[DickingAround]

The constant combining of altcoins and bitcoin is not helpful. There's a use case that is 'money' in which the value of the object used as money is always deeply disconnected from the underlying asset value (i.e. we never trade factories and cars as money. We still don't even trade stocks as money). Bitcoin is attacking that use case head on. It has features like scarcity, no ability to stop a transaction, etc. as features over other forms of money.

Then there's a huge list of altcoins promising things that are different, are not actually different or helpful, and are really just still targeting being a money like bitcoin or the dollar except the founder of the new currency wants to be the one that centrally controls it. Thus 'crypto' is not a helpful space, but bitcoin could be.

[dcolkitt]

The problem with Bitcoin is that the current economics of the network are long-term unsustainable. The current incentive for miners to secure consensus are block rewards. But block rewards halve every four years (which is how Bitcoin enables the hardcopy of 21 million BTC).

That means that over the long-term the incentive for honest consensus tends towards zero. By 2032, the cost of 51% attacking the network for one day will be less than 0.1% of the outstanding market cap. The long-term theoretical solution is to replace block rewards with transaction fees, however because Bitcoin is not a Turing complete smart contract platform the demand for block space is essentially a rounding error.

[DickingAround]

Block rewards get replaced with fees. Part of the 'blocksize wars' was the decision to not just increase block sizes or (or course) increase issuance of bitcoin but to be honest and recognize that there will be constraints on what's in the core chain and it's going to cost money to get stuff in the core chain. There are fees now and eventually fees will replace inflation. But it's going to be hard to 51% attack it because there will be still people mining chasing those fees.

[selectodude]

>It has features like scarcity, no ability to stop a transaction, etc. as features over other forms of money.

Those absolutely are not features of Bitcoin.

[DickingAround]

In what way? There's a limited number of bitcoin (I get there's unlimited altcoins, but they're easy to distinguish). I've never heard of anyone being able to censor a transaction on the network (hard to imagine how you can unless you can cut off internet access). I'm making an honest try to understand how it could fail either of those, but I don't see it and need to be shown a bit more directly what you're claiming here.

[selectodude]

That they simply aren’t features. Deflation is really really bad and I like being able to stop a transaction if there’s a mistake or an issue. Those are features of normal currency that Bitcoin lacks.

[tromp]

> the founder of the new currency wants to be the one that centrally controls it

By its choice of emission, Bitcoin ensured a concentration of wealth on early miners including Satoshi.

Some founders, on the contrary, want no-one to be able to control their new currency, by making the emission purely linear, thus diluting any early adopter.

[DickingAround]

There was no pre-mining in Bitcoin. There were early adopters, but I think we're all early adopters still at this stage. Really, it might not be CPU mine-able and $1/coin but it's still nowhere near final value if it managed to actually survive and win dominance over fiat. Clearly no one centrally controls it. Satoshi is gone and his money never seems to move.