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0 pointscapableweb5y ago0 comments

> I'm not saying there's no innovation here. I am saying that I don't see any evidence that Bitcoin's largest proponents care about that innovation. I don't see any evidence that any of this matters beyond giving them an excuse to hype a speculative asset. If they did care, they would have abandoned Bitcoin and moved to basically any other coin -- anything at all that did Proof of Stake to reduce transaction fees and environmental costs, or that fixed its price to the dollar, or that had better privacy.

To be fair, a large part of the ecosystem doesn't actually deal with Bitcoin at all. The total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies seems to reach up to 1.5T USD at this point. Bitcoin is 1T USD of that, with the rest of the ecosystem quickly catching up[1]

It's really hard to generalize that everyone in any given ecosystem are the same way or act with the same interest. Yes, most people in the oil industry probably don't care about the environment either, but I'm sure there are many in the oil industry who actually care about the environment as well. Same goes for cryptocurrencies.

- [1] "Percentage of Total Market Capitalization (Dominance)" graph - https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/

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verdverm5y ago

BTC at times has had less than 50% of the total market value, so if it is now 2/3, then the rest of the market has lost ground, the opposite of catching up

danShumway5y ago

That's fair, but how much of that 33% of the overall cryptocurrency ecosystem is going onto forums and arguing specifically about Bitcoin?

I don't necessarily want to generalize about all cryptocurrencies or all crypto-enthusiasts -- there is genuinely interesting technology here. But I find it increasingly hard not to generalize about the subset that shows up in these discussions arguing that Bitcoin is the future.