Bitcoin Forum

The community is close to civil war,  you can't implement even the slightest changes without months of debate,  bitcoin is extremely slow,  with ever increasing transaction costs.

I was debating with my Dad about it and he said it's now an investment vehicle only.   But the ETF has just been denied.  I think bitcoin now has a lost identity and other coins are going to be right up your asses within a year or two.

So I ask the serious question :   Apart from network effect, what does bitcoin have going for it right now?

It is a given fact and probably one of the famous failures in bitcoin and that is the disapproved twins ETF. But let us not mourn with that failure since the price of bitcoin did not really have a big backward movement in price. The good news is that the fight for an approved ETF is not finished. There is another ETF that will undergo the evaluation of the Securities and Exchange Commission of the United States of America and that is SolidX ETF.

when money is involved you can not make rash decisions. taking time is actually a good thing and debates are good too but as long as they are constructive not juvenile attacking of the other team with your eyes closed to everything else.


not yet it isn't but we may see it happen not so far away.


ETF had nothing to do with bitcoin. it was a third party setting up a third party way of investing through them.
bitcoin is still what it was. and even if ETF were approved still the rest of the world didn't have ETF!


you are wrong.
and no altcoin can even come close to bitcoin. and this is still true even with all the crap that is going on these days :)


the same thing as always, more adoption, increasing price, more traders trading it and more FUD coming out every day.

Network effect.  First mover.  Pristine origin.

This will take a long time to erode away.

And bitcoin will remain a kind of reserve currency, it can remain at the top of market cap.  But it won't be an affordable currency (to pay with) any more.  Subtly built in from the start.

Bitcoin's crypto tech is the most primitive and clunky.  But it is good enough for a "vault gold".

It is time to get away from the traditional way of thinking when it comes to Bitcoin. Bitcoin can open up and create new markets just like the Silk Road and the others that have been set up right after it was shut down. The dark markets are growing and it is the future for Bitcoin at its truest sense since they operate outside any law. If you do not believe in that then go buy and invest in something tangible like gold since Bitcoin is only an "investment vehicle".

* still the highest market cap
* still the highest trading volume
* the first mover advantage/most recognised cryptocurrency
* highest hash rate/most secure (debatable)
* highest merchant adoption
* still considered to be trustless and decentralised (ignoring geographical centralisation)
* still anonymous (if you try real hard)
* still faster and cheaper than most international bank transfers (but this could change soon)
* still proves to be effective as a long-term investment or store of value

That's all I can think of.

But if stalling continues, BTC could easily lose its "No 1" badge, causing serious damage to the entire cryptocurrencies market, which would then be seen as only good for short-mid term speculation.

bitcoin is on the right way and its still grow and i am sure more people will use bitcoin as their investment. its not a big problem if ETF has been denied because bitcoin itself is design for future and for now bitcoin still can be used for many purpose but in the future, bitcoin will be approve by any of regulation and bitcoin will be use by all country. i think its not right you said that bitcoin is lost identity, if this is true, then why bitcoin is still in high price and more people wants to know about bitcoin and use bitcoin for their purpose. i think bitcoin is more than just the ETF or the others, bitcoin itself is about freedom that every people can have.

Glad someone gets it. 

If you think Bitcoin can't fall from #1, get your head out of the sand!   

Did you see the current price of bitcoin after the ETF has been rejected? It didn't affect the price of bitcoin at all. So I don't think it lost its identify and alt-coins could never comes close to bitcoin in terms of market cap and volume trading as post by pawel7777. Yes alt-coins can have they ATH all along, but coming close to bitcoin volumes, I highly doubt it.

 

You don't seem to get it.  The ETF is irrelevant. 

What's relevant is Bitcoin's utility and scalability, which is in danger.

Yes, all this debate and politics that surrounds it ruining the bitcoin market. They should put things aside so that we, the bitcoin community and user will not suffer the consequences of their action. Because if this roadblock cannot be resolved immediately, a lot of people will lost interest in bitcoin and will go to alt-coins as you have mentioned. Alt-coins volumes are getting huge by the day and I hope will not overtake bitcoin in the market. The sooner they are able to fix it, the better for us bitcoin community.

These 'Scaling Issues' will need to be addressed by ANY coin that actually reaches a certain size. (NO-ONE yet knows if BU can / will work, and whether CORE are right in pushing for a second tier..)

Bitcoin is the only coin that faces these issues ATM, because it'a the only one BIG enough.

If it can't solve them, no one can. (In Full mode - Ethereum has a 60GB chain, last time I downloaded it in November, which grows 5GB/month.. and it's still 'relatively' TINY in terms of actual USE..  that's NOT going to work in the long run..)

Pretty straight forward really.

Well, it needs no aggressive marketing, because it is already well known or familiar with most people. The network affect is no small matter and

other coins or technologies will take years to catch up. Bitcoin has the strongest security and track record and no central figure head that can be

targeted. We also have some of the best developers in the world working on the code/protocol.  ;)

I guess that will be accessibility and global payment processing. I think I agree a bit with you about Bitcoin losing its identity but I hope people will realize this and stop the monetization of the transaction fees .

I am in consent with this evaluation.  I might add that I believe bitcoin has a "keeping up" with innovative solutions problem.  While many hold bitcoin as a means to store wealth, they're ignoring the more utilitarian aspects of the platform....If an alternative platform proves to be more useful, bitcoin can be replaced.  I don't believe it's prudent to sacrifice bitcoin's utility as a vehicle to precipitate exchange for it's ability to store wealth....I think that's where it's heading and I think it's a big mistake.

EDIT:  It really is beginning to look like a Tulip at this point.

If core are scared of ever doing a hard fork then unfortunately bitcoin will never have any other things going for it than it does right now, If we got segwit or BU now i dont know how much that would even do for bitcoin. Its falling behind.

it's not in danger man, solution are there but not the consensus, the consensus of bitcoin is dangerous i think, it require too much time to take a decision, and in some case like now they will never take any decision, and i think the EFT rejected bitcoin because of the scalability issue as well, they are definitely connected

Facepalm to OP.

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Let's analyze the current top cryptocurrencies after Bitcoin:
1) ETH: Scalability issues greater than those found in Bitcoin. Extremely centralized coin, with no immutability. Effectively a Fed 2.0 coin with the 'too big to fail' DAO situation.
2) Dash: Scalability issues. Fake privacy benefits. Extremely instamined coin; over 20% of existing supply aka a Scamcoin.
3) Monero: Scalability issues greater than those found in Bitcoin. Unprunable; no SPV wallets.

If anything is going to come close to Bitcoin, then it is ETH because the bankers will continue to shill for it because it is effectively centralized.

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None of these coins are facing the 'block size debate' because almost nobody is using them for transactions.

It has everything going for it except the network issues you talked about. I don't think Bitcoin has lost any of its core operational principles except delayed confirmations and high transaction fees.

Agree thx!! :)

Well, ETH and Monero have no block size limit.  That doesn't mean they can scale indefinitely - they can't because they are block chain coins.  But at least, the limit is just the technological resource usage, and hence, there is no inelastic offer of transaction space.  If technology (network, processing, storage) goes up by a factor of 10, then ETH and Monero can handle 10 times more transactions at the same cost.  That's about every 5-6 years according to Moore's law.  This means that there is no lucrative fee market.  Both ETH and Monero have tail emission, meaning that there will not be the battle for fees.

Moreover, ETH as well as Monero have regular hard forks, so they can much easier update to newer technology.  For instance, recently, monero switched to ring CT from the former cryptonote tech.  That is a more involved and deeper modification than Segwit activation.   

Both these coins will face scaling problems, and are not able to allow the earth to buy their morning coffee in the foreseeable future, but at least they will never hit the hard and frozen wall bitcoin set for itself.

DASH is a copy of bitcoin with integrated automatic tumblers.  However, DASH being "governed" (and most probably CENTRALLY governed), it can also adapt much easier if something must be changed, like block size.  This is even somewhat scary with DASH: in early history, the coin emission has been divided by 4 (there were going to be 84 million coins, and after the 2 million instamine, this has been lowered to 21 million coins, like bitcoin  :o ). 

So even though all these coins are block chain based coins that don't scale well, they are in much, much better shape to scale somewhat than bitcoin with its hard wall.

The latter is rarely picked up on and it's extremely important. Everything that came after has the potential to be distorted by greed during its creation and indeed often has been. Sadly I'm not sure how many people actually care about that.

Yes, this is very true and the fall might be just around the corner. I may not like what Roger Ver said when he mentioned sending $100k worth of Dash for pennies in fees but I believe we must take that as a cue to start investing and hold other cryptocurrencies to be safe. Roger Ver is the BTC Jesus after all. He has a nose for what is in store for the future however some may disagree with him.

Are you afraid of rejection of the ETF? . It will not give any effect in the bitcoin, indeed any transaction fees tall now, but it's also because of the growing number of transactions where each server or block will definitely be experiencing overload, but you don't need to worry because to be able to get confirmation you just simply use fee that has been recommended. I think after the rejection of the ETF, there is no effect to occur. The price of the bitcoin now stable and transactions also increasing
 

with the way people panic during the last ETF approval or disapproval news on 10-3-2017 I think seeing bitcoin from the investment side is what it has going for it now. Many people are complaining about fee and network slowness, this make them  not to use bitcoin as online transfer and the slowness of the network affect their business negatively.