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I don't think it's silly. Network effects are why Parler failed and Twitter succeeded (thus far at least!), or betamax failed, etc. These things don't succeed or fail for technical reasons, and develop into distinctly different complex systems as a result of in some cases trivial technical differences (or even none) when the people using them are taken into account. And in the case of cryptocurrency in particular, the network effects (even outside of simple success or failure) are ultimately what make it secure/trustworthy or not. Some of the network effects are incentivized by technical measures, like mining rewards, but the stuff I'm talking about here is incidental. The point is that the community/network/whatever that formed around bitcoin isn't centralized, so even for relatively "tame" changes like taproot, nobody could agree and it took years to merge regardless of technical merit. For better or worse and for a wide number of reasons I can speculate about, the equivalent social structure around Ethereum is far more centralized around the will of Vitalik and a handful of others, and they've demonstrated repeatedly (except around the ETC debacle which has mostly fizzled) that they can get the whole network to adopt even fairly complex and risky changes. Monero regularly forks, and even though it doesn't have a formalized leadership structure, is able to get changes rolled out. Same with ZEC and the electric coin company. Be it a single person, a pseudonym, an organization, or whatever, everything but bitcoin has forked repeatedly, which indicates a degree of central control (and thus central benefit, from the POV of regulators). In most cases outside of bitcoin, the founders have also enriched themselves enormously by remaining in control. Contrast with the attempted forks of bitcoin: BCH was a huge mess and has been slowly fizzling out for years. BSV is a joke. Yes you could create a new fork today, but the whole point is that the difference isn't technical, it's a network. The network is partially technical (there are still lots of miners that won't mine your new fork) but is also cultural, and bitcoin users/miners/exchanges don't look up to the "dev team" as an authority. That's the key difference IMO. If you just focused on the technical you'd still be arguing that betamax was a better format. |