Anywhere there is leadership, there will be opposition. There will be decisions that someone does not like. A good leader manages these individuals by making them feel heard, and understanding why one decision was made over another. Amaury doesn't do that. He listens, he hears, but then he makes decisions without first talking to his biggest detractors.

This is incredibly unfortunate, because it means every 6 months someone will be upset and start a battle over the decision.

It started right after the 1 August fork. A handful of individuals including Haipo, Jihan, Amaury, freetrader, sickpig, calin, jonald (and many others I'm sure I've forgotten) did the hard work to make Bitcoin Cash happen. There were a lot of other people involved, as Toomim said in a recent post, however they were largely standing around the campfire still trying to come to consensus.

The individuals I mentioned above, found consensus within themselves. They decided to take risks and make actual steps to creating a big block fork. The individuals who did the fork understood that they would be getting a new ticker. They took preparations to buy domains, create websites, get logos made, listed on an exchange, find some funding for development, and lots of other tasks that were required.

Amaury was seen as the lead of this effort; although maybe his influence should have been limited - it was not. However, the people who funded this effort were not looking for control. They did not want to influence developers and largely gave no-strings-attached funding. My hats off to them for their stance of letting decisions be made by someone else.

Now, there were many other individuals who were talking about big blocks, but they did not want Bitcoin Cash as it were.. These individuals were largely hoping to keep the BTC ticker. Many of them only joined the Bitcoin Cash effort after the fact. They did nothing to make it a reality; or had failed to manifest their visions during the previous two attempts to depose the Bitcoin Core development team.

Bitcoin Cash was a peaceful hardfork in an effort to try big blocks and see if it could succeed.

Shortly after these late-comers joined the effort, the first clash of leadership came. Logos had already been chosen, websites had already been set up, but some core proponents, who wanted to differentiate branding, wanted the color changed. There was also a relatively large group of individuals who did support Bitcoin Cash who also wanted the color changed because they wanted brand differentiation.

Brand differentiation was the exact opposite of what the original Bitcoin Cash team wanted. The purpose was to be different, but make it clear that it was continuing the P2P cash vision. It was also supposed to have a logo with coloring that stood out.

A retheme was proposed and was rejected due to color; a compromise was proposed of sticking to the existing brand color. Now, the website that was already set up. The majority of people involved in BitcoinCash.org had already come to consensus around the logo. The few individuals making this initial demand were by far in the minority, but did not want to compromise with those people who had already done the work to setup the website.

The Bitcoin Cash Fund/Association was shortly thereafter set up because of the disagreements over the marketing material that had been created. Singularity87, the individual who set this up received some funding from the various donors to help market Bitcoin Cash. What he didn't tell his donors was that he was going to start a campaign to rebrand everything.

Now, you may or may not agree with his logic. I think it is somewhat compelling, but the other side of the argument was that it was different enough; and still eye catching. A/B testing had been done on logos of various colors and orange is far more easy for people to see. My suggestion at the time was to allow the color to be set, and to put up images of every color of the rainbow. However, Green does not elicit color arousal - it is a background color.

Amaury didn't go with my suggestion. However, I didn't stop helping him, because Bitcoin Cash is more important to me than petty squabbles over the colors of logos. If we build a good product, Bitcoin Cash will be successful regardless of logos - and better logos will come and go in the future.

However, instead of contributing to the existing effort, and allowing the branding to stay orange until the BCF was able to persuade the other participants in BitcoinCash.org. They BCF started a new website which they started a paid advertising campaign for in an effort to make it the primary digital property for information about Bitcoin Cash.

The disagreement was not primarily over color, but over who gets to make decisions about the color.

Now, imagine someone goes up to the owner of a house and says "Hey you need to repaint your home!" The owner responds with "No thank you, I like the color it is." Then they go try to lobby the neighborhood to forcibly repaint the house because they refused your demands. BitcoinCash.org is property.

However, refusing demands to rebrand your website is not an evil position. And demands from others that BitcoinCash.org's content should be put to some kind of vote by people not working on it is somewhat fascinating. Many people on social media bought in to these arguments.

I bring this history up, because it was the first social fork in Bitcoin Cash. Perusing these comments on github will reveal that many of the same parties have taken opposing positions on every change that has been proposed - or they are entirely gone due to the toxicity of the conflict. There was a significant amount of friendly fire taken by ABC due to the branding, although this specific issue has largely been abandoned.

The social campaign that took place vilified ABC; and you can still see the utterly contemptible posts on r/btc. Many of them make assertions about the motives behind ABCs decisions. This is a common rhetorical technique called poisoning the well. If the main drivers were simple technical disagreements; there would be no need to employ these kinds of rhetorical techniques.

No, the main drivers in these internal battles are not about any particular decision, but about who gets to make those decisions. Malice, and nefarious intent, are attributed to Amaury as a justification for not helping ABC. And you can see this by the “party lines” that have formed.

However, the vast majority of any conflict are never part of an ideological party.  They are otherwise neutral. However, it is unfortunate that a fair number of people have bought into the propagandizing of Bitcoin Cash development and marketing. Amaury has NIH syndrome, he doesn’t listen, he’s mean, etc. I don’t believe any of this is true - I think he’s just a shitty diplomat. He is a software engineer, not a politician nor a manager. He should leave these things for other people to do.

Amaury "became" an evil dictator; even though he was only setting requirements about his own digital property. This continues today. Amaury is only making changes to ABC; he is not demanding that BU, BCHN, Knuth, or any of these other nodes implement the Grasberg DAA.

People say Amaury isn't compromising and therefore is "bad" or "wrong." However, Amaury did implement a DAA due to demands of the community when he believed it was not worth fixing at this moment in time. He also used the algorithm that was shown to work well. He did add some of his own spice to the algorithm - but this is the definition of compromise. The people upset about Grasberg are actually the ones not seeing the steps made towards their position. It is an all-or-nothing demand for ASERT without emission control - emission control that a fairly large group of people either want, or do not care strongly about.

People are claiming Bitcoin ABC wants a fork. This should be obvious. Bitcoin ABC forks every six months so they can make changes towards the goal of enabling world money and digital P2P cash. Nobody is being forced to follow along.

It is the obligation of the disgruntled mob, the same mob trying to convince us all to abandon ABC, to convince me and everyone else why we should continually create chaos. It is not up to Amaury to do this.