How the Censorship in Bitcoin got us to where everyone blindly supports Core and Segwit

[rogerver]

Step 1.
Theymos engaged in a widespread censorship campaign on Bitcointalk.org, /r/Bitcoin, and even Bitcoin.org to lead everyone to believe that everyone else around them supported Core and Segwit.
Here is how humans behave when everyone around them appears to think something different than themselves. (They pretend to agree in order to not rock the boat)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyDDyT1lDhA

Step 2.
Then, once everyone sees everyone else around them believing or behaving in a certain way, they start behaving in that exact same way even though they don't know or understand why. You'll be amazed by this example of just how blindly humans will follow others:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEhSk71gUCQ

Step 3.
The person or group that initiated the censorship managed to get the group to believe and behave in the exact way that they wanted.
The masses all go along with it because they see everyone else around them going along with it too.

Step 4. (where we are today)
A bunch of people who have no clue why Bitcoin came to be used as money have managed to strangle its growth, impose things that aren't needed like Segwit, and drive people to start using things other than Bitcoin thanks to the unneeded "Fee Market." Meanwhile the masses cheer them along because they see everyone else supporting Core and Segwit too. (Because thanks to the censorship, dissenting opinions aren't viewable by the public)

[helloworld]

The implications of this are quite bad, as none of the existing p2p payment systems are resilient against this.

I guess the idea of p2p money came before its age.

[SpaceMonkey]

the censorship on this forum and the hidden agenda of Roger Ver and Jihan Wu is the worst part of all. informations are blocked and people get downvoted for nothing.

the bitcoin network was attacked for months as you can see here.



Roger, stop the blatant cesorship here! with your spam attacks on the network, childern could not sent any transactions at all and are starving becuause of you!

[rogerver]

Roger, stop the blatant cesorship here!

What censorship?
I think you have gone off the deep end if you think there is censorship here.

[GreyWyvern]

the censorship on this forum and the hidden agenda of Roger Ver and Jihan Wu is the worst part of all. informations are blocked and people get downvoted for nothing.

Censorship? LOL. Last I checked, you had a reputation of -75 and the mods STILL let you post your FUD here. I keep wondering if there is some threshold of negative rep before you finally disappear, but so far NOPE!

You should be thankful for your freedom to be clueless here. Especially on July 4th!

[Fremont]

the censorship on this forum and the hidden agenda of Roger Ver and Jihan Wu is the worst part of all. informations are blocked and people get downvoted for nothing.

Roger, stop the blatant cesorship here! with your spam attacks on the network, childern could not sent any transactions at all and are starving becuause of you!

Hi LiteCoinGuy / SpaceMonkey, please see the following posts where I have asked you numerous times to provide evidence of censorship, and which you have consistently failed to come up with an answer for:

post66346.html#p66346
post62567.html#p61915
post59644.html#p59644

In fact, you engaged in censorship yourself - how ironic:

post62567.html#p62567

Aside from that, as explained to you countless times we do not have 'upvoting' or 'downvoting' here. We have reputation points which users assign to posts which they agree or disagree with, and those reputation points do not affect any post's visibility. You're clearly getting negative reputation because your posts are either of a very low quality or because you're constantly spouting 'UASF' nonsense.

the bitcoin network was attacked for months as you can see here.

I have also addressed the above 'spam attack' nonsense that you previously posted here:
post67394.html#p66513
and here:
post67394.html#p67394

You're harking on with the same unsubstantiated claims and empty arguments - it's getting rather old at this stage, and you have effectively made a troll of yourself. It's quite sad really as you used to make some excellent posts which stirred a lot of interesting discussion. What a shame...

[Possum577]

the censorship on this forum and the hidden agenda of Roger Ver and Jihan Wu is the worst part of all. informations are blocked and people get downvoted for nothing.

Roger, stop the blatant cesorship here! with your spam attacks on the network, childern could not sent any transactions at all and are starving becuause of you!

I'll second the "what censorship?" comment from Roger.

SpaceMonkey, either you've never spent any time here or you work for Theymos. Either way, there's no censorship on The Forum. I've personally made specific critical comments about The Forum and Roger's point of view on the state of the blockchain throughput sizing issue...all have been met with only constructive comments debating or responding to my comments. None of my posts have been deleted and no one has responded with a snarky attitude...the latter of which is an extremely popular tactic on bitcointalk.

I can't count the number of times a comment of mine on bitcointalk that goes against the group think has been retaliated with spam, nonsense, and attacks. It's ironic actually.

In any event, SpaceMonkey, your view points are yours to have and post here. The only thing you open yourself up for is debate. So let's do that...what censorship do you see here? Give us some examples? Let's talk constructively about it!

[x1lclem]

Let's forget censorship for a while. The topic gives me a headache.

With regards to the Segwit Opposition:

It seems to me there's the impression that it's a bad technology. I'm not completely sold on that idea.

While I %100 agree that bigger blocks would help growth int he short term, that trick can really only be done a few times.

When you factor in every human on earth doing 1-2 transactions a month, the block size grows to a very unmanageable level.

You simply can't store all human transactions forever, in a single distributed ledger. The more I read about Lightning network, which would be a possibility once SegWit is enabled, the more I like it.

True, you can't publicly verify Channel activity until it's been closed and published to the BTC network, but maybe that's a good thing, as the best way to privatize transactions is to keep them out of public view and rely on trusting the BTC network encryption.

Thoughts?

[JuicyG]

It many cases it proved to be advantageous to conform to the norm, to what you're peer group is doing, instead of going the other way and risk becoming an outcast. It takes a lot of strength and a very strong will to resist this natural tendency. It exists not only in humans but also in animals. Animals also display this type of behavior.

Not only there's this natural tendency to conform to what your peer group is doing, not to risk being left out, but there's often strong peer pressure that forces one adjust his or her behavior and thoughts to fit that of the group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_pressure

The major downside of conformity is being fine with holding wrong views for the sake of getting along, which may come to haunt you later on, since your peer group is seldom right. Individuals don't even realize this sudden shift that's occurring, that's most of the times a slow gradual process.

This is why very few people can exercise freedom of thought, which is not to be confused with freedom of speech. The latter is pretty much useless without the first. Most people want the freedom of speech so they can please their peer group and feel like an important part of the group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_thought

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." - Soren Kierkegaard

I've noticed this debate from the bench, so to speak, since I've stopped carrying about Bitcoin few years ago. It stopped being exciting to me. The pro-core group has pretty much dominated this debate not only by having control over the main /r/bitcoin subreddit and control over the main bitcointalk forum but also by controlling the narrative via some heavily biased talk shows, where people only got to listen to one side of this debate.

People see things very black & white, high contrasts - good/evil, hot/cold, good/bad and so on (and that's another error in judgment due to how the human brain works, this binary thinking) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6bZG7vTUNM. Core supporters have been lead to believe they're fighting evil incarnate - the evil Chinese selfish miners lead by corrupt Jihan, that cheated using ASIC boost and Antbleed and self-serving Roger Ver, who's either naive or pumps altcoins or is in it with the Chinese miners because he's a miner himself, plus a bunch of devs that are more or less irrelevant since they are merely working for these evil Chinese miners. There's also famous Gavin in this camp, who is obviously a corrupting influence, co-opted by the CIA and so on and was rightfully removed from the Core team. And of course all these companies in the space like Bitpay and Coinbase that are so damaging to the ecosystem and somehow connected to evil Chinese miners that want to destroy Bitcoin and make it less decentralized and turn it into a centralized bankster controlled Paypal. And there's also this latest major scare, Craig Wright, the anti-christ fake Satoshi that came back from hell to steal control from Core. I've left out some elements but you get the idea. This is pretty much what the Core camp made people believe by controlling the narrative.

Of course, this fiction is just that, fiction. Things are never black and white and Core is not the angelic entity that's fighting the good fight just to keep Bitcoin decentralized and protect the average guy that wants to run a node on a RasPi. Since no one is paid to work on Bitcoin, active development is mostly handled by some key companies that have a profit incentive to work on Bitcoin. These companies like Blockstream, Lightning, Roostock and the VCs supporting them want side chains because that's how they hope to turn a profit. There's no profit for them in on-chain scaling. Increasing the blocksize will actually hurt their case. Blockstream patented side chain technology by the way. It's all part of a plan to make profit, which is perfectly fine by the way, but they're not open and honest about it and this is a taboo subject, something you're not allowed to say. Instead they've managed to persuade the average guy they're champions of decentralization fighting the evil banksters, when in reality they are the ones working for private investment bankers. The hypocrisy and virtue signaling is the issue here and them demonizing everyone that opposes their self-serving scaling agenda.

Is the Bitcoin Unlimited & co side free of sin and pure, as some people imagine Core to be? I'm sure they're not and I'm sure they've got a bunch of skeletons in their closet too, but that's not the point. People haven't been able to form an objective opinion since they haven't been allowed access to the information and I have to say the Bitcoin Unlimited camp did a poor job when it came to putting their message out there. Roger bought this domain and created this forum and had a bunch of talk show appearances but at the end of the day he's just one guy, that's also busy running a business and doesn't make his living out of live streaming Youtube videos like Tone Vays does.

[SpaceMonkey]

Roger, stop the blatant cesorship here!

What censorship?
I think you have gone off the deep end if you think there is censorship here.

The downvotes are censorship too. And what about all of your lies?

Segwit2x is nothing short of a coup attempt by businesses & miners in the Bitcoin space to oust the core developers of the Bitcoin code and force their control in the direction of Bitcoin technical development.

https://medium.com/@LordAesop/segwit2x- ... 5688f8d4a0

[Fremont]

The downvotes are censorship too. And what about all of your lies?

As always you can't respond with an answer advising us how and where censorship is occurring.

Again, we do not have downvoting here and the reputation system does not affect post visibility in any way whatsoever. The fact that you call people disagreeing with your posts censorship shows just how out of touch with reality you are, though I suppose that does explain why you continuously post your 'UASF' nonsense.

Are you even going to try come up with some sort of answer or should we just ignore you from here on out? Or is it just that you're afraid to respond to my posts because you know I'll tear down your baseless arguments without effort?

[x1lclem]

The major downside of conformity is being fine with holding wrong views for the sake of getting along, which can come to haunt you later on, since your peer group is seldom right

While there's some truth to that, I kind of view SegWit as VHS vs Beta. Both worked. But VHS had better marketing and those who believed in Beta got left out.

So if you conformed to VHS, you had a good 2 decades where you could watch anything available at Blockbuster.

Similar to HD-DVD vs BluRay.

Yes, Segwit is a bit complicated, but it'll work.

[JuicyG]

HD-DVD vs Bluray was all about which company managed to get the best support from other 3rd parties working behind the scenes. It wasn't about the enthusiastic supporters of the each technology. Toshiba backed HD-DVD while Sony supported Bluray if I remember correctly.

I think Blockstream & friends don't have the support of the economic players at the moment. They are HD-DVD now fighting Bluray. Yes, they've managed to persuade some people actively watching the space and engaging on twitter, forum and such but these people don't matter that much. The economic players that serve the real users matter. The real users aren't the people running nodes as some kinda virtue signaling or charity effort. The real users are people actually using Bitcoin to buy stuff. Those are the real users and most of the companies stand with these real users and there's a big majority opposing the core devs.

[rogerver]

Segwit2x is nothing short of a coup attempt by businesses & miners in the Bitcoin space to oust the core developers of the Bitcoin code and force their control in the direction of Bitcoin technical development.

There is some truth to this, and it is because the Core developers have no clue why Bitcoin is useful to businessmen and to people trying to use Bitcoin as money. Anyone who actually uses Bitcoin is sick of the Core team's plan to make double spends easier, and tx fees high, with the blocks full.

Good riddance to bad ideas.