Problem with bitcoin - it doesn't represent anything of value but faith ( fiat) and computation invested
Fiat currencies represnt faith + economies + propaganda+ military backing it. Thats why us dollar is worth something despite all the printing - if all else fails us will make you accepts its currency by force.
Tokens on crypto secure blockchain is great tech. But without anything tangible tied to these tokens its still fiat. And very lightly backed at that
Ok; you made clear how bitcoin is different from Ethereum. But how is it different from other PoW coins that offer no financial rewards for their creators and are less geared toward speculation than Bitcoin is?
I mean having a purely linear emission, replacing the supply cap with a softcap [1].
With no reward halvings, and no advantage to early adopters, there is no fear of missing out. It incentivizes spending over hodling. In contrast to fiat, it's still disinflationary: after n years, the yearly supply inflation rate is down to 1/n.
I would hate to appear like I was answering "it's the first and the biggest PoW so that's that". But this is probably what it boils down to. Of course I'd like my answer to be more refined, and to tell the decades-long quest for a decentralised way to move value around that was solved perhaps by a singular individual who then vanished and chose not to profit from his stash; to talk about the ethos and the release of the white paper months before Satoshi started mining... but in the end the actual argument is that bitcoin was first.
We can argue that such and such parameter may have been different, and that we should not stay lock-in with an inadequate instrument if those parameters would benefit from a change (bigger blocks, tail emission) -wether the actual bitcoin parameters can be improved on is a contentious debate among maximalists, especially the tail emission part.
Thus we may imagine that *if* LTC has more desirable characteristics then we might as well go ahead and use that.
Yes, the fact that Bitcoin was first confers it a particular magical dignity that has little to do with the question of wether it's the best implementation of the ideal it wants to be. But practically speaking, network effects and historical accident make Bitcoin almost impossible to replace for any of its PoW copycats, in my opinion. So in the end, even if I'd like to give more dignified reasons, I believe that its own current weight makes it so that it has already won.
> a decentralised way to move value around that was solved perhaps by a singular individual who then vanished and chose not to profit from his stash;
Not yet anyway. If they wanted to make clear they never would, then they could have opted to burn it.
> to talk about the ethos and the release of the white paper months before Satoshi started mining...
The Mimblewimble paper was released years before mining on Grin started. Both they and the individual who implemented Grin disappeared without even being able to cheaply mine Grin; its initial difficulty was set insanely high.
> wether the actual bitcoin parameters can be improved on is a contentious debate among maximalists, especially the tail emission part.
Not just tail emission (eg Doge has that too), but entirely avoiding any front-loading (Doge had 20x higher rewards in its 1st year) is key for a coin that aims to decentralize ownership. 1 coin per second forever seems like the ultimate emission, that also makes clear it should never be messed with.
> But practically speaking, network effects and historical accident make Bitcoin almost impossible to replace for any of its PoW copycats, in my opinion.
> . So in the end, even if I'd like to give more dignified reasons, I believe that its own current weight makes it so that it has already won.
I think its poor choice of emission could come back to haunt it in a few decades.
Its security could come into question when the block subsidy dwindles into insignificance and there's not enough high-fee paying transactions to compensate.
There is also the weight of Bitcoin's complexity, in particular script with all its warts. I see many advantages in a much simplified scriptless design that can still support nearly all of Bitcoin's functionality (e.g. multisig, atomic swap, discreet log contracts, bidirectional payment channels, etc.)
I don’t disagree with any of this, and I think “network effects” are probably the answer I’d go with here.
Something tells me future politicians will run bitcoin mining setups to generate their commitment to the public good. If mining doesn’t turn a profit, anyone doing it is doing some costly altruistic signaling.
Problem with bitcoin - it doesn't represent anything of value but faith ( fiat) and computation invested
Fiat currencies represnt faith + economies + propaganda+ military backing it. Thats why us dollar is worth something despite all the printing - if all else fails us will make you accepts its currency by force.
Tokens on crypto secure blockchain is great tech. But without anything tangible tied to these tokens its still fiat. And very lightly backed at that
Are there historical incidents of someone successfully holding up a busted currency by means of force?
Ok; you made clear how bitcoin is different from Ethereum. But how is it different from other PoW coins that offer no financial rewards for their creators and are less geared toward speculation than Bitcoin is?
What do you mean by “less geared towards speculation?” I’d have to understand that before I could give an answer.
I mean having a purely linear emission, replacing the supply cap with a softcap [1].
With no reward halvings, and no advantage to early adopters, there is no fear of missing out. It incentivizes spending over hodling. In contrast to fiat, it's still disinflationary: after n years, the yearly supply inflation rate is down to 1/n.
[1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-supply-1169a188d153
I would hate to appear like I was answering "it's the first and the biggest PoW so that's that". But this is probably what it boils down to. Of course I'd like my answer to be more refined, and to tell the decades-long quest for a decentralised way to move value around that was solved perhaps by a singular individual who then vanished and chose not to profit from his stash; to talk about the ethos and the release of the white paper months before Satoshi started mining... but in the end the actual argument is that bitcoin was first.
We can argue that such and such parameter may have been different, and that we should not stay lock-in with an inadequate instrument if those parameters would benefit from a change (bigger blocks, tail emission) -wether the actual bitcoin parameters can be improved on is a contentious debate among maximalists, especially the tail emission part.
Thus we may imagine that *if* LTC has more desirable characteristics then we might as well go ahead and use that.
Yes, the fact that Bitcoin was first confers it a particular magical dignity that has little to do with the question of wether it's the best implementation of the ideal it wants to be. But practically speaking, network effects and historical accident make Bitcoin almost impossible to replace for any of its PoW copycats, in my opinion. So in the end, even if I'd like to give more dignified reasons, I believe that its own current weight makes it so that it has already won.
> a decentralised way to move value around that was solved perhaps by a singular individual who then vanished and chose not to profit from his stash;
Not yet anyway. If they wanted to make clear they never would, then they could have opted to burn it.
> to talk about the ethos and the release of the white paper months before Satoshi started mining...
The Mimblewimble paper was released years before mining on Grin started. Both they and the individual who implemented Grin disappeared without even being able to cheaply mine Grin; its initial difficulty was set insanely high.
> wether the actual bitcoin parameters can be improved on is a contentious debate among maximalists, especially the tail emission part.
Not just tail emission (eg Doge has that too), but entirely avoiding any front-loading (Doge had 20x higher rewards in its 1st year) is key for a coin that aims to decentralize ownership. 1 coin per second forever seems like the ultimate emission, that also makes clear it should never be messed with.
> But practically speaking, network effects and historical accident make Bitcoin almost impossible to replace for any of its PoW copycats, in my opinion.
> . So in the end, even if I'd like to give more dignified reasons, I believe that its own current weight makes it so that it has already won.
I think its poor choice of emission could come back to haunt it in a few decades.
Its security could come into question when the block subsidy dwindles into insignificance and there's not enough high-fee paying transactions to compensate.
There is also the weight of Bitcoin's complexity, in particular script with all its warts. I see many advantages in a much simplified scriptless design that can still support nearly all of Bitcoin's functionality (e.g. multisig, atomic swap, discreet log contracts, bidirectional payment channels, etc.)
I don’t disagree with any of this, and I think “network effects” are probably the answer I’d go with here.
Something tells me future politicians will run bitcoin mining setups to generate their commitment to the public good. If mining doesn’t turn a profit, anyone doing it is doing some costly altruistic signaling.