No matter how many non-PoW shitcoins you make, the main one (BTC) is not going to change and remains the dominant one. You can't solve the problem by creating more shitcoins, only by crashing the whole field into the ground.
- Network effects arising as a result of having many crypto markets which use BTC as the base currency. This gives BTC a lot of exposure on trading platforms. BTC is therefore a gateway to the crypto ecosystem; kind of like a reserve currency.
- Most big mainstream investors don't have any interest in advancing the field. Their main concern is preventing crypto from disrupting their existing corporate interests. They will buy a majority stake in a crypto and then encourage founders to waste time and resources... They want to create jobs to keep developers busy on useless activities; that way these developers are not competing with corporate interests. Also, because all these wasteful crypto projects occupy all the top rankings on coinmarketcap and occupy most investors' trading screens, it prevents smaller, more promising projects from getting any attention so it prevents the crypto industry from becoming disruptive. (Though at best this will probably only delay things by a decade or so until new exchanges start launching and start listing different non-mainstream tokens).
It doesn't change the fundamentals.
Designing a new blockchain that is good at that is innovation. Not a “shitcoin”.
Also unfortunate is the fact many internet users take silence as evidence of consent, and so just doing the obvious thing here — not having this conversation at all — would actively promote ignorance (see: “Bitcoin is obviously not good for small and fast transactions”).
> Designing a new blockchain that is good at that is innovation. Not a “shitcoin”.
Blockchains don’t create efficiencies: if not for decentralization and censorship resistance, which inherently come at a higher cost than centralization, there would be little point in the technology at all. A plain immutable database with cryptographic proofs of inclusion — e.g. ImmuDB — hosted by a trusted org would perform orders of magnitude better than a blockchain at the very same tasks.
As most people can plainly see, what passes for “innovation” in the blockchain space is often a solution in search of a problem, launched first and foremost as a courtship display to HNWIs, socially signaling for them to invest in the cryptocurrency at hand under the guise of it being “innovative”. Ethereum 2.0’s newly introduced “RocketPool” (RPL) token [1] is an unwitting quintessential example of this:
So if insurance isn't the real reason, then why do node operators
need to buy an additional 10% in RPL ($5,600 at current prices)? The
only logical answer is to force buying pressure and pump the token.
Adding a token means the protocol is now more likely to contain bugs,
audits are more difficult, users are confused, and taxes become
a nightmare.
I hope greed isn't the real driving force behind the RPL token,
but that's the only conclusion I can draw. They increased smart
contract risk for a payday, and it's possible the entire Ethereum
ecosystem will pay for it.
“Couldn’t there be other ways of doing this which aren’t obviously designed to enrich the founders?”
Put simply, launching a superfluous blockchain and token is just poor etiquette, and the people who point out this dynamic don’t deserve to be dismissed with endearing terms.
Bitcoiners have nothing against defi, it’s just a question of whether a new token or blockchain is needed to do the things these people purportedly want to do for the world, or whether the new token/blockchain is really just a pretense for self-enrichment.
HTH
See also: Nomic [2], SmartBCH, or Stacks
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethstaker/comments/ncqqu2/rocketpoo...
[2]: https://nomic.io/
I agree though. Bitcoin isn't the only crypto coin worth talking about.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/top-10-cryptocurren...
The most important factor in a particular asset’s “adoption” as currency is its propensity to act as the unit of account for international settlement between nation-states.
Look it up yourself if you don’t believe me. I always find it amusing that people are downvoting objective facts, but hey emotions trump truth.
In theory it could, but Bitcoin simply isn’t used for much beyond speculation right now.
This is just comparing the base assets, adding in stablecoins makes the gap even larger with Ethereum moving 27 billion and Bitcoin moving 9 billion.
Also - shitcoins? So DOT, ALGO are shitcoins? You seem out of the loop.
There is rsk, sovryn and rgb on lightning and you can still use Bitcoin with ethereum or other smart contract platforms.