[fumblebee]

Couldn't agree more.

I struggle to comprehend how an energy obliterating and (relatively speaking) primitive technology like Bitcoin is the top dog in this space. Sure, first mover advantage counts for something, but come on - how has superior tech not yet left it in the rearview.

In a space that moves at such rapid pace with heavy investment and buckets of innovation, at some point the crowd surely will migrate en masse to a PoS based blockchain like (most likely but won't be fully operational until ~2022) Eth2, or (less likely but still in with a shout) Algorand, Tezos, etc.

[Nursie]

> Sure, first mover advantage counts for something, but come on - how has superior tech not yet left it in the rearview.

To me it demonstrates perfectly that this market is largely speculation based on brand recognition and number-go-up-tech rather than any use of the currency. If it was based on use and capabilities then yes, we would expect BTC to be superseded by its more capable cousins.

But it's not.

[adventured]

I largely agree. It's specifically because Bitcoin is perceived to be a place to hide capital from inflation - and the world is comically flooded with capital right now, chasing anything and everything - while all the central banks are busy vaporizing their garbage fiat. Bitcoin is not a currency. It's bizarre that people keep calling it that, years after it became obvious that it's not. If it were a currency, Bitcoin would collapse rapidly toward zero, because it's wildly impractical as a currency.

The Forbes list of world billionaires features 2755 names. They gained $5 trillion in wealth over the past year. Bitcoin is a trivial toy next to the wealth in the world today. A fun little token play thing, a place to hedge a couple of bucks, it goes in the basket.

[Nursie]

Which seems to me exactly like the sort of thing that will work out great, until it doesn't.

Best of luck.

[New_California]

Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that is very hard to change. This property is critical for sound money, including for the emission schedule.

Other coins are easy to change and so cannot be relied upon to preserve any properties, including emission schedule.

Vast majority of coins is also not decentralized at all and being so prone to get effectively regulated.

[rodiger]

This is just plain incorrect. Every cryptocurrency's rules can be changed via hard fork. Bitcoin doesn't have any magic property that guarantees there won't be a hard fork affecting the emission schedule.

[New_California]

Bitcoin actually has this "magic" property of being very, very hard to change. It is derived from community extremism against changes and from the huge number of players who would need to agree and then huge number of existing deployments that are very slow to upgrade.

Bitcoin is hard to change the similar way TCP/IP protocol stack is hard to change.

[rodiger]

It's easier than you think. Just five organizations command >50% of hashpower[0]. I don't think it's likely to change soon but it's not out of the realm of possibility, and it's not even the most decentralized cryptocurrency in terms of difficulty to enforce new network rules.

[0] https://news.bitcoin.com/5-mining-50-btc-hashrate/ (I fully understand this is a pro-BCH site but their sources are accurate)

[seanyesmunt]

Bitcoin's "magic property" is the faith that the miners have. It has been hardforked, but the majority of computing power has chosen to stay on Bitcoin.

[rodiger]

I fully understand that, but sentiment can change. It's disingenuous to say it won't change in the future because it hasn't yet changed.

[rawtxapp]

PoS is yet to be proven, I'm really hoping eth2 shows that it actually works, because the other ones with PoS aren't that heavily used or tested in adversarial ways.

When it comes to money and value, the utmost important thing is security, that's the tradeoff that Bitcoin makes and that's what people are buying into. Everything else is secondary.

[toolz]

cardano is completely distributed PoS 46 billion market cap (5th largest crypto) - I'm not sure what you mean by "yet to be proven"

it also theoretically supports 1MM tx/second - to put that into perspective VISA does somewhere in the ballpark of 2k tx/second (but theoretically can do much more than that I'm sure)

[CuriousCosmic]

As much as I like Cardano and as much as I have faith that it will succeed, I think you might be overstating what has been accomplished so far.

- The network is decentralised and running Proof of State.

- The network is not currently running automated peering. Block producing peers are manually selected by stake pool operators at the moment. This doesn't necessarily make the network more centralised but it exposes certain risks. A node update (and I believe a protocol update as well) will be coming out in the next 2-3 months that will transition SPOs to running automated peering.

- The network currently sits around 250-300tx/s max.

- A near term (next 6 or so months) protocol revision will be raising that limit to around 1k tx/s.

- Hydra (isomorphic state channels) allows 1k tx/s to be processed per state channel (which then periodically checkpoints against the network) and was demonstrated to maintain these performance metrics up to 1k state channels.

So the network is decentralised and it is doing very well however it is not currently capable or currently theoretically capable of handling 1MM tx/s. It can however handle an impressive amount of transactions compared to many other decentralised networks at the moment. The protocol revisions that will allow close to the stated 1MM tx/s are completed with corresponding papers (containing formal proofs and simulations to support tx rate and security claims) already accepted to or well received at cryptography conferences.

Cardano is doing very well and moving at a solid pace however overstating where the project is and what it is capable of will only serve to undermine outside perception of the project.

[New_California]

No, Cardano is still centrally coordinated, with an intention to go actual PoS some day.

[CuriousCosmic]

I'd be curious what you mean by centrally coordinated and not PoS?

There are certain ways that Cardano is not yet fully decentralised to be sure but the network is operating as a proper decentralised PoS network.

The network has been transitioning from Federated nodes to Decentralised nodes (transferring by about 2% every 5 to 10 days) for the past few months. The d parameter (marking the transfer from 100% federated(1.0) to 100% decentralised(0.0)) ticked down to 0 at the end of last month and block production is fully decentralised.

Where it is still centralised:

- Peering between block producing nodes is currently manual however automatic peering will be enabled before the end of the quarter.

- Development is largely controlled by the Cardano Foundation, IOG, and EMURGO. This isn't unusual in the decentralised software space however the plan is to transition to handling development/feature contracts via on-chain voting and treasury disbursement (and this is already being trialled through Project Catalyst as a decentralised accelerator program) within a year or so. All feature integration and HFC event mechanics however are properly decentralised.

[New_California]

Thank you for providing technical details.

[delaaxe]

Not anymore, it's fully decentralized since recently

[toolz]

no it's not, where would you even come up with the idea that it was?

[RobLach]

That's all still in the "research" phase.

[toolz]

45 billion market cap is "research phase"? Exactly what would make it move out of "research phase" then?

[monkeydust]

What would be the criteria for saying 'eth2 works' in your view ?

[deckard1]

I've often thought that, maybe, PoW crypto could be the Great Filter.

I feel like there is a good sci-fi book here. Bitcoin continues to gain speculators, continues to rise in "value", and humans are largely powerless to stop it. It ends up forcing humans to produce more and more electricity, thus heating up the planet in a horrible feedback loop. A crypto twist on the nanontech "gray goo" threat.

[nrp]

I think the sci-fi end state is an interstellar civilization that exists largely to grow an ever-expanding system of Dyson Spheres, harnessing entire stars solely to fuel proof-of-work cryptocurrencies.

[rednerrus]

Tether is how BTC stays at the top.