In the many years since getting on this wild and crazy ride, the one thing that has been most firmly demonstrated to me is the primacy of confirmation bias coupled with an unwavering faith-like conviction in righteousness can lead people to some particularly pathological and repetitive thought patterns. When cognitive dissonance kicks in on a mind with a predilection for double-think that verges on virtuosity, the rhetorical knots and re-evaluations that the subject can end up tying themselves in so that they don't end up discarding those articles of faith can be truly breath-taking.
Case in point, one Luke-jr. Well known Bitcoin Core developer. It is not particularly reaching at this point to say that he is somewhat controversial, and if I had to pick a single poster child for this kind of behaviour from all the people I've ever met, it would most certainly be him. You see the pattern repeating over and over again;
Central article of faith which must not be questioned.
Absolutely stunning levels of rationalisation to dispel uncomfortable cognitive dissonance.
Bland statements from said rationalisation as if they were uncontroversial fact stated in public venues.
Priceless looks of absolute confusion from anybody that isn't on that particular crazy farm.
Loss, rather than profit.
One of the most amusing cases in point for this particular sequence can be found in his steadfast opinion that the earth is the center of the universe, and all celestial objects actually orbit us.
It has been about 4 centuries since Fr. Nicolaus Copernicus suggested a paradigm-shift from Geocentric to Heliocentric [now A-centrism] as an explanation of “how the heavens go”. Those who suggest that Sacred Scripture tells us only how to go to heaven & not how the heavens go must be dismissed by the fact that Scripture makes a number of references to “how the heavens go” & a number of those support Geocentric. It is also a matter of Church history that because of those references, the Fathers & Councils of the Church – prior to the aftermath of the Church’s Galileo affair – were geocentric. Church decrees against earth movement have never been abrogated or reversed by any ecclesiastical pronouncement, although opinions have not been in short supply.
The Aether is real
The consensus of scientific research seems more in favour of the geocentric theory.
The re-application of the above thought process to the question of "What is Bitcoin?"
Which, folded out into our lulzy form and applied to the present situation, looks like this
Then did he raise on high the Holy BitCoine of Antioch, saying, "Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy." And the people did rejoice and did feast upon the lambs and toads and tree-sloths and fruit-bats and orangutans and breakfast cereals ... Now did the Lord say, "First thou set the Holy Block limit. Then thou must count to one million. One million shall be the number of the counting and the number of the counting shall be ONE MILLION. TWO MILLION shalt thou not count, neither shalt thou count FOUR MEGAWEIGHTS, excepting that thou then proceedeth to ACTIVATE SEGWIT. FIVE MILLION is right out. Once the number ONE MILLION, being the number of the counting, be reached, then lobbest thou the Holy Block of BitCoine in the direction of thine foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it."
It's full nodes which define what Bitcoin is, not the """consensus""" of mining nodes
Since Satoshi's original scaling ideas were found to be impossible, Bitcoin has adopted a direction of using more advanced off-chain tech to accomplish the original goals. BCH, on the other hand, wants to do everything on-chain, and so far has just been ignoring the problems
The creator of the system in question pointed out back in 2008 that only people trying to create new coins would need to run network nodes.
And the final and most recent example of this, once again from the people who bring us Bitcoin Core;
Lightning is a decentralised second layer solution to scale Bitcoin transaction levels.
“Decentralisation” is whatever core says it is, the massive hubs forming on the staked and routed lightning network in production are absolutely nothing to be surprised by or concerned about, because it’s still decentralised.
In the sense that as long as nobody attempts to attack the clearly forming choke-points, and nobody actually relies on the decentralisation in question to accomplish anything with regards to resistance to those attacks, either from state actors or other, it is totally decentralised, because you could always just open a channel from your side of the network to another side of the network to a person you don’t know and have no relationship with and no way of knowing about, and then stake that route on both sides for each individual transaction. This will require allocating capital for every single trade relationship you have in order to avoid those centralised hubs, but that’s OK, because you probably don’t have to worry about avoiding those centralised hubs in the first place, because who on earth would attack bitcoin? Also, the alternative is those enormous centralised mining pools, and that is totally not decentralised.
You see , there is a huge difference between large hubs and large mining pools. If a mining pool refuses to include your transaction in a block, another pool will. In the case of hubs, you can only be serviced by the hubs you have an open channel with, and since your money can't be in more than one place at a time, your money will be divided up to the extent you have channels open with multiple hubs. ...and you can't simply move your money from one channel to another because that requires an on-chain transaction
But the lightning network’s got what bitcoin cultists crave. It’s decentralised.
Now, to be scrupulously fair. This particular malfunction is not limited to this particular specimen. It is quite the human foible, and the breathtaking degree of the mental contortions cited here is actually due to the wild gyrations of a mind agile enough to even end up at these incomprehensibly ridiculous conclusions to begin with, much the way only the particularly limber Romanian gymnast with the double jointed shoulder blades is the one who manages to get herself out of being chained up in the cellar of the psycho who was looking for gymnasts for a "classy photo-shoot" in the rough part of town to begin with. But, well, she only ended up in that situation because of being a particularly limber Romanian gymnast in the first place!
In the cryptocurrency world, there are a lot of particularly limber Romanian gymnasts. And they all have their own ideas on "What Cryptocurrency Is". And they're pretty damned sure that they're right, and they'll go to whatever contortions are necessary in order to ensure that their vision retains primacy. And the longer you remain in the space, the more you realise actually the amount of visions that when sufficiently contorted Bitcoin could indeed apply to is much larger than the one you may initially have thought was validated by the citation in the genesis block referencing the present financial crisis.
Want to destroy states and central banks? Well, that's a fairly obvious interpretation of the intent of the instrument in question. Much like a sword could be construed to be an instrument to cut, so fine. But even that interpretation is not objective, it’s your perspective, maybe it was the creator’s perspective too, even. But that won’t stop the sword from being wielded for a different point.
But what if instead you wanted to turn that sword into an instrument to enslave the masses more thoroughly to states and central banks? Implement a panopticon style financial system where everything you ever did, said, bought, whatever, was etched in electrified amber for all the world to see, for all time. Where the forces in control of the system in question exercised absolute power over that ledger, and the consensus rules, by installing a political council that bought unyielding fealty from a class of adherents whose lives were changed by being bestowed with heretofore incomprehensible levels of financial freedom and power, and all they have to do is kneel? Couldn't happen? Are you certain? Software is value neutral, an electron has no more of a conscience than a bullet. It is of no consequence to the machines upon which we operate if we live a million years or die tomorrow. They simply do the mathematics and give us the results. If we choose to interpret those results to mean global slavery rather than freedom, that is on us.
The ride, unfortunately, does not stop there.
Roko's basilisk does not have to be an artificial intelligence. It can simply be a sociopathic rational actor who sees the world in its present state as in absolute collapse already, and the things that said sociopathic actor may have to do to build what they perceive to be a better world by contrast would be an inestimable improvement on the present state. These are just a few of the possible outcomes of this particular experiment. And for those of you who imagine that you can simply ignore this experiment, and the world will proceed as it has for the past few hundred years since the peace of Westphalia, with your particular consensus rules remaining unaltered, no matter how the balance of power shifts on our particular consensus rules, I would encourage you to consider the evolution of the importance of decrees from kings and associated defunct power structures pending the advent of the instruments which invalidated said power structures, and what this implied for those who held said decrees as of the utmost importance, and unalterable in scope and nature.
This experiment, the direction in which it proceeds from the multitude of available potential internally consistent options, is down to the participants in this system to ascertain. If you're not in the system, you don't have stake, then you don't get a say. You will have as much impact on the course of events as a random field peasant has on the affairs of the forces of the revolutionary guard, and the governance structure which they employ after they have dispatched with their predecessors. It might turn out nicely for you, it might not. Is that something you want to risk? For those still on the sidelines, I encourage you to "get with the program". This method of organisation is not going away, it competes too well with the previous one, which will soon possibly be extinct, and the only way to ensure that your interests matter is to participate. I strongly encourage you to do so.
Waoooo! Keep it up you will get more fame.