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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