Is Roger on mission to destroy his legacy?

in #bitcoin6 years ago (edited)
Before you feel compelled to flag this post, or be angry at me, allow me to make all my points clear. I will do my absolute best to be fair here, and of course expect that those who would like to voice their two cents, would try to be fair as well




His rise to notoriety and Legacy


Roger has been quite controversial almost from the very beginning, his political ideologies are what you would call the furthest away from anything resembling mainstream. It's probably because of his rebellious and courageous attitude that he recognized the potential of cryptocurrencies very early.

He is said to be the first real investor of Bitcoin among other cryptos, including ripple believe it or not. And very early in his push for crypto adoption his contributions became crucial to the success that we are seeing today. He's been involved with Bitpay, Kraken, and other names I'm sure most of us would recognize.

There was even a time that Roger sported the nickname Bitcoin Jesus, which of course was clever way of describing his cryptocurrency preaching. There are still many videos online of the early days, with many of the interviews being as passionate as one gets.

The big Divide - Block Size Debate


Here is where some people struggle to see the nuance and cast away all pragmatism into a garbage bin. I say this, not because I'm trying to tinge the events with negative bias, but because the conversation is often too emotional and pointless on this matter.

I do speculate however, that there was a lot of build up to this point, and not all disagreements were based on the block size debate, but of course that was the focus of all arguments for months.

Without getting too technical on the subject, it might be enough to say that Roger vision of bitcoin was to keep it as is, and simply solving the scaling issue with a bigger block, but those who opposed that idea, believed that this would create bloat, and decentralization concerns.

In other words, Roger agreed with the rest of the Bitcoin community that we had reached scaling problem, but the solution to said problem was conflictingly different. To me, it seems as if Roger holds up the initial white paper for bitcoin as some sort of holy constitution, but I do understand his position on the matter.

If Bitcoin is not used a cash, then it did not solve what it was meant to solve. That is reasonable enough, and as a practitioner of honesty I have to agree. But, I think ideas are always evolving and fixating on purity for the sake of crypto-conservatism, is also not something I can personally sign off on.

Another key thing to point out is that 2017 was not the first year were Roger made a push for bigger block sizes. It's somewhat forgotten nowadays but with just a little digging, you can find tweets like this one.



These are my biases speaking, but I don't believe that any extreme is healthy and thus anyone who calls themselves "maximalist" is probably someone who does not echo my personal beliefs, but I digress.

Bitcoin Cash enters the Scene


By now we've all heard over and over that 2017 was just a crazy year all around. It seemed as if anything could grow in valuation regardless of use case, development team, etc. Of course, I'm not implying that because of this, BCH made it out of the gate, but it sure helped. The idea of free money sounds just too good to pass up.

The most controversial aspect of Bitcoin Cash, a new Bitcoin fork, is not so much that it offered a plausible solution to scaling, but the fact that it's inception was accompanied by a lot of confusion and misdirection. And it's precisely here, where the conversations get emotional.

Almost from the beginning of BCh, Roger has insisted almost aggressively that BitcoinCash is the real Bitcoin. Being the CEO of bitcoin.com gave him and his company the ability to muddy up the waters just a little bit.




On one front I do have to give Roger props, he has never changed his tune. He has said from the beginning, regardless of any of us agree or not, that Bitcoin Cash is the real Bitcoin, and not once has backed up from that one claim.

Now, I won't go much into conspiracies here, but it might be enough to say that there are some theories out there that "prove" this to be the case. I remember reading one or two and scratching my head in confusion. It seems at times we get stuck between theoretical truths and pragmatic ones, and the conversation becomes one of definitions. In other words, completely unproductive.

"Define, definition...."

The fights broke out


And they seem to have never truly stopped. I can't say there's been much healthy debate since those times, it's mostly been who can scream the loudest, and who can ambush who on a podcast. I remember a particular youtuber antagonizing Roger over and over, until he had too much and left the interview with an image that became viral.



To be fair to Roger, the intentions of the youtuber were obvious. The purpose of the interview was to ambush Roger and the constant repeating of the term bcash was done with the sole intention of pushing his button, and as we know, it worked well.

Since that Interview Roger has appeared on many more shows, including a difficult interview with David Pakman that was shared quite a bit on social media. I do have say David did not play softball at all, but in my opinion Roger handled himself very well.

The interview is well worth watching, as they touch up on many accusations that Roger has faced in the past, and to be honest, there was no tip toeing around them, not even a little bit. The one of most interest however, is the insider trading allegations that surrounded the Coinbase launch. A crazy time when Bitcoin Cash skyrocketed to irrational valuations. If I'm not mistaken it hit $9000 or so before it came crashing down.

Picking Fights & The Blockchain Cruise

I've been keeping track of Roger's activities almost since this whole thing started. For full disclosure, I've had Bitcoin Cash in the past, and would not necessarily have a problem buying it again, as I personally think it works well, but lets continue.

As far as I know Roger has tried to argue, or debate as some would call it, just about everyone who would give him an opportunity. The intention of course is to prove to the important leaders of crypto why BitcoinCash is the real Bitcoin, and why Bitcoin is doomed.

It's not secret that Roger is vehemently against any scaling solution proposed for Bitcoin that is not on the blockchain. His arguments against the lightning network are valid, but in my view they also fail to see one small yet powerful detail. Logical consistency.




I doubt he regrets that particular tweet, but I think he might have a clever way of explaining himself. How does that new saying go? That didn't age well

I should say to be completely fair, that the censorship that allegedly happens in reddit does not necessarily mean that Roger is directly involved, or that he even condones it.

The blockchain cruise was another indication that we seem to not be progressing from this damaging stage. All I say, and I'm not trying to be dramatic here was Trablism and Worship, and after watching the debates, which I hesitate to recommend to be honest, I was left with a bitter taste in my mouth.



I still don't know if anything has been gained from these "debates" and I think using the word debates is quite generous to be honest. They were a little more than shouting matches in front of a pool of people who probably had a little too much to drink, it was a cruise after all.

Recently Roger has been publishing more videos about the cruise, and of course as a cryptocurrency enthusiast I've been watching them with close attention. That being said recently he posted and "interview" he did with Charlie Lee, and that bad taste in my mouth returned.

The whole interview was a discussion on semantics, and to make matters worse, Roger attacked Charlie repeatedly with insinuations of him being a communist. Yes, I know what some people are going to say, that he didn't quite mean it that way, but let's be honest about this.

Let me translate the verbal jousting into simple terms:

a) Agree with me and say Bitcoin has no intrinsic value at all
b) Disagree with me and you are a communist

I did make it through all the video, as much as I was getting ready to give up on it a few times. I did notice a point on the video were Roger let down his verbal weapons for a second and showed what I believe to be sensible side. It's very much true that Roger has been attacked a lot, and has been somewhat outcasted from the crypto elites, but I would hesitate to call him an innocent victim as well.

Conclusion


In all honesty It would take many more hours or possibly days to compile everything controversial Roger has done, but that's not really the intention of this post, at least not this time. All that I'm trying to do is understand what his mission is, because it seems to me that he either doesn't not understand how much he hurts his message, or that he does, but doesn't care.

Before you ask, I've reached out to him a few times, but of course, no response. Why would there be? I'm not a whale or a crypto elite of any kind. But, I think my questions were quite reasonable.



I'll close by saying this; I doubt Roger will read this post or respond to it, and that's ok I guess. But in the off chance that he does, I want him to know that I'm all for BCH succeeding, it can be a great crypto by all means, but I just don't know how his actions are being helpful lately, I seriously can't see the win anywhere.

The secret to growing on Steem - A response to that one trending post
Bringing People to Crypto
Thoughts on STEEM's current status
Short Letter of appreciation - See you at SteemFest
Crypto Philosophy Series - Change starts with you - Vlog
Sort:  

I was following the "shitstorm" since BitcoinXT was launched, but eventually I gave it completely up. I believe this conflict (and the capacity crisis) has set the whole crypto space some 5-6 years back. Throughout those years, I've always been a "bigblocker" by heart.

I had great enthusiasm about Bitcoin, I was pushing Bitcoin as a means of payment, as a better alternative to other kinds of digital payments. On our fundraising fleemarkets I had posters saying that we accepted Bitcoins. I paid my son bitcoins every time he went out with garbage or did other housework.

But no, then I was told that Bitcoin is not meant to be used as a means of payment. It was a huge slap in the face. The reliability went down the drain and transaction costs went up through the ceiling. One of the cornerstones of Bitcoin is that it's decentralized - but is that true? Ultimately, the miners decide what transactions go in and what doesn't, and miners have the theoretical possibility to change the rules - it wouldn't matter if the miners really were decentralized, but centralization seems to be inevitable with any PoW-coin. And still is seems like the maintainers of the bitcoin core github repo are those who really define the protocol.

There was the big schism and great propaganda war. People started getting more important than facts and logic - the discussion was dominated by ad-hominem attacks and ad-vercundiam-arguments - and I'm actually quite much annoyed that you continue in this track - we should care about the technical arguments, not about who said what, who is right and who is wrong.

First one of the biggest arguments against raising the block size limit was "a hard-fork is unsafe, we risk to split the chain if not everyone manage to update in time". Then, over some few weeks only, the same folks that had supported this argument turned around 180 degrees and said that we need to force through SegWit through a "user activated soft fork", no matter what! The UASF would have been bound to cause a chain fork if it wasn't for the miners "caving in" through the SegWit2X compromise proposal!

At some point the Bitcoin Classic team published their FlexTrans proposal, an alternative to SegWit. From a purely technical point of view, I loved the FlexTrans proposal - it is a clean, modern approach and solves quite some problems with the Bitcoin transaction format - while SegWit is trying to work around the same problems by adding additional layers of technical debt. Still, the timing was horrible. Before the proposal was published, nobody was much against SegWit (miners: "we're ok with SegWit as long as we also get a regular doubling of the block size"). Then came FlexTrans and muddled the water, and suddenly the bigblocker fraction seems to have started a campaign drumming up hate against SegWit.

Bitcoin cash "had" to fork at the time they did to avoid SegWit. I thought back then that Bitcoin Cash was a disaster. It was pretty obvious that it would become just an altcoin, and from a technical point of view it wouldn't be much better than Bitcoin. Can Bitcoin do anything that cannot be done better by some altcoin? No. Also, with most of the bigblockers supporting the Bitcoin Cash project, there wasn't much pressure on the "2X"-part of SegWit2X anymore. Actually, quite some bigblockers wanted it to fail, as it would make it more likely that Bitcoin Cash would succeed. SegWit2X wasn't a good compromise, after all the main purpose of SegWit was to fix things without the need of a hardfork, what's the use of first pulling in such a complex patch and then anyway do a hard fork right afterwards? Still, it was a compromise, and a compromise was needed - hence, I was a big supporter of SegWit2X.

It's very clear that Bitcoin is the big winner and Bitcoin Cash is the loser in this propaganda war. The vision of the Bitcoin Cash supporters was that Bitcoin would be strangled due to the capacity cliff, while Bitcoin Cash then would become the real bitcoin. Some of them still hope for this. It ain't going to happen. The probability that another altcoin will become the new king is much higher than that Bitcoin Cash will become the new Bitcoin.

We haven't seen much capacity problems lately - why? I believe the biggest reasons are that Bitcoin has failed gaining traction and that most Bitcoin owners aren't holding the bitcoin themselves, they have them on the bigger exchanges. Most of those exchanges have off-chain internal transactions, and most of the exchanges collect lots of withdrawals into one big transaction, saving lots of blockspace that way. I guess soon transactions between the biggest exchanges will also go off-chain. Just like IPv4 still can scale thanks to NAT, Bitcoin can scale as long as people keep their coins on the exchanges rather than in their own wallets ... but if people do that, is it really better than banking? (and with IPv4, peer-to-peer is efficiently broken as everybody is using NAT).

I've always had big hopes for the Lightning network, and I'm quite sad that the "Big Blockers" were so much against it. That being said, at some point I got convinced that "The Lightning Network is no Silver Bullet", and I still believe so - though, admittedly I haven't paid attention to how the Lightning Network have progressed during the last year or two.

There has been conspiracy theories at both sides of the schism. I fully believe this schism happened only through internal forces, without any conspiracy going on. I do believe both sides of the schism really wants Bitcoin to succeed. At the other hand, I do have my own conspiracy theory. Some PR consulting company has been hired by the "powers to be" to keep Bitcoin away from mainstream adoption. Said PR agency is actively working at both sides of the schism, pulling some strings and pressing some buttons, a bit like Count Dooku and Palpatine incited the Clone Wars. The PR-company owns a lot of sock puppet accounts on most social medias. They have bought up the accounts of Theymos, hence they are controlling the moderation of r/bitcoin, Bitcointalk, the bitcoin wiki and yet some more forums. Most people in the debate (certainly including Roger Ver) fully believe in the Bitcoin vision - for the PR agency people like him are considered to be "useful idiots". The PR agency supports people like him with one hand, and at the same time they dig up as much dirt as they can with the other hand.

Loading...

Man, thank you for this comment... You made this post 10 times more valuable.

Regarding your theory... I have to say, you might be on to something. It would make perfect sense, make us fight with stupid tribalism about who gets to have the name, keeps the powers to be on their thrones for much longer.

Completely plausible...

Roger that... I think...

Full "debate"

I just can't watch, the preview of the best moment of rover ver was to cringe I cannot imagine what's in the full interview.

You know, I'm not trying to start the whole who is the real bitcoin debate all over again, I think that debate was silly to begin with. But, for the life of me, I know Roger is smart, but I can't flex my mind enough to understand logically his gameplan.

And its not just my opinion, he gets trolled a lot of twitter, he became the one person everyone loves to hate, and that's probably not right either. He is an ally, but why is he being so divisive?

Did you know that CoinsBank, which organized the event, is an exchange with about zero actual trade and fakes nearly their entire trade volume of about 145 million dollars per day?

Mess with Charlie Lee and your going to get the horns Roger. Ha ha. :)

Great post @meno. It seems I feel the same way as you about Roger. That last video where he 'debates' Charlie Lee, felt more like an attack and personal vendetta against him than an honest debate. I really don't think he does himself any favours by acting in such a rude and childish way.

P.S you should watch the end of that last video where Roger Ver makes a bet with Charlie its really quite tragic.... and funny lol. I even made my last post about it xD

Bitcoin Cash is the real Bitcoin

It depends on what your definition of "is" is...

it depends on what you mean by depending also

who the heck is roger? he can go roger hisself...

I'll keep my bitcoin cash. Its the only fork that has worth but even then bitcoin is going through hard times with all the division.

Sorry Meno, this is weak, and having talked to Roger in person, and interviewed him as well, I have to disagree.

Opinions aside, you allude to the idea regarding the Tweet that “didn’t age well” that Roger has censored something or suppressed something. Where? When? Has he kicked folks out of subreddits? Ever refused debate?

I wanna be fair brother, but let me ask you this...

You think the Cruise debates helped? or the interview with Charlie? Note Im not calling for BCH to fail, quite the opposite, I just don't see how this is helping.

I think debate is good. I think it is dying art.

Again. Who has he suppressed or censored? Was that not implied in the post.

I say this with respect. I just don’t see it.

I guess its not provable, but some say, and I should add this addendum to this post, that the reddit of bitcoin censors anything about bitcoin core. I've not tried posting about bitcoin there, but maybe i should try it myself and not take people's word.

Of course, even if true, this doesnt mean its roger doing it, it could just be BCH maximalists.

I don't see any flags so I came in to look deeper

I might get a flag, but I just wanna have a good convo on the subject... that's all... my buddy Kafka knows Roger personally... so he proves that two friends can disagree respectfully.

Nobody can argue that this post is put together really well, nice work for sure

Re "aging well" - here is a post from Mike Hearn dated November 2015: On Block Sizes. One section in that post has aged very well: "Core won’t raise the limit":

There’s a widespread belief in the Bitcoin community that all Bitcoin developers want the block size to rise and all that’s required is enough time for them to reach consensus about the best way to do it. These beliefs probably come from the fact that the community has repeatedly been told that by people involved in development.

Both beliefs are entirely wrong.

In 2015 and early 2016, nobody was publicly against raising the block size limit - the question was only "when" and "how", not "if". Then slowly the narrative changed, for some the 1 MB block size limit seemed to be one of the defining characteristics of Bitcoin.

There were indeed some valid technical arguments against raising the blocksize in 2015, but those were invalidated during 2016 as I see it.