In a five-minute video blog this week, Roger Ver compared violent leftists to Bitcoin maximalists, concluding that they share tactics and ideology.
Is It Okay to Punch a Bitcoin Cash Supporter?
A group of “Antifa” or anti-fascist demonstrators recently beat up a journalist, which has reignited the conversation around “free speech.”
Ver then discussed the “punch a Nazi” meme or the question of whether or not it’s okay to punch a Nazi. Touching briefly on what happened to a journalist at an Antifa rally, Ver gets to the point: the same group thinking, violent mentality deployed by Antifa is prevalent among Bitcoin “maximalists.”
For years, Ver has asserted that moderating on Reddit and BitcoinTalk amount to “censorship” of dissenting views. Ver has always believed that increasing the block size was the first and most valid way to scale the Bitcoin blockchain.
Gradually, a philosophical divide emerged between Ver and other veteran members of the community. Over years, these groups solidified into “big block” and “small block” camps.
Each has enough people to form a “community,” and that’s precisely what they did in 2017, with the establishment of Bitcoin Cash.
Bitcoin Cash’s foundation was as much about network congestion and block size as it is about the “censorship” that Roger Ver refers to in the following video.
Roger Ver: Violent, Suppressive BTC Supporters
At this point, Ver has spent a significant portion of his life promoting Bitcoin and investing his life into it.
When he noticed that ideas he agreed with were being moderated off of the discussion forums, he became infuriated. That anger continues to today.
Both sides of the debate have been right in some respects.
On the opposite side of the debate, people always said that you could fork the chain, and create your own communities. Ver and others have done exactly that, with the alternative Bitcoin subreddit and Bitcoin.com.
Ver’s comparison of Bitcoin maximalists and Antifa is based on the idea that Bitcoin Core supporters have used “bullying” tactics to marginalize opposing views. Whether this is true or not, when the Bitcoin Cash split took place in August 2017, miners stuck with the small blockchain.
For whatever reason, they did, which makes Bitcoin Core the original version.
Bitcoin Cash went on to have its own split, for philosophical reasons again.
The question is, how valid is Ver’s assertion?
Antifa, by and large, are extremists. They don’t support a mainstream vision.
Bitcoin maximalism, while extreme, is relatively mainstream in crypto finance.
It may signify that a lot of people have narrow minds, but these people aren’t “fighting the power” in the crypto space. If anyone could be given that credit, wouldn’t it be Roger Ver and friends?
Well, that’s for you to decide, reader.