how censorship resistant it is even if it gets flagged to 0 it will still be visible and people can comment and post on it. Its not like I care that much about Bitcoin anymore, if it wasn't for these Core developers it would probably be at 20k right now and still have 90% dominance instead of letting all so called shitcoins eat up on its marketcap day after day because its literally unusable for leading companies like Bitpay due to its fees and confirmation time.
I do not think this will be a big problem.
Most likely Bitcoin SegWit solution is not going to be accepted and will crash sooner or later because of blatant mismanagement and corruption.
Investing in it will hurt you if you plan to stay there long term.
You could make some profits short term by gaming the abusive system, but that just makes you as bad as the people you criticize.
The prudent course of action is to keep your Bitcoins where they are and see if there are other parties who try to regulate or destroy the remnants of the original Bitcoin. I do not see how this is possible, however. A lot of people have a vested interest in the maintenance of the original Bitcoin; plus the cat is out of the bag anyway. Noone can stop its replication, in fact, other decentralized currencies are already on their way so that new decentralized non North Korean options are available to us regardless of what happens to Bitcoin.
Obviously, I think that the original Bitcoin is going to survive this, but there are going to be some tough times ahead of us. It was obvious from the beginning though, Bitcoin was and is a game changer and with its creation the rules of the game and the status quo have changed - leading to conflict.
Bitcoin Cash is the original Bitcoin.
Neither are the original bitcoin. They're block structures are both different. 1MB vs 1MB + SegWit vs 8MB
Or you could say they're both the original Bitcoin - as they both started in 2009 technically.
But I guess BCH is closest to Satoshi's white paper
The original bitcoin had no blocksize limit. Not until version 3
I think there is no problem at all with blockchain size increase.
If you can't come up with a better solution do increase blockchain size, until you can create a better solution.
It's much better than a giant pile of shit like SegWit2x
Jeff garzik who had done very little contribution overall had not done any for years. Removing him allowed bitcoin core project to make the statement that not a single contributor support segwit2x / bc1 here :
https://bitcoincore.org/en/2017/08/18/btc1-misleading-statements/
It's the people you support (Chinese miners and Rogers) that stalled the block size increase that segwit provide along with multiple added benefit also improving scaling.
If you know nothing about the situation stop trying to explain it to others.
Bitcoin core is not an elected group of people its an open project project that grew organically for years by welcoming contributions.
Lookup the opinions of the dozens of people who made what bitcoin is and you see 95% support segwit first then Block increase later. Later definetly does not mean 2 months as per NYA. .
If anything the patent has to be a defensive one that stop someone else from patenting it. While on patents why not educate us on bitmains ASICBOOST patent and tell us it's not a big economic incentive not to want segwit.
That's the small-blocker narrative. The big-blocker narrative is that the current core-heads have been stilling any kind of block size increase consistently and particularly since 2015.
The moderate narrative is that we'd had both bigger blocks and SegWit already in 2016 had only the Hong Kong roundtable agreement been respected.
So you're saying Roger has been stalling the blocksize increased through segwit when he's been pleading for years to increase it?
I don't know anything about ASICBOOST.
So there is no incentive to keep the blocksize small on purpose so they can implement segwit and have transactions go through their sidechains which they then control. The people have just to trust them that with the patents they won't turn Bitcoin into the second paypal? To trust these users who are constantly silencing people concerned about their true incentive and have been doing so for years on the most used subreddits and forum?
I have made it very clear that what I am writing is speculation and mentioned many times that I may not know everything involved in the matter since I stopped caring about it because of this censorship years ago. I am not trying to teach anyone anything than to be vary of what they read on centralized sources which I myself am getting this information from.
All people got a piece of both coins and the ones I warned not to dump them immediately have been thanking me cause to them it seemed ridiculous that the hardfork even happened and many of them read r/bitcoin which went on about how BCH will die within a week.
Of course the censorship and hivemind can go both ways and I've also made that clear. I guess in the end the market will decide if they want a controlled Bitcoin with transactions going through another layer or what Bitcoin truly stood for in the beginning, except that this time around we will have the history of this discussion saved on the blockchain where no one can delete it or change it.
No central entity control sidechains, they are just a mathematical concept. Also no specific entity makes money from lightning networks.
How can you not know about ASICBOOST? its one of the main reason we are in this mess. Bitmain is not only in control of a large % of the hashing power they are cheating using ASICBOOST which they patented and implemented giving them a 15% efficiency gain equal to a 50% increase in profit over everyone else. The drawback is that they have to mess with what transaction they are including in blocks and not compatible with segwit optimization.
You should understand that none of the other altcoin have these political debates because nobody cares about them as much. I wish there was a viable alternative to Bitcoin as a viable reserve currency / reference unit of account but sadly I see none. Once we are past that mining centralisation phase bitcoin supremacy will be much harder to challenge.
Bitcoins fight is not againt other cryptos so much than it is againt TPTB, banks and governments.
@transisto You are absolutely right about this.
However, the only other alternative I consider (which is still inferior to Bitcoin) is XRP. I am as far anti-government as one can potentially be, but we have to be realistic and see the world for what it is. Banks are not going to go away tomorrow, neither are governments. It will be a long transition with many interesting and challenging years ahead.
Ultimately, I believe that Bitcoin will change the world for the better.
We have to be incredibly careful to prevent any centralization of its network. Therefore, the political discussion of the blockchain of steemit are extremely important. It's good that you brought this information forward and made it availalbe to the steemit community.
I was aware of the manipulation by Bitmain, but never heard of the ASICBOOST patent. I just thought it was something they did, I was not aware that there were legal patents in place to prevent litigation or adoption to address this problem.
So a problem that wouldn't exist with bigger blocks? :D
That is indeed sad for you.
Bam!
Lets see for how long that remains true.
Satoshi and Gavin are the most important contributors, and they have both been recommending to lift the 1 MB block size limit "when needed" - and it was needed already years ago.
Yes why this took so long? Maybe for a reason like patent.
Economics is not about rationality, neither is it about what people want.
Economies can be driven by FUD to a large extend and manipulated with emotions.
A lot of people do not want SegWit2x. A lot of big players in Bitcoin want SegWit2x because it enables decentralization and cheating to improve profits.
Ergo, Chinese Miners are obviously going to support SegWit2x because they potentially manipulate the tokens by removing signatures from the Block when it suits them, as there is no definite witnessing requirement for blocks with the SegWit2x solution.
Likewise, if you Bitcoin Cash is more profitable to mine, miners are going to act in their own self-interest to improve their yield.
This is the exact opposite of what Bitcoin is supposed to be.
@transisto: I literally agree with everything that is listed in the comment you linked.
I view it as a poor attempt to manipulate the Bitcoin community, but as I said it is ultimately going to fail. I think that Bitcoin community is very aware of the problems that resulted from government interference, corruption etc. and not stupid enough to walk into an obvious trap like that. FUD to manipulate emotion and market value. It ultimately always ends up terrible, so I am glad that we have the blockchain in place to prevent blatant cheating. I am also proud of the Bitcoin community and its level headedness and its spirit to make the world a better place.
Well, if someone with vested interest in fiat was to manipulate the Bitcoin community, I believe they would try to divide the community and manipulate both camps to bitterly oppose any kind of compromise (BIP-100, BIP-102, Hong Kong agreement, SegWit2X), as well as inventing ideas suitable for derailing the Bitcoin project (such as BIP-148 and Bitcoin Cash), and manipulating people to embrace such ideas. Oh. We have already constantly been going into the trap for two years if not more.
Well, there is one important distinction between the attempts of manipulation now and how it was in the past. The blockchain makes it possible to roll back mistakes. Hardforks do not destroy Bitcoin core and Bitcoin core can be maintained indefinitely. If it maintains the highest structural integrity it will always be the default fall-back option for everyone.
Also, lol, kicking someone so they can make a statement of how centralized they are. :D
Who said I'm supporting them? :D I don't even like any of the bitcoins cause its a matter of which one sucks less compared to altcoins. If you've followed the markets and price changes the last couple years I can tell you there are many that only hold altcoins and they don't regret not holding bitcoin even a single bit.
If you've checked my altcoin reports you may notice I'm a lot more for them than the tiny profit bitcoin may bring.
Just cause I use Internet explorer to download chrome doesn't mean I hate IE, its often the only gateway to get to something better, even if it is very slow and unreliable. ;)
This is world-class material.
Survival of the fittest... Darwin law still applies in crypto!!
True 'next level' or knowledgeable crypto enthusiasts generally feel this way, they can see the way it's going that in less than ten years it will take the power of an entire country to mine a single bitcoin. The money is definitely in alt coins, and specifically in those with clear real world use, like steem of course-- man if they just had steem visa rather than having to transfer it to bitcoin first-- and what would really blow it out/send it to the moon is if they created a marketplace based on steemit, with all of us bringing all kinds of products and services from all over the globe...then again I wonder if it hasn't been intentionally designed to keep it smaller, at least to this point, in order to attract the best of the best in the beginning, the 'gatekeepers' who set up the self policing to keep any other censorship out. Early adopters here are generally intelligent people with a lot of foresight :)
EDIT: Most of what I know is from listening in on discussions between my husband and a few of his good friends. And tonight during one such discussion they were excited over two coins: Civic and Library(lbry), they are what my man calls 10X, or coins that will be worth at least ten times their current worth in a year. He is a tireless researcher, it's basically his full time job at this point. He hasn't been wrong yet.
I made a thing to represent the current state of Bitcoin, as lead by Blockstream. You may need to right click on it and click view image to see it better(it looks really small on my screen for some reason, sorry!)
They need to get their crap together. And yes, /r/bitcoin is insane with censorship.... reddit is to censoring for my tastes for the most part. This steemit place is nice for now and in a good position overall. I only see actual spammers/scammers/copy and pasters/toxic(swearing/abusive) being downvoted on steemit, and rightly so.
Completely agreed. ETH wasn't really going any place and neither were Monero and some of the others. People got fed up with the random spam attacks causing days of delays or having to pay huge fees. Bitcoin is where it is due to them being so cautious about not overloading the system and wanting to allow raspberry pis to be able to run as a node and what not...
Now their actions had the consequence of giving up huge market share to altcoins, turning people off of bitcoin all together, making a contentious Hard Fork happen, and it seems they don't want Segwit2X to happen now either so another Hard Fork looks to be coming... It is mind boggling...
This is truly outstanding.
Incredible work.
To be fair, a quick look at the edit history of that wiki page shows it's being policed by people employed by Blockstream and the apparent rule to add your name to the list is that you need to have a commit to bitcoin core in the last year which would exclude many people supporting segwit2X.
Not that I'm in favour of segwit2X :) I think having 2 chains, one with segwit and one with a block-size increase is the optimal solution.
There can be only one Bitcoin; compared with alts, the advantages of Bitcoin is the network effect, the brand name and (arguably) the security offered by the crazy amounts of CPU-power owned by the miners. Split the chain, and Bitcoin is dead.
In the late 90s there was one standard for online chat on the internet, it was IRC; everyone was at IRC. What happened? The network got fragmented due to arguments on how to fix the problems on the protocol level, and instead of IRC we got a lot of commercial, centralized, closed chat-platforms, and some few open chat platforms used by nobody.
Roll forward some years, and we'll still be stuck with fiat (a jungle of different commercial centralized actors) and some few dozens of crypto-currencies used by nobody.
I think the SegWit solution is doomed to fail, but that could just be wishful thinking on my part.
I expect a strong push for SegWit as well as Cash. SegWit to crash Bitcoin so that Cash can become the new original Bitcoin raised from the ashes of the original Bitcoin like a phoenix.
However, I could be underestimating people's investment choices. Perhaps the SegWit chain is going to be inflated by whales dumping all their Bitcoin into it or blatant propaganda or exchange manipulation. However, there is a chance that this does not matter if most people keep their Bitcoin in the original version. The original Bitcoin can solve most of its immediate problems with larger blocks, though it may not be an ideal solution, it's a good solution for the short term (2 years or so). But of course even with a larger blocksize the system could still be abused without effective countermeasures. Nonetheless, I think that 2 years of time is enough to develop an adequate solution or some form of protection against abuse.
nice post very etractive
Seriously? Do tell me which of these Core contributors have over 100 commits. They are either no longer there, or they are Blockstream employees.
Is this really worth a flag? Aren't you two mostly on the same side?
The white paper told us exactly how to scale and they have been fighting it for years. There's no debate to be hand. The block size increase is years late. Segwit is some camoflauged nonsense they only want due to control and patents.
It's thanks to them that Bitcoin Cash and $7 fees exist.
Off-chains are a trojan horse.
PS - Please respond to the points in my link if you wish to debate, as I will simply refer you to them. (It's not going to be easy.)
I believe Reddit has automoderation on posts linking to Steem. At least, every post or comment that I've written on Reddit linking to Steem-articles got shadowbanned (visible for me, but invisible for everyone else - really a bad way of censoring stuff).
amen may bitcoin blockchain live long an prosper
I've been waiting for a post like this for awhile. A reddit user made a timeline/history book on what has been going on with bitcoin and r/bitcoin, and I have to say everything is real shady. Great post!
Oh cool, got a link to it? Would be really interesting since I've probably missed out on a lot.
I saw the post a few months ago but it is very similar to this article.
If you missed any of the drama, here is what actually happened so far in the past few days
An altcoin which was created at 1st Aug was listed 2 days ago in the korean exchanges and as any new altcoin it was pumped by them and everyone got too excited and followed them ...
This resulted in a rapid increase in the mining profitability for the other chain after it adjusted the difficulty yesterday ... and miners started to jump in ...
That is a about it... Interesting to watch nonetheless
Good summary
Personally, I can claim I'm very engaged so far with the Steem ecosystem, working on developing and growing my reputation, trying to promote the learning process. If the latest price growth of Bitcoin will empower the altcoins, all of this leading in essence to a growing of Steem. But this is only my humble opinion, and there is still a possibility I could be wrong possibly because I'm not fully documented on all levels in cryptocurrency field. One thing I'm certain of : Steem has a lot of potential and anyone involved in the network and community will only have benefits for being in this, the most advantaged being the ones involved in this from the beginning. Anyway, very interesting article! Greatly appreciated and upvoted! 👍 👍
"Their moderators have become faster than their transactions"
R.I.P.
:D
Hahahha
Pretty much. I had posted an arcticle, criticizing both forks, both on /r/btc and /r/bitcoin. The first one acted rationally, the latter went full on banhammer on me. This is pretty sad, looking at how the bitcoin community has become so divided.
The whole thing with the censorship towards speaking against Blockstream smells very fishy and looks to me that there is something cheesy going on. Why the Bitcoin core developer will just stay with SegWit and push a block enlargement perhaps for undetermined time. A hard fork is required for a block enlargement this requires a replay protection but Bitcoin core developers do not want to implement this protection? And what the heck is going on with reddit if they continue like this they will lose user (hope they all come to steemit). Free speech is so important for trust but if there is no free speech which is done by censorship people will lose there trust. Damn I am very curious and will dig deeper in the whole situation I like to know what Blockstream is up to. Thanks for telling us!
Yep, r/bitcoin is doing much harm to BTC now. Even though I'm core supporter, I really don't like these mods. tip!
It's ridiculous that a community for championing a currency that has non-censorship as one of it's biggest features resorts to banning people from their subreddit.
Although to be honest almost all of reddit is like that. You block people who don't agree with you, then you go to other subreddits and shout about how they are censoring people...
hahahhhahaa the fucking sad truth!
I am thankful of the Steem blockchain being immutable to censorship where anyone can state their concern and voice their opinion about anything, for free.
Synchronicity. I just came from another user's post where they were questioning whether us being censorship free was a good thing because apparently an account was posting what some are calling child pornography. From what I was able to see, the girls in question could have been of legal age, they certainly were not undeveloped. It's not something I personally want to see having a daughter about that age, but in the end I have to take the stance that we are a self-policing platform and I believe it works, that if unacceptable behavior or material is posted we simply join forces and flag the individual until they have no reason to be here. But If it's a matter of someone who simply doesn't like pornography then they always have the option to ignore or even mute.
I think that creating any formal censorship will land us in the exact same position as what you have as an example in this post, and we do NOT want that here.
Wow!
A VERY powerful statement and proves you are an idealist!
Congrats~*~
Thank you :) And I'm glad you responded, reminds me to pop by 'your place' today. I"m putting together a list, trying to get some kind of organization to visiting people's blogs that I like.
=)>
Great to exchange with you as always!
Hope to see you around more often.
Blessings~*~
Yes, the introduction of any kind of censorship will lead to the emergence of a corrupt system of systematic censorship.
Exactly.
They might create a new altcoin : censorcoin.
LoL
It will probably be added to Segwit soon so they can censor all the big transactions going to exchanges for dumping. :P
Free Bitcoin Cash for upvoting this post