RE: Bitcoin Scaling Debate - Round 2
Really good post and you bring up some very important thoughts looking forward to BTCs place in the crypto market in the future.
I look at BTC in a similar light. "BTC is the traders reserve currency" Do you feel BTC simply maintains it's reserve currency function in the future? This is the question I'm trying to figure out. If it maintains this peg, the BTC price could skyrocket as more money flows into the crypto space. It really has no other viable use. It was first to market and is the most widely known and accepted form of crypto, but when will this start to change and what coin will supplant it is the questions I've been asking myself. I would love to hear your thoughts on this. I've been researching other coins and Litecoin and Dash from the coins I've studied both seem like realistic alternatives. I just don't have a good enough feel for the space or the knowledge yet to come to any definitive thoughts on how to gauge BTC 3-5 years from now.
For now, I think it will hold it's reserve status just because of how the exchanges are setup. Recently, I learned, if I want to buy coins on coinbase, consider buying ETH or LTC instead of BTC. I think BTC may even gradually lose gateway status of the USD to Crypto coin. I know if coinbase supported Dash, I would just be using that with the near instant transactions.
That said, once a big pool of BTC is on an exchange, we can trade it back and forth on the exchange without paying network fees. So it functions as the reserve currency on the exchange. And the price on the exchanges can be managed by people who do arbitrage, buying huge volumes of BTC and paying small percentage of network fee. Also, if the exchanges get lightning network going, BTC stands a good chance of remaining the reserve currency for a number of years.