Bitcoin Scaling's Western Front of Propaganda - Outsider's Guide to the Bitcoin Subreddits

A Tale of Two Bitcoin Subreddits

Outside Steemit, there are much more hostile, but also (temporarily) more well-trafficed areas such as Reddit where people still go to acquire something that may resemble either news or confirmation bias, depending on the user's taste.

I used to be a frequent user of Reddit some years ago, but became increasingly disenchanted with the platform over time. Every change seemed to increase censorship and decrease real discourse for the sake of website profit. More and more of the site was devoted to memes and advice animals. Nowadays, there is almost nothing I bother to open the site for outside of the occasional check of the cryptocurrency subreddits for Bitcoin and Ether. Even the trader subreddits, like r/Ethtrader are mostly memes about HODLING.

Also, my "Meme-Free Animals" campaign never caught any upvotes

Oddly enough, thanks to the contentious scaling debate, there are now two bitcoin subreddits, and they are almost diametrically opposed in both style and substance.

In r/btc, it appears most are proponents of improving scalability via larger block sizes, and think that Seg Wit would create off-chain transactions that would defeat the purpose of the bitcoin whitepaper. It is not anti-miner. This appears, to me, to be the less-censored and more open of the two subreddits, currently. Moderator logs are public, but referencing them can catch you a ban.

In r/bitcoin, it appears most are pro-Seg Wit. It appears to be anti-miner. It is approximately 6x larger. Moderator logs are (were?) private.

The saga continues...

For the record, back on the other subreddit, the r/bitcoin reasoning for maintaining private moderator logs (at least in the past) does not pass my smell test (however, I have never been a Reddit moderator or worked with the logs, so what do I know):

Here is an example of the r/btc sidebar. You will note a few interesting things:

1. There is apparently "no government, company, or bank in charge of bitcoin", but there is an "official bitcoin.com" and an "official bitcoin.com store" that they consider mission critical to link you to.
2. They push a mining pool on you very quickly. There are no ads in the sidebar of r/bitcoin, only this:

Now, whether this money was used for productive purposes remains up for interpretation:

"Michael Marquardt, more commonly known as theymos, is a Bitcointalk administrator and Reddit /r/bitcoin moderator. He has recently came into scrutiny for potential mishandling of $1 million of entrusted forum donations, censorship of Bitcoin Xt, an alternate client, and the blanket banning of the posting of his own personal information on bitcointalk, while allowing the personal information of others to be freely posted on bitcointalk. Even moderators of his communities have came out against his unilateral censorship."

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/who-is-theymos-and-what-did-he-do.87/

Here is some of the front-page discourse from r/btc today:

All of a sudden, r/btc seems to want to take up the torch of Craig Wright:

Spoiler alert - debunking this did not take long for user bitusher, but there appear to be plenty of defenders:

Oddly enough, there is both uncensored debunking of, and defense of, Craig Wright:

Some users at r/btc think they are being brigaded:

I came into this article expecting to declare r/btc to be unequivocally the loonier subreddit, and while I think that's still probably true, after sifting through all the muck I'm not sure anyone is clean in here.

I'll let everyone draw their own conclusions on which option they should support for scaling. I personally think that any off-chain transactions would seem to violate the Bitcoin whitepaper by introducing trust, but I would love to hear more in the comments.

If anyone has a better handle on what the heck is going on in these subreddits, please let us know in the comments!