Based on the Bitcoin euphoria since August 1st, it appears the market is perceiving the Bitcoin scaling issue to be history. Given Satoshi's original plan for scaling, even if the 2MB "promise" activates, it will prove to be far too little and likely too late.
Unfortunately, I'm seeing exactly the signs I would expect to see if this was never going to happen at all. SegWit1X, here we come!
Diligent followers of my blog may have noted that I identified the technical and ideological problems with SegWit and noted there was no possible reason to endorse it other than ignorance or malevolence.
Regular readers may also know that while I have reservations about Reddit in general, and about both Bitcoin subreddits, r/Bitcoin appears to be an open spigot of controlled and censored propaganda, while r/Btc seems relatively open and level-headed.
Both of these provide relevant back-story for what is beginning, again, on /r/btc and r/bitcoin.
There really isn't much reason to engage in organized trolling of r/btc at this point. The market appears to have declared a winner, or is at least happy to comply with the consensus majority. The only reason to do this is that those undertaking in the astro-turfing know that Bitcoin is far from out of the woods, and they do not want any chance of a competitor. This is exactly what anyone involved in Core/SegWit2X would be predicting, since they know that SegWit is snake-oil that violates the white-paper definition of Bitcoin as trustless, p2p cash. The last thing they would want is another viable, similarly profitable Bitcoin chain available to jump ship to when 2MB either fails to activate or proves too little, too late...
Could this be bullish for Bitcoin Cash long-term, which is now only ~26% less profitable to mine than Bitcoin?
Copywright: PBS, The Simpsons, The Fellowship Of The Ring
Bitcoin Cash is made to cover what Segwit2x should have done. If it's ever gonna be introduced Bitcoin, will Bitcoin Cash then be obsulute? I personally think most Bitcoin users will switch to Bitcoin Cash on long term because transactions still are, and gonna be more, expensive. We've all seen how much effort the segwit did cost and Bitcoin Cash is, in some kind of matter, better prepared for the future. One thing we know all; only time will tell the thruth!
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One interesting phenomenon, however, is that sometimes the technologically inferior option wins. A well-known example is VHS over Beta, although it was at least cheaper so maybe more economical:
"Betamax is, in theory, a superior recording format over VHS due to resolution (250 lines vs. 240 lines), slightly superior sound, and a more stable image; Betamax recorders were also of higher quality construction. But these differences were negligible to consumers, and thus did not justify either the extra cost of a Betamax VCR"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war#Outcome
The market sometimes (usually?) acts irrationally, and people do not have perfect information.
It's anyone's guess as to who wins.
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Good example, but the key phrase is: these differences were negligible to consumers
The Tx fees, lack of privacy features, no InstantSend functions, toxic/hostile dev communities.... these things matter when you step out of the early adopters market.
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InstantSend? I assume you're talking about lightning network. Opposition to SegWit is not the same as opposition to LN. One can recognize that SegWit is an over-engineered disaster that will unfold in slow motion, and oppose it for that reason, while being supportive of LN and other layer2 solutions. SegWit is not the only way to fix transaction malleability, it's just an over-engineered softfork solution that should never have been created in the first place - a malleability fix can be implemented much more cleanly while generating less technical debt, if done via hardfork. It's the obvious solution, unless perhaps one has ulterior motives and wants the main chain to become too expensive for general use, effectively forcing the users to use LN out of necessity. If you extrapolate, you realize that (assuming BTC is not eclipsed by superior technology) with no block-size increase fees will eventually rise to a level where they would simply become uneconomical for transactions whose values have less than 4-5 figures - think $50 or $100 for an on-chain tx. At this point, LN becomes useless to most, because who would pay a fee of $50 to place (part of?) their paycheck into an LN channel? But it's OK, companies shall be born (or perhaps they already have been) and will establish themselves as a trusted third party that aggregates funds from multiple users, combines them, and opens a single communal channel to be shared by the users whose funds are locked in it - but the users would have to trust this 3rd party. I'm not sure what such companies will be called in the future, but I do believe we have a word for companies that provide services of this nature today... It's on the tip of my tongue, but I can't for the life of me remember exactly what it is.
I (and afaik most of the rest of us big-blockers) do not oppose layer2 scaling solutions, but I do think they need compete with on-chain scaling organically - as opposed to the deliberate crippling of the main chain that stems from an outright refusal by the Core Devs to remove the 1MB block-size limit (which was not in Bitcoin originally, and added later as a temporary anti-spam protection measure) that we've been living with.
@nullc will tell you that Bitcoin has always been limited to 1MB, but his explanation will be completely ludicrous. He will cite that big blocks were disabled from day 1 (there was a soft limit to blocksize of 750k from day 1) because blocks larger than that would crash bitcoind. He literally insists that a bug (this bug caused a chain split in 2013)in one of the libraries Satoshi used in the original software (the berkeleydb library, IIRC) was actually an intended feature.
The folks behind the divide and conquer assault on the Bitcoin community are attempting to quite literally rewrite history. I'm sure they would edit the whitepaper - if they thought they would have a chance at getting away with it.
A surprising number of people believe that one of Bitcoin's core rules imposed by Satoshi was a 1MB block size, thanks to the hard work of Blockstream Core's propaganda machine and their armies of trolls. The propaganda machine also did a good job of convincing a large number of people that a hard fork was SO dangerous that one simply could never be attempted. I'm glad our Chinese brethren called out their bullshit the way they did with UAHF.
I expect for the next 3 months there will continue to be 2 incompatible BTC chains (unless the gods bless us by granting flippening before then), but in the end one will emerge victorious.
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The thing is we already have Dash with 1.3 second transaction (I didn't use a stop watch but they were fast). We don't even need lightning network and the fees are fraction of Bitcoin (and that's when people are paying X10 for 1.3 seconds instad of 3 minutes.
NEM(XEM) can also do 1 minutes transactions that are easy as using E-Mail that cost almost nothing.
Bottom line is that BTC is Internet Explorer, BCH is Microsoft Edge. One is better but there are even better options. The New coin Monaco(MCO) is also pretty promising. They have a future that Bitcoin doesn't have. Check them out and let me know what you think.
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Yes, that's why I didn't cut that phrase out of context.
People want Bitcoin to do too much. It's a digital reserve and large-payment mover, like gold. It's not a credit card. People shouldn't be sending sub ~$30 transactions.
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SegWit only achieved something like 35% miner support - over the course of a year. OTOH, 50% of the hashpower on the network was signaling for Emerging Concensus without SegWit. It took the '2x' in 'SegWit2x' to gain the support of enough miners to actually activate SW. I see a flippening in our future - that is, if Blockstream manages to derail the 2x train.
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It will certainly be interesting to watch. I think BS will live up to their acronym at some point in the near future.
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I also agree that the bitcoin scaling issue is very far from dead. We shouldn't write off bitcoin cash as being a straightforward solution (although I still say wait until after August 15th, and maybe not after August 21st when segwit activates)
Thank you for your enlightened explanation, I learned a lot about the current scaling 'solution' and debate - also read your previous article
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Thank you for you comment! I'm glad you found it interesting.
Bitcoin is, I think, running on name recognition and first-mover advantage still. This is a notoriously difficult type of advantage to estimate, in terms of how long it will last.
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yes precisely; but the dedicated userbase at least knows that bitcoin cash split off and is a 8mb fork. So if we have transaction backlog and high free problem again, we will immediately think of using bitcoin cash. It took years for segwit to come along. We can't wait that long again to solve a problem satoshi himself didn't see as much of an issue I think.
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Agreed. And that probably explains why BCC is up 100% today.
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The word 'segregated' should have set off bells of alarm in the beginning. Stay unified and secure. Self-contained adhering to the original whitepaper.
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I am in full agreement with you. A huge part of Bitcoin is the lack of counterparty!
Thank you for your comment!
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That coin dance page is interesting, thx for a post :)
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Bitcoin cash solved a temporary problem, in the future they are going to need to be even faster. And yea, segwit2x is so insignificant. Good to meet you in Sarasota by the way! :)
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Good to meet you too!
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Interesting. I've had a conversation with a few folks like...have we ever thought that the reason Bitcoins' will increase without it necessarily growing to be more flexible is the fact that it was the first. It is the "legacy" coin...and that in it self will give it value. I think folks need not concentrate on what would be the next Bitcoin but what will stand next to Bitcoin. As long as Bitcoin is king, there's no way around it. I applaud anyone that holds a whole Bitcoin, that will eventually be a lot of power in someone's hands in time.
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I think you make a good point. People want Bitcoin to be everything, but it just wasn't really intended for micro-payments. I think the idea of it as "digital gold" makes the most sense and is most in line with the white paper.
Once upon a time, gold was the real "cash". $20 notes were just a claim on an ounce of gold at a bank somewhere...
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I share the same sentiment. "The First" has its own legacy value which just cannot be replaced.
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I'd call it a purely sentimental value; like what we have for steam engines, CRT monitors, Old Nokia phones, Internet Explorer, CDs etc. Bitcoin belongs in a museum. Dash (and NEM) is the real deal(for the time being).
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Haha... A Cryptocurrency museum? Dash and NEM are promising.
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Exactly...and I say that again...I really think 4 - 5 years from now...very few people in the world will have owned 1 bitcoin...It will be super valuable.
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yeah, but what do you really think?
Never short on opinions(!), I don't think this has us any closer to predicting the future..
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I don't trust the group behind SegWit, since it's so clearly bogus. I think it's right to be cautious.
Incidentally, I don't own any Bitcoin Cash, but I do have some (far below market) orders in to buy a couple.
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Exactly. None of their arguments against hardforking for blocksize can stand on their own merits, hence the need to resort to heavy-handed censorship to push their narrative. It's painfully obvious that they are pursuing an agenda that has not been disclosed to the public - which may be as simple as they have patented SW (as a result they would very soon be in a position to start filing lawsuits against companies that violate their patent by creating SW transactions), or their ulterior motives may be more nefarious than that. I briefly outlined one possible endgame that could come from from a SegWit LN-enabled Bitcoin with 1MB blocks in my other comments in this thread.
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x2 will never happen
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Nice to see a Dash supporter. It's easily one of my favorites :-)
Digital Cash FTW!
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You're not bothered by the instamine?
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It was a matter or difficulty adjustment. I don't see how it would affect the future of the currency. Dash has the best fundamentals of any coin I've seen especially when it comes to governance. I don't see how the difficulty adjustment would affect unless a large portion of miners were taken out of the system for some time or someone suddenly acquiring a crazy amount of Hashing power.
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Support me and enter here https://steemit.com/help/@gr3g0r/hi-i-m-from-venezuela your collaboration is important
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Nice post! :) @lexiconical
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Thank you!
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You called it!
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