The book The Blocksize War was written in early 2021. The Blocksize War took place from August 2015 to November 2017.

The new rules for the Bitcoin subreddit were reasonably clear: since Bitcoin XT lacked consensus among users and was an incompatible change, and would therefore result in a new coin, promotion of the software was banned on the subreddit. This clearly aggravated many of the so-called large blockers. To them, the Bitcoin Reddit was the main discussion forum in the community, and lobbying for the change they desired on this forum was exactly how they envisioned such a change would take place. The anti-censorship arguments began to gain momentum and proved to be quite compelling. If one couldn’t campaign for a change due to a lack of consensus, then how would we ever reach consensus? It was a catch-22 situation! Who was Theymos to decide when we reach consensus anyway? Bitcoin is mine just as much as it is his! If they had any good arguments, then why resort to censorship? If Bitcoin is so fragile that it requires this censorship, Bitcoin must be pretty weak and useless. If they want to ban Bitcoin XT, it must therefore be good... And so on...

It is easy to blame Theymos [r/bitcoin] for this split. However, looking at how other communities develop on social media, perhaps it was somewhat inevitable. People tend to like reading things they agree with and follow people they agree with. Confirmation bias features heavily on social media platforms and causes polarization. Perhaps the most famous example of this is politics, where right-wingers and left-wingers alike keep reading true stories on the platform of their choice, which supports their initial assumptions and ideology. People become more and more embedded in their views and have limited exposure to the opposing arguments. At this stage, with exposure to reams and reams of supporting material, people on either side of a conflict can barely believe anybody could legitimately hold an opposing view. Those with an opposing view are therefore often assumed to be either stupid, corrupt or to have some nefarious agenda. These dynamics certainly quickly started to play out in Bitcoin. Given the fact these same dynamics appeared to be occurring all over social media, it may therefore be naive to blame Theymos for this phenomenon occurring, although of course he played his part in splitting the community, just like many others on both sides of the conflict.