[uncletammy]

There's nothing wrong with layer 2 as long as they aren't try to pass it off as a scaling solution. If it isn't on-chain, it's not Bitcoin.

> Maybe so do bigger blocks, for now, but certainly at the cost of decentralization

You seem to think that BTC, a coin with a single client implementation controlled by a handful of devs, some of which are employed by a company who's value proposition is in direct conflict with Bitcoin's success, is decentralized. It is not. It couldn't be further from it.

There is a reason Bitcoin Cash is still around and surrounded by drama in the same ways Bitcoin used to be. It's because everyone who was fighting to make Bitcoin "magic internet money" got tired of being censored and forked off in an attempt to fire those few core devs getting in the way of progress. I would recommend you start by reading about the censorship. The censorship is the only reason Bitcoin Cash exists today.

[beaner]

Bitcoin cash isn't censored. It has its own subreddit (and the rest of the internet) where discussion can be had about it.

Equating "censored in r/bitcoin" with censorship in general sort of proves that it's mostly about politics; you want to be uncensored _in a specific private community_. If BCH can stand on its own merit (and hopefully it can!) then you don't need that. Those who think it does need that aren't trying to make BCH successful, they want to control Bitcoin. And so it makes sense that people with those motives should not be allowed.

Layer 2 is a scaling solution, I don't see why it wouldn't be.

[CryptoPunk]

You're right that there is nothing anti-free-speech about censoring a private forum like /r/bitcoin, but the purging of big-block voices from the subreddit was unethical nonetheless.

Countless long-time Bitcoiners who helped popularize /r/bitcoin, and more generally, Bitcoin, suddenly saw their posts advocating for a hard fork deleted, and eventually saw their own accounts banned.

When this purge happened, pro-fork posts were overwhelmingly popular, and absent the intervention of the moderators to restrict advocacy of Gavin's hard fork efforts, the hard fork would have gone through with majority support.

The closing of debate on /r/bitcoin was a betrayal of everyone who entrusted its mods to oversee one of the community's most important communication channels.

>>Layer 2 is a scaling solution, I don't see why it wouldn't be.

He provided his rationale: transactions on L2 aren't Bitcoin transactions. Perhaps respond to his rationale instead being obtuse.

[beaner]

> the purging of big-block voices from the subreddit was unethical

I don't know why. It clearly became a distraction at some point, and so the mods took a side and enforced it. I don't think that's unethical. A specific private sub is under no moral obligation to allow every opinion to be heard. It's intentionally a curated space.

> When this purge happened, pro-fork posts were overwhelmingly popular

Sort of, but this is also kind of what I mean by "populist" movement, and why I don't feel bad about this "purge".

Real development of bitcoin happens on the mailing lists and on github. Everyone is free to contribute and that never changed.

r/bitcoin is just a place for people with opinions, mostly people who don't contribute, to air their mostly uneducated points of view.

If the split had support, it would have happened economically. There's no reason that r/bitcoin specifically would be the bottleneck to such a change. There is so much real estate on the internet, ideas truly have no restriction. If the voices on r/bitcoin at the time represented real node votes, the nodes would have switched. I don't see how being blocked on r/bitcoin would have prevented that.

> and absent the intervention of the moderators to restrict advocacy of Gavin's hard fork efforts, the hard fork would have gone through with majority support.

I just don't buy it. There are too many other outlets.

> The closing of debate on /r/bitcoin was a betrayal of everyone who entrusted its mods to oversee one of the community's most important communication channels.

r/bitcoin was never one of the community's most important communication channels. I'm sorry, but it's _reddit_. As stated above, important communication channels include but are not limited to slack groups, IRC, mailing lists, github, twitter, etc. r/bitcoin was never "important," it was (and still is) the pop magazine of crypto, like everything else on reddit.

I would go so far to say that the outcry over reddit specifically, instead of over all those other resources, sort of reveals the type of person who is hyping the big-blocker narrative. If it were a lot of developers or contributors, the important channels would have seen a surge of such support, too.

But it was mostly armchair economists who don't hang out in the actual development streams. They think reddit is where everything happens.

> transactions on L2 aren't Bitcoin transactions

Yes they are. They're just deferred, aggregated transactions over payment channels which are essentially compressed and broadcast at channel closure.

[CryptoPunk]

>>I don't know why. It clearly became a distraction at some point, and so the mods took a side and enforced it. I don't think that's unethical.

It was a legitimate perspective about a core issue facing Bitcoin: how to scale, and the vast majority of the subreddit's users were supportive of that perspective, given pro-large-block posts were consistently on the front page of /r/bitcoin with numerous highly upvoted comments made under it.

To label it as a "distraction", because it's not the perspective you hold, and delete all voices holding that perspective on those grounds, is highly disingenuous.

Your attempt to rationalize eliminating an entire perspective from /r/bitcoin through comment deletion and account bannings is typical of the totally unethical behaviour behind the Core coup.