This argument usually comes down to the "Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash" quote from the title.
I'd like to point out that the word "cash" is used differently in the cyberpunk community from before 2008. BCH and BSV both interpret it as "money used for every transaction" and thus advocate bigger blocks, while cypherpunks back in the day used it for "permissionless value tokens" (my phrasing here).
How do you explain this: https://twitter.com/gavinandresen/status/929377620000681984 ? You don't get much more "cyberpunk OG," especially in the realm of Bitcoin than Gavin Andresen. It's one thing to disagree, but it's another to ascribe beliefs to people that they don't hold.
The people using the intro of the whitepaper to justify BCH are also conveniently ignoring half the paper and pretends that entire technical sections are irrelevant and should be ignored.
Ironically, trying to prove which chain is the "real" bitcoin by interpreting word from the introduction of the paper goes directly against the almost everything that is written in the rest of the paper.
It's absolutely not true that "the people using the intro of the whitepaper to justify BCH" ignore half the paper and pretend that entire technical sections are irrelevant and should be ignored. Please clarify.
>A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution
It's fine that we've moved the goalpost as we've come to understand the limitations of this kind of blockchain, but it's also fine to highlight that "store of value that you can't directly transact with" was not what bitcoin was designed to accomplish, originally.
It's also fine to highlight Satoshi talked about Bitcoin like gold since the beginning, as well as electronic cash, which people always omit when saying he deemed it to be cash not gold. He introduced the terminology of mining as a direct reference to gold mining [0]. Sure it didn't make it to the title, but the whole premise of Bitcoin being non-falsifiable and it's distribution outside of central banks' control is very much core to the whole thing. Arguably more so than being an e-cash, if it was just about sending cash on the Internet, he would've been making CashApp.
FWIW, I don't even own a dime of crypto, I just find it disingenuous every time people bring up "it's failed to live up to it's email title so bitcoiners moved goalposts" as some sort of smack down, when those goalposts were set before the network even went live.
Quote to take maybe with a pinch of salt. Having been smart enough to invent Bitcoin, one could assume that Satoshi knew that waiting 10 minutes for a block time to be finalized along with a speed of 7tx/s was not going to be practical to go shopping ... regardless of tx fees. Something had to be invented, and this was just not there at the time of this whitepaper
So why didn't he write that instead of being so smart that he knew his followers would retroactively put those words in his mouth? Why not just take him literally and interpret his writings at face value?
More that people who spend a decade dissembling about easily validated technical claims have a trust issue which is hard to reconcile with providing financial services. There were so many people selling this dream world where your life would be full of Bitcoin microtransactions who were unwilling to acknowledge that the system could not possibly scale to that level. Lightning is good for being potentially usable but I would not trust my assets to anyone who wasn’t saying something like it was necessary all along.
That definitely wasn't the original goal of Bitcoin though.