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by phillipsjk 2350 days ago
Blockstream (Which funds Core developers) was funded by AXA Strategic Ventures with about $80Million in two rounds.

Digital Currency Group, which has investment in a lot of Bitcoin companies has a controlling interest from MasterCard.

That alone does not prove anything, but Bitcoin (BTC) failed to scale. When fees hit $50/transaction, with weeks long confirmation times, most companies backed by DGC failed to switch to the upgraded version of Bitcoin (BCH). This was despite BCH being a drop-in replacement, while Segregated Witness (the BTC upgrade) was not.

Part of the reason nobody switched to BCH was a major marketing push to strip Bitcoin Cash of the name "Bitcoin", and to frame it as a "scam" with "air-dropped tokens" you can "claim". (It was just a direct blockchain copy at fork time).

The truth is that BCH forked from BTC after 4 years of obstructionism. We forked just in time: because the huge transaction backlog on BTC happened within months of the fork. The result was an entirely predictable result of failing to scale.

1 comments

> but Bitcoin (BTC) failed to scale.

Citation needed.

> When fees hit $50/transaction, with weeks long confirmation times, most companies backed by DGC failed to switch to the upgraded version of Bitcoin (BCH). This was despite BCH being a drop-in replacement, while Segregated Witness (the BTC upgrade) was not.

The upgraded version of Bitcoin is the version that holds consensus among its users. Bitcoin Cash never held that position, and probably never will. Calling it "Bitcoin (BCH)" shows your bias.

> Part of the reason nobody switched to BCH was a major marketing push to strip Bitcoin Cash of the name "Bitcoin", and to frame it as a "scam" with "air-dropped tokens" you can "claim". (It was just a direct blockchain copy at fork time).

If I were to run a direct blockchain copy of Bitcoin and change some arbitrary rule (such as making the difficulty readjust every 2000 blocks), that does not a bitcoin make. I would be running a dead chain nobody uses. If I were to argue the change and everyone follows my chain and runs my code, only then would it be Bitcoin, since it carries consensus.

> The truth is that BCH forked from BTC

Correct. You forked off, and aren't bitcoin. The 2017Q4 spike in transaction fees was probably due to a number of separate issues and misconfigurations, such as wallet fee estimation being mostly broken, users feeling FOMO and wanting in at any price, and transactions not optimally filling the space alotted to them (which SegWit partially fixed, as designed).

BCH forked off to reject the SegWit+RBF add-on that ain't Bitcoin. Replace by Fee has caused ATM hacks and breaks trust in 0-conf. BCH upgraded version holds consensus among its users & fees are low as P2P Electronic Cash System was designed to have had.