In one of his more dramatic tweets, Roger Ver recently claimed:
The censorship and full block policy by Core destroyed BTC’s first mover advantage.
I owned a pile of Bitcoin, and https://t.co/cFvHMJOHpL. I had more financial and philosophical motivation to see BTC succeed than just about any other human being on the planet. The censorship and full block policy by Core destroyed BTC’s first mover advantage. #BitcoinCash
— Roger Ver (@rogerkver) February 22, 2020
Censorship?
I think, in this case, he means just for him. For if he means as a whole, it’s nothing more than a stupid statement.
After all, Roger Ver, for all his merits, lives in a small world where the Bitcoin subreddit was once all that mattered. Ver and other supporters of bigger blocks eventually moved to an alternative section of the site, the BTC subreddit.
Ver and, to be fair, others, claimed that content policies enacted by the Bitcoin subreddit amounted to censorship. r/Bitcoin chose to allow discussion of only standard Bitcoin, eliminating talk of altcoins.
In the same tweet, Ver talks about his Bitcoin holdings, which are considerable. Like everyone else, he was granted the same amount of Bitcoin Cash when the chain went live. In the intervening years, he seems to have bought heavier into BCH, and his Bitcoin.com site serves as a hub for the cryptocurrency.
Censorship did not destroy Bitcoin’s first mover advantage, nor anything else about it. Maybe in the eyes of one investor, who clearly prefers something else, but not to anyone else significant.
The first mover advantage is important when talking about Bitcoin because it largely defines why the cryptocurrency has such a wide lead over everything else that tries to rival it.
First Mover Advantage
Bitcoin’s first mover advantage is why it sits at over $9,000 and Litecoin sits at under $100.
Bitcoin is the most liquid cryptocurrency around, and therefore the most accessible, cryptocurrency in the world. It is also traded on the most exchanges. It is the defining characteristic of the value of other cryptocurrencies: they have to be traded against Bitcoin.
It’s unclear, of course, what Roger Ver is talking about when he says that Bitcoin’s first mover advantage was destroyed. But it’s worth talking about how it wasn’t destroyed by anything that happened on Reddit, and probably couldn’t be.
Ver took the events of Reddit personally. Many people in the community did. The legendary split in thinking between big blockers and second-layer proponents ultimately led to the creation of Bitcoin Cash.
Bitcoin Cash contends that miners and users can handle bigger blocks. Lightning Network says they shouldn’t have to. In both cases, the goal is the same: get more transactions through the network. The approach is simply different. People who support Bitcoin Cash once supported a movement for bigger blocks on Bitcoin.
Roger Ver and others felt censored when their posts were removed from Reddit, or edited to disinclude certain information. While this is an onerous practice, it’s fully within the rules of the site.
So, has Bitcoin’s first mover advantage been destroyed by “censorship”? Despite what Ver and others might say, no it hasn’t. Nothing about Bitcoin’s first mover advantage has so far been lost. Even stablecoins are a long way from controlling as much of the wealth in the crypto space as Bitcoin does.
Whatever Roger Ver says, Bitcoin still has a first mover advantage, among other advantages, such as its wide liquidity.
