Why Bitcoin’s Reddit Battle is the Most Significant Conflict in the World Today Juice Follow Jul 23, 2016 · 3 min read

It’s a very interesting thing that has been happening on reddit in regard to bitcoin. Bitcoin is different because there is an implication of a monetary factor. We can see this when players disagree, or call one another out and, eventually the truest in the conflict says “Fine, put up some bitcoin, and I’ll prove you wrong” You can do this now you see.

When bitcoin was smaller, reddit was an important and simple source for information. Different types of pitfalls and security leaks naturally come along as bitcoin’s technology pervades different sectors and industries, and up to date information is critical in this regard.

It’s a multi-billion dollar project and many players have a lot of money on the line.

This is the premise for what has been going on.

The nature of bitcoin’s consensus mechanism, which is basically the security for the p2p network, is such that if enough players agree to change, then there can be change. But the standard is set very high, and it’s set high for a very good reason: so the majority cannot override the few.

Do we see the power of this?

We might all agree that there are a lot of ignorant people in this world, but we probably don’t all agree on who the stupid people are. All the creator of bitcoin had to do was set the threshold for change at the lower limit of rational players.

This is exactly what he did.

People who are upset at this limit, are the ignorant players Satoshi was protecting us against.

These players often quote Satoshi suggesting that he explicitly stated he wanted bitcoin to be scaled to support a coffee money. But the reality is that he essentially said “You can change bitcoin, but you all have to agree”. Then he disappeared.

He is not coming to this debate. He chose to avoid it.

Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn tried to a lead a movement to change the future implied nature of bitcoin, we can call the big-blocker agenda.

R/bitcoin was thus flooded with droves of irrational players, spamming the forum with a “scale at all costs” mentality. Lead by ignorance, brashness, and irrationally, this army of accounts rendered the community valueless for sincere content. It got so bad the mods were forced to impose the policy of banning all talk about the big block agenda. The lead mod of this group, who also guared the forum from which Satoshi bootstrapped bitcoin with was theymos. Theymos is now the victim of daily attacks on reddit and most other bitcoin related social media.

This infuriated irrational and ignorant players, until they eventually created r/btc lead by Roger Ver. Ver is well known for twisting logic and definitions as well as using metaphors as if they are scientific arguments. You see, there are early adopters in bitcoin that got wealthy by chance, yet they feel that it was their rational actions that put them in the position that they are in.

Economics doesn’t work like this.

You will notice something on these reddit subs. You will see a poster Greg Maxwell, under the account u/nullc, posting tirelessly trying to fight off this irrational brigade so that the sincere players and newcomers can see through the disinformation.

That is to say the most influential developer, on the worlds leading technology, has come to the rational conclusion that his most valuable time is spent fighting off trolls and attacks on a social media site.

This is how important this issue is, and this is how bad the big-blocker agenda is.

In regard to theymos. If it wasn’t for theymos, no one would know about the relevance of John Nash’s Ideal Money to bitcoin. I have written many articles explaining why Nash’s works supports small blocks. No other bitcoin outlets will let this content be heard, as the irrational army of big-blockers have pervaded all the bitcoin related social media outlets, and no media sites will pick-up the story.

Theymos made a point of letting my voice be heard. He let the minority voice not be suppressed by the majority ignorant players. He held up free speech by the REAL definition of the phrase.

Nash was openly anti-central bank/government, to the point where he explicitly stated he was obfuscating his work in fear of his government.

Gavin lead the big-blocker agenda, and he openly took bitcoin to the CIA.

You do the math.