Tone Vays has the ultimate Get-out-of-jail-free card in any and all conversations. The moment anything he doesn't have the competence to talk about comes up, he gets to appeal to not being technical, assert that everybody who knows anything agrees with him, and he wins automatically by completely shutting down the possibility of even having a conversation.
They are masters in logic. In last weeks I was told several times things like this
You don't understand Bitcoin, since you support Bitcoin Unlimited, which is obviously broken, as people like you, who don't understand Bitcoin, support it.
I think the recent drop of Bitcoin's market share of crypto coins is a reaction on the braindrain of recent years. Since Altcoins emerged, Bitcoin ever had a structural braindrain, as you can get faster rich with Altcoins and do more innovation. But in a sane relation, this just makes Bitcoin stronger, as Bitcoin is the god standard of Altcoins and can benefit by learning of Altcoins. But current braindrop is something else. It is rather caused by intolerance, toxicity, trolling, stalling, censorship, dislogic, propaganda, conspiracy theories and so on. It's not really attractive for free minds to participate here.
Some leave, like Mike, Gavin, Jeff, some are on brink on leaving, like Falkvinge and Vorhees and maybe Fenton, finally loosing patience, that Bitcoin will stay what they need / want; most accept, what Bitcoin has become and put more Ether in their bag, like Andreas A. and Coinbase.
On Scaling Bitcoin I talked with an editor of Coindesk. I asked him why Coindesk writes so few articles about Bitcoin. He said, nothing happens. In Altcoin and Blockchain, things are happening, applications build, investments made, startups founded. But in Bitcoin there is not so much news.
Sometime, in late 2015, at a AMA on Bitcoin.com, Mike Hearn said something like: "No, I don't work on Lighthouse, as I stopped working on other Bitcoin application. If you want to work on meaningful applications which need a lot of users to have an effect, Bitcoin is currently just not an option for you. and I don't think it will ever be." When I read this, it made "click". I realized. I guess, the Bitcoin community is divided in those, who understand the implication of what Mike Hearn said, and those, who don't, but are thrilled by the technical beauty of Lightning. If there is no place on the blockchain for new things, nobody will invent new applications. If you want to build any application which requires some thousand transactions a day, you can't bet on Bitcoin. No more growth. In fact, the community reacts with naked hate on everybody who wants Bitcoin to continue growing.
In 2013 if there was a new application for Bitcoin, everybody: Yeah! Let the world use it.
In 2017, everybody: Fuck. I hope nobody uses it as I had to pay more fees if.
It's like we breed a dragon, but don't increase the size of its cage, as our sorcerers are afrait the dragon will break under its own weight.
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Szabo has reached the pinnacle of missing the forest for the trees, greedy reductionism, looking at one tiny thing in isolation without considering the effects on the entire ecosystem and incentive structure. Despite his understanding of other areas, he has become what Frederick Bastiat in 1848 called a
bad economist.
Szabo was a genious foreseeing Blockchain technology in the late 90ties on a deep philosophical level. I never bought the "Nick Szabo is Satoshi" meme, as their style of writing is heavily different. His idea was Bitgold, not Bitcoin. As the current trend is to make Bitcoin not P2P cash but P2P gold, its natural that Szabo sticks with this.
