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You can consider for example Ethereum, which has hard forked numerous times and changed the monetary policy as well multiple times. It just feels quite centralized and controlled by Vitalik. Harder to trust that crap.
The guiding principle for the monetary policy of Ethereum has not changed: minimum viable issuance. Thanks to the economic efficiency of PoS + fee burn, it enabled what amounts to frontrunning every "halving" and having ~net zero issuance, it's simply good for holders.
If Bitcoin had a way to be secure without further issuance (huge can of worms, halvings are slowly ticking time bombs in the long-run, unless fees rise significantly), it'd be good for holders to fork and scrap it too. There'd be no need to pay billions for security through issuance.
Calling Ethereum centralized at this point is ridiculous. The fact that core devs from multiple client teams can manage to agree on and implement forks to keep developing the protocol (unlike Bitcoin) is a major accomplishment, not a failure.
That won't last. As stated in the Lightning Network whitepaper [0], it will need much bigger blocks (it mentions up to 133MB) to scale.
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/67158/what-are-c...
Bitcoin cash pays the price through centralisation. It can still only manage 100 transactions/second so certainly isn't flawless.
Far better to make the base layer slow but very robust, and then add layers to scale.
What centralization? If you are referring to the node implementations, it has several [0]: Bitcoin Node, Bitcoin Unlimited, Bitcoin Verde,... Bitcoin BTC has basically one: Bitcoin Core [1]. If you mean mining, it's the same as BTC, same mining algorithm, same miners.
> It can still only manage 100 transactions/second
True for now, but it's way more than it needs right now now [2]. But don't worry, this month upgrades to ABLA [3], and will be able to scale to as many tx/s as needed.
[0] https://bitcoincash.org/#nodes
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
To compete with a payment rails like Visa and Mastercard, you'd need to increase that to 10000+ tx/sec, making running a node complete unfeasible for most people to run.
There's simply no such thing as a decentralised blockchain network with unlimited block-size. At some point if you want to remain decentralised, you have to create layer 2+ networks that can handle the smaller, high-bandwidth transactions, and so you may as well commit to that model now and focus on making the base layer as robust as possible.
Ultimately for a money to attract the most value, it needs to optimise for the very largest transactions, and offer the most robustness (i.e. most decentralisation). This is precisely what bitcoin has done.
Non-mining nodes are just observers that do nothing good to the network. Is like going to war with popcorn as a weapon. Mining nodes are the only ones than can include transactions to a block.
The HW to run bitcoin is extremely cheap - less than $100. All you need is an old laptop or Raspberry Pi with a 700GB of storage, and a ham radio/dial-up internet connection to another node.
The non-mining nodes in fact can completely destroy the ASIC miners by upgrading to a new POW algorithm. Hopefully it will never come to that, but ultimately the people, with their non-mining nodes have the power, not the miners. The only way miners can successfully change bitcoin is if the vast majority of people agree with the change.
https://medium.com/@olivierjanss/why-non-mining-full-nodes-a...
If you're convinced a block chain can scale to 50k transactions / sec and also remain decentralised and offer enough privacy, then keep at it, but I'm afraid I'm unconvinced.
Even if it were theoretically possible, the solution would likely be so complex, or based on a long chain of "hopefully unlikely" events that I wouldn't have enough confidence in it to store large amounts of value.
The slowness and simplicity of the Bitcoin network is what gives it robustness, and if I'm storing large amounts of money, that's what I want even if it means I can't buy a cup of coffee on the same network.
> The slowness and simplicity of the Bitcoin network is what gives it robustness, and if I'm storing large amounts of money, that's what I want even if it means I can't buy a cup of coffee on the same network.
Then why not just use gold? It is slow, simple, and you can't use it to buy coffee.
Bitcoin is demonetising gold.
Bitcoin transactions are also "irreversible" providing the fee paid is reasonable, but ultimately the clearing time for both networks is down to the likelihood of a 51% attack for which bitcoin is far more protected against due to the far larger amount of hash power. It's not comparable.
If I'm moving/storing $1 billion, do I care if the transaction costs $1 instead of $20? No - I care that I'm storing the money in the safest place to store value I can find.
So even if fees increase in fiat terms, so will the size of the transactions. Enough to take the market cap far, far beyond that of gold. Once bitcoin has grown to the point that its value has stabilised, there will be substantial demand for transacting in it directly and there will naturally be a lot more work invested into higher-level payment networks/solutions. Right now though, Gresham's law sees to it that most people are happier to hoard than spend and that's likely to be case until bitcoin is at least $10M/BTC
How much of your Bitcoin usage is associated with crypto investments, vs a replacement for traditional bank transfers and expense payments?
I think it has worked well for a lot of people as an investment. Not so much as a replacement to normal money.
Replacing normal money altogether would anyway be an huge goal. Personally I believe, long-term Bitcoin is getting there. I've been using it for payments, now and then, for about 10 years. Mostly as an experiment, but sometimes it also is more convenient to pay with BTC. In general there has been slow, but increasing acceptance of BTC as a payment method. For some things it makes more sense than others. The biggest issue was the early misconception of it being good for microtransactions. I would say that it is more for macropayments.
It used to be fantastic for regular transactions, such as paying on Steam or to Stripe.
But alas both Steam and Stripe dropped support for Bitcoin due to high fees and long waiting times due to blocks being backlogged.
Adoption for Bitcoin payments peaked years ago.
[1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...
For me the main ledger is equivalent to inter-bank settlement payments. It is not for people to use directly, it is to settle the large amount between "market makers", so $10+ transaction fees are not a problem when the amounts transferred would be in the millions. These settlements are few and far between, they do not require immediate execution. In Bitcoin parlance, these market makers would be Lightning nodes, which I imagine in the long run would not be operated by your Average Joe.
Please read the whitepaper [0], at least its title
Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold are used and mined very little.
Decreasing amount of bitcoin supply means that eventually the supply would fall below demand, which ensures rising price.
Every 4 years when supply and the demand reach equilibrium, the supply is halved which triggers new price rise and renewed interest. The entire crypto ecosystem follows.
Bitcoin halvings are THE reason crypto is a thing. Not just a curiosity for some techies.
We have maybe two cycles left ahead of us. Then crypto will become just digital gold randomly fluctuating with interest from the asset holders.
Fees at $50 per traction is "a bit" higher to you?
Beyond that I don't see how it matters what something was designed to do or what early adopters personally used it for or thought it was meant to be used for. The only relevance for a technology is what it's actually adopted for over time and the total addressable market cap for a store of value being 100x + of that of a medium of exchange, it makes perfect sense to me that that's the feature the market converged to by far as reflected amongst other things by the relative prices between current btc and bch...
Note that the same tactics that were used to wreck Bitcoin are now being deployed against Nix, as the open source community has struggled to learn the right lessons from Bitcoin.
> it makes perfect sense to me that that's the feature the market converged to
The market certainly didn't converge to that outcome. It was the result of relentless political scheming and psychological manipulation of a small number of people, combined with criminal tactics like DDoS attacks. The winners of that fight have then tried to retcon what happened as some sort of natural or obvious outcome, but then why did it require so much viciousness and illegal behaviour?
The market value of all cryptocurrencies seems to move in tandem, or at least did many years ago when I last cared about this topic. It reflects nothing more than the general hype and brand awareness around Bitcoin and crypto. Certainly a "store of value" that can't directly be used to purchase things is worthless, as any government that wishes to void that store of value and force users back into their own currencies can do so overnight by simple legal fiat.
I haven't personally done a deep dive on Satoshi's intentions probably for the specific reason I've always failed to see why former intentions or aspirations for technologies, even by their own creators would have any relevance towards their future use cases. If Edison had said light bulbs were for heating should we then oppose them being mostly adopted and optimized for lighting?
As a very passive but very interested stakeholder at the time of the block size wars it really felt to me there was heavy politicking and various degrees of !@#$ going on from all sides. The amount of viciousness certainly didn't surprise me given the immense magnitude of the stakes involved with potentially replacing a market in the hundreds of trillions of dollars.
I'm not sure I follow your last point. Stores of value certainly don't have to be mediums of exchange to build market cap (whereas the converse is true). That's true of the great majority of monetary wealth in the world. Most of fiat currency is held in treasury bond form (not a medium of exchange), real estate is heavily monetized and stocks to a degree. The actual dominant medium of exchange today is cash mostly in bank deposit form and it's a tiny fraction of that market which mostly sits on longer term horizons in assets that perform the function of storing value better. Are you saying a government might void converting stores of value to mediums of exchange? Or cryptocurrency specifically? In essence that they would make those assets illegal altogether? If they did it's true they would become worthless, at least for that jurisdiction, but some of the market obviously disagrees with that assumption, and landmark events like the bitcoin etfs continue to point the other way.
Without headers.