An Open Letter to the Bitcoin Community from the Developers

[freedombit]

There is nothing wrong with a fork. Let's just make sure the exchanges allow the exchange of both. If there are exchanges that intentionally block one over the other, the exchange is not a supporter of free markets.

The only problem is that CURRENTLY, real world merchants like Dish, Expedia, etc will only accept "Bitcoin".  They will not bother accepting two coins, so most likely the fork with less mining power will die quickly and there will be miniscule demand for it.

In the future if crypto becomes more mainstream, a fork that leaves two currencies will be more viable.

Dude, no one is using Bitcoin to pay for his Dish bill. That type of use case is never going to make a difference... get some sense, won't you?

Dish is definitely receiving Bitcoin payments.

Yeah maybe some hardcore Bitcoin dude does it but if we are being honest this use case is negligible.

Usage is negligible now; but these are the use cases that count the most for those in the Bitcoin is a currency camp. If you are in the Bitcoin is an asset camp, then you are right, who cares about the smaller transactions. I believe in the US consumer spending outweighs government and business spending combined. Tried to find some quick stats, but couldn't. Anyhow, the largest corps by market cap are all consumer oriented.

[1714841754]

1714841754

[1714841754]

1714841754

[1714841754]

1714841754

[1714841754]

1714841754

[brg444]

There is nothing wrong with a fork. Let's just make sure the exchanges allow the exchange of both. If there are exchanges that intentionally block one over the other, the exchange is not a supporter of free markets.

The only problem is that CURRENTLY, real world merchants like Dish, Expedia, etc will only accept "Bitcoin".  They will not bother accepting two coins, so most likely the fork with less mining power will die quickly and there will be miniscule demand for it.

In the future if crypto becomes more mainstream, a fork that leaves two currencies will be more viable.

Dude, no one is using Bitcoin to pay for his Dish bill. That type of use case is never going to make a difference... get some sense, won't you?

Dish is definitely receiving Bitcoin payments.

Yeah maybe some hardcore Bitcoin dude does it but if we are being honest this use case is negligible.

Usage is negligible now; but these are the use cases that count the most for those in the Bitcoin is a currency camp. If you are in the Bitcoin is an asset camp, then you are right, who cares about the smaller transactions. I believe in the US consumer spending outweighs government and business spending combined. Tried to find some quick stats, but couldn't. Anyhow, the largest corps by market cap are all consumer oriented.

Asset markets largely surpass retail/consumer use cases. Bitcoin is infinitely more valuable as a replacement to gold, offshore saving accounts & safe havens. It also happens to be this is what it is best at.

If we're being honest Bitcoin as a payment system and transactional currency currently sucks balls. It is still years away from being mainstream consumer ready. Bitcoin as a currency will get all its glory and flourish once the majority of people on earth hold it and it becomes a unit of account. Until then we should expect retail use to remain marginal especially seeing as people will be increasingly encouraged to spend their inflationary fiat and save into Bitcoin or whatever other asset.

[nutildah]

This might be a good time to look at the alt coins. Are there any alt coins that eventually went offline, or do all alt coins continue to exist, even if they only have two users and near zero value?

A coin is officially dead only if it can't be mined anymore. I've seen a couple of coins die due to coding hiccups. Something "breaks," the dev has already split and nobody in the community is interested in fixing the problem.

If it can't be mined and blocks can't be added to the blockchain, it becomes impossible to transfer and thus its value goes to zero.

See HawaiiCoin and ColbertCoin for examples.

[galbros]

"Trust us"

I LOL'ed at this as it was my first response as well.

I was hoping there would be some clear statement of why they thought what they did regarding the current core versus XT fight or maybe even some compromise suggestion, e.g. 2 MB blocks now, oh well.

I hope the conferences are productive.  Thanks for posting the letter.

[RGBKey]

Seriously this is super disappointing that the developers can't come to some sort of agreement on a simple code change/removal of a number in the code.

Imagine adding any more changes to the code that could or would help bitcoin become a better digital cash that Satoshi meant Bitcoin to be.

Mind boggling.

It's a bit more complicated than just changing a number, and when I say that I don't mean it literally, but in the sense that changing that number has very large implications for the whole community. I'm glad they're taking their time on this.

[tsoPANos]

The letter looks suspicious. "Trust us" is simply not enough, I suspect they prepare something big,
and they want to have the community with them even before they talk publicly about it, so that they can
limit the controversy which will be caused by their hidden proposal.
Maybe it's blockstream. Off chain solutions are worthless, only trust the mainchain!!!

EDIT