How can you be "capitalist" if you think that distribution of value via voluntary exchange is flawed because it leads to inequality?

People are not equal, some can create huge amounts of value and sell it for money, others produce very small amounts of value with their simple work. There's nothing wrong with X% of people owning Y % of economy, as long as the market is 100% free. Socialists who cry about top 1% just have a very childish understanding of fairness.


Subjective theory of value is the answer. Marxists base their theory on presumption that labor and resources have some intrinsic value. If you understand that value is subjective, than you should advocate for 100% free unregulated markets.

One anecdote doesn't prove anything (in that case LTC got pumped because it had SegWit, while Bitcoin miners were signalling), there is a strong correlation between BTC and altcoin prices.


It's a bit better in Bitcoin's case, because it has been circulating for so long, and has very high volumes now, and is traded against USD.



Marketcap is misguiding because you can create millions of coins, sell a few coins for some hundreds of USD and claim that there is "multi-billion network", "third most valued cryptocurrency", etc. This is just a method to trick noobs into buying shitcoins.

First, regretting is always useless and harmful, you can't change the past, so focus on the future instead. Let every mistake be a lesson for you so you can make better decisions.

And even if you invested in Bitcoin in 2009-2010 and mined it, it doesn't mean that you would have hodled it till now, you most likely would have sold it during one of the crashes, fearing that this is the end. Holding Bitcoin is not a one single decision, it's a continuity of decisions.

If you don't like it, feel free to create your own commie-coin and airdrop it to all people equally and see how it goes. Or create some UBI coin that will be stealing coins from top addresses and paying them to every wallet in the network. Feel free to experiment, comrade.



Congratulations, you have just invented the suvjected theory of value.

BCH airdrop is kinda genius, essentially it just moved Bitcoins from people who don't believe in Bitcoin (big blockers) to people who are confident in Bitcoin, in such a fashion that the latter didn't risk anything, while the former got exactly what they want - dead coin with no future. We have built the wall and made big blockers pay for it.

Another common misconception in crypto community is measuring value of altcoins in USD. You can often find statements like "this ICO raised $20,000,000" or "that altcoin increased in [USD] price by 20%".
People ignore the fact that altcoins are pegged to Bitcoin, most of them can only be traded for it on exchanges, and even when there is an option to trade altcoins for fiat, most traders still chose the BTC pair.

This leads to some interesting situations - when BTC price is growing, it looks like altcoins are growing too, because their USD price increase, but when you check their price in BTC, they usually fall. In the opposite scenario, when Bitcoin is falling, alts usually don't change their BTC price, or even fall. This means that value of alts is very shaky, they are highly speculative assets, and BTC dominance as % of marketcap isn't representing the real relationship of value.

Bitcoin is gold. Alts are inflationary fiat banknotes.

If something was acquired for free, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's worthless, value is determined by other people who want to participate in transaction (subjective theory of value) and not by amount of resources used to produce something (labor theory of value). Free distribution of this coin creates a sell pressure on the market, but in the long run it's price will be decided by how good the code is, and that's why I believe Bcash won't survive longer than a year.

This is why it's actually not simple to measure actual consensus in Bitcoin community, if you check this forum or reddit or Twitter, you can find lots of different opinions, but Bitcoin is not democracy where every vote has the same weight, if agreement is not reached, network splits in two and miners decide what to mine basing on value of rewards. People who suffer from chain splits the most are newbies who get tricked into installing malicious software to claim their forks, send coins to wrong chain, or invest in obvious loser.

Here's a good list of Bitcoin resources that covers pretty much every aspect of it: https://sites.google.com/site/bitcoinsig/resources

I'm currently unsatisfied with the quality of crypto journalism, but this site is the best source of news and analytics in my opinion: https://www.coindesk.com/

When you'll feel like you are having a good understanding of Bitcoin, you can start reading blogs and mailing list of Bitcoin devs, Technical discussion board, github, BIPs, etc.

Ideally, we would have decentralized exchanges run by smart contracts, but it may be very hard to implement with fiat, and anything that isn't cryptocurrency.

As for current centralized exchanges, it's a risk management problem. You have some negative expected value determined as (probability of loss * amount of funds). To minimize it, you could only send funds to exchanges when want to make a trade, instead of keeping it there all the time, but this creates additional costs due to transaction fees and delays. If you are dealing only with small amounts and trade frequently, it makes sense to keep your coins on exchange, but if you are hodling large amounts long term, hardware/software wallet is the only right choice.

If you read some crypto or mainstream media, you can stumble upon phrases like "civil war", "feud", and most recently "Bitcoin split". This all implies that we have 2 roughly equal-sized camps, which I believe isn't the case.

Developers

Bitcoin Core developers oppose all recent big block proposals. Big block proposals have very small teams of developers.

Miners

Most miners will always vote for whatever is going to be more profitable for them. The recent Bcash fork showed us than hashrate follows the price.

Users

Economically, most users seem to favor Core's direction, Bitcoin's price was stable during August 1st, and now it's growing as SegWit lock-in is near. Bcash price is at around 8% after 4 days of trading and keeps falling.

Nodes

Bitcoin Core and UASF nodes together form 80% of all nodes.

Bitcoin network is secured by PoW, which relies on block rewards and transaction fees. Currently, block reward is 12.5 BTC and around 1 BTC in fees. This amount represent some value that higher than value of electricity used to get these rewards. In the future, as block rewards are decreasing, Bitcoins value (price) and transactions fees (amount of fees and their value) need to compensate for it, in order to maintain sufficient hashrate to secure the network from attacks. I believe that this won't be a problem, if the price of Bitcoin will be high enough by the time block rewards become very small.

And by the way, it's not as simple as "you could have sold your BCH for $600 or $1000 if you held on exchange", because the price wasn't that high from the start. The price was gradually growing from 0.1-0.15 BTC after launch, so you had to wait some time before the pump, and I'm sure most people would have dumped quickly. And BCH markets weren't entirely closed, you could have deposited BTC, buy BCH at 0.15, sell it at 0.3 and get the profit, but if you didn't actually do it, than it means you had no confidence in BCH and would have sold it asap and ~0.15, which is close to what you could have achieve with depositing it to ViaBTC. So don't grieve about lost opportunity, it's almost impossible to trade perfectly. You still got some totally free money if you have sold BCH.

Keeping coins on exchange is a risk that gives you rewards.

Risks: exchange gets hacked, exit scam, loss of funds due to network disruptions from problematic forks, etc. etc.

Reward: being able to trade without delays, access to limited markets.

The decision is always yours, if you are unsatisfied with advises from other people, than do your own research.

You don't need to hold your coins on exchange all the time to get benefits of early trading, you can just deposit shortly before the fork. Still, it's a risk vs reward, because other forks, especially those without replay protection, can cause technical difficulties that might lead to loss of funds of some users. I personally preferred to sell my airdrop BCH at lower price and not endanger my Bitcoins by keeping them on exchange, even though most people haven't encountered any problems this time.

If you check list of people and companies who signed New York agreement, you'll find that most of them are big blockers, Chinese miners, and companies tied to Barry Silbert. Maybe there's not even a single "SegWit supporter" on that list, so this "agreement" is pretty one-sided. So, any claims that someone is breaking NYA by opposing 2x fork is just a stupid propaganda, because one can't break something they didn't sign.
If miners will decide to fork, chain split is pretty much guaranteed, and we'll very likely to end up with much less total value than now.

You are assuming that 2x hard fork won't cause chain split, but miners in such situations are still following the economic majority. Very small percentage of miners switched to Bcash now, so if community will pledge its support to legacy chain, miners will stay on it, because it's more profitable. The situation will become clear a few weeks before the fork day, when major services will start issuing their statements regarding potential chain split. A chain split when both chains fight for the succession of "Bitcoin" name can be very hurtful economically and we can easily end up with a huge crash in overall value, if NYA supporters realize that, they might get convinced to drop their 2x fork.

It's not about shutting down every miner in the world, it's about preventing growth of cryptocurrencies. In free environment, like we have now, hashrate follows the price, so 51% attacks can't be profitable for private parties, and also very expensive for governments. But when mining is banned globally and hashrate drops to very low levels and can't grow freely, it becomes a natural limit to the price, because disproportionally high price would make malicious mining profitable. Also, in this scenario governments could use seized mining equipment to further disrupt cryptocurrencies with 51% attacks. Successful attacks further drop the price and cause miners to quit.
But for this to work, all governments in the world need to treat cryptocurrencies as a terrorism, to make sure that some countries won't become safe havens.

Always keep in mind that when you import private keys, you are essentially giving access to your Bitcoins, so make sure to move your Bitcoins to a new wallet before claiming your forks. Also, it's recommended to use clients for forked coins on separate machine, to avoid any unexpected bugs that can corrupt your BTC wallet files, getting infected by malware, etc. Don't hurry and make every step carefully, verify each new installation, and be cautious.

A few exchanges actually accept deposits, so you should try to short your BCH asap while the network is slow and people haven't start dumping massively. As I'm writing it, the good price is around 0.1-0.13 BTC, but it can drop within minutes. If you will be too late, you might want to keep it and wait for some pump, but it might be risky, cause it might just die at some point.
You probably know it, but just in case, be very careful with BCH clients, use them on separate machine and move all BTC to new wallet before importing private keys.