Now listen I'm not talking in the form of confirmating transactions but in the form of earning based on the amount held.
Bitcoin has been fork and fork planned on the main chain where you get x amount of the forked coin for the amount held at time of the snapshot.
You take these forks and sell them to increase your mainchain holdings, it's definitely a form of interest based on amount held we just don't know how much. Bitcoin cash gave us a 10% stake, Bitcoin gold I'm not sure how much and I'm hearing about a Bitcoin diamond. It seems this will be a more and more common thing that should be taken into account when investing long term.
So as we progress and forks are more common should we start to anticipate an interest earned by holding main chain and dumping forks?
The mechanism at play is not interest, but rather a decentralized form of dividend. Traditional dividends are issued as fiat cash; this obviously isn't possible in a decentralized manner. So in the tradition of open source culture, "dividends" are "issued" as
software forks. And since Bitcoin natively issues tokens within its software, so do its forks. It truly is magic internet money created out of thin air.
But just as that "value" was created out of thin air, it's likely built on hype and unrealistic expectations, unlike Bitcoin's strong fundamental foundation. Bgold and Bcash are worth talking about as dividends because of the asymmetry of market information. Long term, these dividends won't pay off nearly as much as today. In time, the market will begin to understand that Bitcoin's value is derived from its network reach and user base in the context of limited supply -- not its "brand" or "instant, cheap payments."