So the party held by the BCH community rocked yesterday. All were invited but many were a bit wary of some of the characters attending. This didn't stop the hosts from putting on the muppets mah nah ma nah song in an attempt to attract BTC neighbours from attending. Some neighbours, unable to sleep moved into the ETH house. Eventually the neighbours complained about the noise and a few hours after the soundz were shut down as people went home. Some were in too bad a state and had to crash there for a while as their bags are too heavy from overindulgance.
The wiser neighbours have seen this all before but are perplexed about who provided the booze. Was it the hosts or was it other people from Shelbyville?
As the hangovers clear the whole neighbourhood is trying to make sense of what happened and what it means. Has the neighbourhood been infiltrated by bogans? Are there gang connections? Is it time to move out or is it better to wait and see.
There is Talk of a civil war within the bitcoin, talk of power grabs, conspiracy theories and the usual general FUD.
Here is my take on it. It was an attempt to attract people away from the BTC house. Whilst the BCH house has larger rooms and an Nintendo Wii, the BTC house has a PS4 with a massive projector screen which attracts people from all over the province. Sure the rooms are small but the BTC house has been a safe-ish refuge for many for many years.
The BTC house was going to extend their rooms but people didn't like the look of It or the reputation of the builder, so the BTC house has postponed their renovations for now.
It's easy to analyze this all in terms of the tech and the crypto politics. Whilst this can't be discounted, I suspect the following happenned:
- Institutional investors in sth korea d3 coded to enter the market directly through BCH. About 20B involved I reckon.
- House BCH took the opportunity to point out their bigger rooms (block size) ad got wildly excited in the hope that they could attract enough people to get their hands on the BTC brand.
- House BTC wasn't, however tempted.
BTC is wrestling with something similar to what governments were wrestling with in the 70s with stagflation. Back when currencies were tied to the gold standard, governments were trapped when stagflation came as they didn't have the flexibility to prime their economies. Much in the same way BTC is struggling to balance between being a currency and a store of value. If it's a currency it needs to scale. If it's a store of value scaling is not so important.
What am I learning from this? Well I doubt this will be the first time this happens. For institutional investors, if they have the chance to buy directly into a stable enough coin directly, they will do it. If it drives the price up they will hold and dump it back into fiat and profit take. If they can pick a coin with a decent enough following, the followers will try and drive the price up.
Now this was maybe 20b. I think we can expect to see much larger plays as institutions come raiding.