Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

BCH-ABC vs BCH-SV was a online flame war that only really involved the 4th largest coin (BCH). But why would it be the cause of this latest downward slide?

There's a theory that the BCH-ABC vs BCH-SV war brought to light: that "trustless" doesn't really mean trustless. It means "trustless, as long as you trust the coin". Innately, the BCH-ABC vs BCH-SV flamewar destroyed the notion of trustless and decentralized.

Anyway, I don't really know why BTC has done so poorly here. And the correlation to the BCH-ABC vs BCH-SV war may have just been coincidence. But its worth thinking about and discussing... maybe we can learn something from the past few weeks.

--------

Alternatively: "Store of Value" was a self-defeating prophesy. BTC was a "good" store of value, until it lost 50%+ in just a week or two. So as BTC fell, it just fell harder and harder, as the "store of value" argument was defeated.

View on HN

The reason it would be part of a catalyst for the latest downward slide is because Craig Wright masquarades as Satoshi Nakamoto, who owns 10% of all Bitcoin.

Although Craig Wright has never proved his ownership, he is wealthy by any stretch, and threatened to sell his bitcoin into the market. The people and funds holding support levels around $6,000 USD pulled their bid in the face of this, and helped panic sell.

Craig Wright has not moved any of Satoshi Nakamoto's mined coins.

Secondly, Roger Ver exists on the other side of the war. He owns a large cloud mining farm, and has been redirecting hash rate that customers paid for. He has been redirecting it away from Bitcoin to his Bitcoin ABC fork, to help win this ego war. He is paying the customers in his bitcoin still, so that they don't have a disruption in payouts.

Ultimately, there is a lot more bitcoin on the market to fund the bitcoin-cash war, between two very wealthy people.

This has nothing to do with your theory of trust. There's just more supply than demand. Anybody can hedge their store of value. You can hedge the USD value changes with futures, you can hedge gold, you can hedge bitcoin, any currency or commodity really. Your conclusions are misguided, but there is room for market maturity in bitcoin.

The pretty obvious explanation as to why it is doing poorly is that it was a bubble. People bought it because it was going up, which caused it to go up further. Now that it's going down, nobody wants to buy it and a lot of people want to sell it.

As far as I can see, there's no particular reason to expect the slide to end here. Stocks have a valuation floor based on income and assets. Commodities have floors based on the people who use those commodities to create economic value. Most currencies have a floor for many reasons, but partly because a central bank will stand behind it and defend its price. Bitcoin has none of those.

> As far as I can see, there's no particular reason to expect the slide to end here.

The real bottom is underpinned by the "True Blue Bitcoin Believers", who will most likely die than sell their bitcoin shares.

In a few years we'll realize the true value of Bitcoin wasn't the blockchain, but it's existence as a curiosity of sorts, where people were buying and selling purely imaginary things -- numbers -- which had no real value in the real world.

Yes indeed. Although I'm not sure the TBBBs will provide much of a floor. Holding doesn't prop up the price; they have to keep buying.

I heard somebody refer to Bitcoins as "math beanie babies", which certainly fits your model.

The logic behind the BCH-ABC/SV war affecting BTC prices was that both of the principals behind the BCH split were early Bitcoin investors with substantial BTC holdings, and they were selling off these holdings to prop up the value of their preferred currencies and fund mining equipment.

There's some evidence for that in both their Twitter statements and the fact that BCH-SV has skyrocketed as every other cryptocurrency plummets, but ultimately I find it a little unconvincing. BAB (BCH-ABC) has also dropped recently, and I doubt that even a rich egomaniac can affect the whole BTC market as much as has happened recently. I'd chalk it more to capitulation as the previous bubble bursts.

> trustless, as long as you trust the coin

What is your intended meaning here?

My main point is that the word "Trustless" has been abused repeatedly over the past year. "Bitcoin Trustless" doesn't mean what most people think it meant.

And it was most obvious when people were forced to pick sides in the BCH-ABC vs BCH-SV flamewars.

I have picked a side, and I won't tell you which one, but I'm not sure that I've been forced to monetarily pick a side. In fact I've seen enough propaganda around "unified" coin that sounds a lot like "you better not have picked a side yet," I still think there might be some advantage to have not picked a side, and to maintain that.

Are most exchanges picking a side yet? (What side are you on?)

I will never understand what motivates some people to downvote rather than reply (unless you tell me...)

You're trusting the developers and the code that the developers write.

In principle, no. You're supposed to review the code you run. The open-source status of bitcoin is a vital part of its security model.

This isn't a nitpicky point either. Bitcoin has specifically avoided any sort of automatic update mechanism, and not just because of the security risks involved. Additionally many companies and miners take their time evaluating new releases before upgrading.

> You're supposed to review the code you run.

Really? After spending years watching the pro-bitcoin people shill their crap, this is the first argument I've seen espousing a requirement to understand the code before using your wallet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com