Re: stop blaming miners
Why are people blaming miners for anything ? Bitcoin is based on mining.
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Miners are the ones securing the network, so its their decision how to vote with their hashpower.
That is all fine and dandy until they collude together in a 51% attack to change the protocol.
Satoshi designed the system to be immutable (or die, i.e. a poison pill protection). That means when miners attack it with a HF, then it ideologically dies for many of the hardcore Bitcoiners because the 21 million coin limit is no longer surely going to protected. Miners have every economic incentive to mine more than 21 million coins.
The miners are demonstrating they can organize a 51% attack and are swallowing the poison pill. They are likely destroying their investment sunk costs by demonstrating that the 21 million coin limit can be subverted (whether they promise not to is entirely irrelevant). Unless a new class of Bitcoiners will prefer Bitcoin over altcoins for other reasons (what the heck would those reasons be when Bitcoin can't do instant transactions, can't do blockchain apps well, can't do on chain anonymity well, etc), even though Bitcoin loses its immutability that imparted it special status from Satoshi.
Appears to me that Satoshi wanted Bitcoin to either be replaced by something better or die. Bitcoin was the pot-of-gold he put out to incentivize the free market to find a better mouse trap than he could accomplish. It was a masterful strategy.
The miners made the mistake of not realizing this and so now they are stuck in a quagmire which has no solution. There is nothing they can do which won't destroy their ability to recover their sunk costs (and they probably deserve it any way, because apparently they are too stupid to realize and I intuitively expect they are likely involved in some corruption).
One the clones of myself wrote about this back in 2015 (<---click this because I can't quote from that locked thread easily) when having a discussion with BU's core developer Andrew Stone (alias @thezerg) and the alleged HashFast scammer @cypherdorc, and the linked discussion warned everyone that it was impossible for Bitcoin to scale decentralized.
Andrew Stone admits it was those interactions which caused them to start Bitcoin Unlimited, ignoring all my warnings (not be truculent but so now they are getting precisely what they deserve for being stupid and defiant).
Here is another sample of the interactions which I can more easily quote:
The problem with Bitcoin is that so many people didn't get on the train. So now they hope it will fail so they can board a new train -- Monero, Etherium, whatever. And they go onto these forums concern trolling as if they are actually Bitcoin proponents. But suck it up. There is no other train available to you -- the next train will have exclusive membership and will actually be a rocketship (think Apple ipay) deployed simultaneously onto millions of POS, default installation in your phone, automatically connected with checking accounts for several major banks etc.
It is the analogous non-choice that we will be offered with the one-world reserve currency:
1. US dollar reserve currency hegemony over the world
2. One-world reserve currency with every nation sending a representative
These two choices are framed as being different, but in reality they are the same outcome. In both cases, the global bankster cartel is in control.
Ditto Bitcoin.
Any way, I support moving forward using Bitcoin to destroy existing banking systems and government issued currencies, and moving the world to a global digital currency (albeit I assert ultimately controlled by the banksters). Because the alternative is no better (as you point out) and at least by moving forward we bring more capital into crypto-currency (including altcoin experiments).
I agree with you there will not be another train in terms of scaling a crypto-currency to the masses before 2033. Bitcoin has this locked up already.
I do believe it may be possible to identify a market that is large but not the (lower 50% of the power-law distributed wealth curve) masses which Bitcoin can not reach and which an altcoin can. I am 80% sure about this. I don't care if the other attempts have fallen short. That doesn't rule out someone with appropriate insight creating one that hits the sweet spot. And the goal is not to topple Bitcoin (let the lower 50% have their pacifier to suck on). My thesis has been the upper 0.1% are going down with the lower 50% into the NWO. The Knowledge Age will rise up and take over by 2033. Let them have their Bitcoin in the interim. Smaller things grow faster. There is exponential growth available to the right altcoin.