r/bitcoin VS r/btc

For those that are new to the bitcoin community, it might be confusing why there are two separate subreddits for Bitcoin discussions. An uninformed reader may assume that both places are essentially the same thing, but the two are quite different.  

Both subreddits were created to promote Bitcoin discussion and the sharing of Bitcoin news. The boards were created roughly 5 years ago, r/Bitcoin being the older one by a few months. At first, both communities existed in peace alongside each other, but on August of 2015 drama ensued.

During that time, the block size debate was at it’s peak. There were quite a few solutions that were presented to solve the filling blocks, one of them included doubling Bitcoin’s blocksize. The moderators over at r/Bitcoin had strong opinions on the subject, as they wanted to avoid hard forks at any cost. The mods believed that a hard fork would only weaken the network and it should be avoided at any cost. An example of that is the Ethereum hardfork, the fork that was created because of the reversal of hacked funds resulted in two separate currencies – ETC and ETH.

Due to those strong opinions, the moderators began censoring posts that had to do with any talk of block size increase. According to r/Bitcoin those that wanted the block size increase created sock puppet accounts to try and sway the opinion of other readers. As a result, they had no choice but to ban any talk of block size politics that didn’t align with their views. Understandably, many readers got frustrated at the fact that their comments and posts were getting removed which led to r/btc’s rebirth.

r/btc’s subreddit’s vision is to promote uncensored discussion for any topics relating to Bitcoin. Whether it be block size discussion, or bitcoin price discussions, everything is allowed. Furthermore, the subreddit shows transparency by providing a public moderator log that anybody can look at. It will give info if any posts were removed and for what reason, the subreddit still has rules that all subreddits have to follow which relate to spam, abuse, etc.

Currently the disagreement lies in the implementation of SegWit. It is quite a hot subject that has been receiving both positive and negative attention. On the one side, Segregated Witness presents a great way to increase the capacity of Bitcoin blocks. On the other hand, some argue that SegWit will decrease fungibility and in fact create a sort of “debt” in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Each side has valid reasons for their arguments, but at the end of the day both want Bitcoin to succeed.

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