There are 10,000+ other cryptos. Bitcoin's immaculate conception, decentralization, and network security and adoption is what sets it apart from every other copy pasta attempt. You could wrap that all up and call it first mover advantage. First movers don't always hold their status, but in my view Bitcoin has passed the threshold of being overtaken and no replicate could possibly achieve the same immaculate conception/fair launch that bitcoin had.

Slater covered the biggest hurdle preventing copying it imo. But even if that were somehow reproduced you'd still need to find a way to attract more people to use that copy than use btc. Since btc is older, more secure, upgradeable, and already has a large group of people that agree on its value then that's very hard to do. What is the incentive to switch?

If you wanted to make a clone of a $100 it would be possible. There's a lot of hurdles to cover, but it's possible and you could have two pieces of paper that look exactly like a 100 dollar bill.

Since you can't use another cryptocurreny on the btc chain, that crypto cannot be used in the btc marketplace. In order for your perfect btc replica to have value you'd need to create a new marketplace where people accept the replica as having value. If the USD had this same feature that btc has (ability to stop all counterfeits), what value would your perfect copy of a 100 dollar bill have?

You would need to create your own marketplace where people agree that your piece of paper has value.

Inactive is accurate, but do you believe the keys are lost? I don't think they are.

It's biggest advantage over other cryptocurrencies is really network effects.

I've been out of the BTC world ever since i sold way too early, but what do you suppose the market effects would be if, say, a small transaction suddenly occurred from that batch?

Or a large one?

Or a really huge one?

Counterfeiting for currencies is only a problem in paper form, if it's even a real problem that is. Most USD transactions are digital, ie bank transfers, ACH, credit cards, etc, where counterfeiting doesn't occur. So I'm not sure BTC is unique in its anti-counterfeiting. There of course are hacks in the USD digital world, but the same is true for online BTC wallets even though that's not the core of the system.

As for whether BTC can be replicated, as @applesauce123 points out, BTC enjoys networking effects, so the question is can those effects be replicated? Nobody thought a social network could come along and compete with Instagram, Snapchat, YY but then TikTok appeared.

Short term down.

Long term would be a positive because now that overhanging threat is gone.

You think USD is primarily paper?

Did, pocket: you're both missing the point, the paper is inconsequential. You could create a perfect copy for any form of money, if it's not accepted like the real thing is then its value is 0 until you've created a marketplace for your copy.

I understand and agree. The point I was making is BTC started from zero, so an alternative can start from zero as well. Denigrating a potential successor as a "copy" misses how things evolve quickly in the digital age. The marketplace won't see it that way. People called TikTok a copy of Vine for about five minutes. Now most don't even know what Vine is.

Let's say the United States government spent $800 Billion (currently higher market cap than Bitcoin) to create UBI coin and evenly distributed it to everyone that has a computer or phone. And let's say 4 Billion people have a computer/phone and will be made aware of the UBI coin. That would average out to $200 a person. Even though this new UBI coin is even more decentralized than Bitcoin, the Bitcoin is still more valuable as there is no large liquidity in the UBI coin. How is a corporation or a pension fund that wants to hold digital property on it's balance sheet going to be able to move $100 million into UBI coin? They would have to get 500,000 different individuals to sell to them. Bitcoin is already scaled up to a point where governments, corporations, and pension funds can store large amounts of value buying from fewer sellers. And this doesn't even take into account hash rate. It is hash rate above of all that makes a digital immutable ledger of value and Bitcoin has the highest hash rate. There would be no incentive for miners to maintain a large hash rate for perfectly distributed UBI coin over BTC as there would be lower rewards for mining.




The perfect youtubez explanation released just hours ago.

What makes Bitcoin special? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7WP-ziTZc0

No one's saying it can't, I'm outlining the difficulties as was asked of me.

BTC's market cap is only $750B. That's nowhere near enough supply or liquidity to satisfy large institutional investor demand.

BTC's hash rate is high because it keeps increasing the difficulty metric. Seems like such an artificial way to build a hashrate. If PoS proves successful then hashrate and the billions invested in achieving it won't be very useful anymore. PoS has the potential to scale much faster and that has implications for adoption and liquidity. It also opens the door to new currencies that use PoS since it lowers the barrier to entry.

You should watch the video that I posted in regards to why proof of stake might be undesirable to an institutional investor.

Yeah all that yield at 5-10% going to scare away all the institutions. Couple that with a positive esg narrative relative to bitcoin. Institutions hate esg as well right?

It would be bad short and long term. Ask the question a different way, what would the effects be if 10% new supply were introduced?

I agree that money is an idea and not a thing (at least I think that's what you said) your example just seemed odd to me.

I watched the video. He just reshashes (ahem) the prevailing arguments for BTC. The videos he recommends to prove why PoS is less secure are replete with political and financial industry dogma and light on persuasive technical argument. The outsized control of large stake holders in the currency is not much different than the control that large BTC miners have and both present risks that have been argued to be more theoretical than practical.

That said, there's no question PoS is a huge gamble and its success is not assured by any means.

The difficulty increases because the hash rate increases, not the other way around.

If the main critique is that not all financial settlements are solved with paper ( a completely irrelevant strawman) then I think that suggests it's not an "odd" example, it's actually an odd critique.

If you're going to handwave the leading pro btc arguments then i don't know what you're hoping to get here. I don't think anyone has some novel idea which no one else has had which will immediately convince you.

In fact having gone from "why does any crypto have value" to "what if pos is better?" suggests you're kind of just looking for any reason to not believe in btc.

I acknowledge the pro BTC arguments but an investment thesis doesn't begin and end with pro arguments. Perhaps we just have a different take on how to approach and challenge investment ideas.

That's certainly possible. But what's the source of the higher hash rates - a greater diversity of miners, or existing miners throwing more hardware at it to stay competitive with other miners as they all anticipate progressively higher difficulty thresholds?

It's already introduced and there's an overhanging question by all serious participants that if it becomes liquid could have serious effects.

Let's assume that happens. Price drops. That concern is now gone, and rather than an average purchase price that is dragged down by 1m coins at $0, the avg purchase price increases since now those coins were bought at $15k or whatever amount it turbo nukes to.

It's healthy long term.

It's exactly how it works. The difficulty adjusts based on hash rate, or more specifically the speed at which the previous batch of 2016 blocks were mined.

If people turn their miners off, difficulty goes down. When China banned bitcoin and all their miners went offline at once, the difficulty cratered down. It has since recovered and I believe at ATH.

And yes, hash rate increases as miners buy new equipment and amp up their mining output.