This was such a frustrating listen. Patterson’s dishonest debate tactics, such as shrieking about @Guy Swann “interrupting” when he was just trying to finish a sentence after Patterson’s own interruption, prevented @Guy Swann from making some obvious points.
For example, at one point, Patterson complained about how @Peter Todd killed 0-conf. This is incredibly ironic, since (1) the only “security” that 0-conf may have had was because of node policy, and Patterson dismisses nodes as irrelevant, and (2) Todd killed 0-conf practically by himself outside of Core, not as part of the “Bitcoin Core Developer Cabal” that is in the Bcashers heads.
That is a good segway to object to Patterson’s continual reference to “Bitcoin Core Developers” as some kind of monolith. There are plenty of contributors, such as Todd and @Luke Dashjr, who basically answer to no one and do whatever the hell they want, and there are maintainers, who, when they are doing their jobs right, merge code from contributors after they assess that the changes have achieved rough consensus, have received sufficient review and are technically sound.
Another missed opportunity came with the topic of “censorship”. By early 2017, though a chainsplit had not occured yet, the camps were completely polarized. This made conversation on any Bitcoin topic devolve quickly into a flame war between small blockers and big blockers. This forced the *moderators*, not censors, to start moderating, or their forums would become unusable. That the most popular forums were run by small blockers was simply a reflection of this being the majority opinion amongst OGs and plebes.
Trying to explain why BTC won the hash rate war, Patterson can only muster the weak hypothesis that most of the miners, being Chinese, are culturally submissive and therefore deferred to Bitcoin Core developers’ authority. How this applies to the tiny minority of 1 billion chinese who chose the risky business of bitcoin mining, no one knows. The obvious counter within that collectivist framework, is that the miners were deferring to the authority of the consortium behind the New York Agreement and the malicious Jihan and then they stopped once there was massive blowback and Jihan blinked.
By far the most infuriating part of this debate is how Patterson can get a way with complaining about small blocker dirty tricks while holding up Gavin, Hearn and Roger. These three individuals where most responsible for enabling Craig Wright’s relentless lawfare against developers. The hypocrisy of complaining about small block censorship while trying to drive commentators like @Peter McCormack into bankruptcy is incredible.
This is not a knock on Guy. Patterson, while being completely wrong, is incredibly smart and a skilled debater and philosopher. I don’t even think he is being deliberately dishonest. He just has this massive blind spot that comes from betting it all on the wrong side and now being permanently broke.
Fountain
Liberty Lockdown • Michael Saylor: Genius or Madman? FIERY DEBATE w/ Guy Swann & Steve Patterson • Listen on Fountain
Today I have on Guy Swann of Bitcoin Audible and Steve Patterson who co-authored his latest book with Roger Ver titled Hijacking Bitcoin. All three...
