Medium sent me a suggested article from Unwriter. He seems to be a very decent developer in the crypto space, and he details out the infighting of the teams in Bitcoin Cash forks. Read it here The resolution of the Bitcoin Cash experiment.
It’s a very good article and has helped clear out some stuff for me. It’s from 2018 so a lot of stuff has changed, but it boils down to this:
The Bitcoin Cash group of people thought that Bitcoin was too slow and didn’t scale well enough to be used as the world’s first digital currency. Remember that the narrative back then was digital cash, digital payments, fast, cheap, all that Silicon Valley stuff. So it made sense, and I’ll have to admit that I liked the idea behind Bitcoin Cash. So they wanted to increase the block size, the classic Bitcoiners disagreed and then they forked. Meaning they decided on a specific block in the blockchain to carve a new path and start on the new coin. Now, before you think that it’s another shitcoin, it really is not. Bitcoin Cash had immense support from the miners, the bitcoin community, the developers. It was a massive schism. And its failure proves that no forks can survive, no matter how good they might be, since BCH had the best infrastructure to succeed. Read this hilarious article about BSV. Bitcoin SV already won.
I agree that BSV, named Bitcoin Satoshi Vision might look better on paper. I’m sure it’s faster, cheaper, just awesome in every way that matters except one: Market cap.
Or to put it in simpler terms: people using it.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, huge companies like Sony have learnt the expensive lesson that better technology does necessarily mean widespread adoption. People don’t use something because it’s better, they use it because it’s convenient. It’s right there. People are lazy, and they should be. Why should I bother with Yen when I’m in Greece and have Euro in my pocket? It doesn’t make sense. Yet these bitcoiners keep asking people to do just that, screaming at the top of their lungs that it’s better and that everyone should use it. I don’t care. I don’t wanna use something that’s far away, I don’t wanna bother with it. That’s how the userbase thinks. I still use Paypal. If you look up online, you’ll find a million horror stories about paypal and merchants getting screwed over with paypal scams. I’ve only been scammed once and it was for a small amount of money, so I might have been lucky. Yet I still use it, even if it costs me 5% each time I make a sale. It’s simple. It works. I plug it into my eshop and I get paid, I transfer cash to my bank accounts. I don’t care if the payment was in Euro or USD or Bitcoin, since they support it now. That’s what people want, not better, but convenient.
Asking them to migrate to BSV, which has been dropped by a ton of exchanges mind you so they have to jump through hurdles to get it, is simply not gonna work. Unwriter claims that it’s the original bitcoin, and that there’s no doubt in his mind about it. It’s the Satoshi Vision.
I disagree.
Satoshi is not some mythical character. He’s a real person, a genius programmer who posted on a cryptography newsletter and forum a little over 10 years ago. Even if he was retired, there’s a good chance he’s still alive. If his vision in the original bitcoin was flawed, well then he can bloody say so. People huddling together and calling something “Satoshi Vision” is like a religious sect that reads from the good book, takes stuff out of context and builds on that so they can gain money and power. Even his use of the word “currency” is debated, since he clearly states that not all is included in the whitepaper. Yet some people are saying, “Oh, Satoshi wrote in his whitepaper that he wanted a world currency, bitcoin doesn’t scale, so we’ll interpret his vision in our fork.”
No. Just no.
The narrative has shifted, the community agrees that bitcoin is now digital gold. It’s not gonna be used to buy coffee. I heard someone on the What Bitcoin Did podcast explain why the digital cash narrative took off at that time, and it was probably because it was being pitched to Silicon Valley people. Those people wanted to hear things like disrupting the monetary system, making the next Paypal, decentralized currency and stuff like that. And that’s why the narrative got stuck into that rut of bitcoin as digital cash, and that’s why projects such as Bitcoin Cash and the many forks after that popped up.
But they have failed to gain traction. I know people don’t wanna hear that, but it’s true. Their userbase is small, and bitcoin needs the network effect to survive attacks and become a safe store of value.
It’s just not there in BSV, BCH and whatever other fork there is out there. The small currencies can be taken over by combined hashrate and they essentially turn into shitcoins.
So, I know it sucks if you’ve invested in a fork coin, just sell it and get some Bitcoin.
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