From an oddity and online plaything a few short years ago to an over hundred billion dollar industry, the rise of cryptocurrency has been remarkable and swift. There have been plenty of bumps along the way while figuring out the best way to move forward, but they have all been surmounted over time. However, the most dangerous, and possibly fatal, bump is still on the road ahead, that of slowing our move forward. The biggest mistake that the community of cryptocurrency developers, users, and advocates can make right now is to lose momentum.
We’re on to something really, really important
Let’s take a step back to think about the magnitude of the technological innovation we have on our hands. Right now, a few centralized institutions control nearly all the money (and therefore the power) in the world. Anyone anywhere can have their funds frozen and seized at any time, for any reason, at a moment’s notice. A store of value can quickly become worthless if its central bank decides to reissue or hyperinflate, while an individual who made great sacrifices for a lifetime can see all their accrued value disappear, and will be helpless to prevent it. Now, finally, cryptocurrency offers an avenue for a new money that a centralized source doesn’t control, that can’t be seized and devalued, that users truly control. The implications for a free and prosperous world from this aspect alone are huge, not to mention the potential for other innovations such as decentralized, trustless, and voluntary governance systems. We have to make this work, it’s too incredible an advancement for humanity to do otherwise.
Wasting time bashing other projects is fatal
Now that there’s fierce competition among various projects in the cryptocurrency space, it’s important to remember not to eat your own. Yes, the free market is healthy, we should be constantly trying to figure out which approach is best, and we shouldn’t be too shy to point out when we see something that’s wrong or unhelpful. However, none of that equates to bashing, which is trying deliberately to destroy or hamper another project. This is commonly done out of a sense of zero-sum competition for dominance over the crypto pie. At its heart, though, this small-minded attack on others is nothing but a greedy and shortsighted grab for power through the exclusion of others, when what we should really be doing is growing the space as fast as possible. An insular community that does nothing but fight will increasingly fall into irrelevance. That’s not something I want to happen.
We should still back the right projects
That being said, we shouldn’t be afraid to be choosy with the projects we support. The absolute best coin should succeed, and it’s a mistake to back any other out of a sense of loyalty or nostalgia. By putting the best one forward we increase the chances of the entire field succeeding long-term. Now remember, this is quite different from bashing, which is focusing on the detriment of a competing coin. You can have opinions while still focusing purely on the forward momentum of the good.
Momentum is our biggest advantage, and our one saving grace
There’s a great deal of power around current structures. The banking system is massive, and every government on the planet is content with its global financial hegemony. All the world’s powerful are inherently threatened by the takeover of a new financial system that can’t be controlled, and they can and will try to stop it from growing to relevance. All we have on our side, other than superiority, is momentum. If cryptocurrency grows so fast and effectively that power structures can’t keep up, no one will be able to stop it. That’s the real choice right now: full speed or failure. Choose wisely.
I have been pondering on this question myself the last couple of days, and the answer I come up is every-time the same, we need to use ways to democratically decide what we want, do I also believe if bitcoin would have just raised the block-chain a bit, and would have just done a hard-fork every once in a while, the leadership of bitcoin-core would not have come into question that much (I personally believe the plot of blockstream is and never was to make bitcoin better, it was to slow it down and break it up, which they have successfully done).
The hateful and the king of trollcoins, aka Monero on the otherhand, I think its unavoidable, in maybe ways they remind me of the FED, because they very so successful in slander that they managed to pull of a bank-run on the number 2 bank in America at the start of 19th century( I forgot the date, and name of that bank), which made sure that became the most powerful bank entity it is. Luckily more and more people are starting to see truth their evil ways, hopefully karma will hit them appropriately.
My end conclusion, and looking at the 100 coins once more, that the best coin right now to minimize all this mud-trowing is DASH, the decentralized Governance of DASH is a stroke of genius, and one that I would like to see improvement on, so come on other coins, do the same or better, lets have a democratic competition !
Such a typical comment from the Dash community. Pat yourselves on the back for being so civilized while at the same time attacking another currency by labeling it a “trollcoin”. I cannot speak for Monero, also, I am not a leading Bitcoin expert but your assumptions on Core and Blockstream are wrong. Core is generally anti-hardfork for safety reasons and Dash has already proven that hard forks can be dangerous which is why they decided to do sporks after the failed RC3 Darkcoin hard fork. It isn’t Core or Blockstream who have slowed or broken Bitcoin, the scaling crisis was caused by the ” Moby Dick” spam attacks with some collaboration from Chinese mining pools who oppose Core.
Than blockstream is highly overrated and incompetent, bitcoin cash has proven how easy a simple hardfork in fact is.
Jupp Dash invented sporks, It’s a good way to implement cutting edge technology into a decentralized network. Bitcoin could do the same as well.
How much proof is that that transaction fee’s have been cost by a very expensive spam attack ?
As far calling Monero a trollcoin can be found for all how wish to see who much fud they have produced about DASH. If the FUD was true I would bring it up, but than I would not have invested in dash either, neither would anybody else for that matter.
A “simple” hard fork is unnecessary on a network with Bitcoin’s complexities and can bring unintended risks.
Conflating Bitcoin Core with Blockstream is incompetence, FUD, and troll behavior. So then, are Dash and BCH also trollcoins?
There is lots of proof of spam attacks, just look at the three most recent blog posts by LaurentMT on Medium.
BCH is live and running and if you are unable to understand that BCH increase from 1mb to 8mb, went very well with no real problems to speak of (other than well hash-rate allocation), than well I don’t know what will.
As far calling my on my labeling the current bitcoin-core as blockstream, well their is again enough proof to figure that one out else well, including the most prominent members working for both core and blockstream. And I wanted you to understand that.
But if you feel the need to label other as “trollcoins” please do explain why you came to such a conclusion. Because really there seems little truth to that at all.
You need to be more precise, LaurentMT has allot of articles on there, please provide some titles so I can read the ones that so called provide proof.
It’s hard to tell if there are any bugs in a network if it has virtually no users. A small faction forking away with unanimous consensus to create BCH is different than trying to get the entire Bitcoin community to upgrade to an unnecessary and rushed hard fork. Again, just look at Dash’s past. The entire community wasn’t prepared for the RC3 disaster and now they don’t do forks that are rushed, unsecured, and that don’t have near unanimous support.
I never labelled anything a trollcoin. But, based on your own logic of FUD, slander, and mud throwing, which the Dash & BCH communities are also guilty of, I was wondering if you thought that those were trollcoins also.
I already told you it was the three most recent LaurentMT articles will provide you with sufficient proof of spam attacks. If you still cant find them just google “Moby Dick spam” and it’ll lead you to a great story from Bitcoin Magazine with a summary of the research that led to the discovery of those attacks.
I have read “Moby Dick spam”
Quote:
“The analysts found that the Bitcoin network has seen many transactions that fit this category: almost three gigabytes worth of data within a two-year span, adding up to more than 2 percent of the total size of the blockchain, or the equivalent of about a month’s worth of normal Bitcoin use.”
I can hardly call that the reason why blocks are full.
I don’t know what can slander, you think Dash & BCH are doing. All I see is that Dash is pointing it’s strengths compared to btc, and from BCH where may be some rogue supporter that go a bit overboard, but still I can hardly blame them. Espically when facing such a wall of shills, that even defend the actions of core, I believe that includes you as well. Because you don’t want to accept either that hardforks can work when done correctly.
The blocks aren’t full all of the time, only when they’re being spammed. Coincidentally these spam transactions started being picked up by Chinese miners at the same time they started pushing their anti-Core agenda.
Pointing out your strengths is one thing but labeling people you disagree with as “trollcoins” and “walls of shills” is the epitome of slander.
I do not oppose hardforks when they are necessary or when someone wants to create an altcoin with different features or that follows a different ideology but forcing them on the community to benefit the interests of the elites is not the way.
Blocks are full there have multiple occasions other than the spam attacks, that i have to wait allot longer than 30 minutes before I got confirmations in, even worst so for me certain exchanges now start to create segwit-coins instead of bitcoins for doing transactions.
Well I am not sure, how would be doing that certainly not me, but it seems like you do. But there are ofcourse legit reasons why one would call another one a specif name, but such a thing should always be back up with proof.
Well, than we agree, bitcoin blocks are full regardless of spam attacks or not (bigger blocks would also make spam-attacks that much more expensive, and nobody was forcing anybody to accept bigger blocks, do smaller blocks have seem have taking control of core and slowed down bitcoin rate of adoption so much that recent people saw an opening to start there one fork of bitcoin. In case of bitcoin cash it has at the very least seen a relative succes. My opinion is that once segwit2x is live bitcoin cash will certainly lose a major foothold, something I believe we both would like to see, and that only at the cost of a small increase from 1mb to 2mb