All i can think is.. Currency.
Well, this period seems to come to a close for bitcoin. Bitcoin is not really useable any more as a currency, with the full blocks, the long delays, the high fees and the uncertainty of getting your transaction in a block.
Agreed its bullshit that they can't come to a agreement on this it's like they are waiting for BTC to crash and burn I don't get everyone knows the blocks are full instead of the Chinese miners and the core devs bickering back and forth put it up for everyone to vote on they aren't the only ppl who care and use BTC.
It is not the fault of a specific person or group. It is the immutability dynamics of bitcoin itself which prevents that it changes. Not the fault of the Core guys, the "chinese miners", ...
The consensus of immutability makes that nobody can change the fact that there will be 21 million bitcoins. There will never be total agreement over changing this, because it is an economic scarcity parameter. The block size now also became a scarcity parameter, installing a "fee market". Some people profit from that. In the same way that miners are, by competition, forced to come to consensus over the immutable block chain, they are forced to respect this other scarcity parameter.
So bitcoin will not change. It might hard fork (BU), but most probably not. Segwit will not be adopted either. Bitcoin is locked into what it is, today, and its very mechanism that makes bitcoin trustworthy, is the same mechanism that will prevent any change.
You can read more about it here:
Every single altcoin will face the same issues. It looks like people can't grasp the reality that fleeing to an altcoin != solution. It equals to shifting the problem from location A to location B. The scamcoins like ETH, Dash, et. al are another story.
Well, there are altcoins with hard limits, like bitcoin ; there are altcoins with extensible blocks too, without hard limits. The first ones will face exactly the problem bitcoin is facing, but only when they "get filled up". The second ones will be able to accommodate until they hit smoother, and more practical, technology-related issues. Some alt coins have centralized decision infrastructures that can modify things in a centralized way, deciding one way or another.
But the biggest difference between bitcoin on one side, and altcoins, on another side, is that there's (for the moment) only one bitcoin block chain, and there are MANY alt coins. While the number of bitcoin chains is limited (to 1), the number of altcoin block chains is essentially unlimited.
So when bitcoin is "filled up" and reaches its limit of transactions (that's about right now), an altcoin can still "fill up". When that altcoin is "full", yet another altcoin can start filling in. And so on.
Bitcoin's legendary immutability will make it what it is today. Exactly the same forceful immutability and consensus mechanism will make it impossible for bitcoin to do anything else but remain bitcoin. I seriously doubt that the block size will change, that Segwit will get accepted, or that any other important change will ever happen to bitcoin, because of, exactly, bitcoin's legendary immutability.
Bitcoin has a huge first mover advantage, and a huge "moral high ground", which is why, 8 years later, bitcoin is still number 1. But it is hitting its technical limits, as they were laid down long ago. Alt coins have been living in bitcoin's shadow for most of this time, even though many of them are now technically superior, because they could implement solutions to bitcoin's shortcomings that bitcoin cannot implement (because of its immutability). Bitcoin being "full", this will start eroding bitcoin's leadership ; alt coins will be able to fill in the room that bitcoin cannot take.
I'm not saying that a *single* altcoin will overtake bitcoin. I'm saying that once bitcoin's unique position as first mover is being eroded sufficiently by practical problems (full blocks, high fees, long delays, no privacy, Chinese centralization...), *several* altcoins will fill in the gap, and bitcoin will be a crypto like any other alt coin in the long run, after its first mover edge has been eroded away.
Even though every single block chain will run into capacity problems, *a lot of independent block chains* are able to scale: just add more chains.
and here:
Hard fork the longer chain wins but the older clients could choose to keep their chain if they want to. The fork with the most users is the fork that has value, that's democracy.
Not at all. Hard fork means that the chain is now two independent chains. On each of these two independent chains, there is consensus. There's no interaction any more between the two chains, they are now two different crypto currencies. The market cap of the original chain will now be split over both prongs. Of course, users and miners might all flock to one of the chains, and abandon the other one. Or not. In the end, the users will decide upon the market cap split, and the miners will follow.
Soft fork, blocks are created that are not rejected by older clients but are meaningless to them, forcing them to upgrade. That's not democratic. There is no option to keep their own chain, there is no choice. That's not democracy.
That is exactly democracy: the majority imposes its will on the minority. What you call "democracy" is what is called "consensus".
As long as the soft fork doesn't have a majority OF MINERS behind it, it doesn't impose its will on the others. Once it does, there's NO FURTHER OPTION.
What is important to realize, with a soft fork, that is are not the *users* but the *miners* who impose their majority on everyone. With a hard fork, even if only 10% of the miners continues on the old chain, maybe 90% of the users prefer the old chain, and the old chain coin will get 90% of the market cap. This is extremely lucrative for the 10% of miners, and the miners that chose the new pron (90% of them initially) will revert to the old chain because it is more lucrative. In the end, the mining distribution will follow the market cap, determined by the users (they determine, on exchanges, how they value the new coin versus the old coin, of which they hold, initially, equal amounts after the hard fork).
This is not the case of a soft fork. When a majority (51%) of miners, and miners only, whatever users think, applies the soft fork, it is imposed on everyone: the minority of miners have to follow, there is only one chain, and the users have only one token and cannot "vote with their money" as there is no other token to buy.
and:
They said exactly that of the ETC/ETH case. No miner did so. Because he's not crazy. He wants to maximize his profits, and not waste his hash rate on an attack while his buddies take profit. If he uses his hash rate, he wants profit from it. If he uses his hash rate on the minority chain, that is to earn minority chain coins that are worth more on the market per "unit of hash rate" than in the majority chain where the difficulty is higher, and hence the reward for hash rate is lower.
As he doesn't know what way the MARKET will go, there's no reason to destroy minority coins that may be easily mined, and maybe worth a lot on the market.
ETH & ETC did not have segwit & LN to content with.
That has nothing to do with it. Segwit is a SOFT fork. So this doesn't apply. We're talking about a hard fork (BU). A hard fork can be pulled off from the moment you have 5-10% or more miner support, and will give rise to two coins if you have less than 90%-95% of miner support. If you are lower than 5-10%, your chain will not live ; if you are higher than 90-95% your new altcoin will replace the previous coin.
With a soft fork, there are no two coins. So the ETC/ETH situation doesn't apply to the Segwit situation. We are only talking about the BU situation.
The reason is that you mentioned that BU is waiting to have "51% of miner support". But for a hard fork, "51% of miner support" has no meaning. It is "more than 10% of miner support" and "more than 90% of miner support" that are the meaningful numbers for a hard fork. 51% has no specific meaning. Less than 10%, you can't pull it off. More than 90%, you will keep one coin (the altcoin). In between, you will create 2 coins, the old one, and the new altcoin, and both will live. During their life, market forces will determine the respective market caps, and HENCE the miner ratio. Like ETC/ETH.
Whether the BTC Unlimited Guys would actually do it , who knows.
Again, BU will NOT HAPPEN, simply because if it were, it would have happened already. With 25% of miner support, the hard fork is viable.
And segwit will not happen either.
Nothing will happen. Bitcoin will remain stuck where it is.
They can vote to increase the bitcoin circulation beyond 21,000,000. if they don't, not realizing that bitcoin is not sustainable, someone else will with another cryptocurrency (as you have said, economic scarcity which benefits some).
The main concern is the fundamental limit on all cryptocurrencies due to blockchain size, which will always get bigger if all transactions must be stored on all nodes. But there are pruning discussions going on. Why not just take old transactions off the blockchain and require x nodes to hold copies of those, where x is large and distributed enough. Hashes can be carried forward to maintain the validity.
There are plenty of legitimate uses of cryptocurrency. Besides ease of use across international borders, the ability to back it up, easily transport it, having a public ledger, and ease of transmissibility.
