4 ms·

It only works if people use the forks, which ... doesn't seem to be happening yet.

zanny 9y ago
The incentives are completely backwards on why anyone would want to. All the value is trapped in the blockstream bitcoin core client - deviating from that sets the value of all those coins, all of which were already mined and are already owned by wallets that may never even come on the fork. Thats 80% of all coins. Yeah, your fork can kind of start from scratch, act like the 16.6m coins that came before never happened, that most of them will be dead forever, and start mining from there and treating all the new coins mined (of the remaining 4.4m let) as the monetary base. But then you get any momentum and suddenly "dead" money is flooding the market from legacy wallets. Wallets that didn't contribute to the growth of the fork, that didn't harden the blockchains integrity on the fork, that simply installed a program and had a fortune ready to go with no effort and no commitment to that currency at all. There is already the problem that vast amounts of bitcoins blockchain hasn't moved in years. Millions of coins that are being treated as dead that could come back to life at any time. But there is no way to know what wallets are actually gone - dat files lost, passwords forgotten, etc - and which ones are just waiting to cash out. Fundamentally the problem is there are two groups of people here - futurists that want to overturn fiat, and investors that want to make (fiat) money. It is why we have not seen a cryptocurrency that can behave like real money yet - the closest we have gotten was dogecoin, which started as a joke and was completely abandoned by its original developers and left to rot. To make a cash replacement, it would need enough minting of coins to cause inflation enough to keep people from stockpiling coins. But who wants to mine your cryptocurrency or hold it early on in its life if its depreciating in value from its own algorithms? The whole point of why people adopt early into cryptocurrencies is that if they blow up they just made millions from trivial amounts of effort by just being there first. Classic pyramid scheme. But all crypto today has to be a pyramid scheme to get the adoption to start having momentum to operate as it is intended. Without the gamble of making a fortune how many people would have early on started bitcoin startups or invested in mining? If the promise was that a coin worth a dollar today would be worth a dollar ten years from now because the blockchain itself would generate enough coins to peg the exchange rate, the only first mover advantage you get is in how much less electricity it costs to mine early on assuming the coin takes off and becomes popular. That can still be an incentive. It is still a gamble of course, but it is also an incentive. The problem is when you are one of those investor types with some large cash in a small neighborhood shopping for your next get rich quick scheme the humble coin trying to push the future is a lot less interesting than the pyramid scheme promising ludicrous returns if it can get enough fools to buy into it.

The incentives are completely backwards on why anyone would want to. All the value is trapped in the blockstream bitcoin core client - deviating from that sets the value of all those coins, all of which were already mined and are already owned by wallets that may never even come on the fork. Thats 80% of all coins. Yeah, your fork can kind of start from scratch, act like the 16.6m coins that came before never happened, that most of them will be dead forever, and start mining from there and treating all the new coins mined (of the remaining 4.4m let) as the monetary base. But then you get any momentum and suddenly "dead" money is flooding the market from legacy wallets. Wallets that didn't contribute to the growth of the fork, that didn't harden the blockchains integrity on the fork, that simply installed a program and had a fortune ready to go with no effort and no commitment to that currency at all. There is already the problem that vast amounts of bitcoins blockchain hasn't moved in years. Millions of coins that are being treated as dead that could come back to life at any time. But there is no way to know what wallets are actually gone - dat files lost, passwords forgotten, etc - and which ones are just waiting to cash out. Fundamentally the problem is there are two groups of people here - futurists that want to overturn fiat, and investors that want to make (fiat) money. It is why we have not seen a cryptocurrency that can behave like real money yet - the closest we have gotten was dogecoin, which started as a joke and was completely abandoned by its original developers and left to rot. To make a cash replacement, it would need enough minting of coins to cause inflation enough to keep people from stockpiling coins. But who wants to mine your cryptocurrency or hold it early on in its life if its depreciating in value from its own algorithms? The whole point of why people adopt early into cryptocurrencies is that if they blow up they just made millions from trivial amounts of effort by just being there first. Classic pyramid scheme. But all crypto today has to be a pyramid scheme to get the adoption to start having momentum to operate as it is intended. Without the gamble of making a fortune how many people would have early on started bitcoin startups or invested in mining? If the promise was that a coin worth a dollar today would be worth a dollar ten years from now because the blockchain itself would generate enough coins to peg the exchange rate, the only first mover advantage you get is in how much less electricity it costs to mine early on assuming the coin takes off and becomes popular. That can still be an incentive. It is still a gamble of course, but it is also an incentive. The problem is when you are one of those investor types with some large cash in a small neighborhood shopping for your next get rich quick scheme the humble coin trying to push the future is a lot less interesting than the pyramid scheme promising ludicrous returns if it can get enough fools to buy into it.