As we arrive 2018 analysts say this is likely the year the bitcoin bubble will burst, reason being that if it continues to push up the ceilling above the 20k dollar mark governments might impose strict controls or even outright ban in order to protect government issued fiat currencies. My question to us all is: How would an eventual ban on bitcoin effect Altcoins and the global crypto market? Please be constructive in your views.BTC
A ban is not what is threatening bitcoin. Its clunkiness is. Its ridiculous block sizes, electricity consumption and fees are. Bitcoin represented > 80% of crypto in the beginning of 2017, and had always been at that level or higher. Look at it now: less than 35% of the market (if we include the 20%-25% of dead coins), because of the silly block size limitation.
The real question is: what will happen to crypto when bitcoin loses its nr 1 position for good, like it lost its monopoly in 2017 because of clunkiness.
There are two answers if this happens:
1) bitcoin will slowly sink away like any old tech, taken over by better, and alt coins will prevail.
2) given that "eternal bitcoin" only lasted for 9 years or so, this pulls the floor under any other eternal crypto belief system, and crypto inflation kills the very idea of crypto scarcity.
So bitcoin losing no 1 position could be the liberating boom for crypto, or it could be the realisation that all this is just hot air, as just any dude can launch a new coin and dilute the crypto market with its inflation.
Of course, one can say that bitcoin will never lose its no 1 position. Now let us think about that. Real chain transactions seem to be limited forever to 1 MB blocks (optimized with segwit but very limited nevertheless). Yes, the LN can be a banking layer on top of bitcoin, where the banks (the LN nodes) hold full bitcoin reserve. Now, let us suppose that crypto increases still 10 or 20-fold in market cap in the coming years. If bitcoin needs to stay no 1, it will most probably need to increase also 10-fold in market cap. That means that mining costs and electricity consumption need to increase also 10-fold. Is that still reasonable ? Is bitcoin all by itself, going to consume as much electricity as Germany ? If bitcoin reaches these values 12 years from now, there's less of a problem, because of the diminishing block reward. But in the coming years, power consumption needs to remain proportional with block reward value.
This is why bitcoin cannot remain no 1 if crypto market cap is still going to rise a lot, and if bitcoin remains a PoW coin, which it most certainly will remain, if it cannot even change its block size. And if it changes to PoS (which PoS), this will almost for sure be a contested hard fork, because all those people who invested in mining equipment will want to keep the PoW coin alive.
But if bitcoin goes down the drain, the whole belief system in crypto might go down the drain too. Because what eternal belief can still be held up ?