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Comment by WJW | Hacker News Reader

> they’re the reason the whole community split in 2017

This makes it seem like it was some sort of 50/50 split, but in reality it was more like 99/1. A tiny group split off to do their own thing while "normal" bitcoin is just chugging along with unchanged block size. It's all fine and well that Satoshi may have wanted something different for block sizes, but he hasn't been involved in bitcoin development for over a decade now so his wishes are pretty irrelevant. Right now, the vast majority of "bitcoin" value is in the original one and speculating about how things could be different is just the crypto version of "world peace is easy if we all could just get along".

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>This makes it seem like it was some sort of 50/50 split, but in reality it was more like 99/1

In reality most bitcoin owners/users were the silent majority, and the "default" option was to do nothing, so they did nothing.

>speculating about how things could be different is just the crypto version of "world peace is easy if we all could just get along".

bitcoin's current blocksize/transaction fees are basicially an artificial problem that could be fixed with a minor storage/bandwidth tradeoff. It's more like "world hunger could be solved if we produce more food and stop limiting ourselves with insane protectionist trade policies".

But you make it seem as if it’s a done tale, as if there were no bad actors, no companies set to profit from selling their own “Layer 2” solutions, no censorship, etc. Reality is, even if the whole planet (not only the 99% of the community you claim) were set on a broken vehicle which they can barely drive but just speculate on, it won’t be long before most realize that this is just that, a broken vehicle meant for speculation and has nothing to do with peer to peer electronic cash, you know, Bitcoin.

So when you discuss miners, on a network DESIGNED to emit less Bitcoin and change to transaction fees down the line, it’s ultra important to note that this actually working vehicle exists and the same miners protecting the speculative vehicle are also protecting the working one. And when calculating for the working one, miners are set to be some of the richest businesses on the planet, even when ALL Bitcoin has been already mined, a 100 years from now.

Perhaps, if and only if bitcoin manages to win out against the traditional banking system AND the governments of the world do not regulate miners into oblivion. Even if some form of cryptocurrency does win out against the combined might of traditional banking and governments, let's hope for the sake of these mining companies that the winning currency is one that both depends on Proof of Work (I can stake PoS chains just fine from a raspberry pi, after all) and also requires hashing of the type supported by the current equipment of the miners.

All in all, the chance that a crypto mining company becomes one of the richest businesses on the planet is slim and the chance that that company will be one of the mining companies already existing is slimmer still. Buyer beware when investing in the current crop.

As someone who is more familiar with BCH rhetoric, I can tell you that what the parent comment is referring to is not mining companies but rather LN relay node operators and other "services"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHFrf5ci_g

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