Bitcoin Cashers Up in Arms as They Accuse Craig Wright of Leading a Shill Army

“This subreddit is absolutely INFESTED with Craig’s shills!” So starts one of many posts in r/btc where a campaign has been on-going to persuade onlookers of ABC or SV.

“His army of shills use psychological projection and gas-lighting. When you call these shills out, they project that YOU are the shill, and are trying to destroy BCH.”

So says a long time Bitcoin Cash supporter with the emphasis all his. As if to prove his point, shill he was then called, but a shill who last year celebrated the BCH fork by giving much of it away must be of a very special kind.

“**** CSW and his shills – they are ruining this sub,” says another very long time BCH supporter. While one of the most upvoted post of the week says “We are under a social attack.”

An old article by Forbes comes handy, titled: “Reddit Is Being Manipulated By Big Financial Services Companies.” It details 21st century PR where “word of mouth” is faked by pretending to be a redditor or an ordinary online poster.

Studies have found that where it comes to say what product to buy, people trust the most other people, especially the ones they know, and even random redditors. Certainly far more than PR companies. So the simple solution, obviously, is to pretend you are one of the trusted.

“Put a fork in ABC v18.0. It’s Done. Game Over,” says someone called etherbird. Username does not checkout because he has no post in ether related subreddits with all of them being in r/btc, at least for the past few days.

So social media managers might be at work and their favorite point is that hashpower decides. No one seems to have given Bitcoin Cashers any talking points, so their reply for now is yes, but.

They could follow that but by saying hashpower can double spend, and if 51% of such hashpower is under the control of one individual, then it is an attack not a decision.

Yet they could say many things, but no one really seems to be arguing the ABC side. It all instead appears to be either you agree with Craig Wright (CSW) or you don’t.

Why this man has gained any say in BCH is a bit of a mystery because he is effectively arguing with a proposal by Gavin Andresen, the lead dev of bitcoin until 2014.

Andresen has been focusing on scalability for now years and one efficiency gain he came up with was Graphene. That requires canonical ordering for the highest level of compression, but it does gain much compression even without canonical ordering.

ABC devs say they planned canonical ordering for months. They had discussions with all other devs, all seemed to be in agreement, so they coded it and prepared it for the upgrade in November.

Now it is ready to go. Why should it not? Well because Craig Wright started having a hissy fit, threatening to take all his patents and leave. Vitalik Buterin was impressed and effectively told him to not let the door hit him on his way out. Yet some others talk about unknown unknowns, as if this is some sort of philosophy 101 seminar.

There were no concerns over such unknowns until Wright pretended he knows how to code Hello World, but multiple implementations means multiple teams and that means a bit of competition which can lead to some small tensions. Tensions someone like Wright can exploit.

ABC devs say if they remove canonical ordering, then Wright would complain about op_checkdatasigverify. The latter appears to have complete consensus, but Wright says:

“We have patents on this and related techniques pending – so, you add DSV [op_checkdatasigverify] and you hand the base protocol to us.”

Now if they remove that as well, then maybe he’ll say you need to increase the blocksize to 128MB. If concerns are raised he’d probably say forget about all that code stuff, who cares about 32MB message limits.

In other words, who cares about all that is proper, let’s just have a clown show with patents and all the other nonsense. Something he is free to do in his own coin, not BCH.

Whatever some might say, BCH has respect from those that matter. The fork was not attacked, even though it could have been. There were words, but not really by anyone of care. The level of support it gained, because it had a respectable reason to split, is shown by the fact it is now in all of bitcoin’s infrastructure, including Coinbase, including BitPay.

A clown coin would command no respect. A BCH where Wright has any say in protocol development is not really BCH any longer. He is free to split, however, that’s the right of all.

Yet as far as the non-nChain clients are concerned, nothing appears to be intrinsically political about canonical ordering, so if there is a proper technical point to be made, it’s unclear why it wouldn’t be discussed in an appropriate manner with a conclusion reached that satisfies all.

By discuss we mean in technical spaces, not on reddit. Maths is not up to public debate. It either is secure within the reasonable levels of such conclusion, or it isn’t. Either it has efficiency gains or it doesn’t.

If ABC devs are right that there was consensus among all devs on canonical ordering prior to Wright’s hissy fits, then those devs might want to re-consider their more recent positions in light of what looks like a probable chain-split in November.

If they wish to go with nChain then obviously that is their right, but otherwise, this implicit backing of some over the top criticisms of ABC isn’t very healthy.

Obviously if there is a good reason for it, then that is why there are multiple implementations, but splitting hair to score points while there’s someone waving his patents might not be too wise.

Copyrights Trustnodes.com