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Comment by MandieD | Hacker News Reader

As Keynes might or might not have said, “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

The weird thing here is, Bitcoin is clearly a shitshow. There's not much debate about it. It has no redeeming qualities compared to other coins except the global hashrate. And it is worse off on so many aspects.

How many times has bitcoin hard-forked because of the protocol being compromised? How much daily volume is it currently supporting? How does the velocity of the codebase compare to other coins?

>How many times has bitcoin hard-forked because of the protocol being compromised?

Looks like there were some. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15907735

>How much daily volume is it currently supporting?

Doesn't matter. Any other coin can support the same daily volume (and many others usually do)

>How does the velocity of the codebase compare to other coins?

Terrible. Constant in-fighting. This is what is hurting bitcoin right now.

Edit: added hard forks link.

Litecoin actually did last night, more volume than Bitcoin, the fees were almost nothing! I actually did send an LTC transaction last night, so much fun not to be stupid and take advantage of this revolution instead of just sitting around like a troll calling it a bubble :D

https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/gdax/

>Terrible. Constant in-fighting. This is what is hurting bitcoin right now.

Anyone who's paying attention to the bitcoin repo can see your statement has no basis in reality. For instance, compare the number of closed pull requests between btc/eth/ltc...and bch if you want a good laugh.

Hard-forked? Never. But you don't need to hard-fork to secure the network. Bitcoin HAS soft-forked several times to close of critical zero-day vulnerabilities, although to be fair this was in the early days of the network. (There was multiple ways in which any random participant could spend anyone's funds in the early days. They were all honorably disclosed and fixed without being exploited.)

There was an unintentional fork on August 15, 2010, when "[an] attacker exploited [an] integer overflow bug that permitted an attacker to create several billion bitcoins". [source][0]

There was an unintentional fork on March 12, 2013 caused by previously disallowed number of tx inputs (?) as resolved by [BIP50][1].

[0]: https://blog.blockchain.com/2016/02/26/a-brief-history-of-bi... [1]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawi...

The first one was reorg'd out of the chain. It was a soft-fork, just deployed in response to something rather than in anticipation.

Likewise in the second case, where there was a temporary soft-fork put in place to limit the block size so as to not run afoul of the bug, which itself wasn't a hard-fork or a soft-fork but rather a probabilistic failure to achieve consensus under transient circumstances.

>Hard-forked? Never. But you don't need to hard-fork to secure the network.

I think the point was about vulnerability + hard-fork due to disagreement a la Ethereum Classic

> How much daily volume is it currently supporting?

(for varying degrees of support where without a transaction fee of ~$5-20, your transaction may be silently dropped, and even without may require multiple hours for confirmation)

>your transaction may be silently dropped, and even without may require multiple hours for confirmation

specifically, after 72 hours if it's not confirmed. but your wallet will continually rebroadcast the transaction, so it's not a hard limit.

Hashrate and adoption are important though -- anyone can create the smallest tweak to Bitcoin that may improve it to some degree, but the market can't swap chains every day to accommodate these changes. Bitcoin is good enough for now, and that keeps it on top.

You're right. The adoption advantage used to be my go-to argument about why Bitcoin is better, but what good is that if it is unusable for transactions it was meant for?

Lightning network looks like it can do something, but the slow progress even with the current situation makes me question the future of Bitcoin.

The point is that people aren't buying bitcoin to make purchases with it now. There are relatively few merchants that take bitcoin and its cost ineffective to buy bitcoin to make the transaction anyways (even without the high tx fees). People are buying now because of the potential and because of exponential increase in price. That bitcoin is bad for coffee transactions right now is irrelevant.

>People are buying now because of the potential and because of exponential increase in price

This is the problem though. People are buying it for the price increase, rather than technical merit. It will eventually result in some middle aged couple who took out a mortgage holding the bag when it comes crashing down (if it does. If it doesn't, that's even scarier because that tells us how uninformed most people are.)

That's a lot of assertions without any backup. Here's one thing bitcoin has that no altcoin has: the legitimacy of its network buy-in from being first to market. And since any technology another chain has can be adopted via sidechain, extension block, or soft fork, why not standardize on the one currency that has achieved the most adoption?

>the legitimacy of its network buy-in from being first to market

What legitimacy? It's all code. Any smart person will take something for it's technical merit. Good developers will eventually move.

>why not standardize on the one currency that has achieved the most adoption?

And where did that get us? A currency which isn't usable for daily transactions. And people give that "Oh it isn't meant for that, use Litecoin" comment. So why do we even quote adoption?

Even then, when a transaction takes $25+ dollars, you realize that there's something wrong.

I never quote adoption. Bitcoin isn't a currency, it's a store of value. Just like gold which it seeks to emulate. It's useful as the collateral for fully-backed smart contracts. Not paying for coffee.

it's hilarious how many times I've seen this repeated on hn over the past couple of weeks.

and it can be rational

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