Bitcoin has worked for me all right for 10+ years. What is exactly wrong with it? At times fees have been a bit higher, but overall I would see the protocol as "good enough". For smaller transactions I have been using Lightning Network and it seems to work all right. The fact that Bitcoin hasn't hard forked for whatever reasons is a positive feature, that outweighs the negatives.
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.
Vitalik is basically only a thought leader these days, he has taken many steps back (as you can read about on his blog). He doesn't "control" anything.
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.
Given the monetary policy Satoshi chose and the headline he picked to include in the genesis block, I really don't think you can infer what he himself thought bitcoin was meant to become, even if he referred to it as cash originally.
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...
Satoshi wrote extensively about what he imagined Bitcoin could become, including in emails to me that I later published. Certainly, what was done to the original Bitcoin completely voided Satoshi's goals and offers an abject lesson in the difficulty of keeping institutions on-track over time.
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.
repomies69|1 year ago
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.
ErikBjare|1 year ago
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.
hggh|1 year ago
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.
[0] https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf
yardstick|1 year ago
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.
lawn|1 year ago
Fees at $50 per traction is "a bit" higher to you?
TarasBob|1 year ago
awrence|1 year ago
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...
mike_hearn|1 year ago
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.