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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

But cryptocurrency is a rare commodity right?

How many bitcoin forks before people stop believing the bullshit that these tokens are deflationary.

Bitcoins are rare as long as people keep up the delusion that there is only one blockchain that matters, but there’s really nothing that distinguishes the consensus coin from the others aside from how much mining power it has currently.

All the miners or merchants could switch to one or several of these forks at the drop of a hat and the value of ‘core’ bitcoin will go to nothing.

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Great point. Which raises the question: with billions of dollars on the line, why haven't all the miners switched at the drop of a hat to something more beneficial to them?

Miners are making a killing off of the insanely high Bitcoin transaction fees.

Are the miners paying the developers so that they don't implement a solution?

A lot of them have intermittently switched to bitcoin cash when the price/difficulty worked out for them.

Two reasons, profitability and they are locked into the hashing algorithm. They can realistically only switch to BCH.

That's like saying because there are an infinite combination of ways to stamp a physical coin, and that the USA could instantly switch over to some random stamping of a coin and the value of the USD would drop to zero at the drop of a hat...

The value bitcoin has is in it's trust. The miners do not give it that trust in total, only in part.

If there were a market for bad analogies for cryptocurrency, it would be inflationary.

But how is it wrong? Saying "there's an infinite amount of X because someone can create Y and everyone will switch to Y and call it X" is a silly pointless argument.

Of course that could happen, but it would require basically everyone to agree that Y is X and to switch over to Y, which is basically an impossible task, let alone when tens or hundreds of billions of dollars are involved.

It's a criticism that can be applied to literally anything.

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