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by econner 3129 days ago
Yes, there's really nothing that gives Bitcoin value beyond new investors being willing to pay more for it than previous investors. Most people don't transact using it and the network is far too slow to support that use case anyway. It is a "store of value" that loses or gains half its value every few months. The community is torn with 3 separate forks & some of the earliest Bitcoiners have gone all in on Bitcoin Cash. The majority of the hashing power is controlled by a few entities and is a far cry from the decentralization originally envisioned. The communities online no longer talk about Bitcoin as a useful tool. They just talk about getting rich off of it. coinmarketcap.com, a site only for checking the price of cryptocurrencies, is a top 500 site globally according to Alexa, meaning there are a lot of people checking the price of bitcoin, few people using it for anything.
2 comments

> most of the early Bitcoiners have gone all in on Bitcoin Cash.

this is an absurdly untrue statement

Ok, "most" was the wrong word, but Roger Ver and Gavin Andresen were instrumental in the success of Bitcoin and they now support BCH.
Gavin Andresen maybe, but what has Roger Ver done?
In April 2011 Roger Ver bought enough bitcoin to drive the price up from $1.89 to $3.30. His company was the first to accept Bitcoin for payment. He paid for the first radio and billboard advertisements for Bitcoin. He funded BitInstant, Blockchain.info, BitPay, Ripple, and Kraken. He helped found the Bitcoin foundation. He started an online store that accepted only bitcoin. He essentially became a spokesman for Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is processing roughly an order of magnitude more transactions than Bitcoin Cash right now. Though the fact that Bitcoin Cash is only running at about 1/100th of its nominal capacity hasn't stopped the community cheering for another hard fork to increase that capacity limit further, presumably because its price is driven by speculation about how much it could do if anyone actually cared about it.