Topic: Is Bitcoin playing into the hands of the competitors? (Read 508 times)

the "media" is saying  a lot of things. they are even saying "bitcoin is a ponzi scheme". if we start paying attention to the "media" which is basically a click-bait fiasco you should one day buy bitcoin with extreme enthusiasm because they told you it is the best and the next day you should dump it because they told you it is bad!

anybody with money can advertise their coin in the media like ETH does! that's not really hard.

Bitcoin is a very strong digital currency, it competes with all other altcoins to get to the top of the market, it's a fast paced, it's still the king of this market. Can compete with it

being first and having head start played a role but it was not the reason.
the reason is that bitcoin is the most secure, decentralized project which is actually a currency not playing at one and the code is safe and bug free thanks to thousands and thousands of reviews throughout the years. a lot of the altcoins are still untested or have attack surfaces that will be used as soon as they have the incentive to do it.

in order to even begin to discuss this you should first define this "gap". what do you think it is?
- price?
- market cap?
- volume?
- number of transactions?
- number of nodes?

- or merchant adoption? and use cases in real world?

first of all Ethereum is not even in the same category as bitcoin to want to compete with it. it is like saying apples are competing with oranges. Ethereum is a platform which has a token that its usage is to create smart contracts which are used only in ICOs so far. bitcoin is a currency.
secondly this momentum you are talking about has been a price rise/pump which happened thanks to millions of dollars spend by the centralized foundation on advertising it for the past 2+ years all over the internet, thousands of ICOs which you can only invest in with buying ETH and lots of newbies who thought they could become rich with investing in it.
finally it is not even a good investment for long term because of its unlimited supply!

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what happened in the past year was that bitcoin was under severe attack and because of the ridiculously high fees we experienced it opened up opportunity for all the altcoins to start their advertising campaigns and attract the investors. but it stopped there. they only attracted speculators and nothing else.
i would start worrying about "competition" when i see a decent amount of merchant adoption for altcoins.

it's hard to say really

I only mentioned Ethereum, because they are hyped as the Bitcoin replacement in the media. I do not support it at all, and would not drop 1 dime into it. Bitcoin are currently the "King of the Hill" but if they relax now, thinking that they will keep that position forever, then one of these other Alt Coins will come to knock it on it's ass.

We have seen the recent spam attack on the Mempool with unconfirmed transactions backing up. Things like this needs to be addressed quickly and efficiently, to prevent backlogs. The R3 developers have loads of funds and resources to hire the best developers and they have the backing of the government already, so we must make sure that we stay ahead of the competition, with the limited resources we have. ^hmmmmm^

What momentum are you talking about? Ethereum and Hyperledger are free to deploy their platforms in a real world scenario and could be considered as Bitcoin test nets but with better exposure since it is released for real. If you fear that Bitcoin's "competitors" are "catching up" then I suggest that we should learn and read more about Bitcoin. It is the gold standard of cryptocurrencies. Slow and secure development should be seen as a plus.

You think Ethereum is a good plaform? I was going to invest in Ethereum Classic but after doing some research I changed my mind.

eth and the shitshow surrounding it tells you everything you need to know about that.

people are cautious because it's actually being used by real people for real things, not just exchange pumping. i'll guess many of these bitcoin killers would fall apart if subjected to the use and scrutiny that bitcoin attracts.

it's very easy to attract empty hype. if the hype ever translates into asking people to actually trust and use something I think a lot more people would come around to the cautious approach.

I think we are on a good path and the speed with which we are progressing is fine to me.
Things have to be tested as much as possoble before going live.
You don't wanna mess with a multi billion dollar network.
Otherwise you end like Ethereum, which devs have to solve a mountain of problems.
In terms of hyperledger, let them celebrate themselves and their blockchain only initiative.

I would much rather want to see them going slow and steady, than rushing into chaos and collapse. The communication in a Open Source

project, is the key to it's success. The developers working with proprietary software, discuss these things behind closed doors with the CEO

and other shareholders, but in a Open Source environment communication is even more important between their peers and the investors,

which will be every Bitcoin holder. { All of us}   

Firstly, I have to disclose that I am a Core supporter, and I like the direction they are going with SegWit and LN. That said, I still feel that the slow progress on these implementations and projects are playing into the hands of our competition.

We < Bitcoin > have had a head start over our competitors for a couple of years, because we were first. The gap between us and the competitors are declining with each day that these scaling solutions are not released. We have seen Ethereum and Hyperledger < Corda > gaining momentum faster than we are progressing with SegWit and LN.

Will this cautious approach cost us in the long term, when these other technologies catch up?

Yes, it is better for us to make sure that our multi Billion dollar technology are secure, but will that cause us to lose ground against our competition? All this fighting about Big and Small blocks are wasting valuable time. Let's just leave the developers to do, what they are paid to do, which is coding.

Give the PR work to other people and let's just get this done, so that we can stay ahead of the competitors. ^hmmmm^