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    BTC How I was brainwashed

    February 23, 2018

    BTC How I was brainwashed

    How I was brainwashed

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 08:34 PM PST

    I have to preface this with the fact that I've known about bitcoin for 5 years, but never really knew the specifics of how it worked.

    "You now enter a journey from which your soul may not return. Don't say we didn't warn ya. The back button is up and to the left. Like yourself the way you are? You might just want to press it."

    Back in the day, bitcoin for me was new, cool, and seemed really promising. The biggest reason it attracted me was the pseudo-anonymous payments I could make, and it was fast! Admittedly, these attributes were qualities I liked because it opened up a whole new subterranean jungle of deep-web drug markets that I had no idea existed. This was such a cool 1-2 years in my life, I felt like I was a part of some kind of resistance making history, and I'm certain I'll always remember the adventure. Of course this was merely a phase for me, and after I had grown up and finished my experimenting, there was no reason for me personally to use bitcoin anymore.

    It wasn't until summer of 2017, while at my job, I was helping a customer free up some storage on his phone, and I noticed some bitcoin wallet apps. Who can resist bringing it up, even if you haven't used it in years?! Well, we had an awesome conversation and have been great friends ever since. Hereinafter I'll refer to him as Z. He was really into bitcoin and had been 'holding' it for a number of years, with an impressive profit at that.

    This was the first phenomenon I never knew about. People are actually hoarding this stuff and betting on its future. It definitely made sense to me, but back when I was using it, it never crossed my mind; everyone I knew back then was actually buying stuff with it, and not to mention most of my friends were too young to understand investing or didn't have enough capital to comfortably purchase some and forget about it... the whole frenzy with the price hike due to China in 2013 simply only fueled our uncertainty. As far as we knew it served one purpose and that was digital "anonymous" cash.

    So, back to summer 2017, Z tells me he's come back to town to retire, and he doesn't know any people interested in crypto. I initially become a "wall" of sorts to bounce ideas and interesting news off of. I wasn't hooked yet as I had other financial priorities for a little while. But as we kept talking over time, the idea of buying in became more alluring, and the price started steadily increasing faster than it ever did before, and right at the beginning of October I couldn't resist any longer, with a leap of faith I threw in some money. It felt weird to be investing in what was to me, 'money', but it brought back the excitement I remembered in a whole new way.

    This was the second phenomenon that was new to me. There was a vast variety of exchanges to buy bitcoin, and there were even some new players on the scene. Also I could link my bank, along with other features. I never had this versatility before, years ago I had the convoluted process of buying bitcoin from Virwox and getting rinsed by fees, because it was the only way I knew to get coins with Paypal, ha.

    As I now had a stake in the race, and a paying job unlike my earlier experience, really getting to know bitcoin and how it works was more relevant for me, as a 'holder.' This marked the beginning of surface-level, and mostly harmless skepticism. Giving a bunch of my personal info to an exchange started dawning on me as counterintuitive of the spirit of bitcoin's pseudo-anonymity, and it turns out I don't own my private keys... yikes. As I accumulated bit by bit, a hardware wallet started becoming a worthwhile purchase, another new phenomenon for me. But I'm so glad I got one. This healthy level of distrust was encouraged by Z, and he would keep me in the loop with news.

    Up until then, I was still a noob, and although I was more interested in the tech, I didn't spend a great deal of time on it. That started shifting the closer mid-December approached, every day there was a new ATH, and I started telling my friends about the good ol' days. Some of them joined the ride and it got me doing more learning.

    This is really what marked the terrifyingly covert controlling and manipulation of my mind. It began with Z, as I grew to know him, it became more and more obvious that his seemingly harmless paranoia was not just an eccentricity. He was forwarding me FUD links about price crashes, government bans, fork FUD like how "Roger Ver and friends are all scam artists." He kept telling me that anything else besides bitcoin is never going to survive, etc. It turns out Z had lost a lot of his profits, something he never really mentioned. He was prone to fomo and dips, classically buying at ATHs and selling lows. He confessed that he actually lost about half the coin he started with, which is crazy considering it consists of 90% of his retirement money.

    Things seemed to be relaxing for me from my internal perspective, but the real brainwashing was now activating. I realized I need to stop listening to Z, and sort of stop taking bitcoin so seriously, in my mind it was much easier to hold and chill, and watch the show. What better place than Reddit, right? Hmm, it looks like /r/bitcoin is much more of a shitshow and a hypetrain for my amusement, and even has some 'serious' posts, not to mention the sub is more active than /r/btc.

    That's how it all started. After the ATH mania cooled off, I felt more involved with the crypto-movement having gone through an emotional and historical ride, so I began learning about the future developments. It's unfair for me to insult my past self for being naive enough to have blind faith in the /r/bitcoin users, after all, I had no idea it was a censored echo chamber. It's designed that way on purpose. I still had a busy life, so I would read a little bit about stuff such as the lightning network, like "it's going to add smart-contracts and make transactions instant" and move on with my life and not think twice to give it a closer look. I never knew it was already supposed to be activated over a year ago.

    Fast-forward to yesterday, one of my best friends is telling me about this concept called coloured coins. I'm totally fascinated by it, seems like such a cool optional feature with little drawbacks, and it actually creates an incentive to spend coins in a hoarder's market! Oh hey, it's a revived concept from earlier days of bitcoin? Even cooler! He tells me: "Yeah, exactly, it's more incentive to spend, that's why bitcoin cash is bringing it back." Without any good reason, I'm suddenly unreasonably suspicious. If I weren't such an open-minded person, and if he wasn't one of my trusted friends, I think I would've instantly dismissed him and rolled my eyes. But with a bit of resistance, a very small piece of me said what the hell. The idea of coloured coins was cool enough for me to hear him out, I asked him what would be stopping bitcoin from rendering bitcoin cash's concept revival obsolete in a future upgrade.

    Then he drops the bomb on me, without even knowing it. He tells me that the bitcoin core team is all fucked up, reminds me that the transactions are slow and expensive... I say what about the lightning network? It's a sham he says. There's absolutely no reason a best friend, one who is intelligent, and cares about me, would bullshit me over something so trivial to our friendship, so my mind is suddenly hugely conflicted. As much as I trust him, I suddenly realize something really fucked is happening, and I need to do my own research. There is an invisible battle going on, and only later would I see that one side is fully aware of it, and on the other, only a small handful.

    I fell down a rabbit-hole of investigation.This internal conflict initially felt like, honestly, a mild psychosis, and as I discovered more, everything slowly started making sense. This shit was doublethink, straight out of Orwell's 1984. I started finding out the truth of myths like: bitcoin-core team being a huge collective, is actually a small group of around 10 devs all connected through a couple organizations -- organizations such as blockstream that have direct investments from financial institutions and services like mastercard. The block size was kept at 1MB intentionally to keep fees high and transactions slow, so the core team could create or more accurately, deliver a product to their investors in the form of infrastructure off-chain... the lightning network, the perfect model to centralize, monopolize, and record transaction data... i.e. future-proof the banking system. Everything bitcoin stood against. Roger Ver isn't some kind of scam artist, and even if he is, who the fuck cares? He isn't even responsible for bitcoin cash.

    It was unhappy miners. Unhappy because they saw bitcoin becoming an investment/store of value, i.e. moving against a digital currency. This is when things really clicked for me. I started realizing why bitcoin didn't feel the same as it did when I used it years ago. The title of the original whitepaper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" not "peer-to-peer electronic gold." I can't even pinpoint when I started calling bitcoin 'a store of value' I seemed to subconsciously convince myself it had always been this way. I was even treating it as an investment myself, holding onto it; after all, how would I spend it with the ridiculous fees and slow transaction times? Even though when I first discovered it, it never even occurred to me to be anything else but digital cash.

    Bitcoin-core enjoys the undeserved status of a church, claiming to be the resilient extinction-proof perfected coin with a diverse development community of veterans whose only mission is solidifying its sustainability and doing what's best for all of its users. It has this status only by virtue of a hijacked legacy. This is why so many will continue to believe that bitcoin cash is an alt-coin. Nothing could be more ironic or backwards. Bitcoin cash is magnitudes closer to what bitcoin's trajectory was years back, an actual peer-to-peer electronic cash system. The truly depressing reality of this is that bitcoin cash is considered to be an insult and attack to bitcoin core, when it's actually a struggle to preserve the history, integrity, and elegant genius of the original path. Newcomers to the scene aren't going to realize the dangerous path bitcoin core is headed, they weren't around to see what it used to be. It's a really unique kind of sadness to me.

    I sincerely only wrote this with the intention of providing a portrait of what it's like for somewhat of a newcomer like me to go through. Although this is a success story, I think a lot of people will remain oblivious to what's being done to their mind. It's not fair to them, and I feel sorry. I'm not even here to shill bitcoin cash as an alternative, however it's simply important to recognize that the existence of bitcoin cash is now the best evidence one has to show the catastrophic damage and direction bitcoin core is suffering and headed towards. It's not responsible to pretend like these poor manipulated people deserve what's coming to them, no matter what currency you support.

    "Without separation of church and state, it is easy be for a democracy to indulge itself in arbitrarily irresponsible misgovernment, simply by telling its bishops to inform their congregations that black is white and white is black. Thus misdirected, they are easily persuaded to support counterproductive policies which they wrongly consider productive."

    If you are skeptical and want to check things out further yourself, I highly recommend this well-compiled list by /u/thepaip

    Thanks to all you guys fighting this out there, you are reaching some of us.

    Edit: didn't really think i'd have to prove I didn't pay for my reddit account... i don't really have a footprint because I just like some privacy. But I get that some of you are skeptical of my lack of (deleted) posts and I can't blame you, especially considering the nature of the topic. So I tried my best to compile some stuff to verify myself? Anyway can't say I didn't try hope the effort means something https://imgur.com/gallery/nzovb

    submitted by /u/fotion
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    Gavin Andresen has a great sense of humor!

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 10:53 AM PST

    PSA: The new address format added ambiguous characters that Satoshi purposely left out

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 10:28 PM PST

    I was trying to accept a tip, but the bot wasn't accepting the address I sent to it. After investigating I realized what I said in the title. My phone wallet was clearly showing me a "1", but apparently it was actually an "l". It took me long to realize that because I always assumed the new address format kept Satoshi's idea of not using amibuous characters. But apparently I was wrong.

    inb4 "why would you type an address?"

    Because some setups don't have a camera, can't have a camera, or shouldn't have a camera for security reasons. Other people might have other reasons.

    I remember one of the reasons people gave for the new format was "more error checking!". But I thought you guys were saying we shouldn't type it? So why should we care about more error checking?

    In my opinion, utility has been reduced here. The new format may have other benefits, but in this particular case they messed up by adding ambiguity.

    submitted by /u/WiseAsshole
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    Say Hi for adoption! Venezuela To Go Full Crypto; All Coins To Be Accepted For Payments

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 05:41 PM PST

    BTC Mempool finally clears out after 3 months transaction backlog and they be like.... lmao

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 11:04 AM PST

    Yet again! Ross Ulbricht's Post-Conviction Relief Extension is Rejected

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 08:50 PM PST

    Request : Rick Falkvinge OP_GROUP

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 07:11 PM PST

    I really want to see a good video from Rick Falkvinge on OP_GROUP

    May or November and why ?

    submitted by /u/CityBusDriverBitcoin
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    Bitcoin Cash is King

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 10:13 AM PST

    Whats the deal with r/bitcoin

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 05:32 PM PST

    I honestly don't know could someone enlighten me? I got banned for suggesting that bitcoin might be in a multi month downturn.

    submitted by /u/perfoverlaydrawfps1
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    Opcode proposals for Bitcoin Cash introduce tokening functionalities

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 07:21 PM PST

    Switzerland embraces digital currencies and crypto-entrepreneurs

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 10:00 PM PST

    Addressing an emerging sentiment amongst some of our community

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 03:58 PM PST

    In todays Bitcoin community, both online and in person, I have been consistently hearing some variant of this sentiment: "r/bitcoin is a crazy place, I haven't visited that forum in years! Look at what the people there are saying. They must be literally insane to believe this shit." Also, just as a testament to how consistently this line of thought is employed, even though I have not explained exactly what the "shit" is that I'm referencing, I'd be willing to bet a bit or two that there is a general understanding of what I am talking about. (If not, please ask!)

    Just to get the obvious out of my head, characterizing the tone of a censored forum is a catch 22. The topics and tones that are highlighted in r/bitcoin cannot be used to reliably analyze the sentiment of that community. What we are seeing is a carefully cultivated stream of information that has been allowed past the filter. As we know from countless posts highlighting this, there's just as much unseen filtered content that stands in stark contrast to the crazy "shit" that has come to characterize that subreddit.

    One question I'd like to make to our community: are the individuals who consistently visit/comment and post to r/bitcoin wrong for doing so if their routine is based on incomplete information? This question clearly ignores the actual paid trolls and abusers who day and night harass the communities found here and on twitter regardless of their own personal beliefs.

    To visualize this question, envision a hard core Bcash-ist who has gathered all of the cryptocurrency information they know from forums like r/bitcoin. Their community's icons and orators are people such as Tone Vays, Whale Panda, Fluffy Pony, Samson Mow, Adam Back, Greg Maxwell, Luke-Jr and so on.

    While it is relatively easy to counter the arguments made by individuals such as our example extremist with facts and evidence, it is easier even still to forget that the person behind the persona could well be ignorant of the fact that they have been misled and misinformed. If this ignorance is present, logical counters to their arguments may well go unnoticed by the extremist not because of lack of logic but because to them it simply does not compute. Often times, individuals like this have had their fundamentals warped by carefully calculated talking points and FUD.

    My own personal answer to this question: No, it isn't wrong of them, but I'll be damned if it isn't upsetting to see the extent of how common this issue is. I believe that we all owe Bitcoin a great deal of time, energy, and dedication. Deriving how exactly these resources are applied to it becomes the individual responsibility of each of us. But even more still, I am of the opinion that our community owes something to those people that have found themselves caught in the misinformation campaign of r/bitcoin. While we would do well to disregard those who cannot or intentionally will not hear what they have been deliberately deprived of, we would be wise in equal measure to address the newcomers and upstarts who have begun their Bitcoin journeys in gloomy places like r/bitcoin.

    submitted by /u/A_Recent_Skip
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    You want another reason to join the Bitcoin Cash community? We got the music makers ... because we have a dream worth dreaming.

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 09:47 PM PST

    Alexa, what’s the price of Bitcoin Cash?

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 12:44 PM PST

    Anybody know if Overstock.com accepts BCH? They accept alt-coins through shapeshift, but it appears BCH is not an option in the drop down.

    Posted: 23 Feb 2018 01:47 AM PST

    Daily Discussion - February 23, 2018 (2018-02-23)

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 10:27 PM PST

    This is the daily thread for today. Feel free to talk about anything pertinent to /r/btc. Sort by New to see the latest comments.

    submitted by /u/MentalRental
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    Mike Maloney is a big blocker

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 08:08 AM PST

    The War Within Bitcoin - Mike Maloney

    Which if you looked close enough in this video you would've already known

    submitted by /u/dementperson
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    Could/will colored coins have different address prefixes? Is that something that might even be a good idea?

    Posted: 23 Feb 2018 01:52 AM PST

    I was thinking about this on my way to work.

    We created the whole idea of address prefixes to avoid people sending coin A to a wallet that expects coin B. But it seems to me that we're recreating this problem with colored coins.

    My thinking was, what if I created a new colored coin called A Beautiful Coin ABC, maybe I could use an address prefix of beautiful:/abctest:/abcreg:

    So, once again, is this possible? Is this planned? Is this something that would even be a good idea? I have no idea what the technical implications would be, so I'm interested to hear your opinions.

    submitted by /u/smurfkiller013
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    Transaction rate and fees on Bitcoin Core

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 11:53 AM PST

    Ask BTC users when tipping is coming back

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 09:29 AM PST

    I've been told twenty times in the last two weeks that BTC fees are low now, everything is fixed, and now there's no reason for Bitcoin Cash to exist. And now today the mempool is finally clear.

    Of course nothing could be further from the truth. BTC fees are low because BTC usage is low now. A few things have been done that make marginal improvements to the number of transactions that can fit in a block but none of these makes anything like an order of magnitude improvement. These are not silver bullets. Essentially nothing has changed, and as soon as demand and usage rises again, BTC blocks will fill up, the mempool will be congested again, fees will rise as everybody scrambles to get their transactions in a block (many people will be scrambling to get their BTC onto an exchange so they can exit), and we'll be back where we started because nobody ever scaled BTC.like it needed.

    So when somebody tells you everything's great with BTC again, ask them when the BTC tipbots are coming back. You know why, and I know why, and truly they know why, too: because BTC can experience the same problems again at any time because it didn't scale.

    Meanwhile the rest of us keep demonstrating how Bitcoin Cash is phenomenal and invulnerable and that the blocksize should've been raised a long time ago so that Bitcoin can work. Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin. Deal with it.

    Enjoy the next mempool rise.

    submitted by /u/WalterRothbard
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    My Cryptonize.it purchase, everything went well!

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 04:36 AM PST

    The point in following "the Satoshi vision" isn't to blindly follow a mythological figure but to have a clear road map, otherwise bch will end up like the btc project and will divert from its original path - it's sort of like having a CONSTITUTION.

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 01:06 PM PST

    Mike Maloney is a fan of Roger Ver (2 min video)

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 09:08 AM PST

    Jaw-dropping Yachts for Sale for Bitcoin Cash!

    Posted: 22 Feb 2018 05:58 PM PST
    Read more
    at

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