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by CryptoPunk
2820 days ago
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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. |
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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.