Sooo. A variety of Ancap leaning top influencers. (I’ve called them leaders, because I don’t think organic leadership = statism) have chosen the Bitcoin Cash side and decided to try their luck at distributed consensus.
(I published this article on my facebook and medium on the 14th and forgot to share it with my Steemian friends. Here you go)
I think that’s great in a sense. I look forward to seeing how they fare with a variety of the challenges that every cryptocurrency has to face.
I’ve been in this space for close to 5 years now. I’ve specialized in the altcoin space so far. I’ve seen a lot of altcoins try to become better then Bitcoin.
And I’ve seen a lot of them fail and fall into irrelevance.
BCH is special in one particular way, it is historically and culturally attached to the Bitcoin brand and is very consciously trying to stay within the Bitcoin brand space.
I think their technology is inferior to that of other on chain scaling coins like DASH and if it wasn’t for the brand play, the history and cultural clash of its creation and the high notoriety of some of its supporters, they’d be no where near the top 5.
I don’t believe that Segwit breaks transaction security and I don’t believe that having Axa fund 20% of Blockstream, means that Bitcoin core as an open source development community is now owned by Bilderberg. I hear Blockstream devs sign an ironclad “Can’t tell me what to do” contract.
‘Follow the money’ leads to Bilderberg no matter what your starting point is. On its own it is simply not accurate enough.
Happy to be proven wrong tho.
I also don’t buy the Blockstream has patents there for, malicious conspiracy argument, tho if we follow that logic, then Bitmain’s patents are just as corrupting, and will have the same effect on Bitcoin Cash.
There’s also a difference between defensive and offensive patents. You can blame the state for the existence of patents at all.
I think it is cool that BCH have managed to get into Copay and Bitpay and other wallet and exchange infrastructure, it’s like we kept pre Segwit Bitcoin, and that might serve us well while Bitcoin Core gets to lightning network scaling.
However, I expect BCH supporters will find that the paradoxes that have established Bitcoin core as the public github repo, mailing list and communication methodologies that it is made of, will also be recreated in BCH.
Simply speaking. If you want to reach consensus, you need to talk.
To talk productively and efficiently, you need to agree on methodologies of communication.
You need atleast one space in which to engage, (say, a mailing list) and you’ll need somewhere to host the code for peer review (say github).
In the case of self lead consensus breaking updates, from this team or that team, I expect forks will be a common occurrence in BCH. Consensus being maintained based on which code the majority of their ecosystem runs. And what people prefer. It’ll take a lot of attention.
It’ll be interesting to watch, for sure.
Maybe Rick Falkvinge and other ancaps can pull a rabbit out of a hat and innovate on open source development process in a distributed space.
I’ll be paying particularly close attention specifically because of his involvement and success with the Pirate Party.
I also see that Kimdotcom, expressed support for it. And ofcourse they have the support of the biggest miners in the space, so they are, atleast for the foreseeable future hard to ignore.
Never the less, I remain skeptical and I think that the security compromises that BCH makes, when trying to scale on chain, will end up sacrificing the things that make Bitcoin great.
Things like the ability to verify the consensus rules by hobbyists.
Things like the consumer grade possibility of verifying the integrity of the ledger, without trusting a third party service.
And ultimately, if I am right, censorship resistance, since the more expensive it is to run a full node, the less people that will run one.
DASH is different in this area because it actually pays full nodes to run on the network, if they put a collateral and become masternodes.
Instead, BTC and BCH create a tragedy of the commons around running a full node.
Lightning networks can and create an incentive and payment mechanism for full nodes that’s internal to Bitcoin and will counter this tragedy of the commons.
Even with DASH’s masternodes however, I’ve seen data showing that many of their nodes are on amazon servers.
So, that’s where I’m at. Let me know what you think.
Oh yeah. And Bitcoin Cash supporters and top influencers should have Fake Satoshi prove he is the real Satoshi with crypto, or denounce him as a narcisistic patent troll.
He may be very knowledgable about crypto, he was in the mailing lists back in the day, I hear. But if he is a narcisist, he will poison his messege.
Also, consider that early cypher punks like Nick Szabo, opposes the big blocker argument.
I do wish Bitcoin Cash the best and hope for a time of peace when both chains can co exist. tho I expect it’s still too early for that.