Appeals to authority are tools used in arguments to get away from facts and force a conclusion.
“Every programmer I know thinks…”
“Sam Harris says…”
“97% of scientists agree…”
a.k.a. “Shut up and stop arguing.”
It is valuable to be on the lookout for arguments from authority as most of the time they don’t address the facts of the debate, but there are some cases where an appeal to authority is valid.
For example, if you are arguing with a friend about what Kanye thinks of Donald Trump, you would be right to point to the tweets Kayne wrote about Trump. That’s not a logical fallacy of appealing to authority, because the opinion of the authority is what you are arguing about.
I’m thinking about this today because of the common technique of Bitcoin Core supporters use of calling Bitcoin Cash supporters religious or dogmatic when they reference Satoshi or the Bitcoin white paper.
In an argument about whether something technical will or won’t work, it is correct to call out appeals to Satoshi. What Satoshi thought about layer two scaling has no impact on whether it will actually work or not.
But that is not the scenario where appeals to Satoshi are made.
The One True Bitcoin
Over the past year, since the fork that created Bitcoin Cash, there has been a large-scale campaign to discredit Bitcoin Cash. A big part of this rests on accusations that it is using deceptive marketing by using the name Bitcoin. Legions of trolls on Twitter attempt to shout down conversations about Bitcoin Cash with endless “BCASH is a scam!!!” “Roger is a felon” comments.
The argument on the Bitcoin Core side is that no other project has the right to call itself Bitcoin and that Bitcoin Cash is fraudulent for using Bitcoin in its name. It is in response to this argument that most appeals to Satoshi are made.
Bitcoin is an open source project started by Satoshi Nakamoto. Since it is an open source project, anyone is legally free to use the code and the name.
I don’t want to dive into the “What is Bitcoin” debate here, but simply point out that referencing Satoshi in that debate is a valid appeal to authority.
Satoshi’s writings are widely available, so you can go look at how he described Bitcoin and get a sense for what he thought the core element of Bitcoin was. Since he is the person (or people) that started this project, that writing carries weight when thinking about which project is more Bitcoin-like. It is not authoritative, but it is certainly not irrelevant.
In the debate about which project is Bitcoin, it is smart to look to the creator of bitcoin as a source. It is a valid appeal to authority. But since Bitcoin Cash supporters reference Satoshi in this debate, Bitcoin Core supporters often extract that from the specific argument and attempt to paint BCH supporters as appealing to authority generally.
Person A to Person B: Bitcoin Cash is a scam because it uses deceptive marketing.
B to A: Bitcoin Cash can legitimately call itself Bitcoin. If you look at what Bitcoin originally was, by reading what Satoshi wrote in the whitepaper, BCH is more in line with that today than BTC.
A to C: Bitcoin Cash supporters are religious. They keep appealing to Satoshi even though Satoshi was wrong about many things.
Pulling Arguments Out of Arguments
The Bitcoin white paper is not a religious text. It should not be treated as gospel or blindly followed when it comes to making technical decisions, but when it comes to which projects have a right to which names, it is definitely valid and probably the most important source.
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