There are thousands of altcoins already. The prices of hundreds of those altcoins have already gone to zero…
But wait a minute, their prices didn’t go to zero. They went to 0.000000015 of a bitcoin. Someone still has them.
Yeah, but how do you know that bitcoin will not end in the same way? What is the difference between Bitcoin and Litecoin for example? Why to prefer Bitcoin?
Bitcoin did it first, bitcoin did it best. It has the absolute best development team in the industry, the most intelligent scientists and software engineers, developing team who are building amazing stuff every day, and I can barely keep up. Just when I think that I am done reading for the day, somebody drops some other new innovation on the mailing list and I’m amazed once again.
Here’s the other important thing. People don’t realize that Bitcoin today is not what Bitcoin was in 2009. It has the same name, 21 million coins cap, and more or less the same transaction structure… but a lot of other things have changed quite dramatically.
In scaling stories, sometimes the only thing that scales is the brand. You are how many years old, and yet not a single cell in your body is one that you were born with. They have all been replaced by now. All that remains is the pattern of you, right?
If you were 25 years ago in college, they said “Ethernet can’t scale to one megabit,” “can’t scale beyond five megabits,” “can’t scale beyond ten megabit.” Ethernet is a networking system, if you are not aware. If you wanted to install Ethernet, you needed to do it with a coaxial cable as thick as thumb and it could go only 100 meters long and it could only do five megabit.
Today, all of the Local Area Networks (LANs) run on Ethernet, with ten gigabit over fiber. How much of that is really Ethernet? How much of that is just the word “Ethernet” attached to what we made it into?
It is a different distribution medium and different architecture. The only things that are really the same: maybe the frame size and the brand.
You must reconcile yourself with the possibility that, in fifteen years, Bitcoin may only retain three or four fundamental properties, such as the 21 million coin limit. The coin limit is not going away, If that were to go away, it is not Bitcoin anymore.
Besides that – the brand name, and some fundamental architectural characteristics, everything else may be completely revised. We will just still call it “Bitcoin.” I don’t believe that we need to worry too much.
To me, altcoins are a very important part of the ecosystem. In fact, the more we have them, that means the more experiments, and the more they experiment, the better it is.
Something really important happened in 2016. People fled bitcoin into Ethereum. That was awesome. During all the previous times when they fled bitcoin, they left the cryptocurrency economy altogether. But this time, they simply switched lanes. They did not abandon cryptocurrencies. They left Bitcoin and went into Ethereum, to see what the other side is doing. “Look what is happening over there, they are not fighting!” Yet. “They are scaling!” For now. “It’s all cozy and nice. They have contracts and smart stuff.”
They also have humans, and human nature always prevails. Pretty soon, you will see some “interesting” things happen, like in Bitcoin. Bitcoin was fine, scaling was fine in 2012. Nobody was arguing then. The arguing came in 2017.
So the bottom line is that from 2016, we are keeping people in the cryptocurrency space. As people went into ether, its price went up, and then new people came in from the outside… who in order to buy ether, because for some reason they didn’t believe in bitcoin, first they still used bitcoin as a medium of exchange to buy ethers. We will see how cryptocurrency space as a whole goes. I am very optimistic.
Add Comment