I have the feeling this thread will be interesting to read in 20 years. Not in the same we read Krugman's 1998 [paraphrase] "the internet is dumb" statement but instead from a post-truth post-hypernormalization world were capital and code are closely entwined. You can already partially see in this thread a technical community that would like to, but can not quite, separate their personal bottom line from some pseudo-scientific idea of right/wrong. I would guess 20 years from now that falsehood will have faded and this thread will look interestingly passé.
The blockchain = internet is a grand claim but so is the assumption of little utility. People forget how horribly inefficient and unethical current economic tools are. Crypto-plebs seem to completely undervalue blockchains ethical potential. Both the pro- and anti- proponents are moving sideways throwing the same memes back and forth at each other. Maybe engineers will eventually focus on the stateless ethical proposition again someday, maybe they never will and stagnation will become the constant.
I couldn't agree more. I'll add, if you are interested in making money there are plenty of coin's, including BCash, to spend your time with. Go for it. But if you are interested in something beyond speculation, it's pretty hard to ignore the shady reputations and ecosystem of many of the most valuable blockchains. Dash written and rewritten to centralize everything to Evan. Ripple is basically the first ICO with all token being issued in the same manner. It's pretty surprising these issues don't matter to anyone. The only outlier really is Etherium. I think there should be both centralized and decentralized systems and Etherium fits the former well and with the least amount of scammyness in it's foundation.
to be clear bitcoin.com was purchased and thereby founded by satoshi. According to Themos Satoshi gifted all his ownerships in domains to other people in a community. According to me this happened just before he, I mean hal finney, died
Due to the encoded rules and relationship of miners to them Bitcoin has to increase in value by %25 per year (a doubling every 4 years) or slowly die by miners exiting. This would continue until the capital sucking machine of bitcoin becomes such a burden on productive wealth (that wealth which isnot locked into value storage devices that only serve to store value) that the bubble has to pop. It's anyones guess when that will be.
That doesn't mean that next year it should be worth double of what it is now. One would need a better index of miner capital costs and their increases to really track but my napkin says miner required value now is around ~$1200 (based on the value pump that happend just prior to the previous halving)
1. web.archive.org/web/19980610100009/www.redherring.com/mag/issue55/economics.html