Bitcoin is provably the only decentralized system that has permissionless, borderless, digital scarcity. Other cryptocurrencies are less secure (the many direct forks, such as Bitcoin Cash and the like), less decentralized (Solana, BNB), less permissionless (any system that can be halted by its operators) or less scarce (Ethereum's emission schedule can be changed by a single organisation).
Bitcoin's value (not in terms of money, but in terms of usefullness) is an emergent property of the combination of proof of work, the difficulty adjustment, and its peer-to-peer nature. Other cryptocurrencies suffer because their founders have changed one or more of those properties in an attempt to "fix bitcoin" (bigger blocks! faster blocks! more blocks!), but that cripples the resulting emergent value.
If Bitcoin is directly cloned as Coinbit, and miners flock to it, and it achieves a greater total hash rate than Bitcoin, then its value supersedes Bitcoin's. Bitcoin's first mover advantage makes this unlikely (though non-zero).
>Bitcoin is provably the only decentralized system that has permissionless, borderless, digital scarcity.
Why do we need digital scarcity, exactly?
>Other cryptocurrencies are less secure (the many direct forks, such as Bitcoin Cash and the like), less decentralized (Solana, BNB), less permissionless (any system that can be halted by its operators) or less scarce (Ethereum's emission schedule can be changed by a single organisation).
Ok, we agree that other cryptos are bad too.
>Bitcoin's value (not in terms of money, but in terms of usefulness) is an emergent property of the combination of proof of work, the difficulty adjustment, and its peer-to-peer nature.
But what is that useful to do? I agree cryptography and blockchains are nifty, but why do 1000's of decentralized computers need to do the work (and therefore duplicate/waste resources)? Couldn't one computer do it and make their work public so anyone/everyone could check their work?
You'll say something ambiguous thing about trust, but please give a concrete example when the above wouldn't work. Visa (and it's shareholders) have hundreds of billions of USD worth of incentive not to fuck up transactions (enough to buy enough electricity and ASICs to become 51% of miners), so why don't we let them do the work and then we check their work?
Is that bad because it's what we do now and it works?
I am not the best person to address everything point by point as I am not putting enough thought into it, but perhaps I could point (heh) you in the right direction.
Sure you could let Visa do this (as they and Mastercard handle most online payments now anyways), and it would probably work as well as Visa/Mastercard work now, but for some people that is not good enough.
1. Differentiate clearing (telling you you now have some money) and settlement (you getting the money you "have"). For Visa and Mastercard the latter takes days or more.
2. Permissionless means that you don't need any entity's permission to transact. Visa and Mastercard definitely require permission, and on occassion don't give it for various legal but "immoral" things like porn, Wikileaks, and who knows what in the future.
3. Borderless is kind of similar to permissionless. As soon as you bring in legacy behemoths like Visa into it, this kind of goes away.
4. With decentralization, fees are determined objectively (you pay to get in, and if there is enough demand, regardless of price, blocks are full). A monopolist would charge as much as they could get away with, sometimes even if that means no transactions are being performed.
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I would say that with a Visa(like) company, you definitely lose 2, and 4 will probably have some bullshit involved.
1. This has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. There is literally nothing about a decentralized trustless architecture that makes this happen. You're falling into the common trap that crypto people fall into where they equate criticisms of the current centralized system with 'possibilities of a decentralized system,' when really what they mean is any hypothetical new system could be better than the current one. All else equal, a centralized system will be faster no matter what (i.e. this is a major reason why servers are centralized) and I agree we should be working on better/faster centralized systems.
2. You definitely need the permission of the miner/validators/whoever to transact [0]. You also need to convince them to put your transactions into the block and there is nothing that compels them to do so other than the same economic incentives that motivate Visa. You are again, criticizing the system now and imagining that a decentralized system is better.
2A. To break down the problem a little more clearly for you - Visa's main service (what it makes money doing) is actually fraud protection, since as you must know bank's can very easily settle between each other over other rails. Visa chooses not to process transactions that are at high risk of fraud/illegal activity, because they have regulatory liability. Miners not having regulatory liability isn't a function of decentralized trustless architecture, it's a function of being new. Either blockchain is similar to a wire transfer (something that porn companies still have full access to) or it's similar to Visa and will face the same problems.
3. I suggest you google the countries where it is illegal to use crypto to buy goods/services (governments plan on keeping currency controls intact after all!). The shear number will astound you!
4. Not sure on the monopolist point there, but again, Visa/Mastercard/Amex compete on swipe fees (look at the Costco example!) so I'm not sure what this decentralized point you're making really is.
The good news is you don't need to coax anybody. Once you study how it works (legitimately), you realize it has a ton of intangible value [1] and can trade with others who think the same. Anybody who disagrees can choose not to use it.
It's quite beautiful. It's universally frowned upon in the Bitcoin community to tell people they're going to make X in X time frame. All of that nonsense takes place with the Ethereum/shitcoin crowd which gets conflated with Bitcoin.
I think we are on the same page. Some people like to own and trade bitcoin. Some people like to own and trade Beanie Babies.
Some people may think this is a silly comparison because one of these things was fueled by a get rich quick FAD and the other has at least some real value in the real world.
But they are pretty similar in that they will be worth whatever people want to pay for them in the long run.
To be fair, there's no value in stuff like Twitter, stamp collections, the US dollar, etc unless you coax other individuals into them (in some cases by using armies).
It's a function true of pyramid schemes and any system that relies on network effects to be of any real value.
Not that I care about Bitcoin one way or the other.
> Bitcoin is provably the only decentralized system that has permissionless, borderless, digital scarcity. Other cryptocurrencies are less secure (the many direct forks, such as Bitcoin Cash and the like).
Bitcoin isn't a "system" unless you're already in it. If you're not already in it, you have to consider the whole economy and Bitcoin's "job to be done" inside it.
At which point there's two problems. One, you have to get into the system which means the things people are claiming "aren't crypto" like exchanges are, in fact, part of it. Two, it doesn't necessarily possess scarcity, because users have the option to fork Bitcoin rather than pay you to use it.
SBF is deeply tied to Solana. It's reported SBF/FTX/Alameda were sitting on close to $1bn worth of Solana up to a few days ago. Some are apparently locked. This makes him the biggest holder of Solana. Centralized indeed. Now of course these "$1bn" are in that worthless Solana scamcoin which already fell from $32 to $13 since the news. So I take that that $1bn is now more like $400m or something, and shrinking fast.
It's possible that, like with Serum, SBF was involved in the creation of Solana from the very start (I take it more independent journalist are going to dig on that: I don't expect mainstream media to do much research that said).
Not sure if the question is meant seriously but there are important differences between a serious attempt of private currency and any one of the "less serious":
Bitcoin has a real multi stakeholder maintainership, where no single party can hard fork the currency or change the rules in any important way from the ones the users signed up for. This is what people mean when they say hard forks should be close to impossible to pull off. The only exceptions are where there is absolute consensus, such as pure security issues.
Closely related to the above, the issuance model is clearly known to everyone in advance and will not change. The issuance is not the same thing as the consensus rules. That helps force stakeholders to play fair.
There is no founder or foreground representative that has an undue influence in development. Even the core developers will have to convince everyone that their changes are sound and will not change the rules of anyone's investment, and more often than not, ends up with them dropped if consensus can not be reached.
Again related to the above, there was no pre-mine. Since there was no central party, no one owned any coins before the public blockchain started. So no one could sell or promise any future winnings. There's this whole founding myth to build culture on, and npt everything may be true, but what's clear is that an effort was made to prove there was no pre-mine (someone included today's paper in the genesis block, before which per the protocol no coins can exist).
The first mover advantage does not enter this. You could start a new serious attempt at a currency along the same lines as above, but very few bother when you are competing with outright scams. Personally I believe we have to wait some time to shake out the scammers before we can see any serious attempts at competing.
What unique properties does Bitcoin have that makes it useful that other cryptocurrencies don't, beside first mover advantage?