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Comment by makomk | Hacker News Reader

In 2012 or so, the block size limit was 500 KB and blocks weren't close to being full; towards the end of 2012 they were approaching 100 KB each. The current block size limit is 1MB+ and almost every block is stuffed to the limit. It's easy to lose track of the fact that the reason fees are high is because there's a lot more on-chain activity than back in 2012.

What's more interesting is that, for example, Bitcoin Cash has a similar level of on-chain activity to 2012-era Bitcoin without the interesting shops accepting it, but its price is about a hundred times higher than 2012-era Bitcoin.

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There is criminal level fraud occurring.

I am not going to throw allegations out, but I believe there will be a day in the coming years where we read stories about organized crime and pump and dumps in this space. I believe the bitcoin forks will be at the heart of this all.

Everybody is happily singing the song of crypto while the music is going. Not sure how long it will last.

In other words, you're saying bitcoin is the stock market.

Same doom story I've been hearing since it all started. Bitcoin is real, get used to it.

Why Bitcoin forks? Exchanges would be where the fraud happens. MtGOX was insolvent and yet they inflated the price of Bitcoin across all exchanges. Bitfinex is alleged to be engaging in the same market manipulation through margin wash trades and their central bank scheme of free Tether minting.

Bitcoin forks are funny because it's decentralized software with a shared database history from the time of the fork. After an update, users can choose to use one or the other. Unfortunately the incentives are warped for miners and devs, so users might not have the best possible design.

There's an excessive amount of propaganda surrounding cryptocoins because "investors" need to psychologically lure you in to buy their supply, which they've acquired for significantly lower value, lower capital, and lower computational work then you if you're starting after them.

[0] https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/latest

Because supporters of Bitcoin Core want to dis-credit Bitcoin Cash and the way they are doing it is by promoting a bunch of increasingly scummy Bitcoin forks. Then they say hey look these forks are all scams. Bitcoin Cash is a fork there for it too is a scam. Nothing could be further from the truth though.

Agree, bitcoin cash from my experience has been more useful than bitcoin. I was able to send bitcoin cash without any fee at all and was able to get it confirmed in the next block mined.

It looks like bitcoin cash is going to be extremely useful for doing daily type transactions (ie. low dollar transactions etc.)

Ver rode the Cash band-wagon to help his position of control over the ecosystem, as did many others. Hundreds of millions of value was created — and a lot instantly lost — in a day. It's been pumped over and over again by mining pools looking to make a quick buck while the difficulty is low as well.

That is where the "scam" lies. It isn't discrediting BCH — BCH already did that to itself.

Here is an example of a typical clueless Bitcoin investor with irrational hate toward a prominent player in the space who did nothing more than express their genuinely held opinion.

Well, good job at assuming incorrectly. You wouldn't know by my comment that I've been in the space since '11, or that I've contributed to the codebase (however slightly).

Nope, you just see a completely pragmatic view of Ver's actions as an attack, probably formed on the r/btc sub (that he mods).

I love how you say "completely clueless" too — because it's ironically you.

So an individual exercising their economic freedom to buy and sell an asset and express their opinion is an "Attack" in your book?

Do you have a problem with Ver helping to restore Bitcoin’s original functionality of making instant, practically free transactions?

If you don’t like BCH then don’t use it, you can leave that to everyone else.

"Everyone else". Lol.

24HR Transactions:

* BTC — 328,580 [1]

* BCH — 20,255 [2]

[1]: https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/

[2]: https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin%20cash/

Because forks were necessary for their plan. The exchanges we're definitely in on it. Adding futures for forks? Is there any doubt that they were colluding?

It's not happening because of forks per se. I think the weak link is Tether. There are already signs of a lot of shady shit going on with disappearing funds, essentially capital controls, etc. The exchanges are the ones perpetuating this and once people find out the whole crypto market might crash - which would be a shame because it could set back crypto as a whole by quite a bit

Funny, I was working on a research paper for this Ethics class talking about organized crime, and how they made movements into cybercrime (credit card, ID theft, etc). What popped up in my head last week was with the whole USDT/Tether Tokens, there has to be a good chunk of cash getting into these networks that is dirty. Cycling around in the various networks will get easier with Atomic Swaps / SEGWIT...

Far fetched idea is that these networks were designed for this type of washing. Clean and Dirty money enters in, someones bound to walk at some point.

True but Bitcoin can't just blame its activity level for the high fees, since Ethereum does twice as many transactions per day and charges under a penny for a simple coin transfer.

All true but that's just proof that BTC doesn't really scale to the point where it's a useful global medium of exchange.

That's an interesting way to think about BCH. Some of the price increase is justified due to the increasing legitimization of all crypto currencies but definitely not 100x.

Some believe that it can easily scale to the that point, but there are corrupt and powerful people who are stifling that effort.

Some people believe the earth is flat, too. I'd rather hear a detailed discussion than a summary.

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