Topic: I've come full circle, BTC is the only worthwhile cryptocurrency - page 3. (Read 712 times)

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..

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.

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.

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).

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.

I perceive BTC as the only currency that you can really devote your time to.

though our time now are very different from what is before,when we don't have basis of how much Bitcoin price could ever reach,not like for the newbies now that they can even check the history to use as reference on how they can trust this market.
we cannot blame them because they are more concern about the money and not the technology.

in these we will surely be on one side,because i manage to hold in dip and i am sure can keep holding till 6 digits come.

Alts have their purpose, primary of which is to extract the most value out of whatever bitcoin you put into it, as, let's face it, most altcoins are paired with bitcoin on exchanges and almost nothing else.

They are the penny stocks of the crypto world.

As one post in 2016 or 2017 says, if an investor went in on the top 10 alts by marketcap with no regard to doing any other due diligence, he'd have made a lot more money than if he put the same fiat amount all in, in bitcoin. If he put it in bitcoin only, he'd make 8 to 9 times. If he "diversified" to the top 10 after bitcoin during that time, he'd make 100 to 200 times.

Let's just take ETH as an example, if you joined the ICO back in 2014, 1 BTC = 2000 ETH. ... Just remember to take your profits a few years later, but even if one did not, that ETH is still worth ... 40 times what BTC is worth today.

Like a lot of people, I looked at ETH, but did not participate. I looked at LTC, bought them at 20, sold them at 40 a week later, I think that was my best move then. I looked at EOS, ZCASH, DASH, I tried to join BAT but missed the deadline by 2 seconds or whatever it took to finish that one (crazy ico times) ... then I looked a bunch of smaller cap altcoins, and would have made some profits if we knew to cash them out in early 2018.

Of course, that's not fair and we don't have crystal balls, but we should have seen the so called crypto winter coming anyway.

Now, stablecoins are here, so it's either that or sell the alts to get BTC, eventually keep a large percentage in BTC, either to use or to just hodl.


If you're watching the regular stock market, I'd say altcoins are like the "Beyond Meats" ... you start at 70, pump up to 200, then it's now back to 70, and likely to go down, down, down.

im all for the whole be your own bank and being decentralized.. but its not going to work. ordinary people will never adopt it.

its too easy to steal and be scammed, its too easy to lose your key or password and its too complicated.

OP, it's part of the journey. I'm confident that most of the newbies will go through the same process to learn. The hard way.

Newbies, listen to the trolls.

We'll be HODLING Bitcoins to sell to you later at 6 digits.

Will bitcoin ever solve scalability? It's now nearly two years since the fee and mempool problems of 2017 and still the mempool gets full even with much reduced transactions.

If bitcoin can't solve scalability, either cryptocurrency as a whole dies a death, or another scalable alt will take it's place.