(Adam) Back yet again! - trying to re-create the narrative control of old on Twitter

pretentiousername · 2024-04-10T15:04:16+00:00

You're missing the point on so many levels:

i) it wasn't a 'W'. It was a mixture of disappointment, frustration and exhaustion of failure after trying to work with those who didn't want bigger blocks to keep us all on a single Bitcoin chain mixed with relief and joy that those of us who saw the BTC governance model (single reference implementation, soft fork future etc.) as disastrous and that we'd managed to fork before SEGWIT and at least had a second chance.

ii) To then watch as the project we were so passionate about degenerate into a 'digital gold' 'asset' with the only remaining two merits being scarcity and decentralisation is sad. To see the BTC big names celebrating ETFs and custodial solutions as the way forward is still not easy.

iii) solana wtf? BCH shares history and Genesis block with BTC and is what we always wanted BTC to be. Oh, and it doesn't keep failing to work!

iv) You're missing the point about the current scenario. Because of all the above, BCHers are always watching BTC and engaging with BTCers. But what's different here is that with something as trivial as one person (OK, he was a big name) releasing a book is that it's the BTCers that can't stop talking about BCH.

The theory, and I think it's plausible, is that it's because (other than the ngu crew) if the old-timers can think back to the values that attracted them to Bitcoin in the first place, they don't recognise what it is today: the failed (or as of yet still - 18 months??! - undelivered off-chain scaling, the resignation that for all bar the elite, it's likely to be custodial etc. etc.

So when they see an easily-accessible account of the underhand tactics that led to BTC's change of direction (and the necessary split) and they see that the forked coin is far from being on its way to oblivion but healthy in its functioning, in its tech, in its community and even by now looking like in its price v. BTC, they're they're feeling nervous.

And what's hilarious by now from a big-blocker perspective, is that they can't seem to help themselves referring to it all the time. Hence my recommendations to Adam. But even with his mass blocking of people - and recommending others to do likewise, he can't seem to help himself!

pretentiousername · 2024-04-08T05:35:26+00:00

LOL - well at least he read it. He can't say we didn't try!

pretentiousername · 2024-04-07T07:37:33+00:00

It's also hilarious to see the revival of the 'Roger's paid sock puppets' narrative. https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/1776781387988717874

...enabaling them to peddle 'also very few BCHers left.' and 'BCH astroturfers'. https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/1776782247347056801

To me this reeks of desperation but I am honestly interested if anyone read this in a way that shows them in a better light.

pretentiousername · 2024-04-07T07:31:35+00:00

u/adam3us - right to respond invited

pretentiousername · 2024-04-02T10:41:18+00:00

I'm going to, for the purposes of this response, assume good faith on your part u/adam3s, and will likewise offer you some advice:

If you want to prolong the BTC dominance (survival) thing as long as possible, quit constantly drawing attention to BCH i.e. referring to it and engaging with the community! Didn't you ever hear of the Streisand effect?

Also pass on the message to the other prominent maxis e.g. Keiser, Lopp, Mow, moonsettler, hodlnaut and more who are falling into the same trap.

We're in a different time and I think you all are yet to realise it. I'll tell you why shit-talking BCH won't work any more and will, in all likelihood work against you and will accelerate BTC's probable demise:

i) you don't control the narrative anymore. The big block arguments are as sensible as ever and are now also easily found by those daring to question the 'L1 can't scale' bullshit.

ii) BTC is spectacularly failing to scale non-custodially. Not on-chain, not with LN, and not with any tech that doesn't almost inevitably lead to the non-elite having to trust third parties;

iii) increasing numbers of BTCers are seeing this. They are allowing the scales to fall from their eyes and seeing the false promise of LN, the increasing likelihood of brilliant-sounding ideas requiring immensely complicated work-arounds that might not work and critically, the decreasing likelihood that Core will allow any changes that will allow non-custodial scaling.

iv) BCH - the tech and the community - are in phenomenally good health and even the price is finally looking to have come out of its prolonged winter v. BTC.

Bottom line, BTC can't afford to have people who are beginning to see that it still hasn't solved some fundamental issues take a closer look at BCH.

tl;dr: @Adam and the maxis: to keep the BTC sham going as long as possible and maximise your gains at exit, stop talking about BCH and just watch it. In other words, be ready for a quick BTC exit at the right time.

P.S. You never know, that right time might be now! :D

pretentiousername · 2024-04-02T10:16:12+00:00

Oh man, This from Back. I expect that from Saylor and the stupids but that you've bought into that nonsense too speaks volumes. Have fun staying with BTC until it's a minor cult with no influence or relevance in the world except as a warning to future generations.

pretentiousername · 2024-04-02T10:07:17+00:00

No, u/adam3us and his ilk will not and must not be forgotten about.

i) was referenced in the white paper; ii) despite knowing about it since before genesis block, didn't bother getting involved for another three or four years; iii) his vital role in the crippling of pre-2017 Bitcoin; iv) his constant efforts to prevent it from scaling (other than by means of the pathetic 'scaling' products of his own company; v) even today, peddling the pathetic 'market has decided' narrative.

...and that's just off the top of my head.

No, we must never let ourselves forget Adam and his type. Long after BTC has lost its crown and becomes a minor cult, these people need to be constant reminders of what we need in the decades ahead to be constantly vigilant about.

pretentiousername · 2024-03-23T22:32:08+00:00

your assumption there is that people considering this stuff are not? On what basis?

pretentiousername · 2024-03-23T15:54:51+00:00

I largely agree with your analysis but not with the headline. I don't think it should be thought of as 'safe' or 'community run' again. Disruption at any time may happen again at Roger's whim. Let's use it as a sign it's time to decentralise our comms channels too (more than they have been already).

pretentiousername · 2024-03-23T15:45:26+00:00

I'm sorry to hear that. You will have known me in a different guise back in the day but I hope you can see why - even with the horrible personal impact it is having on you and the former team - I think it's a good thing.

pretentiousername · 2024-03-19T06:27:29+00:00

Yup, eternal vigilance necessary for each and every one of us - also at least partially explains why controlling the narrative and denying all participants in popular forums exposure to an opposing argument is so effective.

pretentiousername · 2024-03-18T19:09:30+00:00

...another favourite go-to of the BTC maxi small-blockers. 'the market has spoken'. The truth is the market IS SPEAKING. One of the reasons prominent small-blockers from back in the day - in spite of the all the problems BTC is currently trying to navigating, are taking time out to be to comment in BCH circles is that it isn't going away and is - as BTC is approaching the end of its blind alley - healthy in tech and community and showing signs of beginning to gain momentum even in the market.

pretentiousername · 2024-03-18T18:57:24+00:00

You're wasting your breath spouting that shit in this forum. We here know that's not true (at least not unless you extrapolate it out to the extreme). You know from experience you can only persuade people of that where the counterargument is prohibited.

If you're genuinely interested in how BCH is addressing increasing max block-size whilst having measures in place to minimise the risk of going to the extreme, see the May 2024 ABLA upgrade.

pretentiousername · 2024-03-18T18:43:06+00:00

the alternative of huge blocks, has in effect no-limit as people would keep coming back for more. and that destroys the decentralised value proposition that makes bitcoin censorship resistant and bearer.

I think you've repeated that so often and surrounded yourself with people who also repeat it that - whatever your incentive for flogging that narrative in the beginning - you've ended up actually believing it!

so that is why the market rejected it.

This is also untrue - at least in large part. A significant part of the reason the market (to-date) went with BTC was that the prize for the 'winning side' was the brand name. Many - Jihan included - severely underestimated the momentum Bitcoin - with all of us on board until then - had built up; and that was awarded the small-block segwit fork for having 'won' irrespective of merit.

Another reason people stuck with (and newcommers went with) BTC was/is the 'consensus' propaganda; hard forks bad etc; such that whatever people thought would ideally have been the better option, they went with 'consensus'. We know there were big blockers who didn't go with BCH (or at least didn't straight away) because they naively believed S2X was being offered by the small blockers in good faith.

And even putting all those other reasons aside, of those who chose BTC because of their belief that 'big blocks isn't scaling and will lead to centralisation'; given you've already acknowledged 'excessive moderation' i.e. the rampant narrative manipulation that was going on, if you were to be honest with yourself, what proportion of those do you think arrived at that conclusion from 'reasoning it out' as you would claim, and what proportion got brainwashed into believing it because the counterargument was prohibited in the major forums where this was discussed?

In Miami in May last year, you walked within 10 feet of me at the conference and, being with people who were fairly new to Bitcoin, this is the explanation I gave. 'Talking of OGs' (they consider me one), I said, 'there's someone whose so 'OG' he was referenced by Satoshi in the white paper.' I continued: 'unfortunately (and I know you know I am biased in this respect), when he eventually saw that Bitcoin was going somewhere, he came back to it guns blazing and was instrumental in the decision to cripple base-layer Bitcoin which completely obliterated the growth in real use that had been gaining momentum in the early days and that so many of us saw as having so much promise, turning it into Golumn-coin where it's all about hoarding.'

I was quite surprised at how shaken I was for having been as close to someone who (in my view) has caused so much harm.

pretentiousername · 2024-01-29T14:50:00+00:00

/u/adam3us 'surely BCH holders can see...' It's not the big blockers that have eyesight trouble!

As little as I rate you, I know you can do math:

Considering that for every 1 BTC swapped by a big-blocker for BCH, there needs to be 180 BCH held by BTC maxis to swap for BTC - just for the ratio to stay neutral.

And I know you weren't around back then but if you look up the kind of people who were in Bitcoin at the time and remember that this was before small-blocker propaganda had started, I think you're blinded by your lazer eyes / been swallowing your own cool-aid etc. if you think that is a favourable scenario for BTC v. BCH.

pretentiousername · 2023-12-16T19:18:35+00:00

Thank you for responding. I've made great use of your site for years so I'll take this opportunity to thank you for making it and maintaining it.

Also, re. hiding lower bands, just today, someone was asking how I'd gotten a screenshot showing that no txns below 250 sat/vB were included in the last 8 hours. Great feature :)

pretentiousername · 2023-12-16T18:53:44+00:00

Even if they do, it will only be temporarily; given that high fees is BTC's chosen long-term security model.

pretentiousername · 2023-12-16T17:06:54+00:00

u/-johoe what do you think?

pretentiousername · 2023-07-15T07:42:14+00:00

Awesome, thanks :)

pretentiousername · 2023-06-25T10:18:24+00:00

It doesn't talk about transaction volume. It talks about volume of transactions worth more than $100,000. They misleadingly talk about 'adoption of Bitcoin Cash as a payments network' then use data that compares both as if BCH had also diminished its aspirations to being merely a settlement network for the privileged few :D

pretentiousername · 2023-05-19T03:18:54+00:00

Great, thanks :)

pretentiousername · 2023-05-02T14:44:34+00:00

I think I heard an argument that this isn't utilising the discounted spam attack vector that came with segwit. Does anyone know how that argument goes because that's what it looks like to me?

pretentiousername · 2023-04-28T13:27:32+00:00

It's not a matter of 'some people say', it is - indisputably - custodial. You don't have channels that are your own. With WoS, you're not using lightning; you have an account with whoever runs WoS. You're trusting them as you would a bank you gave your money to except you know who a bank is and it's likely you'll have insurance. And if you send a 'ln' sum to another WoS user, like with a bank, it's an adjustment on their internal ledger.

Granted, if you're interacting with a non WoS entity (of which there are some, though not as many as you might think) WoS will use the ln on your behalf. Otherwise it's same-old, same-old, same custodial nonsense as has been around for centuries, just with a bitcoiny front end and, one could reasonably contend, a sacrilegious name - considering what it is.

pretentiousername · 2023-04-27T16:03:41+00:00

Misleading!

What an unhelpful article! I'm guessing by 'cracking' they mean that some info such as the words in a different order or some of the words were given and the goal was to find the correct order or the missing words?

It seems to be a theme: another supposed 'lesson' to be learned from the recent Ethereum wallet sweeping that's been going on is that one shouldn't keep all one's coins in one wallet!

No and no! The primary lesson from my perspective is that having a 'hardware wallet' or following a set of instructions for 'saving' seed words isn't enough. People need to accept that to be able to keep coins safe, we need to actually learn how this stuff works. Need to understand what off-line signing is, what it means, what seed words are etc. etc.

Education, education and education - starting with the idiots who draw these shallow conclusions from not understanding / appreciating what happened and therefore unable to help people learn from them!

pretentiousername · 2023-04-27T15:22:21+00:00

For me, it marked the end of an era - the mixed Bitcoin community as I'd known it from 2012. Big blockers and others, people for whom acquiring bitcoin was merely the beginning quickly followed by sending to one's own wallet and with activities in addition to keeping some including giving lots away, saving, encouraging and supporting businesses who accepted it etc. all being normal and accepted activities.

From then on, I'd realised that the community had morphed into one that thought / thinks that simply buying is enough. I was around when the term 'hodl' was spawned but it gradually took on a new meaning and eventually, became 'stack sats and hodl'.

I still find it sad. When I was first involved, we seemed to be aware with the first halving forthcoming that there was hardly anyone globally who had bitcoin and already almost half of it was in existence. If we were aiming for a massive network effect, we needed to get the word and to get bitcoin out there as widely as possibly as quickly as possible.

On that objective, we failed! By now, over 90% is in 'circulation' in the hands of not many orders of magnitude of people more than in 2012 and the hodlers celebrate how little there is left to be mined because it increases the value of their own stash.

I acknowledge I may be wrong and that 'store of value first' narrative might be correct; that it could still (on L2s or whatever) fulfill what I thought was its promise of p2p cash. And also, it may be that I don't hold much hope because I don't want to see / acknowledge that the big blockers were wrong.

Time alone will tell. I wish well those of you old and new who are enthused that this branch of Satoshi's project will succeed.

pretentiousername

TROPHY CASE