RE: Crypto Tips UNPLUGGED: Do You Realize What We Are Witnessing?
I take your points and agree with your end argument. Keeping Bitcoin decentralised should be the priority though I do wonder with the current set up and where BTC finds itself currently with blockstream et al. I see bitcoin and wanting to change things and implement new features, very similar to a very large corporation with a massive IT infrastructure. Nobody wants to touch anything without very costly consultations lasting a number of years with endless testing. By the time most had upgraded to Windows 7 from XP, Windows 10 was already on the cards. Bitcoin right now is still king and so essential to the space, that nobody wants to break it. It's a bit like trying to change every single moving component on a commercial airliner operating at full capacity whilst it is in the air.
The lightning network worries me but I urge you to look into Gavin's proposed solutions, more specially with homomorphic encryption and and non interactive zero knowledge proofs(which are the most viable). These two would still require extensive testing when interacting with DLT. All the other proposals from the research I have done are heavily complex in relation to on chain scaling.
I honestly don't think Satoshi envisioned his/her/their creation being where it is now(especially in the given time frame) and I do take your points as mentioned above, and we need to be very aware of the consequences of what will happen if BTC becomes more centralised.
My theory is that Bitcoin, at least for a while, will continue to be king of the space for 3 reasons:
- First Mover Advantage/Brand Recognition
- Trading Pairs
- Money moving in and out of the space, for the most part, goes through bitcoin.
Numbers 2 &3 will change over time and is doing already. I am no bitcoin maximalist and I hold both bitcoin and the bitcoin cash I received after the fork, so I have no horse in this race in terms of rivalry. That being said, it is my opinion that bitcoin will eventually lose its crown regardless of what happens. Whatever the outcome, the more decentralised a coin becomes, the better.
I would add as an afterthought, Satoshi is not here anymore. If he was still active in the development of bitcoin, I may have a different opinion, and then again, so may he. I would also probably have more support for bitcoin cash if the coins development team were actively running tests of the on chain scaling solutions mentioned above. Most of the time, that isn't what is actually happening. Anyway I digress.
PS. There are very few threads on this subject that don't dissolve into a Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash argument. with name calling and memes of Roger. I will say again, keep things decentralised! There is no point otherwise.
From an argumentative standpoint it doesn't matter that Satoshi is not here anymore. I'm still here. I've also said often that if Satoshi changed his mind it wouldn't automatically change mine. He could be wrong in his new conclusions.
Not ever hardforking can be just as destructive as doing it for the wrong reasons. Changing PoW algo if necessary is fine, forking in new blocksize is too. This is both implied by the design and was openly said by Satoshi.
I honestly don't think the risks are anywhere near what people think. It's not outright "centralization" for starters. It's "consolidation". There's a big difference. Bitcoin was built to eventually consolidate more or less in the same way as Usent consolidated into different companies, only with the distributed chain completing the competitive system and ensuring that no one node would be irreplaceable.
I agree that ticker BTC (not the Bitcoin design imo) will continue to rule the cryptoverse for some time ahead and possibly forever. The reasons you provide are the same primary ones I see. This gives a lot of time for developers to mess up and get back into the game again, if they so choose. But this is time they only get because of the largely uninformed speculative environment and will not last forever.
It's indeed very frustrating with the name calling, quick to boil hostility and exaggerations etc. From a marketing standpoint the Bitcoin Cash community is just as guilty of this as of when the conflict really started to heat up, even if the more subtle manipulative tactics were originally (and still are) being employed by the Core and Blockstream supporting side. Countless times have I seen ordinary newbies get caught up in between these two groups and not know what to think. Eventually most tend to go with the larger and less pressured community, which is the Core one.
In the long run I think the "Bitcoin" brand will survive, either as BCH or BTC. Technically however, now BCH (the Cash fork, aka BCC in part of the Asian market) is the real Bitcoin as I see it. PoW and popular opinion can't change my mind on that, so those that laugh they better keep laughing. But if BTC starts acting better again and becomes even more mainstream in a huge way, then I'm not ruling switching back to it and putting up with the "Bitcoin" brand even after the chain split.
In either case, I'm happy there is free market competition. We're no longer stuck with a single currency of the state or the higher up state and there are actually the seeds of much better things to come.