[zanny]

Bitcoin did fork. That is what Bitcoin XT was. Every major operator of Bitcoin XT nodes got systemically DDoSed, including Coinbase, until participation died down. There are concerted efforts to prevent blocksize expansion.

Additionally, admins at most major bitcoin news sites censored or banned users discussing it.

Switching to another cryptocurrency is a whole different can of worms - remember, btc right now costs around $420 a coin, and all that value is because of the total sum of people invested in it. No other cryptocurrency has anything close to the btc market cap, so capital fleeing the bitcoin blockchain may not trust alternative ones that are much smaller. The problem with bitcoin right now is that mining power is majority controlled by a very small group of people, and any other competitive cryptocurrency is much more at risk for whales taking control.

[bduerst]

There have been hundreds of Bitcoin forks. XT is just another in a long list of failures.

[chii]

> mining power is majority controlled by a very small group of people

what can change to make this better? Because it seems the root of the problem is that some small group of people managed to amass a large amount of hardware.

[zanny]

A large part of the problem is again a flaw in bitcoin itself. SHA256 mining is extremely GPU unfriendly by design, whereas most other cryptocurrencies use scrypt which is much more applicable to the GPU model. As a result, ASIC hardware to do SHA hashes to compute blocks in bitcoin became by far the most efficient hardware to mine bitcoin, but because it is custom it requires a ton of money to fabricate. So you see hundred million dollar mining operations emerge because only they can afford the fab run on a custom PCB to do SHA256 hashes.

In theory, Litecoin would not have the same pandemic ASIC runaway market control problem. GPUs would still moderately competitive, and act as a counterbalance that normal users have available to them to mine. There would be custom scrypt hardware, certainly, but it would most likely not have the insane performance advantage over general purpose computers that SHA algorithms have.p

To fix bitcoin itself, you need to commoditize the hashing hardware used by the best in the industry. If everyone had access to the ASIC's bitfury were using at reasonable prices normal people could afford, people could distribute the mining more, but as it is most of these vendors are using in house solutions that dramatically outperform off the shelf bitcoin mining hardware.

[wmf]

Maybe spending $121M of VC money whipping up hype about distributed mining...