Level of Argument in the Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash Debate
Rich Falkvinge’s latest video on what you could call the level of argument or disagreement in the Bitcoin community nails it.
THE GIST:
BTC supporters are largely at the “name calling” and “ad hominem” levels.
BCH supporters are largely at the “refuting the central point” level.
Now in any debate there are going to be those on both sides that dwell on that bottom levels.
What I have observed since the fork however has been heavy one-sided with BTC supporters dominating these lower levels.
MY EXPERIENCE
Now I’m relatively new to the space. I finally and shamefully started paying attention the summer of 2017. (I mean holy shit this whole time I’ve been wanting to end governments control of currency through policy when we could just bypass the leviathan completely!)
My fresh eyes gave me an interesting perspective to observe the space and the debate that was brewing because I had no opinion or skin in the game. Being in good company with ancaps and libertarians, when I learned about the coming fork my mindset was, “Oh we have a disagreement? Awesome, lets experiment and see which one works best. We are people of ideas and principle after all so while the left and right fight with feelings and dogma we will make the world freer through experimentation”. Damn was I wrong and perhaps naive.
I quickly found out crypto was not immune to dogma. It made me realize how humans naturally make “religions” out of anything even “science” and “Bitcoin”. (Why? Well it’s easier than continuously shattering your world view when new and conflicting information presents itself. We seek order not chaos.)
After carefully sifting through the arguments on both sides, I found myself leaning towards BCH but I wasn’t married to it. I genuinely wanted to discuss my new findings and have them challenged but even on Facebook crypto groups that were anarchist and libertarian, I refrained from posting. Why? Because
I had already witnessed how people making a case for BCH had been treated by the “BTC police”. I was looking for an open discussion but there was no point in debating people playing at a different level.
SO WHAT?
Does this mean BTC will fail and BCH will succeed? No, but if I had to rationally decide to put my energy behind a community of people name-calling and committing character assassinations against its original pioneers vs a relatively positive community trying to live out ideas it believes in, I’d pick the latter. Perhaps a new metric with which to measure cryptocurrencies is how its community falls on the Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement; I’ll see what Coinmarketcap can do about this.
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Bitcoin Cash is een scam, people please not buy it before investigating yourself!
https://steemit.com/bitcoincash/@michiel/be-careful-with-bitcoin-cash-all-the-value-is-created-by-manipulation-and-it-is-not-bitcoin
I give you Exhibit A.
Ad hominem, he just have to come and poke. Just pure textbook as Rick mentioned.
Bottom feeder
Totally agree. Every argument ends up the same way nowadays. Although things have been a bit calmer lately since people have had a lot to worry about.
The only possible argument in favor of BTC that I can accept (even though I don't agree) is that the crypto currency market is still too dependent on the ONE currency, and hurting bitcoin would negatively affect the whole "industry".
That said, I think it would be beneficial. Unless BTC quickly gets the lightning network going, I don't see it going anywhere.
Yeah, that dependence is going the way of the Dodo bird. You are for one seeing more and more pairing of the top cryptos to smaller alts so you could use BCH, ETH, and even LTC now in a lot of exchanges to buy smaller alts rather than BTC. Also you are seeing more direct buying of alts coins from fiat so you don't need to buy any BTC to get any alt coin. Things like the Robinhood app are going to really change the game. People were stuck having to go through BTC but with more access it will have to stand on the merits of its underlying tech alone.
Strip all name out. Then look under the hood. There's one system that completely overhauled the internals, removing digital signatures to save space. The other system increased the pipes. No special changes. It's still a road with now eight lanes. The former, looks like a grey road but underneath it, the stones are removed.
True. The perception of Bitcoin hasn't changed for many people that support it but the fundamentals, even if only temporary, have changed. It is no longer cheap, fast, or censorship resistant since only those that can afford the fees can use it. For the time being I'm bearish on Bitcoin though I believe sentiment/speculation will still drive the price up until people start to realize what this paradigm shift is about.
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