Echo Chamber Effect

"Ripping out a man's tongue doesn't prove he's a liar; it lets the world know how scared you are of what he's going to say."

― George R.R. Martin

On November 8, 2016, the world shuddered at the success of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Pundits, the press, and politicians sat in shock, asking themselves how they could have been so wrong. They thought the presidency was a sure thing for Hillary. But for anyone who had been following the presidential campaign (that is, anyone who thinks for themselves), Trump’s victory was not a surprise. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat their mistakes, so when Bitcoin eventually suffers the inevitable block size increase and hard fork, I worry that the egos of certain members of the Bitcoin community will lead to the destruction of another great hope.

In a brilliant election piece on the dangers of refusing to learn the lessons of Brexit, Glenn Greenwald cites his own work from July:

Rather than acknowledging and addressing the fundamental problems within, [elites] invest their energies in demonizing the victims of their corruption, all in an effort to de-emphasize the grievances of those victims and thereby evade their own responsibility to address them. This behavioral response feeds into the idea that the meritocracy is hopelessly toxic and self-serving. Without discernment, the meritocracy will not be reformed but destroyed. Instead, the only certainty is that there will be more “Brexits” and “Trump wins” in our shared future.

The upcoming hard fork will be another “Brexit” and a “Trump.” This should come as no surprise to those who have been paying attention, those who have ignored the hype and the flowery rhetoric claiming that half of their community is a “cesspool,” and those who still listen to the opposition on Twitter.

For those of you who have secluded yourself into your cozy little anechoic chamber, patting each other on the back and looking the other way at the less fortunate - you are going to get hammered. And that is nobody else's fault but your own.

You elect valuable members of your community. It's not enough to simply disagree with them, no. You have to restrict their freedom, silence them, discredit their reputation, and destroy whatever little influence they have left. Rather than speaking up, or wondering if you'd be happy if it were you who was in charge of an issue.

Anyone who wants to show that they care, is wondering if what you are doing is right... well, you give them the same treatment. Again, if you can't face reality, you still don't know what you are doing.

You are content to read media reports that agree with you, but you dare not challenge yourself. You pride yourself on your higher-level thinking, but fail to perform any basic tasks that a critical thinker should do.

You cling to the comfortable security blanket of complacency and use it as proof that you are always right. Rather than questioning where the voices of discontent have gone, you are glad they have been forcibly removed from your sight. Out of sight, out of mind.

But hey, idiot (as Greg likes to say): we're not going anywhere. We're always here. Before we were banned for the twelfth time, we sat next to you in meetings, started conversations with you on Twitter (if you hadn't blocked us), tried to tell you what was going on in extremely dangerous posts on your own turf. But you still wouldn't listen. You called us trolls and buried your head deeper in the sand.

The downside of isolating yourself in an echo chamber is that by intentionally limiting your access to useful information, you deprive yourself of the ability to make smart decisions - decisions based on real social facts in business and in your community.

The first great dash of your hopes has already begun, though you may not realize it yet. The entire Core mechanism is in the earliest stages of total collapse. Those who intervened with the civilian population have once again become rebellious, having had enough of the abuse and ridicule you have treated them with in the ritual.

If SegWit fails to launch, it will be your second great dash of hope. This thing that was conceived as the Advent of Jesus, the thing that saved you from your fear of bigger blocks, the thing that you bet everything on, will not end with success, but with you whimpering. The excitement you feel now is like the Clinton campaign on the morning of November 8th, thinking victory is imminent. As the results come back from each country, and the goals are reset every two weeks, your hopes will gradually fade. You will cling to the most minute logic, looking like MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki and his magic drawing board (which can draw any possibility), frantically trying to come up with a scenario where you can still win, even though it is obvious that failure is imminent.

When mining pools start running different software, that will be the third and final hope dashed. By then, the end result of this process will be clear, even for you.

Unfortunately, it may be too late to save yourself, because the damage has already been done. Your technical solution is so intertwined with the tyranny that the merits of your work no longer outweigh our dissatisfaction with you. However, all tyrannies will eventually be overturned, and the collective delusion you are experiencing now will not be realized until the system functions perfectly.

The disheartening result of all this is a huge loss of what has become a momentum, away from the primary goal of the Bitcoin movement. It will be a big job to rebuild, but we must rebuild. For we are not your enemies, but your compatriots, and we will welcome you back. Let this be a lesson to all of us.

John Blocke fully recognizes the possibility that he may be wrong, and this proves that distributed and leaderless movements are best managed through censorship and exclusion rather than autonomy and inclusion. But what do I know?

Translator's note: The echo chamber effect refers to a media phenomenon. When two competing events are happening in a closed system, one of the parties receives a lot of media support, and its information, ideas, and beliefs are amplified by the media, and the media keeps reporting on this party. The other party on the other side is not supported by the media. However, the former is just an echo, and the only people who really speak out are a small number of people. The momentum is an illusion created by the constant echo. The real power comparison behind the competition has not been discovered by the media.

This phenomenon played out with Brexit and it played out again with Trump’s presidential campaign.

The author of this article uses this effect to describe the current controversy over block expansion in the Bitcoin community. On the surface, Bitcoin Core still has the support of the vast majority of computing power, but the author believes that this is just an echo effect, and the power that truly determines the outcome is silently waiting for the decisive battle.