altcoin hostility. altcoins existed since litecoin, and are the original scaling mechanism envisioned by Satoshi. Simply start 2000 Bitcoin clones with 1MB blocks each and you have 2GB worth of blocks (visa scale) - instantly! limited bitcoin capacity allows altcoins to innovate, experiment and explore novel concepts. If Bitcoin actually becomes challenged by an alt (it won't), it can adopt
This I agree with, the only problem is that so many altcoins are scams that there is little trust in altcoins.
I won't go near them because every single one I have looked at either has a huge premine or other shady aspect to it, or doesn't keep up with changes in core that we know are necessary fixes.
But in the future I believe there will be region specific altcoins that work (region specific meaning businesses in a certain geographic region are more likely to accept them) and that bitcoin will largely be the mechanism by which people exchange from one altcoin to another when they travel or do business outside their region.
all this talk reminds me that bitcoin has seen a lose in market share, poeple appear to be moving to ETH as a safe haven to bitcoin's scaling crisis
I don't know why people are moving to Eth, it looks dangerous to me.
I think the reason why a good alt-coin hasn't arisen yet is because it is expensive to properly maintain a code branch and the demand just isn't there yet for serious continued funding of an alt-coin.
Ethereum seems to be spending a lot of money on marketing even though it isn't being used for anything novel, only the promise that it someday will be used for something novel, but I just do not see a market demand for what it is promising.
A lot of people make speculative buys into something they do not believe in simply because they predict a pump they can profit from before the dump, and that's unfortunately I think why people are buying Eth.
Bitcoin does not yet have a scalability problem. It can handle the transactions it gets right now just fine. With SegWit it will handle an increased TX rate. The point will come where it needs something else - whether that is sidechains, alt-coins, or a block size increase remains to be seen.
That being said, I am not opposed to 2MB blocks - we can get the code for it now, to trigger if the last 1000 blocks used 950 MB or something (filtering out empty blocks). That way it is only implemented if the 1 MB blocks are not big enough with SegWit.
you're underestimate Ethereum. maybe you should watch this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C3jCV-JxYkyou're right about it being very dangerous, I wouldn't feel comfortable with serious money in ETH, but having SOME is probably not the worst idea. At this time ETH does seem to be in a bubble, and thats definitely being fueled by bitcoins scaling crisis. when the hype about bitcoin "dying" or "unable to scale" dies down, ETH price might take a nosedive, hell it not unlikely it'll take a nosedive regardless, it's gone up to high too fast at this point...
But it's a fairly strong reminder that Bitcoin isn't the only game in town, bitcoin's network effect can only carry it so far, at the end of the day bitcoin NEEDS to be better than the alternatives if it is to remain #1.
