I have been thinking about what to do for August 1st and what should we expect. I have been researching into both side's opinions about it, I think I have some answers.

First of all there is a lot of drama and exaggeration and FUD about what will happen on August 1st. I just ignore that. It's not healthy to worry about irrational things. Anything could happen, but why worry about low probability things. It makes no sense, just as you don't worry about a meteor crashing into your house, you should not worry about low probability BTC fork, it probably won't happen.

But there could be some calamity in the markets. Ok, but I personally don't really care about that either. I will just hold through it. I have had 60-70% drawdowns in some altcoins recently, and I am still holding. It sucks a lot but I try to not think about it that much, it will drive a person crazy to think about the losses all the time, so I just tend to ignore it for now.

So even if BTC crashes down to say 1800$, I don't think it will crash below that. That is like the minimum floor in my opinion. In fact it looks like the 2000$ level is already sacrosanct, so I don't think it will go below that anyway.

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August 1st

So I don't really look at the price, I rather look at the issues. There are 2 camps the Core team and the Bitcoin Unlimited team. Basically the /Bitcoin and /BTC subreddits respectively, where you have vicious fighting between the two.

The /BTC subreddit's users always accuse the Core team of corruption, malice, and dishonesty. So I believed this for some time but then I realized that a lot of it is exaggerated.

First of all the Bitcoin Unlimited software is crap, it was full of bugs, full of serious bugs, it's developers are not careful with the code, and they have like a gambler mentality, the 2 MB hardfork is a risky bet. People are panicking for even a softfork, so if they would throw around risky things like that, coming from an incompetent dev team, the panic would be 100x worse.

But then the /BTC community accuses Core of bottlenecking Bitcoin and forcing all transactions offchain. Okay, this is a valid criticism. They also accuse them of trying to bypass consensus with the UASF and trying to implement Segwit with less consensus, a.k.a centralization. Okay this is a valid criticism.

Don't get me wrong, I am not 1 side or the other, although I see the corporate intermingling in Core, the Unlimited guys aren't any better with their Miner oligarchs dictating them things.

So at this point Bitcoin isn't really decentralized at all, it's full of whales and power elites steering Bitcoin towards their opinions. Okay the question is which side is the better, by better I mean better for everyone.

Because let's face it, some leaders emerge naturally, it's still a voluntary community, there is no coercion, yet, so the leaders/oligarchs of Bitcoin are still voluntary. The question is which side is best for the community.

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Best Outcome

• Core made it clear that there won't be a hardfork. So this means that all transactions will go offchain, and the fees will stay high, although relatively better than what it is now. But in the hands of middleman (in the Lightning Network hub), who could do all sorts of nasty things with the money. It kind of looks this way.
• Unlimited wants on chain scaling, some risk with hardforks now, but a better future later. Onchain scaling will accommodate many transactions, it will let many people join Bitcoin, low fees, and mainstream adoption.

So ideally speaking it looks like Unlimited is better. But we don't live in a ideal world. In our world there are many problems.

• The onchain scaling is not possible. Yes hardware is cheap Internet is cheap. But if you really look at it, people don't have access to those. Yes you could buy a 10 Petabyte harddisk to store the Bitcoin Blockchain, but most people just use a 50 GB one. Yeah, if you don't live in the 1st world, there is a good chance that you buy your electronics second hand, and they are still selling 25-50-100 GB hard disks. The Bitcoin blockchain is 131 GB of size, so already the 3rd world will not host nodes.
• Then you have ISP's, Trump and his oligarchs, who really want Net Neutrality gone in the US
• Then you have the Great Firewall, totalitarian censorship in China, less severe in Russia and India, and in a few other places in Asia, mostly from where new Bitcoiners are joining.

See the full censorship map:

_{Source: https://explorer.ooni.torproject.org/world/}

So as you can see the global situation is pretty dire. And the situation in the USA is getting worse as Trump and his corporate buddies are trying to end Net Neutrality as well:

• https://www.battleforthenet.com

So we have a global crackdown on the open and free Internet in favor of tyrannical governments and crony corporate elites. This is what is happening. We can ignore this or not, but the problem won't go away. So we can't wish for an ideal Bitcoin, if we have such a bad situation here.

The control will come from the ISP's. So Bitcoin Core's plan might sound Orwellian, but at least the reference transactions will be in the blockchain, and nodes could still operate "under the radar".

If Unlimited wins, the block size might get to 50 MB, and then ISP's could just block the bandwidth of those nodes and essentially totally centralize Bitcoin nodes into the hands of a few banking elites.

I personally think the offchain transactions, even if done through middlemen, is a less risk than totalitarian censorship of large bandwidth nodes, essentially leaving only like 10 corporate nodes running.

If we would have a free Internet, then be it. We could have an even 1 Gigabyte sized block, no problem, in the future I am sure they will invent some 1 yottabyte hardisk using some quantum technology, and 1 TB/S Internet bandwidth using High frequency radio waves.

But we are not there yet, at the moment we are at the mercy of corporate oligarchs controlling the Internet, and tyrannical governments salivating over it. So until this is solved we have to settle for less.

Maybe in 30 years we will have something more decent, but hey, we have already accomplished at lot, no need to be greedy. There will be more room for improvement in the future.

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Sources:

• https://pixabay.com
• https://explorer.ooni.torproject.org

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Upvote, ReSteem &