eddie13, fork you! You forking forker. I simultaneously laughed aloud, and vomited a little bit in my mouth.
Please link to the Wright photo from which you got that face. I want to use the same one, and take my own shot at this. My mind’s eye en
visions something to get the message across to people who deeply trust the police, embrace ubiquitous ID checks that “keep people safe”, yet also quote Orwell and brag about how lucky they are to not live in a police state like those nasty Easteurasians. (I know plenty like that. How?
Doublethink.)
Maybe I'm warped but I never saw any type of 'threat' in the first place. He's a ludicrous shit heel backed by a pervert who've attached themselves to a fork of a fork.
72 hours ago, I could and would have written that first sentence.
Two seconds of googling would give anyone with a functioning mind an immediate overview of the fountain of diarrhoea they've spouted since turning up.
Two seconds of effort is too much to expect from the average person. The “functioning mind” part is an assumption which, like Craig Wright’s Satoshihood, is backed by zero evidence
and contradicted empirically.
If a supermajority—no, a bare majority—no, even a
significant plurality of people had the will and ability to research facts and think for themselves... If even that plurality
cared about freedom... Then, tyranny in any form would not exist in this world. Now, take two seconds to look around you.
Contra popular delusions, the “consent of the governed” is not a political theory that must be imposed: It is a natural reality that is unavoidable, even to the most ambitious of tyrants. Regardless of iron-fisted tactics, any régime that lacks the consent of the governed will fall within a what is a
relatively short span on historical timescales; and it will meanwhile suffer internal instability.
Vide the Soviet Union. The mere existence of stable, tyrannical régimes that last through the course of generations is proof positive that those tyrannies has at least the tacit, passive consent of the governed. Collectively, people do get the government that they deserve—much to the dismay of the few dissenters in their midst.
Limiting myself here to only a few issues: All Western democratic régimes today have slave-level taxation, fiat monetary systems based on debt and inflation, mass surveillance, and all those other lovely features that Bitcoiners oft complain about. I can summarize these issues in simple terms, in 5 minutes, to anybody who will listen—probably you can, too. But few will listen, and fewer still will take the mental effort to
understand. (Never mind taking great personal risks, as is necessary to actually change anything.) Thus do these “features” have the “consent of the governed”.
I have observed that otherwise smart, freethinking people tend to fall into the nearly-universal trap of assuming that others are like them. I here speak from experience. Fully escaping that trap requires a level of detached objectivity that almost no one can achieve—perhaps one in ten thousand or fewer.
It’s obvious to
you that Craig Wright is a liar, a scammer, etc., etc. Now, step outside yourself. Go beyond objectivity: Get into the heads of millions of grinning idiots happily living on Facebook between obedient daily stints at wage-slavery, and subjectively evaluate the world from their perspectives.
You now have an IQ several standard deviations lower than your own, but that’s the least-important difference. (IQ is important, generally. But I know many high-IQ, highly-educated people who are slavishly devoted to the chains that bind them.) You have a near-total lack of motivation to actually
think, especially when your thoughts may reach unhappy conclusions—or worse, when you risk the cognitive dissonance that may result from questioning your pre-existing beliefs. Happily for you (in the sense of ignorance being bliss), you have a habit of forming “opinions” by copying thoughts which
feel like they have social approval.
Congratulations! You just bought BSV, beaming with sophisticated excitement about how you are on the cutting edge of “cryptos”! You also nodded your head autonomically,
unconsciously, when you saw a TvFacebookYoutube talking face tell you that measures K, Y, and C are needed to protect you from drug-dealing child-pornographic terrorists using Bitcoin on the “darknet”. Because,
tax evasion.
At this juncture, one must descend from the ivory tower, and speak in short, simple, emotionally evocative sentences peppered with smileys—sandwiched between pictures that will melt your heart into a puddle of tears.
gmaxwell’s above post struck me like a lightning bolt, because I did not evaluate it by looking at the world through my own eyes. I stepped outside myself, then took a hard look at Craig Wright through the eyes of people who are not me. People who are dumber, less reckful, more careless, and vastly more numerous than I am.
I thereupon concluded that the obvious clown show of BSV is an existential threat to Bitcoin, and to all that Bitcoin stands for. It was not unlike that moment when you realize that the latest American war based on made-up non-facts is going to happen anyway with millions of people cheering, and somewhere in the world, safely hidden behind the TV screen, people who did nothing wrong are going to get blown to smithereens because of it.
Bitcoin and its community are adaptable to meet and counteract such threats. But it will not happen if we ignore them. I observe that in 2017, BCH and S2X failed to destroy Bitcoin through well-funded simultaneous attacks from multiple directions. I further observe that in 2017, the Bitcoin community was not laughing and brushing it off—people were angry; they saw the threat.
