In the beginning there was Bitcoin. People collaborated around Satoshi's ideals and all was good.

Then people started disagreeing if Bitcoin could scale, and some forked off into Bitcon Cash to pursue on-chain scaling. While the group was smaller, things were good again.

Then Faketoshi came around and gathered a following. Some people tried to make amends, but the group still went ahead with their "hash war" and forked off to their own chain. The group grew smaller again, but things were still pretty good.

Then some people wanted to make improvements again, backed up by some juicy research, but the Benevolent Dictator said:

Hmm... No, we're gonna do it my way. If you don't like it fuck fork off.

And the group got worried that it would get smaller again, and things weren't so good anymore.

Forking is the fail-safe, but it guts the community

Forking is a wonderful thing. It's the mechanism that ensures that if a cryptocurrency is taken over by bad actors, or if it stops following your ideals, as a last resort we can always fork the chain to go our own way. We don't have to compromise if we don't want to.

But there's a big downside to forking, and it's gigantic.

When the chain forks, the community forks as well. A fork hurts the most important thing for any cryptocurrency, namely the network effect. People, projects, price and general mind share go separate ways, ensuring that both sides of the fork lose.

Just look at the history of forks. Sure we have the forks that nobody use, which does no real damage, but then we forks where a sizeable part of the community split.

When the BTC/BCH split happened, many people left BTC for BCH and took their money, their projects and their support with them. Even if you may not like him, Roger Ver has done a lot for Bitcoin adoption and he took his company and his funds to the BCH side. Or how in BCH we have several wallets and full node clients that are exclusive to BCH. Or the various places in the world that are now adopting BCH instead of BTC (I've used a few of them myself).

BTC lost something important in the BCH split.

Even if I absolutely loath Craig Wright and I'm glad I don't have him in our community anymore, other people and projects left for BSV when they split from BCH and they are valuable.

BCH lost something important in the BSV split.

While it's good that the ability to fork exists, a fork where a significant part of the community split is among the worst things that could happen to any cryptocurrency, and it should be avoided at (almost) any cost.

Chicken

The game of chicken is a game between two players. The best outcome is if one player yields, but none of them wants to because they want to win (and avoid being called a "chicken").

For example a game where two people are driving a car right at each other. The one who swerves away first loses and is a chicken shit, but if none of them do then they'll crash and fucking die.

ABC plays chicken during network upgrades

Since the creation of Bitcoin Cash ABC has had an approach to network upgrades that's exactly like the game of chicken.

It boils to them announcing what features they're going include before anyone else has announced anything, and then don't budge an inch. (They rip out the steering wheel while the other player is watching.)

They say:

Follow our lead, or fork and split the community.

It's also what they've done repeteadly on issues large and small, ranging from rejecting BU's OP_GROUP proposal (support for miner verified tokens) to choosing our currently broken DAA, going against the opinions of all other developers in the community.

History's repeating itself with ABC announcing that they're moving forward with the Grasberg DAA, despite everyone else agreeing that another algorithm is better. In the following discussions their response has been that they've already decided, and that the BCH community is not their customer. (Yes, Amaury really did say that.)

ABC are again playing chicken. If they win they get to activate changes of their choice, but if they lose the BCH community will lose badly.

So far the other developer teams have always folded and have followed ABC's lead. BU dropped OP_GROUP (and later on the improved proposal GROUP), because they decided (correctly) that splitting the community over the change wasn't worth it. ABC won the game of chicken against BU.

BCHN has gotten some flack on social media by ABC supporters that they want a split, but the opposite is true. Even if IFP would've activated, BCHN would follow the IFP chain. Despite BCHN being fundamentally opposed to the IFP, they recognized that splitting the community would be worse so they went out of their way to avoid the split. ABC won the game of chicken again.

They say actions speak louder than words, and ABC's actions say that they don't put the interests of the Bitcoin Cash community first. ABC prioritizes ABC above else, and don't seem to care that their actions might split the community.

If they really did put the BCH community first, they would drop Grasberg to avoid a disastrous split.

The BCH community is in a lose-lose scenario

Now the BCH community is in a really bad position. Because if they call out ABC on their bad behaviour, there's a really high risk that there will be a split. ABC don't seem to care, so there will be two different consensus rules and therefore it's extremely probable a split will happen.

But if the community always gives in and lets ABC do whatever they want, and in effect let Amaury become the dictator of Bitcoin Cash, there will also be dire consequences.

A lot of great developers have already been chased away by ABC, which will continue happening. For example the talented developers who are working on the other full node clients, or Jonathan Toomim who wrote one of the most well researched proposals in BCH history (where he suggests a DAA algorithm for this upgrade).

We'll also start activating poor technical solutions, such as the previous DAA and Grasberg, which means we'll start to lag behind other competing cryptocurrencies on a technical level.

(See my previous article of why Grasbergs hurts the sound money properties of Bitcoin Cash.)

But what's even worse is that we'll essentially give up decentralization, the absolutely most important thing for a cryptocurrency and the one thing that differentiates it from PayPal or Libra. There's just no way we can claim that we're truly decentralized if we have a dictator who can push through any change he wants.

(Like messing with the emission schedule or redirect the blockreward to themselves. Or maybe take something from Vitalik's playbook and censor transactions.)

Then what should we do?

A split sucks and letting ABC to unilaterally dictate the protocol also sucks. Anything we do will suck in one way or another.

Maybe if we could convince most users and miners to switch away from ABC, maybe to BU or BCHN who have worked to keep the community together, then a split might suck less?

Alternatively we could just give up the idea of decentralization and declare that decentralized cryptocurrencies were just a pipe dream.