Comment by jlrubin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jlrubin | Hacker News Reader

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It's a meme that Blockstream leads opposition; the opposition to SegWit2x is actually pretty decentralized.

See the Blockstream team[0] and cross reference it with dissenting developers[1].

Alex Morcos has written a good take-down on why even if prominent companies like Coinbase are willing to fork, it doesn't really matter[2].

Personally, when Barry emailed one of the organizations I founded the messaging was as Alex put it, bullying. There was no room for discussing or changing the proposal, just, "my way or the highway". We opted not to sign the letter because of that, among other reasons.

My beef with the framing, and hence suggestion to re-title, is because this type of bullying aims to disenfranchise users. When Facebook rolls out an upgrade, as a user you are more or less along for the ride. Bitcoin is a participatory technology where everyone can have a real voice and influence, every user gets to decide if they want to opt-in to this upgrade attempt or not.

[0] https://blockstream.com/team/

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support

[2] https://medium.com/@morcos/no2x-bad-governance-model-97b8e52...

That wiki page is not independent evidence, as it is maintained by luke-jr (a Blockstream employee and borderline radical Segwit2x opponent) and hosted by Theymos, the guy who enforces strict censorship on the largest Bitcoin forums. Please cite a more independent source.

That's a pretty serious character attack and insinuation of misbehavior.

I can attest at least that my own entry is accurately represented and I have not been in contact with any other developer who has expressed that they have not been able to add their own entry or that luke-jr or Theymos have otherwise misrepresented their entries.

Have you heard from anyone having such difficulties listing their opinion that this is not a good source for developer sentiment on fork proposals?

edit: At the very least, it likely suffices for the purpose which I suggested, which is to cross reference blockstream employees and non-blockstream employees?

> I can attest at least that my own entry is accurately represented and I have not been in contact with any other developer who has expressed that they have not been able to add their own entry or that luke-jr or Theymos have otherwise misrepresented their entries.

As a technical participant of the bitcoin community and the CEO of a company in the bitcoin space (in my profile, for anyone interested), I have the same experience. The entry for our company is accurate and I'm not aware of anyone claiming to be misrepresented on that page (also, I'm not personally familiar with any technical person in the bitcoin space that supports the 2x proposal. not even one!).

> That's a pretty serious character attack and insinuation of misbehavior.

I guess this is the point where you play the victim. Anyone familiar with Theymos and Luke-Jr. knows that Theymos engages in excessive censorship of /r/bitcoin and every other forum he controls.

Luke-Jr. has openly said he believes the sun revolves around the earth and has proposed that max block sizes actually be REDUCED to be only 300KB, which is of course ridiculous for any number of reasons.

The OP was being generous, don't try to pretend anything different to confuse people unfamiliar with these two.

The censorship claims are pure nonsense being blown out of proportion. r/bitcoin engages in standard moderation, not different from what I would expect to see in any other subreddit. Their job is more difficult than normal, though, due to all the voting robots and narrative manipulation that the bitcoin community has been suffering from in recent years [0].

[0] https://medium.com/@shesek/observing-forced-narratives-and-m...

This is pure, unadulterated nonsense. Go there and make a post about increasing max block size, bitcoin cash, or any other obviously relevant topic that doesn't suit their narrative and see how long your comment lasts. Theymos was clear from the start that he was going to use heavy handed censorship to force their narrative to people new to bitcoin.

Their moderation logs also aren't open so they can hide what they actually do censor. They also reorganize threads that don't go their way by most controversial, so they can further hide anything that doesn't say what they want. Claiming there is no censorship on /r/bitcoin is absolutely absurd, and if you really don't think it is true then you need to educate yourself.

are we resorting to ad hominem attacks now?

Which part is an ad hominem? For that to be true it would have to be irrelevant to the discussion.

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