I've come full circle, BTC is the only worthwhile cryptocurrency

[Shasha80]

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.

[bettercrypto]

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).

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.

[Wind_FURY]

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..

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

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.

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

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.

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

[100action]

I wonder, if you will feel the same way , if bitcoin only goes down in price from now on.

PoW aka Proof of Waste has too many failures to be sustained in the long run.

And you are depending on the top 4 mining pool operators, they are all that stands between you and a daily 51% attack.
Scratch that the Top 3 mining pool operators now hold ~56% combined.
https://www.blockchain.com/en/pools

So 3 guys now control bitcoin fate.  
and #1 is listed as unknown, so it might really be only 2 guys. 

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).

[100action]

• 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.

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.

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.

[aarons6]

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..

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

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.

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

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.

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

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..

[gentlemand]

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.

[Dabs]

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.

[Wind_FURY]

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..

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

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.

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

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.

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

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..

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.

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..

Censorship-resistance will be its doom? Haha.

I believe you confuse "blockchains" with centralized databases.

[coinfinger]

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.

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.

[makolz26]

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.

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.

[Artemis3]

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.

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...

[DrKenobi]

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.

[Carlton Banks]

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.

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.

[Murat]

   
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.

[Wind_FURY]

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.

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

Proposed by who? A Core developer?

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.

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.

[100action]

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.

Correct is a subjective term,
what you can verify with PoW is which Chain is the longest chain with the highest hashrate.

Now prepared to be shocked,

With PoS, you can verify the longest chain with the most coins and highest difficulty.  

Because all you are doing is comparing chains.

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.

[aarons6]

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.

Correct is a subjective term,
what you can verify with PoW is which Chain is the longest chain with the highest hashrate.

Now prepared to be shocked,

With PoS, you can verify the longest chain with the most coins and highest difficulty.  

Because all you are doing is comparing chains.

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..

[Carlton Banks]

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.

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

Proposed by who? A Core developer?

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

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.

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.

that was my idea (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

[Dabs]

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.