First, a little bit of background. I got into Bitcoin by accident in 2012 but only really got into it deeply in 2013. In the grand scheme of things, I was in “early,” but not early enough or in the right places to be particularly influential until 2016, when I started to do more advocacy on social media. I rarely used Twitter or Reddit, but I ran a couple of very large blockchain discussion groups on Facebook (NASDAQ: META) because it was more conducive to un-moderated conversations where censorship didn’t happen. And the only reason the censorship didn’t happen was because I was in charge of those places.
Roger Ver was one of the very first people whose content inspired me about Bitcoin. Well, he and Adam Kokesh, but he was more my brother’s connection. I discovered some Andreas Antonopoulos content in that era, too, but I heavily preferred Ver’s tone and Socratic style of asking questions and soliciting the underlying root of matters—then there was the fact that he was (and is) a serious Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner—which was my other weird subculture that I was heavily involved in at the time.
When the Bitcoin Civil War started heating up, I got very into it, and I got into lots of Facebook wars with small blockers. I also got heated with people at the Bitcoin meetups that I had grown to love. In person, everything changed from a culture of people who wanted to change the world with a P2P cash system, and it (d)evolved into constant grand-standing about macroeconomic jargon and talk about “number go up.” This led to me forming the Chicago Big Blockers Meetup, which became the Chicago Bitcoin Cash Meetup, which turned into a BSV Meetup. For a time, I was working with Bitcoin.com (Ver’s company) to educate people about Bitcoin Cash’s place in the Bitcoin Civil War, and I enjoyed working with those guys.
When the BCH Hash War led to the emergence of BSV, I was at a crossroads. I felt very much stabbed in the back by former friends, and I had to reassess my feelings about Ver because BSV was so obviously the version of Bitcoin that he had been fighting for as long as I had followed his work. I ended up being a BSV supporter to see if I could help usher in a truly unbounded version of Bitcoin to the world, and so somehow, I split from my favorite big blocker because he chose to advocate for smaller blocks and a soft protocol. Wild…
Not long after this all happened, Ver went on a very long hiatus from social media (presumably to write Hijacking Bitcoin,) and it was hard that he was gone. Even though we found ourselves on opposite sides of the big blocker politics, his voice in telling the truth about Bitcoin’s subversion was sorely missed.
Now that I have disclosed my history on the subject…
The book
Hijacking Bitcoin is very well written. It gives an evidence-based and truly gut-wrenching retelling of the Bitcoin Civil War, full of verifiable and well-sourced quotes from the people involved on all sides of the discussion. On the one hand, reading it was liberating as a reminder that I am not crazy in my recollection of the extreme amounts of subterfuge and toxicity that undermined the Bitcoin experiment by the likes of Gregory Maxwell and his surrogates. But on the other hand, it feels like I imagine it must feel for Polish refugees to read a first-hand retelling of the invasion of Poland by the Nazis and then by the Soviets. It feels good to be represented in print, but it is also nauseating to relive memories of the devastation of places, people, and things that you loved.
The bizarre thing for me, personally, is that I hadn’t realized just how much my own work on the subject of the Bitcoin Civil War was echoed. In fact, across 99% of the content, it felt as though I could have written it myself, both in content and tone. This isn’t a…
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