Bitcoin Forum

After 4+ years in the space and countless hours of research, it is becoming increasingly apparent that BTC is the only worthwhile project.  Also by the thread title, you can probably tell its not my first rodeo.

Some of my strongest reasoning is specified below, it is by no means comprehensive.  While I may have typed the below with conviction, I am openminded to other views (my wallet compels me so) - please put forth your opposing views.

• PoW is the only true Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus mechanism.  PoS is not BFT at this point in time and I do not see how it gets there.  At the end of the day, under PoS and the many other consensus mechanisms, one needs to trust a third party to relay them the correct data and that is assuming that one can be certain that the delegated node holds the majority of the voting power – this is not trustless and re-introduces third parties.  With PoW, I can verify the hashes and the longest chain is the correct one.

• Bitcoin as a base layer focuses on censorship resistance, immutability, security and decentralisation.  Second layer solutions (scalability/escrow) can be built on top.  Claims by other ‘cryptocurrencies’ to be ‘better than bitcoin’ are ignoring trade-offs involving BTC’s key features.  Any appreciable increase in throughput will reduce security, decentralisation, immutability and censorship resistance.

• There cannot be a ‘next Bitcoin’ and the paradox of replacing a store-of-value (SoV) applies.  Any successful replacement of BTC will forever undermine the credibility of any successor.  We are instead made to forever question the replacement of a SOV.  How is an investor to know it won’t happen again?.  Any other attempt at digital money ‘fails by succeeding’, it fails the eco-system by replacing Bitcoin and ultimately fails itself.  By way of example, Gold is the precious metal SOV of choice, most governments/institutions warehouse little or no silver.  If silver supplants gold as a SOV, then I’m all out of precious metals because one cannot trust silver will maintain its SOV dominance.

• Medium of exchange(MoE) aside, I can’t think of another legitimate use case for ‘decentralisation’.  At a stretch illegal marketplaces may benefit from decentralisation given the risk of censorship or seizure of assets.  All these other uses cases like smart cities, record keeping, supply chain, fundraising etc are far better managed through centralised databases where it is not unacceptable for the user/operator to bear some of the risks cumbersome decentralised platforms seek to eliminate.
  

• If (and it’s a big if) smart-contract enabled platforms finds widespread commercial use, the ‘utility’ basis for value for many of these smart-contract enabled platforms acts as a ceiling to price.  An increase in fees to use the network will result in competitor chains becoming more attractive.

• For smart-contract enabled platforms, infrastructure limitations decrease the ability of users to run fully validating nodes (compared to a cryptocurrency targeting a MoE use only).

All your points are valid and I'm happy to see that there are users who understand the fundamentals of cryptocurrency instead of parroting the narratives created by altcoins' marketing teams.

I think that there are 2 kinds of altcoins that currently have some uses and as the result hold some value. The first type is privacy coins - Bitcoin's privacy is pretty bad, and the most common solution to it - mixers, requires some trust. If Bitcoin will solve privacy, privacycoins will become obsolete.

The second kind is coins with relatively good security and adoption. They can be used as a plan B when Bitcoin's fees temporarily skyrocket. They can be used for small transactions or for moving value between services to save on fees. But again, when Bitcoin will solve scalability, these coins will become useless too.

I think, in terms of money use case, there are other categories of crypto money. Most cryptocurrencies try to be some kind of Store of Value. Crypto space has not focused enough on money use cases. I think there is another category of decentralized cryptocurrency: inflating cryptocurrency. I made a diagram to illustrate emerging kinds of cryptocurrencies.

https://bitflate.org/assets/images/CryptoCentralizationDecentralization.png

I kinda have also come to your conclusion.

Have like 4 Altcoins I'm hodl'ing because well, hoping for a pump and not underwater yet.

The only one I do have a bit of faith out of the above 4 is Litecoin and that is simply for Mimblewimble.

But at this rate, I'll have cashed out the remaining above at HOPEFULLY the next pump and be all in for BTC.

It is obvious that where BTC goes all the altcoins follow anyway, just have to pare this down from these last 4 altcoins hoards of any note.

I did have a dozen altcoins hodl's at one time...so it is progress.

later

Brad

In a way you are correct but, not all Altcoins are bad. The supreme cryptocurrency is Bitcoin, there is no doubt about it. But, you cannot ignore altcoins like Ethereum and exchange coins like BNB. You will need them as long as they have a platform which needs them. You cannot ignore these Altcoins .

The more I read and think about ethereum, the more unanswered questions I have.

The most concerning being:

1. The vast majority of DApps are better off on a centralised database (see original post).
2. The only use case that may benefit from being on a decentralised platform is an illegal marketplace.  Ethereum has proven to not be immutable with the DAO hack and I think it's no longer a candidate for this use case.
3. Eth has a 'utility' basis for value. The cost of utility (gas) act as a ceiling to price.  An increase in fees results in more competitor chains becoming attractive.
4. Exponentially increasing blockchain size and decreased ability for one to run full validating nodes.
5. PoS is not BFT

Eth may fill a niche market for smart contracts but why you would speculate in ETH over something that:

• is the perfect storm of being the first mover, most decentralised built on the back of guiding principles in security, stability, censorship resistance and immutability
• benefits immensely from the network effect of a sound store of value, where an increase in price only creates additional demand and legitimisation

support everything that you've mentioned and its already proven for how many years,looking at the price and the capitalization?and the transactions per day?i am sure that only Bitcoin is the most safest and practical way of investing here in cryptocurrency market
yups thats also correct and it is exaggerated to say that all altcoins are bad because there are plenty of them that is legit and until now bringing good in this market so basically its just a matter of supremacy is the issue and not tha existence of altcoins.

bitcoin is not a store of value, bitcoin is FIRST a CURRENCY and then because of a dozen reasons it can be used as a store of value.
and there can be "next bitcoin" but it doesn't have to replace bitcoin! it is like saying there could only be room for only one CPU (Intel) and there is no room for another one (AMD).
if some day a better innovative idea came along that could be as good as bitcoin, it will simply grow to bitcoin levels and is used alongside of it.

not everything is about illegal activities. most of the times it is about not wanting to bend over to the corrupted  centralized power. look at India for instance.

well, i don't know how obvious it is because i can not find any altcoin at all that has followed bitcoin over the past 22 months! over that period altcoins have constantly gone down while bitcoin had its fall and then has been rising for the past 10 months.
for example bitcoin dropped ~80% and after reaching bottom in Dec 2018 it started rising a couple of months later and has gone up 250% in total
litecoin has dropped ~80% and after reaching the bottom Dec 2018 it had a little dead cat bounce where it goes back up for some time and then comes back down again to the same bottom it reached in 2018!

Very well made post mate, it's getting rarer and rarer for there to be people who actually have seen all/most of the crypto-currencies, and haven't fallen to the marketing jargon and come back with a clear mind.

This particular line in your post caught my eye, for a particular reason. There's been a lot of new crypto-currencies that have been made the last couple of years, and a lot of them add random, useless features like "decentralisation" or "blockchains" when they, to simply put it -don't need it.

I will address three fundamental flaws with your reply.


Bitcoin is absolutely a store of value and designed as such with a emission schedule imitating that of gold.  The base layer has throughput limitations that preclude it from being a 'currency' useful for general/micro transactions.

It's borderless, secure, censorship resistant, immutable and decentralised.  There is $30 trillion in tax havens and swiss banks, using BTC as a SOV is a no brainer.

Additionally, BTC's deflationary nature does not encourage transactions and by extension lends itself to hoarding which would be more in line with an SOV.  People in this forum hate Keynesian economics (and perhaps for good reason), but its proven deflationary assets experience lower use and becomes hoarded.


Bitcoin as a SOV is fundamentally different to two different companies delivering mass market products - we would be comparing apples with oranges.  There can only be one dominant SOV which is explaned in my original post.

By way of analogy, Silver has more market uses than Gold, why are governments/institutions hoarding gold over silver?, why has government/institution inventories of silver dropped precipitously to almost non-existant levels?

Both these articles are excellent and reinforce my point on Bitcoin as the dominant SOV and the problem with utilities:

https://medium.com/john-pfeffer/an-institutional-investors-take-on-cryptoassets-690421158904
https://medium.com/john-pfeffer/doubts-about-the-long-term-viability-of-utility-cryptoassets-db04350b1f55


I never claimed this to be the case.

My point is that there is pretty much no point in decentralising uses aside from money (MoE) and perhaps illegal market places.  All other uses are better suited to centralised databases where the market (operators and users) are happy to bear the risks cumbersome and expensive decentralised platforms seek to eliminate.

That is a great write-up @100action! You might wanna put together a little more content and format it & publish it on Medium or so. It is very important to keep things into perspective. All the altcoins got hurt much more than BTC in the bear market so that's another indication why it is the only viable crypto store-of-value. Regarding the smart contract functionality I'm sure it can be implemented on BTC as well. RSK(Rootstock project) offers smart contracts secured by the Bitcoin network & I'm sure multiple functionalities can be built upon Bitcoin through extra layers.

It also took me some time to realize after I earned and lost on so many altcoins. The only coin with consistent future is bitcoin. If you look at the price of coins before and after the bear run, the bitcoin has been the most successful one. Ethereum holders lose more in the bear run than Bitcoin and BNB has performed more incontestably in last 6 months than bitcoin.

How long these altcoins you mentioned will last is another question if you are looking for its longevity, Ethereum was an instant hit when all the scam projects could use that to collect money and there was a time when Vitalik Buterin was bashing bitcoin about its high fees at one point and he was very vocal about Ethereum and now what happened, he had to swallow his words and hide  :P. In short as long as projects or companies are using these platforms they will have some valuation and the possibility to go down to zero are high and that is not the case with bitcoin and that is the biggest difference between bitcoin and the rest.

@OP I do accept most of the things you mentioned but i do not agree with the store-of-value part.

It is infact true because I have seen all currencies showing their highs and lows but it was transient and it happened once and then we never see them again in the bull run .
This is exceptionally weird to consider that a win for currencies like this , because Bitcoins on the other hand is slow and steady these Currencies are abrupt , they suddenly change and goes down in moments and we will never see them get up again , this is why I like Bitcoins , this is why I invest 100% in Bitcoins instead of other currencies.

what you are missing about ethereum and smart contracts is that it has been useless so far and the only people who are using it are the scammers trying to raise funds out of thin air and the gamblers who are giving up their money to see if they can win some profit.

if "smart contracts" were to become useful and have some real world applications other than what is currently is being used for then it will be used on top of bitcoin as a side chain or a second layer. there currently are at least one project that is doing it called RootStock. the subject is not popular because there has not yet been any real world usage and also these side chains aren't similar pump and dump coins like ether to give profit to be able to produce similar hype.

everybody eventually reaches the same conclusions after a while. the time it took you seems a bit too high in my opinion (4 years). usually depending on the time people join this world it could take the maximum of one cycle of altcoin pump and dumps which is usually less than a year for them to realize the truths and start seeing past the "next bitcoin" advertisements.

I'd also add something to the list, but I'm struggling to find a way to phrase it so that it makes sense.  Or perhaps it's just an extension to the second point you made.

I feel like there's a link between the underlying principles of Bitcoin and the overwhelming momentum it has in terms of development.  Most altcoins are founded on the goal of mindless speculation and profiteering.  Some are founded to focus on a particular feature (although often a gimmick).  But few are founded on the genuine belief that the fundamental principles they are based on are important.  How many coins have faltered because they had a lone dev who simply lost interest in the project?  Probably thousands.  There's no longevity in cryptocurrencies that were founded to pursue the wrong goals.  

There's no doubt in my mind that Bitcoin has the strong dev base it does precisely because people care about "censorship resistance, immutability, security and decentralisation".  As such, a greater number of developers are more willing to commit considerable time and effort on their part to contribute to Bitcoin, rather than devs who focus on altcoins to make a quick buck.  People believe in this, so they strive to make it succeed.  Few, if any, coins can match that level of sheer passion.  Which is why Bitcoin is never going to have a shortage of contributors and the pace of development remains steady.

It still depends on how bitcoin do actually impacts an individual with regards to the investment they have in BTC as well as their trust if it is fulfilled or not. In a simple explanation, those investors and bitcoin enthusiast that can get what they want from BTC will conclude much that the current system is already enough, while those who are having a hard time gaining profits will think of the other alternatives to supple their needs.

Well, for me it depends on the risk that a person is exerting. Because learning will be absorbed much efficiently if one is having a loss with their investment. Or in short, those that are committing mistakes are much likely to learn with an exception that when they commit a mistake, they will not do it again.

Wow, an excellent thread with thoughtful responses in bitcoin discussion.  That's a rarity.

Op, you made some very good arguments even if I don't fully understand some of the technical aspects of what you wrote.  What I found most interesting was your explanation of why proof of stake isn't as good as pow, because I like some of the pos coins and use a few for staking.  I don't think any of them have a fatal flaw, but I concede that their design probably isn't as secure as pow coins. 

It was *supposed* to be a currency, but it isn't really being used for that so much as either a store of value or an investment, whatever the difference is there.  In fact I've always thought bitcoin was a crappy currency for a whole host of reasons, but it certainly can be used as one.  It isn't even that great a store of value since it has volatility that would make even penny stock traders nauseous. 

Alts have their purpose, primary of which is to extract the most value out of whatever bitcoin you put into it, as, let's face it, most altcoins are paired with bitcoin on exchanges and almost nothing else.

They are the penny stocks of the crypto world.

As one post in 2016 or 2017 says, if an investor went in on the top 10 alts by marketcap with no regard to doing any other due diligence, he'd have made a lot more money than if he put the same fiat amount all in, in bitcoin. If he put it in bitcoin only, he'd make 8 to 9 times. If he "diversified" to the top 10 after bitcoin during that time, he'd make 100 to 200 times.

Let's just take ETH as an example, if you joined the ICO back in 2014, 1 BTC = 2000 ETH. ... Just remember to take your profits a few years later, but even if one did not, that ETH is still worth ... 40 times what BTC is worth today.

Like a lot of people, I looked at ETH, but did not participate. I looked at LTC, bought them at 20, sold them at 40 a week later, I think that was my best move then. I looked at EOS, ZCASH, DASH, I tried to join BAT but missed the deadline by 2 seconds or whatever it took to finish that one (crazy ico times) ... then I looked a bunch of smaller cap altcoins, and would have made some profits if we knew to cash them out in early 2018.

Of course, that's not fair and we don't have crystal balls, but we should have seen the so called crypto winter coming anyway.

Now, stablecoins are here, so it's either that or sell the alts to get BTC, eventually keep a large percentage in BTC, either to use or to just hodl.


If you're watching the regular stock market, I'd say altcoins are like the "Beyond Meats" ... you start at 70, pump up to 200, then it's now back to 70, and likely to go down, down, down.

first of all you have to keep in mind that being a currency doesn't mean it can not be a store of value. in fact "money" has been considered a store of value for ages. and bitcoin is a store of value because it is a currency.
secondly limitations that the "base layer" has doesn't change anything about the fact that bitcoin is a currency. bitcoin is not just the base layer, it is a network. right now you can use it for micro transactions and in the future as the adoption grows and second layer matures you can use that for a better result.

in the end bitcoin is still a toddler and can even be considered experimental even after a decade. we are still struggling to find that balance between keeping it decentralized while maximizing the capacity and the goal from day one that Satoshi released the paper has been to create a "currency" that is why the title of the paper says "electronic cash system" not an "electronic invest and HODL system".

At this point, I mostly agree. In the future, who knows? Things might still change, more coins might decouple from BTC, and some projects might even overshadow it. I'm not saying that it will happen, but it might happen, so yeah, we'll see.

Will bitcoin ever solve scalability? It's now nearly two years since the fee and mempool problems of 2017 and still the mempool gets full even with much reduced transactions.

If bitcoin can't solve scalability, either cryptocurrency as a whole dies a death, or another scalable alt will take it's place.

Having attended a blockchain conference lately, I find it amazing how many developers, investors and institutional figureheads appear to be interested in the tech, while having little to no knowledge how bitcoin came to be, or even what the double spending problem was. Oracle, Microsoft and IBM are trying to sell the idea of permissioned, privately hosted, centralized and non-POW blockchains. It's as if they want the blockchain without the block and the chain...

In terms of cryptocurrencies, bitcoin really is the one and only viable one in my opinion. Even Ethereum's founder has come to redefine what he means by the term "full node"...  (https://old.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/8npkcc/state_of_the_currency_of_the_future_in_the/dzzhjpg/)The only one keeping standards high is BTC.

OP, it's part of the journey. I'm confident that most of the newbies will go through the same process to learn. The hard way.

Newbies, listen to the trolls. We'll be HODLING Bitcoins to sell to you later at 6 digits. 8)

Bitcoin can survive as an SOV alone with the currentl transaction limitations.

Gold as the precious metal dominant SOV would have very little transactions across a day, and I am certain the amount of transactions in gold per day can easily be matched and surpassed with current Bitcoin infrastructure.

A 2nd layer scaling solution like the lightning network is just a cherry on top.

though our time now are very different from what is before,when we don't have basis of how much Bitcoin price could ever reach,not like for the newbies now that they can even check the history to use as reference on how they can trust this market.
we cannot blame them because they are more concern about the money and not the technology.
in these we will surely be on one side,because i manage to hold in dip and i am sure can keep holding till 6 digits come.

ive sort of came full circle the other way.
i feel that bitcoin has to be replaced with something for it to be a worthwhile currency.

i feel that too many are currently in circulation and being held by too few and it inhibits its use as a money currency and it promotes holding for profits. which is not what bitcoin is about.. its about being a semi anonymous payment method that is immune to charge backs.

im all for the whole be your own bank and being decentralized.. but its not going to work. ordinary people will never adopt it.

its too easy to steal and be scammed, its too easy to lose your key or password and its too complicated.


if a bank like chase made a coin, and it was backed by banks so you could go online and transfer some to a wallet and use it to buy things online, and also the government didnt try to hose you on taxes.. then i could see that being adopted as a currency. but then i think the banks like things the way they are.

until then, hold until you are rich.. :/

That's why improvements are always in the pipeline.  As was said above, Bitcoin is still effectively in Beta.  All the stuff that makes it easier to use for ordinary people to use is still to come.

If you can't explain how an Automated Clearing House works on a technical level, then surely credit card payments are too complicated and no one will ever use them.  Except that people do use them and have probably never even heard of Automated Clearing Houses, let alone be able to explain how they work.  Given sufficient time, Bitcoin can reach that level as well.  Play the long game and see the potential.

This is one of the post that should be merited. Push it to the roof.  ;D

Sold all my altcoins for bitcoin and is now already in profit if I will still be calculating the increase in my altcoins against bitcoin.
I dont think there is really one altcoin now that could soar in value. Some of them may have taken it to the next level but not how bitcoin did it.
Ethereum is my next. I still believe with that technology. Although it had been a long wait, my faith with it is still strong. But not as strong as how it is with BTC.

If you are interested to the applications of blockchain technology under ETH, you probably wouldn't ignore some dapps which BTC doesn't have like the smart contracts. Technology is binding us all here so it doesn't have to create division when we explore decentralization, consensus, programmable blockchain and flexibility. All these are on altcoin projects which are smart contract base like ETH. We may see them not so decentralized but these I guess all for experimentation, probably for shitcoins as well as you may think but these are still interesting for innovation.

All out of them plus points or I'd give some to you, but yeah, welcome to the club. I made up my mind fairly quickly, but to be fair, I splashed and mucked about in 2016 with a fair share of different crypto (I would call them assets if I were a bit more classy I suppose), and even the communities at the time in those alts respected and acknowledged Bitcoin for what it was. None -- to me, anyway -- ever saw themselves as a replacement for Bitcoin, merely a co-existing alternative.

On the other hand, sad to also see others even longer in the game than me, give up on Bitcoin. But Bitcoin isn't being about tribalistic (even if it seems to on social media) so we all get to have our say, our time on the wagon, and we're all no less nor more than each other.

Cheers, Bitcoiner.

The thing is most other Alt coins are simply a knockoff of the original concept and they are making empty promises of specific use cases and then

nothing actually happens. Ethereum started out with a mission to become the best Smart contract enabled Crypto and then Bitcoin had the scaling

war, then it suddenly changed the mission and pretended to be a better currency than Bitcoin. Ripple on the other hand wanted to be a centralized

Bank coin and it failed miserably with that goal. Bitcoin just built on it's original goal and mission as stipulated in Satoshi's whitepaper and it became

popular with both merchants and traders.  ;)

For me it has always been Bitcoin, I don't care what people have to say, even if they try to give me reasons and say that altcoins are better I still won't agree. Yep, I have seen several of those reasons that makes people say that altcoins are better, maybe because of being faster and cheaper and whatsoever, all those things still won't change my mind. The fact that Bitcoin is the first is enough for me to just stick to investing my money in bitcoin. But, I do invest a bit in altcoins and that's just the top altcoins.

The way I see it, the next bull run might only be for Bitcoin. Altcoins might just crash (and they are already crashing and losing value), some have just been stable and not showing any signs of going up this year. Some altcoins I just use them because of transaction, just like for signature campaigns, but I after I receive them I still exchange.

This is a classical analogy and good example too.
I want to go down to your last paragraph briefly. It is better to convert shit coins to btc but the issue is, after you calculate the value, they still amount to nothing and can't come out from exchange because of fees  ::) ;D. I have learnt my lessons with pump and dump shit coins.

Sorry, I almost forgot. Thanks for reminding me.

https://i.redd.it/3525lt9kvir01.jpg

Never forget, HyperBitcoinization is coming. Let the trolls be trolls because they HODL, and will never HODL NONE. 8)

I perceive BTC as the only currency that you can really devote your time to.

but why?

bitcoin is not currency its property.. its really not much more than buying an expensive watch or whatever and hoping in a few years it will be worth more than it is now..

i used to think wow bitcoin is so great it has so much potential, but seriously everything you can do with bitcoin, you can do without it.

now, blockchain tech is great.. it has great potential.. it doesnt have to be currency, or have any monetary value at all for it to work.

In what way?  Blockchains which don't have any incentive for a significant number of users to secure them are equivalent to centralised databases.  Databases arguably have potential, but it's rare for anyone to get excited about that.

This is the one that the most people seem to have the most difficulty with and I truly don't understand why it's so hard to wrap one's head around it.

Even now you still see that fucking Myspace/Facebook comparison when all it took to skip across was a couple of clicks and the only thing you had at stake where some whiny essays and a few duckface pics. I just don't see how people can fail to acknowledge the fundamental difference.

Having said that the tricky bit is if Bitcoin ever needed 'replacing' out of necessity, a concerted attempt to murder it or some unforeseen tech disaster, rather than some fantasy usurping. Even then the incentive is there to preserve and reboot that pile of data rather than any alternative.

It is true that bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that can be relied upon for now, given the condition of the altcoins market
not getting better. Investors are tired of investing in altcoins, so prefer bitcoin as a safe way to earn profit. So from that
until now it is clear why bitcoin always dominates the market, because it is the most profitable compared with altcoins.
Plus in 2019 there are many ICO projects that are scam, adding to investors' confidence to save their money only in bitcoin.
But when it comes to the future, for top altcoins like ETH, LTC, BNB, XRP and XLM there is still hope.

Will take note of this!
There are many cryptocurrencies living in this industry nowadays and most of them want to compete with bitcoin. Yet, they have new mechanism and security features, I can say that bitcoin still the most safe and helpful cryptocurrency. There is no doubt that it is the King of all coins.
Thanks mate for sharing this. Many newbies will open their eyes from the reality of bitcoin.

But it IS money. Anyone can use it as a medium of exchange too.


Can you buy drugs from the dark markets with your PayPal?


Are you trolling? Because I believe either that, or you don't actually understand how the Bitcoin incentive structure works.

You misunderstand bitcoin.  If the pool mining operators attack the network and its not in the interest of the individual miners, then the individual miners will exit the pool and mine for a operator that has their best interest at heart.

Lets pretend even if there was 2-3 entities that can attack the network, well the network will just fork and the chain that is accepted by the majority of the users will be the real bitcoin. 

A large mining pool would have to be completely irrational to 51% attack a network they and their users are heavily 'invested' in anyway.

PoS is not BFT, and is not comparable to the hardest and most secure cryptocurrency - Bitcoin.  In any case, POS/DAG etc coins are far more centralised than bitcoin with the vast majority of tokens held by the top few (the bell curve would actually look far more skewed than that of Bitcoin's).

Spot on.

If there was somehow, a far better piece of decentralised distributed ledger that is invented in the future, this can just be forked into the Bitcoin network and the existing data is retained, or the Bitcoin data is transfered to the new distributed ledger.

i think you are trolling.. bitcoin is not money..
also the fact that most exchanges are banning US customers and the ones that stay available are shady has a lot to say about bitcoins future..

if buying drugs is bitcoins main feature, then its doomed.
and no i do believe that blockchain tech does not need to have any monetary value to work..

It's the US government forcing customers from exchanges. The ones that still can be bothered accommodate US customers are a cut above in legitimacy.

If your blockchain has no monetary value then there's zero incentive to work to secure it which means it's effectively useless as anyone will be able to wipe it out.

If your blockchain is private and centralised, and that's the only scenario where a valueless chain could work, you may as well stick with databases in most cases.

I imagine a central bank currency is decentralized in the sense that the blockchain or full nodes of that chain run on bank computers all over the country. So there is no single database held by the banks, but all the banks and all the subsidiaries and all the branches and all the buildings are running full nodes.

The big top 5 or top 6 or whatever banks are the block producers, and its some sort of delegated proof of stake or even some sort of proof of work where the only hardware that can mine it belongs to the central bank / other branches of banks.

In theory, they can work with something that has longer block times too, like 20 minutes, 30 minutes, even 1 hour. It would be their final settlement layer which would be the base, and on top would be their centralized regularly banking layer for the instant transactions needed for every little thing every little client or depositor does.

Checks or Cheques still take a few days to clear, anything that "clears" in an hour would be better, and the public could have access to at least view this, like on some central bank block explorer specific to that chain.

That's how I imagine it could be. I don't really know what they want to do or how they intend to do it, maybe they'll just consult some blockchain start up companies to do it, and those guys will get paid a lot of money.

In the end, it's still fiat, but at least you can think of it as government stable coin.

It IS money. Some use it as a storage of value, some use it as a medium of exchange, it's a unit of account in the blockchain.


Censorship-resistance will be its doom? Haha.

I believe you confuse "blockchains" with centralized databases.

I believe this is what many cryptocurrency users and investors have realized now that is making them to put more attention on bitcoin and which is why they are not buying more of all these altcoins again, because they know and believe now that bitcoin is the only coin for the future, and if there is any currency in crypto that will be accepted worldwide, it would be bitcoin.

I am quite so much disappointed in Ethereum a little bit, because they have a very solid background and a beginning, but it seems that they are trying not to end it well or sustain it, I am only waiting for their Ethereum 2.0 to be released before I fully conclude on this project to be one of the project that I should continue holding apart from bitcoin or not.

That's what I realized and learned too during those times that I lost from altcoins. I believed there is a reason for everything, sometimes we need to risk in other things for us to realize the real value of the one and only King of Crypto, we don't know the future, and we know and we believed that there are altcoins that are good project too, it's just that, it's not that worth it compare to Bitcoin.

Better late than never. The OP's arguments are solid and technical, it also helps explains why bitcoin keeps the value it has, despite of being "backed by nothing" as some ignorant people claim. In fact its backed by code, which results in the aforementioned features described by OP.

If people wanted to know why bitcoin has the value it has, look no further and read what OP said, which has been said around here many times by many people, but still needs to be repeated again and again...

To some extent, I agree with you.For a couple of years in the running,it has been quite solid with volatility in the market and all,but then,not all altcoins are completely useless.

exactly this was suggested when "Directed Acyclic Graph" chains were newly proposed.

A big problem was how to mine using a chain that's really structured like a tree, how do you arrive at consensus on newly distributed money? And of course, the answer was to start with a satoshi style PoW uni-chain, mine all the coins, then fork to a DAG chain once there are no new coins left.

   
Of course, it is, In this cryptocurrency platform, Bitcoin is the only project which is profitable to me, I also think that Bitcoin has some special characteristics which make this one special, not only that but also it's really worth than any other project, from my experience, I assure you that Bitcoin holding and trading both are profitable, since there is a price volatility, Bitcoin will bring to you a good amount of money in the future, so it's really a worth project for anyone. that's why a lot of new investors have started again investing in this forum because they have finally realized that is the best option to do something special.

Proposed by who? A Core developer?


That proposal is a little naive, isn't it? We've already seen what kind of drama the community had with the scaling debate. That proposal would be like nuclear war if taken seriously.

The longest chain in a PoW has the most 'work' commited to it.  Changing a block in the past will require all subsequent blocks to be somehow remined at huge energy costs - the earlier the block, the higher the energy cost.  This is simply not the case with POS as you are effectively told what the longest chain is.

By extension POW has much better immutability which is perhaps the most important feature of any decentralised ledger technology.

if you are thinking about bitcoin being secure tho 2/3rds of the mining pools are backed by china and basically the same. if they really wanted to, they could fork bitcoin and NOBODY can do anything about it short of the core devs writing a patch to put it back..

i personally think that allowing mining pools has hurt bitcoin.. all its done is grouped together the miners and forced them to join a pool to get any earnings. as everyone talks about how decentralized bitcoin is..

no, it was Sergio Demian Lerner's concept. Although arguably it's just an evolution of the "tree-chain" concept, which was proposed by (former?) Bitcoin dev Peter Todd



that was my idea ;D (but maybe Peter Todd suggested it as part of tree-chains? Not sure :-\ ) But it's really just a potential solution to the "2140 problem"; when the block subsidy ends, how do we incentivize mining new blocks? So it would seem like inducing armageddon for no reason if it was proposed to be rolled out any time like today, but 2140 is not today ;)

I think we have other problems (which can be easily fixed), like the 32 bit unsigned time counter... which is much closer than 2140 (year). That's got to be updated, but we have a few years to do that, and I don't think it's a very big issue if everyone is in agreement that it should be bumped to 64 bits. I'm not sure if this requires a hard fork tho, but I do know bitcoin likes time to be within 2 hours of every block or the median or average of the last several blocks, basically it wants the correct time and gives a tolerance.

you're right, it's not

don't really understand your point though, we're talking about the "new blockchain tech usurps satoshi's model" aspect, not general "future problems"

There is no need for that:

https://i.ibb.co/L0dBWKB/2.png

Bitcoin is organically replacing block rewards with higher transaction fees - this bodes incredibly well for its future. BTC doesn't stop surprising, its almost as if the more one learn about it, and the more that unfolds, the more magic that happens.

At this point, I can only look at this piece of technology with absolute awe and I have never had this feeling about anything else in my lifetime.  Dare I say, I've become 'moved'?

sure, but there's a limit to that....

the minimum output size (i.e. the smallest amount of possible BTC you can send) is currently 182 satoshis (and that's segwit outputs only, non-segwit outputs have a minimum size of 546 satoshis)

so that means things will change somehow before we get to 2140, otherwise the value of BTC will be in effect capped to 182 satoshis being equivalent to the smallest individual item one can buy (so maybe the price of a single nail in a hardware store? something like that)

But the idea always was that 1 BTC could continually divide into smaller denominations to reflect the increasing buying power of the currency. It seems now that 2.1 quadrillion (i.e. 21 million BTC multiplied by 100 million satoshis constituting each 1 BTC) is not going to be enough, whether BTC is a dominant currency or not. Milli-satoshis are already in use on the Lightning network, but I see Lightning as a medium term stop-gap to some other way of solving the various scaling issues. Maybe Lightning itself will evolve to becomes an all-encompassing solution with no compromises, but it doesn't quite seem like that just yet (I'd happily be proven wrong however).


So there's an unknowable scenario in store for Bitcoin; only once all innovation in efficient production of goods has ceased will we know how many decimal places we need to subdivide each satoshi into. And only then will we know what the economics of mining with only fees as a reward will be. I guess we could speculate on the range of possibilities, but that naturally includes different ways of mining and/or structuring the blockchain (innovation is innovative ;D ).


But of course, none of this will matter for at least 100 years. There's alot to do between now and then without trying to tackle these issues seriously, maybe something that happens between now and then will make this sort of speculation entirely a moot point.

Indeed, Bitcoin is really profitable compared to other cryptocurrencies but there are still some altcoins that can give a profit as what Bitcoin can give such as ETH, XRP, and more. Based on the coins that you have mentioned they are more likely placed in top-ranked coins which are reasonable enough to put your investment. Always remember that go for coins that have high volume and have the highest liquidity in the market to lessen the risk of getting lost.

That is why I do not spend my time on other cryptocurrencies, bitcoin is enough for me.

Of course anti-Bitcoin trolls will make you believe that POW is "wasteful". Bitcoin's incentive-structure proves that it's not. It's working, and it's actually what holds the network together. In POS, it costs nothing for stakers to collude, and cheat the network. It would also be cheaper for a nation-state to attack POS, and turn it into their Bitchcoin compared to Bitcoin, or some of the POW altcoins.

Does this proposal look the same as the treechain concept? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5060909.0

Can you comment on its technical viability?

To the author of this post, i must salute you for your infection knowledge in the area of cryptocurrency and blocking technology.  Nonetheless i beg to disagree to the fact that bitch remains the only reliable cryptocurrency. Whenever i view cryptocurrencies, i do not only see them from the angle of being a store of value, but i rather look at cryptocurrencies from the point of other usecases such as granting individuals access to flawless financial services, education and lots more. Nexo for example has shown how strong alts can be with its services in the financial sector.

yes all the points that op mentioned are true bitcoin will always be the main and most profitable digital currency in the cryptocurrency market. but in my opinion not all altcoin is bad. there are some altcoins that have good and very potential technology such as ethereum, litecoin and binance. if we only focus on investing and trading in bitcoin then cryptocurrency will not develop rapidly like this. we also need altcoin so that bitcoin can compete and improve its technology.

Altcoin's presence adds to the diversity of cryptocurrency and makes the market feel more alive. Various innovations from various altcoin projects involving adoption for daily life will make this more easily understood and accepted by the community at large.

Nobody can deny the facts listed in OP. BTC is the only worthy cryptocurrency that is trusted by millions of people. I just wanna add one more coin to this list of trusted coins i.e. Ethereum. Smart contracts, DAPPs introduced by ethereum are some cool facts that add beauty to crypto and blockchain domain.

I think the worthiness of cryptocurrency is subjective.  Others may think Bitcoin as worthless but see another cryptocurrency worthy.  We cannot change the fact that every cryptocurrency have their functions.  Meaning they were created to address the weakness of the created cryptocurrency before them.  So I do not think that everyone will agree that BTC is the only cryptocurrency that is worth having.

superficially, there are similarities, but they really are separate concepts IIUC

my advice to research this would be to find Peter Todd's original thread here on Bitcointalk (there might even be in that thread a younger version of me, probably not adding much to the conversation :D ), also try to look through the bitcoin-dev mailing list archives to find a corresponding thread.



not in any detail. I know so little about tree-chains and DAGs that it's better I don't comment right now. But you can make a basic observation: no-one's developed any separate cryptocoin using either concept that has seen any notable success. The most prominent was IOTA, and it suffered the typical crpyotcurrency life-cycle; ICO flavor of the month -> slow decline in interest/relevance.

Possibly there's some interesting research in these areas too, but I'm not aware of anything that's caught fire at all.

No one buys a single nail, they're either sold in small packs of a bunch of them, or by weight. Any single item that is too cheap to be less than 1 sat will get bundled up in quantities that allow it to be conveniently bought, or there is some sort of other accounting system in place, (something off-chain like a credit system or account balance or something).

Rice is sold in bags. The smallest retail quantity I've seen is maybe 1 cup of rice. Liquids are sold in bottles or cartons or jars.

It's unlikely we will see anything smaller than 1 sat even if divisibility becomes an issue. Or I could be wrong, but still a hundred years to go before we find out.

The surviving altcoins will provide liquidity for small ticket items, but the existence of those very same altcoins will be volatile.

Arguably, that's a function of the non-viability of microtransactions using current tech. But even today, micro-transactions is a use case. People sell e.g. single cigarettes, and people buy them. Can you today sell single cigarettes using BTC on-chain? Not really.

I'm not saying people will buy single cornflakes if they suddenly get the chance, just that if you only want 1 nail, then that's what you'd prefer to buy, even if the rate you're paying is 5% the price of 100 nails. Both parties are happy; the retailer gets that warm satisfaction of a 500% markup, and the customer doesn't have the problem of holding on to 99 nails they don't have a use for.

If a currency or payment system existed that made that economically feasible, the Bitcoin network might lose that business to it (lightning channels could handle it, but they're denominated in subdivided satoshis in order to do so, which was my original point after all)



You're thinking about this as if the current dynamic of small coins being "silver to Bitcoin's gold" can persist indefinitely, yet there's already a possibility of that relationship breaking down. Coin devs won't stop coming up with new ideas, so it's puzzling to me that you've become so set on the way this market worked back in 2013.

Counter argument:

https://i.pinimg.com/474x/5c/39/6e/5c396e57a1a168a04afa9f21cb3e1afa--gumball-machine-candy-store.jpg

Damnit, now I want a gumball/jawbreaker machine that takes satoshis.   :'(

Ok. Yeah, maybe I'm one of those who wouldn't buy a single item at 500% markup because I can just get a box of it and eventually find a use for those 99 other nails. Or gumballs.

Those gumballs are expensive, I think the price is either a quarter, or a whole dollar. But yeah, kids will buy them, the parents will provide the coins.

As for the way I think of alts, I really don't know what to think of most of them. Lots of them have different properties already, such as smart contracts and other stuff. The silver or litecoin type of altcoins are basically just forks or alts and are "plain" coins so those are indeed for small value transfer, ... DOGE has found it's way not just as a tipping coin, but a way to transfer between exchanges without withdrawing and depositing BTC, if both exchanges support DOGE.

I see them as they are. But then I don't play ETH based games or collect kitties or anything like that. People are trying to do all sorts of decentralized things, like forums and discussion boards. Some, for example, work on top of EOS. So that particular forum or discussion will live and be immutable so long as EOS exists, and that's likely to remain true for a long time since they raise a billion dollars for it. Not to mention it's predecessors are Steem and Bitshares.

That's just an example. I'm not sure about all the other coins, don't really have time to look at each and every one of them. May the good ones survive.

That's funny though! But I guess, it will be valued more than 1 sat and how can you pay satoshis on this machine? Need to have computer interface rather than the manual spin? A nice technology if ever it will be realized in the future.

right

there's a very important reason why people buy 1 cigarette: they don't have the money for a 10 pack. When you're right at the bottom of the economic ladder, spending minimum absolute amounts is far more important than multi-buy value. There's a small spending window you gotta fit all your needs into somehow.

And there's more people like that than anyone else, Bitcoin needs them as adopters as much as it needs the millionaire class. TV commercials are targeted at those people more than they are to anyone else, and that's because that same millionaire class needs the bottom decile of economic status, they're the ones buying most of the mainstream corporate products (ironic huh?), and they're the largest economic group by headcount.

Yes right now BTC worth a lot and the coins struggling to meet the expectations of investors to overcome the BTC. It can be possible in future but nt in near future,BTC changed the mentality of people and beyond the vision that how to invest and how to get financial freedom.

BTC itself a worthy asset and coin at same time which will multiply yur income if you invest or trade it wisely.

This is already proven and tested for all the years that passed, we are already aware and we know the future of digital currency and Bitcoin is worth investing at, so we should be aware of it and let's check out and maximize the fund. BTC is really worth it to invest but sometimes needs time for you to realize the real value of it as at the moment it's becoming stable.

Oh, I can see myself buying single items that cost a little more, but not nails or 1 cigarette. I've seen retailers sell 1 cigarette and people would indeed buy them. It's also what attracted me to "group buys" before, so we can get 3 or 5 of something, but there are 5 of us participating, so we all get the discount. (Or ten thousand avalon mining chips ...)

It was obvious from the beginning. One has only to look at the growth chart and prices now.