Topic: R/BTC moderator steps down, announces he is leaving bitcoin for Ethereum (Read 1426 times)

Try explaining Ethereum to joe public. Good luck with that. They will probably just laugh in your face. It's a ridiculous name for one.

This is end-game discussion. A lot of people avoid altcoins because digital currency hasn't penetrated even the most outer layer of mainstream yet. It is like diluting your engine oil, you'll have more of it, but don't expect it to get you anywhere. If Bitcoin fails, that's it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsx2vdn7gpY

Yes, this is what I've been noticing too. And, that's what confuses me. It appears to me like there's one group who stubbornly keeps holding onto an aging bitcoin protocol while a much larger community is looking toward more functional platforms. It's confusing and seems to be counter intuitive at times.

Well, as i said, bitcoin is a victim of it's own success. Bitcoin worked like a ponzi scheme and people at the base got rich, then they turned bitcoin against everything it meant to protect their own interest and increase short term value. So instead of a technological marvel that was supposed to become people's money it became a centralized cult because short term thinkers that got rich thought they know best. And here we are. How can they come with a real solution now after years of brainwashing telling everyone hardforks are bad ?

Hardfork at this point is risky, bitcoin can die for many reasons. The alternative is to continue like this, the price can bounce back and forth but it will be a mid to long term dead cat bounce. Eth next week gets offchain scaling with raiden, and next year on chain scaling with casper. That will be the last nail in the coffin, assuming raiden and zksnarks in 2 months won't start a snowball effect.

The possibilities this reddit user enumerates are rather catastrophic, but similar things might happen. He seems very fond of ETH, but forgets one thing: if there's a general perception that "Bitcoin is no good", it will drag any other altcoins for sure... ETH isn't some magical being. Besides this, Scenario 2 and 3 can happen simultaneously (Unlimited lacks support and SegWit activates).

His view on LN is really interesting, tho.


I also disagree seriously with this... Why would a country support a decentralized means of payment?

Anyways, it was a nice read.

I don't think merchant adoption was ever going to be the silver bullet that some thought it would be and they'll probably continue dropping like flies.

None of them can solve the straightforward and insurmountable issue which is BTC is wonderful for the merchants, and a shite proposition for customers unless they already have BTC.

Nobody wants to buy something to buy something. On top of that there's the volatility (for the customer), the pain of getting hold of it which usually has a premium and then storing it safely.

The people who already have it are reluctant to let go of it much of the time and they're mainly first worlders with other options anyway.

The fee thing may well have added to the demise but the fundamental turn offs are the same for all crypto no matter what the fee or coin is.

Storj is a separate thing and it sounds like the right choice for them. Circle's a darned shame for the average person but I'm not surprised by that either.

At this stage of the game a vast amount of shit is being slung at the wall. Most of it will slide off again.

If you look at Coindesk, Coin Telegraph and other cryptocurrency news sites, the daily flow of articles the last few weeks looks like this:

1. Ethereum makes new inroads/new project announced/attracts new investors, etc.
2. Bitcoin division continues as antagonists yell at each other some more. Or services cut back due to high fees.

The news flow has been strongly positive for ETH and there have been almost as many articles focused on ETH as there have been on BTC. The BTC news has focused on the "can't-do" state of Bitcoin, which stands as glaring contrast to the coverage of ETH.

Unless you care to denounce the entire cryptocurrency news media as conspirators, it's pretty plain that the price movements are a rational result, at least largely, of the news flow. It would be very surprising if ETH were dumping in the face of the positive news and BTC was rising despite the muddle it is in.

Who cares about some admin of some subreddit? Everyone on that subreddit is a sore losser anyway.

Segwit remains the best solution, the only people not agreeing are trolls such as franky1, which pretend to know how to read code better than every expert that agrees on it being the best solution.

If you are going to fly up there with the people who are pumping Ethereum, then you will have to make sure that you ready yourself for the big

crash when it all comes down. A lot of ETH shills are jumping in on the opportunity to cash in on the divide that there are between Core vs BU

and the negative impact that this divide has on it's price. They did this with XT and again with Classic and now with BU. They shill on the BTC

side and hype on the ETH side and it is very clear what they are doing. 

This is a radical departure from Bitcoin.  Miners are supposed to be the ones voting with their CPU power on rules according to the whitepaper.

http://www.coindesk.com/could-the-super-uasf-break-bitcoins-scaling-deadlock/

If you are  going to read this article there is a way to overcome bitcoin deadlock and settle all problems coming from miners disagreement and conflict. This time a proposal was made and it plans to create a user-activated softwork or UASF. The goal of this system is to give power to the bitcoin holders, exchanges, wallets and payment processors to dictate and give directions on the changes and the code to be used to improve bitcoin. This way we are not going to have more problems coming from the miners.

meanwhile in the Ethereum pump headquarters everyone is running around trying to come up with new ideas on how to save ETH from crashing this time.

Shill officer: "Sir bitcoin started to go up, we can no longer use that to our advantage to pump and our price is dropping at an alarming rate. we are already down 15% we need a new thing ASAP".
Shill 1: "I know we can start mass spamming anyone on /r/bitcoin with PMs"
V.B.: "Nah we did that last year, it won't work again"
Shill 2: "How about mass spamming bitcointalk"
V.B.: "We did that yesterday and have been doing it all this month. but lets keep that as plan B"
Shill 3: "how about we release another news"
V.B.: "can no one come up with a new plan, we did that too, multiple times, the budget to pay news sites is running low"
Shill 4: "I know! we go to our friends on /r/btc and ask them to make a topic supporting ETH, that will buy us more time"
V.B.: "this is what we are going to do this time."

I'll break it down to my own point of view

When singularity says "I think bitcoin is past the point of no return" and provides his rationale I disagree with his conclusion but agree that the current iteration of Bitcoin is in trouble.

Not all routes will end in failure the scale is to large for that to occur even a worst case double fork or triple fork or even multiple mini forks will just result in blockchain splits and the usage will still exist on as many N chains as there are forks. Until one takes dominance.

It will divide the value will it kill Bitcoin in its current iteration perhaps, will usage suddenly plummet to 0 on all coins NO the only bet worth taking is the bet that there may not be a singularity but betting on this is the coming new Lingua Franca and we will shift to Ethereum over Bitcoin over all other altcoins is also a fallacy.

We will need to base prices on or move to a co-existing state at some point but a fork will build up Ethers market cap so it is a good hedge bet.

The Past:
Well except for Gox and that accidental Fork on a new client he-he 2013. Bitcoin adoption and news was more fun back then some of my most active time on talk was during this period ^^.

The Present:
He's too pessimistic on the outlook we are the same as in the past which is a bit concerning but now we see scaling moving from being on the horizon to upon us creating the atmosphere of fear and debate.

The failed Consensus meeting and other issues cropping up with legalization and regulation as it grows turns into politics which is annoying.

As a result the development has stalled to an extent and it is true that Blockchain compression and other things have gone to the backburner while debate moved to blocksize and other new updates are stuck until this threshold is passed one way or another.
On the other hand we did see the rise of alt-coins in a big way since 2014 most crap some good ones though so agree with that point and the idea that there is an inertia effect that makes Bitcoin the de facto asset class.
Singularity does bring up an interesting point on the definition of investment capital.
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-venture-capital/

Money is flowing I don't expect to see the flow stop anytime soon in fact I expect it to grow but with some moving to Blockchain over Bitcoin however given the Inertia effect it does props up Bitcoins price as it is absorbing a fraction of those investments into the ecosystem and it doesn't factor in the fact that people still don't know most alt-coins and begin their trading and interaction with cryptocurrencies through Bitcoin although to his credit the real life meetups in public I know of are only two one is for Ethereum the others are for Bitcoin so as a singularities hedge on Eth is as good as can be seen from the present point of view it's just not worth abandoning Bitcoin at this point in time.

I am bullish on both Bitcoin and Ethereum for the future with some other alt-coins the real gamble would be in buying a decent sized basket of all them and assuming that if 9 fail and 1 grows significantly enough to cover the losses of the others your golden as many other people seem to be doing this seeing how a lot of alt-coins have rallied in this past week as the market % cap of Bitcoin dropped.
(Of course the alt-coins crashed again after the first real panic buy and spread in a while so there will be better opportunities to position that basket he-he)

New money comes with higher risk the same can be said of alt's if 9 can fail and 1 succeeds in the long run it's fine if that one does go Huge it can cover all the lemons you buy.

The Future:
It is not set in stone but it is true a strong community is a good sign for growth.

Scenario 1:
It's a buying opportunity for those with the balls to do it fear and panic bring opportunity and real big returns once the fires stop burning.

A short of BTC or a long if you want to play the alts route using Bitcoin as the base index can still make you money even if it gets that messy the exchanges won't care since the value of the coins to fiat will drop either way if it forks and that impacts all across the board giving a rise to a new stable coin to base prices off of.

Maybe there will be a temporary halt on trading if people turn to cash or a bank run occurs or if they don't have enough split coins to cover the runs of the weaker coin at the time of fork then the real 0's occur.

But unless you believe it will burn to 0 and the coins you hold are worthless your fine I've seen those days I know the fires are pretty but Bitcoin forked is still a stubborn mule or honeybadger and it doesn't give a damn I'll bet my cart in this fire and aim to be the King over the Thief.

Bitcoin will survive but Ethereum does have its opportunity to propel and perhaps act as a second demmurage coin we base our basket upon.
Like the World Banks the basket of currencies and their weighting when they give loans out will change from being one to two or more coins held in a basket.  

So yes he is onto something here you can make good $$$ in chaos but he is off on the market cap since there is no base price we will agree upon for a while post fork market caps will be a bit wonky until a new Equilibrium is found.

On that point ETH can be anywhere on the new scale until the base price all coins are priced at is agreed upon and if BTC 1 and 2 are down the cap is down unless ETH magically gains market share and cap and its own base price not at all connected and unique to Bitcoin's price if there is two BTC it may pass the cap of one forked version resulting in press but not the other confusing people and in the end all coins will flow in a messy muddled state until a new pecking order and pricing mechanism is agreed upon.

Scenario 2:

Possible scenario unless a forced migration occurs Bitcoin it is in effect capped and other coins may pass it in time.

Scenario 3:

Timeframe may be off could also be spot on
Quicker solutions may also appear as new options are explored that were not explored before Segwit aka the present because it was not worth the research until after the fact.
The future is uncertain so the validity may be reasonable now but not after Segwit is implemented.

The second part of scenario 3 is occurring but merchant adoption is lagging behind until multiple coins are accepted at the same time alongside Bitcoin in all use cases real world store applications may falter behind the network effect coin aka Bitcoin.

Kind of like how some merchants may take Visa over Mastercard but not both and only a few use Discover or AMEX relative to the other two.
(That will depend on what the retail Point of Sale Terminal providers decide the basket of accepted coins are for most users)
http://www.coindesk.com/information/bitcoin-retail-pos-systems/

What is Most Likely to Happen:

Nodes can also force an action on the miners in some unique cases but pools will likely decide this issue.
BU may be treated like the other options we have looked at that have lost popularity over time but at fork it will have a faction that could grow into majority depending on how cohesive it remains it could also fork even further.
Ethereum has forked a path like that and even thought about forking even more in Classic so that is the way Core and BU could go.

SO THIS IS BU’S FAULT FOR FORCING A HARD FORK?
Blame can be put on both sides nough said.

ISN’T THIS ALL JUST FUD
Na he's got valid points but in the end the whole Ethereum will be the new base coin argument is off as I think not we have a ways to go to the supercoin if it is a post-bitcoin world if there is another one in the short run. We could also end up with the multi-national system of currency baskets in crypto.

The Myspace Vs Facebook analogy could well be the Line vs Skype vs Whatsapp vs Yandex vs other mobile apps argument.

Either way it will be profitable to diversify if they all get traction and keep up to date.
That is decentralisation.


Related Food for Thought:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-19/bitcoins-fork-road
https://magnr.com/blog/bitcoin/bitcoin-fork/
https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-fork-segwit-vs-bitcoin-unlimited-explained-simply/

Who cares about centralization as long you take a lot of money from a new "job"?  Everything is about a lot of money

I agree with you but listen dude.... instead of playing the blame game on this person who left , lets get brutally honest with ourselves and admit we're failing as a community... We need to get our shit together and fast.  Are you with me brother?

To me, leaving bitcoin for Ethereum is worst than anyone who participated in BU/Segwit debate. How about when the current issues have been ironed out? Will he come back? Ethereum is basically "governed" by centralization, controlled by the few. They can HF anytime.

One person stepping down isn't really a big issue (see Mike Hearn). However, I do think that Bitcoin has to tackle this issue head-on in order to set a precedent for future consensus conflicts. If this doesn't become resolved, then Bitcoin's consensus model has failed and another cryptocurrency will take its place.

So are you saying this person is lying:

Completely fake statement made up by r/btc shills and BTU fanatics. Nowhere does it state that Dell has stopped accepting Bitcoin for this very reason. Complete assesment:

Keep in mind that the BTC market cap was lower ~2 years ago than Ethereum is today. Bitcoin is still the leader in terms of network effect and valuation, but things can change _very_ quickly in the cryptocurrency space. I've been wargaming in my mind the same kinds of scenarios as the moderator in the OP, with roughly the same results, for some time. I wish I could say I see a good chance bitcoin will come out of this stronger than ever, but I think it more likely that it is going to get out-competed. If it could afford to take years developing greater capacity solutions like the LN then things might be different, but Raiden for Ethereum and all the other major alts gunning for BTC's throne while BTC is locked in a toxic stalemate does not bode well.

Bottom line, I still hold a significant chunk of BTC and don't see myself exiting it easily, but I shifted most of my crypto funds to ZEC, Dash and ETH some weeks ago (just before and during their rise). Then I consolidated towards ETH a few days ago, though still keeping a chunk of Dash and ZEC for diversification. Things have gotten too volatile to stay concentrated in just one coin at this point.