I'm going to admit it here and now. I'm a victim of my own lack of self-awareness. Or I was. Until I saw these truth bombs.

Let me start with myself. I joined the cryptocurrency space in late 2016, right before the scaling catastrophe and network split in Bitcoin took place. Being a noob though, and a teenager, I was very uninvolved with the politics. In fact, I didn't become specifically pro-BCH until maybe a year later.

It was around the BCH-BSV split where I became very engrossed in the politics, and I started off in opposition to the SV community, which appeared to support threats of violence. But after feeling like I was so closed minded to other views due to my personal convictions, I decided to pay more attention to what the various opposition was saying. Also due to my naivety, I misunderstood the free speech allowance of r/btc and took things for granted.

Long story short, after trying to be more open minded, I ended up fighting with moderators, developers, and other well-intentioned individuals, for whatever likely mundane reasons. After crossing a line too far, I was banned. In my time away, I had a few different phases. I joined SV for a few weeks, I explored other communities like Ethereum, Monero, Nano, etc... And eventually came back to Bitcoin Cash, but with much of the same contempt and arrogance I had before.

Now I make an emphasis of my shortcomings, because it is very relevant. Of course if you want to know the rest of the story, after the very beginning of this new revelation I've had (which has inspired me to write this post) I've decided to restart on a lot of things, and after seeing my real effort, I was unbanned too.

Now enough of myself. Why do I bring myself up? Because I finally understand myself. And this has helped me understand many around me too. I am a Bozo. Or was. Now I'm trying to be less of one.

Yes, a Bozo. No other word describes it better. I'm an individual who is self-centered, lacking achievement, not producing value, and of the opinion that somehow, my presence and opinions matter. Or was, and am trying to reverse that negative quality.

Being a Bozo, naturally, I attracted and was attracted by other Bozos and recreational trolls. Why? Because instead of caring about real value, I cared about a misplaced sense of ideals. And instead of valuing the production of value, I valued heated argumentation, trolling, and having empty fun on the internet. All things an ill-achieved individual with inflated image of self worth might resort to.

I learned that, until I become valuable according to others, until I make the Bitcoin Cash world a better place, my opinion has no place outside the bounds of respect and humility. There may not be a central authority, but there is an effective one, and it comes from the hard-working leadership responsible for the life of this project.

And for these reasons, I want to thank Amaury Sechet for helping open up my eyes to the reality of social entropy in the cryptospace. As he put it:

"Bozos are like the entropy of social engineering. Even good people quickly become bozos under the wrong set of incentives."

Even good and productive people can easily become Bozos under the wrong set of incentives. Incentives such as being rewarded with attention and praise for being negative, being enabled by others' lack of constructive criticism due to a social position, not producing enough value and filling the void with the shallow admiration of others, etc... Bad incentives might also include feeling bullied or harassed, whether undeserved or provoked, feeling jealous of others, and by not being aknowledged during times where some aknowledgment would have been beneficial.

Amaury understands well what having too many Bozos can risk:

"When the ratio of bozos to talent gets too high, you see sociopath[s] crop[ped] up."

This is why the BSV community is the way it is, and is so unattractive. It's very existence was a sociopath and his following of Bozo supporters, whom have formed the core of the new BSV community, which is malicious, intolerant of others, and destroys more value than what it creates.

This is also a good way of explaining what happened to the BTC community, small blocker bozos took control of the media channels which led to a very sad decrease in merchant adoption and a degeneration in culture and value. The rise of Blockstream and it's propaganda campaign created a huge wave of new Bozos, a bunch of people who contribute no value, but think they do. I'm referring here to full node operators who run a full node because they think it protects the network, and all the social media influencers.

Bozos are a fact of life, and of the human condition. Doing work is hard, but people still want to feel like they're important; This is how Bozos come into being. Being a Bozo isn't black-and-white though. We're all Bozos to some extent. Nobody is 100% completed, and nobody is perfect in how they treat others relative to how they should treat them and themselves. Bozo-hood is a spectrum, and the first step to mitigating it, is humbly recognizing that it exists.

Amaury said it all well in this detailed explanation:

"Let me try to explain. The stability of a community depend[s] on the ratio of productive members to bozos remaining low enough so that it is manageable.

When the ratio gets out of wack, then sociopath[s] tends to take over. Indeed, productive people will spot sociopaths very quickly, due to the discrepency between advertised contribution and actual contribution, but bozos do not.

For [a] thing to be successful, you need to attract and retain talent, and ensure this talent has a manageable amount of bozos to deal with.

Failing to do this inevitably lead to a bozo explosion, which we experienced not so long ago. We went from being stable around 0.12 [BTC] to 0.03 [BTC], and lost a bunch of resources, while sociopath[s] turned into scavengers."

Bozos enable sociopaths to come to power by supporting abstract and not-very-well-thought-out, or even hypocritical principles over pragmatic resolve, by not being able to understand the difference between false promises and delivered promises (due to the lack of effort in keeping up with it), and by making poor collective judgements of value and social priority.

Bozos however cannot be eliminated. Nobody is perfectly intelligent, perfectly humble, perfectly wise, etc... So the only way we can fight back against the social entropy is with stronger social culture. As Amaury says:

"Bozos are a fact of nature. You never get rid of them. They'll keep coming. But you can remove them as they come and limit their impact by building a culture that is resilient.

There isn't a one size fit all solution, but refusing to attract too many bozos, especially at the expense of talent, and transitively being suspicious of these who bring bozos onboard."

This is why so many people in BCH have been looking into cultural resolve and having clean and carefully moderated forums, because we need a clean, energetic, and positive environment to foster social resilience to social entropy. We also need people willing to step in and break Bozo ideas apart before they propagate, gently and considerately. Even if someone acts like a Bozo, they're still a person, and their thoughts and feelings still matter. To moderate is not to censor, but to peacefully disassociate with low quality or aggressive behavior as a voluntarily assembled group of individuals.

In Conclusion, I think we could all make the Bitcoin Cash community a better place by recognizing the existence of Bozos, recognizing the Bozo within each of us, and working to succeed in personal achievements instead of holding all that unresolve inside and using it to lash out and treat others unfairly or unkindly. The first step to stop being a Bozo is to recognize you are one, that your sense of group worth is probably inflated, and that you're probably your own worst enemy. And the way we can get rid of Bozos is by being aware of them, building a strong and positive culture, and gently but firmly calling out bad behavior when it arises.