“I suspect part of his motivation may be due to the fact that Bitcoin Cash has been grabbing a lot of headlines lately and taking attention away from the coin where he invested all his money.”
The metric to measure the honesty of this statement would clearly be the BCH/BTC price, which is still tanking after a long downward trend:
Bcash as of today 13SEP18 is worth 6.8% of 1 Bitcoin.
“Further it appears that after years of being propagandized and lied to people have finally woken up and are dumping the censorship-ridden propaganda subreddit /r/bitcoin. The competing subreddit /r/btc, without censorship and manipulation, is consistently seeing more daily viewers than /r/bitcoin.”
“Many of the OG anarchist Bitcoiners (myself included) have left for greener pastures, many to Bitcoin Cash but also to Ethereum and other projects. There are a few who still remain committed to Bitcoin but they are increasingly outweighed by statists (usually silicon valley leftist types).
Very few of Core developers strike me as hardcore libertarians. I am friends with Ben Woosley who recently started contributing to Core, but besides him I can’t say with any confidence that any of the rest of them are libertarians, let alone solid anarchists.
We do know that Core developers like Mark Friedenbach and Jorge Timon believe that interest is usury, which is a typical left wing, anti-libertarian screed.”
Most of this section relies on the Bandwagon propaganda technique. Rather than relying on labels of groups for people to associate with, the author should be arguing about how his ideals are better accomplished with BCH.
“Further the obsession in the Core crowd about “store of value” and speculative trading and the corresponding lack of interest in using Bitcoin for the one thing that can actually undermine the state―money”
Due to the heavy reliance on the Bandwagon propaganda technique here, I cannot speak for the people the author is referring to. I can merely speak to my own views regarding the utility of Bitcoin. Firstly, I’m personally not a trader, so I’m not going to defend this utility type.
* For the ‘Store of Value’ utility (Or more accurately, ‘value maintenance’ and ‘value appreciation’, as value is subjective and cannot be ‘stored’, this is in high demand globally. The fiat credit system increasingly discourages savings, and encourages debt slavery.
* For Independent Economic Sovereignty – Bitcoin accomplishes a level of sovereignty not even possible before with previous forms of money. Previously, if the Government became desperate enough, they could come to your house, hit you over the head, and take off with your savings. Now, an individual can simply remember 12 words to regenerate their entire wallet. The wallet can be backed up a thousand ways and in a thousand places, and if proper security precautions are taken, there’s little that the Government can do to gain access.
* For easy method of payment – We already have this. Mastercard and Visa accomplish this well. Additionally, the Bitcoin mempool has been empty for quite a while now, so this is also accomplished on Bitcoin quite well. Developments to improve method of payment on Bitcoin are ongoing (eg Lightning). However, it would be insane to sacrifice the savings and sovereignty aspects of Bitcoin for a utility that we already have.
“Hence the current drama in Bitcoin Cash. If there was, as Jimmy says, an “elite group determining the roadmap” then there would be no risk of a fork in November as our BCH overloads would just dictate the protocol to us.”
This isn’t how centralisation works. This would only be centralisation with absolute authority. For example, the Australian Government just had a change in Prime Ministers due to a power struggle. However, I doubt many people would point to this as meaning the Australian Government is decentralised. As Jimmy Song said in another video, the types of personalities in the BCH community made the current reality bound to happen. And these people are fighting over power.
“One could easily turn this around and say that it’s the user’s of BTC who are being forced by a central planning committee to subsidize miners despite market signals.”
An open fee market in no way resembles a central planning committee
“The reason for this is that the Bitcoin Cash developers have spent years studying the scaling problem and working on solutions.”
The Bcash developers are clearly incompetent. There were plenty of well known bugs in Bitcoin which could have been rectified during an initial hard fork, none of which were fixed. This shows that Bcash is an attempt to gain political control, with little regard for technical or economic considerations.
“It’s rich that someone who advocates a hard coded price control in the protocol says his coin is based on market forces.”
An open fee market is not hard coded price control
“But the biggest reason segwit2x didn’t happen was because Bitcoin Cash had already forked off.”
“This might be a hard pill to swallow for Jimmy but the entire Bitcoin protocol runs on altruism as excellently highlighted by Emin Gun Sirer years ago”
Bitcoin does not run on altruism. Bitcoin runs on a mix of altruism, competition, hostile behaviour, cooperative behaviour and many other traits.
“When a node contacts you and asks you for neighbors, there is absolutely no payment and no incentive for you to respond. Every honest node who responds is responding out of altruism.”
Nodes respond for both altruistic and selfish reasons. When a node contacts you to ask for neighbours, by telling that node about your neighbours you indirectly increase your own propagation reliability. This aspect is therefore mostly altruistic, but not entirely.
“Lightweight Bitcoin wallets called SPV wallets, of the kind that most people actually use on their phones, contact full nodes to ask about the disposition of certain accounts. Full nodes respond with blocks and transactions of interest to the SPV nodes. All of this happens out of the kindness of the participants.”
This aspect is also mostly altruistic
“Full nodes could record and release or sell the IP addresses of their SPV clients, in a large breach of privacy. That they do not do this is incredibly nice of them.”
It’s highly naive to think that this hasn’t already happened. Some large centralised exchanges running full nodes, for example, would certainly have been compelled by Governments to reveal private information. They do this selfishly, for self preservation, and altruism flies out the window.
, this is in high demand globally. The fiat credit system increasingly discourages savings, and encourages debt slavery.
