How conflict theorists think

Friday, July 3rd, 2020

This wasn't the article I was planning on writing for today, but in the BCH world, life moves fast.

Yesterday Shammah Chancellor posted an article sharing what he remembers of how the DAA was implemented:

https://read.cash/@micropresident/a-story-of-how-amaurys-broken-difficulty-adjustment-algorithm-came-to-be-776afff3

It's a great read, and I highly recommend it to anyone who cares about the future of BCH protocol development. As the famous saying goes: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

In addition to his article providing a ton of information, it was also serendipitous in that it cleared up the questions I'd been asking myself regarding mistake theorists versus conflict theorists.

The truth is I was still struggling to understand the way a conflict theorist views the world, but now I have been given a perfect example to demonstrate how they differ from a mistake theorist like myself.

For me, one of the things I value most is learning and gaining knowledge. I believe that education is key to improving oneself and others around you. When I read the article by @micropresident , I read it first and foremost for the information it contained. The question of who had written the article was only important in verifying that this was someone who had knowledge on the subject he was writing about. (For those that don't know, Shammah Chancellor was a member of the Bitcoin ABC team during the early days of BCH until he left for reasons I won't speculate on here.)

If an account of these events was written by someone else who was directly involved that contradicted Shammah's article, I would also read that article as objectively as possible in an effort to gain information that I can then use when making my own decisions.

Skim through the comments on Shammah's reddit post found here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/hkbf5r/a_story_of_how_amaury_broken_difficulty/

What struck me when I did was that there are those who read the article and found it informative and useful. Then there are those who struggle to see the information being presented simply because they are opposed to the person presenting that information. As some might say, they just want to REEEE!!!

Now I think I finally understand how a conflict theorist views the world. They are convinced that the people who oppose their views are not to be trusted no matter what. They could care less about the information being shared and care only about who is sharing it. While the mistake theorists in BCH believe that increasing the intelligence of all parties involved is the best way to solve the community's problems, a conflict theorist believes that the problem can only be solved by increasing their passion and having more people join them to fight against the opposition. But what kind of plan do these people have for BCH outside of trying to follow the roadmap that ABC put together? So far all I’ve seen is them taking things away.

I am hoping that the BCH community is filled with more mistake theorists than conflict theorists. I hope that those who contribute the most are able to read Shammah's article and use the information he presented to avoid repeating those same mistakes.

Some may argue that I'm in the "Amaury cult" and can't see straight. I doubt I have any chance of convincing them otherwise, but if you were to search through old Telegram chats, you'd see I was not a fan of Amaury at first. I even wrote an entire article about changing my mind about him here:

https://read.cash/@Cain/the-benevolent-dictator-b531593d

But as a self-proclaimed mistake theorist, I continued to gather information and my views can always change based on that information.

Shammah's article has reinforced my position regarding Bitcoin ABC because of the information presented. Should someone write an article in opposition to his that makes intellectual sense, I could change my mind, but until then, I can't help but continue to support Bitcoin ABC.

Some have recently brought up evidence based development as a strategy for moving forward. As someone who doesn't read code, the only evidence I can rely on is that which I'm able to understand. Over the past couple of years, I have watched plenty of videos and interviews of Amaury. To me the evidence is clear that he is as knowledgeable about Bitcoin as anyone else in the space.

Then came the IFP (which didn’t pass) and the backlash, and suddenly I'm supposed to believe he didn’t know what he’s doing? At the same time I’m supposed to support his opposition when they have so far given me little to no evidence that I should listen to them over ABC?

As an example, I recently discovered a 2 part interview of Amaury From 2019, and as usual, I came away feeling I learned something. I’ve linked them at the end of this article in case you haven’t seen them. Can you point me to similar videos that might convince me to listen to those who oppose him?

Despite what some may say about ABC’s output so far, here is a simple graphic that serves as more evidence that they’ve definitely gotten many things right.

And if you’re asking yourself who is Shammah Chancellor and what evidence can you show that he is worth listening to? Stay tuned for a future article I’m putting together to preview a special project he has been working on for the past year called Stamp: https://github.com/cashweb/stamp/releases/tag/v0.0.2-alpha.7

I don’t know about you, but I choose to follow builders, not protesters.

Here are the interviews I mentioned earlier: