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by swensel 1891 days ago
I would like to support BCH but everyone I talk to who supports Bitcoin Cash comes across as so divisive on this matter. BTC obviously has an important place in the crypto ecosystem. To discount the price growth of BTC and its importance in the overall awareness of crypto to the public seems short sighted. Price does matter. All of these coins can exist.
1 comments

They sound divisive on the matter because for over a decade now they've fruitlessly tried to explain the abject idiocy of backing a takeover attempt by a party whose business model is directly focused around constraining on chain capacity to a uselessly low rate, the lower the better, and the uselessly low rate this attack has managed to constrain it to is barely higher than the throughput of a fax machine. Let that sink in; it's 2021 and gigabit internet in developing countries is not that big a deal for context. Fax machines haven't been "fast" since I was a kid and my hair is white now.

The situation is utterly absurd, and watching it unfold first hand over the last decade has been completely maddening. It is zero wonder at all that everybody subjected to that spectacle is not in good humour about having watched it transpire and the only way people can be surprised by that state is a lack of familiarity with the facts of the matter.

What about the arguments that I've heard that Bitcoin Cash / big blocks allow miners to make more money, and that could be why this whole discussion started in the first place?

I understand the argument that Blockstream has some bias, but it seems like there may be bias on the BCH side as well. If that's not the case, could you explain that in more detail?

Is that actually an argument against something though? If change x allowed devs on the apple store to make more money, why would that be an inherent reason to oppose it, for example? All the arguments that I've heard focused around that angle of attack fail to address this issue; there's nothing wrong with miners making money, and in fact it's the design of the system that they should make money, that's how security is paid for. Even the originator of the BTC permanently limited to 1mb meme admits this and constantly uses it to push his own position by claiming that an artificially constrained chain is necessary in order for a "fee market" to develop so that security is directly compensated by usage, whilst ignoring that the original design was indeed to have it directly compensated by usage, but in volume rather than artificial scarcity provoking a "fee market".

In terms of bias on the BCH side, you could argue that because of conditions after the split they've had to take some hits and make rough decisions in a rocky landscape, but even those I think you'd be hard pressed to really disagree with in light of what the options were at the time. When it comes to pre-fork though no; it's simply unequivocally the case that they were right all along. They were outright censored on the main forums from making the very simple points of both technical and historical fact in support of the position that the goal was always to scale on chain and the math works just fine for it, and even having actually executed that and pushed the BCH network to 256mb blocks on scalenet already, the cultists over on BTC just ignore this and pretend like their position has any more merit than it ever did, constructing progressively more idiotic justifications as time goes by and it becomes clear that their narrative of it being impossible to grow a chain faster than a fax machine is exactly what everybody who knew what the underlying numbers were knew it to be to begin with.

Thank you for providing more details. I actually was in support of Bitcoin Cash around the time of the fork, but after some time, something about Bitcoin Cash and r/btc seemed off to me. Bitcoin Core and r/bitcoin seemed to be the more reasonable folks. Roger Ver's attitude in interviews did not help. If anything, his behavior made me think twice about holding Bitcoin Cash at all. I can see that some people feel this same thing about the Bitcoin Core devs though. Craig Scott Wright and the Bitcoin SV split also didn't inspire confidence in the Bitcoin Cash community for me. Anyway, at this point I'm trying to gather more information to see if it's worth buying back into Bitcoin Cash, so I appreciate this.