Topic: Why is Bitcoin the predominant one among forks? (Read 519 times)

For me, I'll say that as bitcoin is the first  of its kind, it is useling its dominant power to subdue others, and bitcoin itself has lots of backers that bitcoincash, bitcoin gold, bitcoin segwit2x does not have. Bitcoin's influence in the crypto market is so high and trusted that it affects all other currencies.

The first is bitcoin is the original and it is the first blockhan technology. From that, people have developed higher generations of blockhan and formed other currencies.

On a protocol level the amount of work put into a chain only accounts for something if we're talking about an chain split occuring within the same blockchain. That is, to resolve a chain split nodes will follow the chain with the largest amount of work that they are aware of and miners will add their next block to the chain with the largest amount of work that they are aware of (barring attack scenarios or other funky behaviour).

Predominance between blockchains that do not represent the same cryptocurrencies (even if they used to, at one point) usually refers to the coin with the larger market cap. A metric which is admittedly rather arbitrary, but is also reflected in the hashrate of a given fork, assuming they share the same PoW hashing algorithm. Case in point, BCH currently being worth 0.12 BTC is reflected in BCH's hashrate currently being roughly 11% of BTC's hashrate. This correlation will of course shift with changing block rewards due to (1) BCH being ahead 7000 blocks leading to an advance halving by about 48 days and (2) transaction fees and thus network usage becoming more relevant. For now that's the relation we see though.

I assume something similar can be seen with ETH and ETC, but I'm not too familiar with the details of their dynamic.

It is also worth noting that once a fork coin changes its PoW hashing algorithm, as was the case with BTG, it becomes hard to meaningfully compare the amount of work put into it. Obviously you can make an educated guess which network has a larger amount of computational power behind it, but once you take a closer look and try directly comparing the work put into blocks mined with Equihash to the work put into blocks mined with SHA256 things get fuzzy.

For me. Because alt-coins are bitcoin for dumb people. 

From technical perspective..
Isn't it "simply" just because BTC chain has the most proof of work?
What if BCH or BTG (hypothetically) get a hash-rate boost then its chain has the most POW. Did it then become the predominant among forks?

That as well as the fact that it was the first coin to emerge on the market and so people have strong sentiments associated with BTC.

People only want to fork from something successful, you wouldn't want to take an absolute trash coin, and then fork it into another slightly less trash coin? You would inherit all of the negative stigma associated with it, and be left with nothing but a deformed clone.

Strength, user base and utility are the major criteria, there are clones of a few other protocols, like LTC (itself a clone of BTC), and thousands of ETH clones if you count the ERC-20 tokens. However, these can vary significantly in their implementation, or even the standard they use, e.g. ERC-20 or ERC-721 (non-fungible) types.

Here's a good article about ERC-standards, just for some light reading 

https://medium.com/wepower/erc-standards-to-move-ethereum-forward-erc-20-erc-223-erc-721-e1712456449d

Actually, you have answered yourself with those rethorical questions. Bitcoin is predominant because it is more famous than those forks, not to mention that everyone is putting their faith and trust in bitcoin. Not only bitcoin is the only dominant coin among forks but also among other coins. And if you tell us that these forks will replace bitcoin in the future, then no one can be sure because everything is expected. Expect the unexpected. But still it is going to survive. 

Bitcoin has gained the cryptomarket ground that is why its predominant. Now the advantages of bitcoin outweighs the disadvantage and that is why proven to still be very much around the market even with its rise and fall in price. People are more comfortable with bitcoin because they know the nitty gritty around it but this other coins are just new in the market, the fact that they have bitcoin attached to their name doesn't make it bitcoin. Bitcoin will still always be predominant amongst other folks because it has proven the test of time.

I think that all these Bitcoin plugs were created in order to be able to earn. Bitcoin is a leader in crypto currency and had a large enough price to provoke the same price increase for its counterparts. the value of this currency will be preserved only when it is in great demand in the society. Not only air should be appreciated, but also practical application.

I think the answer is obvious - bitcoin live more than 10 years. This is really a brand and it has impressive volatility and volume. Other forks are just forks.

I think so that mainly due to firs-mover advantage. Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency to be launched which initiated the crypto market. Therefore it enjoys a huge adoption rate and highest market capitalization. It has been able to survive successfully for 9 long years so investors have trust and faith in it. The forks might offer a better solution to the problems faced by bitcoin but they are just not the original bitcoins. Moreover the core miners too have not supported most of the forks with an unanimous consent which is another reason why is this happening around. I don’t think so it would be possible to replace this cryptocurrency.

The fact that Bitcoin Cash can smooth sail hoping from one hard fork into another proves that the project is de-facto centralized. If it was not the case, there would be some dissidence and therefore their hardforks would result in a surviving chain as well as the forked chain (just like it happens whenever someone wants to hardfork Bitcoin.. all you get is an altcoin).

The only other possibility is that the project is irrelevantly small enough that consensus can be reached, but that is a short lived period in time. Bitcoin Cash's scaling roadmap will eventually face a problem of big % of people not wanting to increase blocks anymore once they feel the consequences of big blocks (if either actual usage starts filling blocks or someone bothers to spam the network to fill them up making hosting nodes a mess, just like Ethereum)

The flexibility of a programming or scripting language is always a trade-off against how insecure or buggy it will be. If more complexity is permitted, then there is a much wider range of possible test cases, this is a direct reflection of the higher diversity of expression allowed by a complex language. Trying to imagine everything that's possible, and hence everything that could go wrong is simply alot of work. That's why a layered approach to complexity is sensible; discovering problems in the base layer is easier to reason about, which makes designing upper layers both easier and safer. Because the upper layers function using well tested & well understood primitives from the lower layers, it's easier to design the upper layers in a way that's more predictable and fails more safely.

Cryptography codings and supporters are one of the reasons why bitcoin is predominant. That's What i believe.

Interesting. Particularly the point you make about around contract programming flexibility of Ethereum being considered a flaw by many isn't something I was aware of. You generally hear the 'smart' contract functions of Ethereum framed as a positive, especially with all the erc20 tokens. Perhaps this is a case of ease-of-use in creating an erc20 token taking priority over the possible 'better' but longer approach of creating side chains or additional network layers to Bitcoin.

Yeah ten years of bitcoin development is about nine years longer than most altcoins out there, so not surprising the source code is borrowed so heavily from other smaller projects.

This is not true. Bitcoin might not have the same contract programming flexibility as Ethereum, but that is widely considered to be flaw in Ethereum's design methodology (the most prevalent opinion among developers is that more complex contracts should be implemented as additional network layers to Bitcoin, and/or as separate sidechains). Transaction privacy is much the same, better as a separate protocol layer (and the practialities of Ethereum and Monero prove why; both have very fast growing blockchains, which is a decentralisation compromise).

Additionally, Bitcoin source code is constantly borrowed by the (much smaller) developer teams working on other cryptocurrencies even after the new coin is launched (this is sometimes referenced directly on the webpages of pull requests in the Bitcoin git repository). A large number (~20 regulars, plus many many more occasional contributors) work on Bitcoin, whereas most other coins have maybe 3-5 developers at the max. The development focus is on Bitcoin, and maybe that does have an element of 1st mover advantage to it, but that can only be maintained if the development is of a consistent high quality (and there's been nearly 10 years of this kind of impetus with Bitcoin development, no other coin matches that). A large number of talented programmers work on Bitcoin, and that's what makes the Bitcoin network function so well and attract users, not incumbency.

I think that this is a very real scenario, however, for this there must be a number of circumstances. For example, I think that if the Ethereum can implement the Casper protocol within the next few months and increase the number of transactions per second to 1 million, this can be such a factor.

Its mainly because of game initiator and the kind of branding and marketing they have indulged in their ecosystem has helped them a lot. And yes there could be the day when someone replaces them from the No. 1 spot but they will always be the first name which

Bitcoin is and will be the dominant crypto simply because it was the first one.

See for example all the pairings happen with Bitcoin in any exchanges. An increase in the volume of transactions the value of the crypto increases as well like a domino effect.

The value of incumbency in cryptocurrency is massive.

Bitcoin is not, at a technical level, any better than most of the other blockchains/coins out there. In fact, depending on what you use it for, it is demonstrably worse (hence forks or brand new altcoins focused on privacy or whatever).

But because Bitcoin is the OG, every other coin is traded relative to Bitcoin and discussed relative to Bitcoin (in satoshis).

So being the first mover has huge advantages and I think Bitcoin will continue to dominate, specifically as a 'reserve' currency of crypto.