Pretty simple really the community has been clamoring for a block size increase for years now and the devs have been actively fighting it. They managed to create enough division in the community to scuttle the last compromise (Segwit2x) and now people are rotating en-mass to Bitcoin Cash which has the larger blocks they want and doesn't have the divisive developers.
Very little surprising about this at all except for maybe the speed with which it is happening.
>>now people are rotating en-mass to Bitcoin Cash which has the larger blocks they want and doesn't have the divisive developers.
This isn't entirely objective. BCH has 25% of its market cap trading today in volume. There's something weird going on. As for the developers, BCH has very little Github activity while Core is being actively worked on and improved.
I don't have a horse in this fight as I am into other cryptocurrencies but your statement is not very fair.
57 days ago, I said that it would be a good time to buy Bitcoin. If you'd listened to me, you could have made some serious cash since then. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15259134
Back then, the price dropped to around $3k. One of the questions was "What makes now a good time to buy?" And the answer was simply "Bitcoin has been crashing."
The counterintuitive thing is, if you want to get into bitcoin, you need to wait for a crash and then buy.
Bitcoin is crashing. Again, it's a good time to buy.
I don't think that is good advice this time. The combined market cap of Bitcoin Core + Bitcoin Cash is actually right at 7600 virtually unmoved. What is happening though is that the Core development team has used underhanded tactics to go against the wishes of the larger community for almost 4 years now and the Segwit2X cancellation was the final straw Everyone that believes large blocks are necessary are fleeing to Bitcoin cash.
If you were paying attention to the s2x cancellation and were a first mover into BCH and out of BTC you are making a killing right now.
We'll see. This is tea leaf reading. My record speaks for itself. I said two months ago to buy in at $3k. I'm going on record now: $5,800 is a pretty good buy-in price. Check back in two months.
It's simply hard to assign logical motives to overall movements in the market. As scientific minded individuals, we would love to believe there must be a motive. But sometimes there isn't one.
I think what's been happening is that the price has been going up and up, and it's been looking for an excuse to unwind. We're seeing it unwind now. That means the time to get in is now.
You should be equally suspicious of my words too, though. That's the tough part about trying to call the market. I'm just admitting it's hard.
There's a bear for every bull. You might as well go to Vegas and put it on black. At least then you can lose your money quickly instead of dragging it out over an extended period.
Right now is as stupid time to consider getting rich off Bitcoin. Even if the price doubles or triples, you'll only make 100 or 200%. That might seem like a really good investment. Maybe if you put down $100,000. Otherwise, it doesn't mean much. The risk is too high.
Back when it was $10 or $40, it was a great speculation. The ship has long since sailed.
>>Back when it was $10 or $40, it was a great speculation. The ship has long since sailed.
Has it? Many learned people believe BTC's ceiling is in the five digits. And back when it was $10-40, no one would believe you that it would go to $6000-8000.
The only thing we know about BTC and cryptocurrency in general is that we're looking at serious variance, regardless.
Here's the super-summarized story for those who are out of the loop: the Bitcoin community has been fighting for years over what they call the "block size increase." From its original design, Bitcoin has capped each block to 1MB, which effectively caps the transactions per second to 4 or so. Raising this limit would allow more transactions per second onto the network, but with the downside of making nodes in the Bitcoin network more costly to operate. The majority of current Bitcoin developers do not want to raise this cap. However, a large group of users and several of the earliest developers (including Gavin Andresen, the guy hand-picked by Satoshi Nakamoto) do want to raise it. There is evidence that Satoshi himself thought that the cap should someday be raised.
There was recently a compromise struck among the largest bitcoin exchanges and mining pools. It was called the Silbert Agreement, or New York Agreement, or Segwit2x. The agreement was to deploy a feature upgrade that the current developers had been pushing (called Segwit) alongside a block size increase from 1MB to 2MB. It broke a stalemate in which the big blockers had been preventing Segwit from going live, and the Segwit supporters had been refusing to increase the block size.
The deal was that Segwit would go live immediately, and several months later, the block size increase would go live. Segwit did go live as agreed, but then its proponents refused to honor the rest of the agreement (since they already got what they wanted).
That was a few days ago, and now we're seeing the backlash: lots of users and capital fleeing to "Bitcoin Cash," a separate branch that recently forked off from the traditional Bitcoin. Proponents (including Gavin Andresen) consider this new branch to be the true Bitcoin, because it's willing to scale with user demand as Satoshi Nakamoto intended. Opponents consider it to be an altcoin that's fraudulently calling itself Bitcoin, since its block size increase is a departure from the original spec.
There exact reasons are a point of contention. But a lot of people believe that they thought it was in their interest to keep the block size small because they hold a business interest in companies who's business plan is to make money by selling so called "second layer" solutions.
The direction of development is really controlled by a handful of people and they also have control of 3 of the historically important Bitcoin discussion forums so they were able to control the narrative for years and push out anyone who brought up contrarian opinions on the block size.
Each node in Bitcoin's P2P network has to store a copy of every transaction since the beginning of time. This currently takes 140GB of disk space and is growing by 5GB per month. If more transactions are allowed to go through, it'll grow even faster. If it grows to extremely large numbers, only those who can afford the huge disk arrays will be able to run a node.
The fear is that eventually, only major companies and universities will be running Bitcoin nodes. This could make it easier for governments to threaten all involved parties into changing or dismantling the system.
However, those who want to raise the block size say that government agents threatening Bitcoin node operators is not a realistic fear. Whereas, if transactions can't go through because the network refuses to scale, then businesses will abort their plans to accept Bitcoin. To big blockers, such a scaling failure is much more likely to kill Bitcoin than government agents in dark suits.
Trying to work around the problem of all part transactions having to be present on a node by limiting the number of transactions that can happen honestly sounds like a silly joke. The entire point of any currency is easy, cheap and fast transactions.
> The entire point of any currency is easy, cheap and fast transactions.
All of those are relative, and part of tradeoffs with other values. If you think those are the only important properties of a currency, you're missing the entire motivation behind crypto currencies.
For a long time one of the big promises of Bitcoin was that you can easily, cheaply and quickly transfer them even to people in other countries.
I assume the benefits you are referring to are political? Like lack of central per controlling it? If so, I don't think that will run over every day Joe.
What's happening with the price of BCH is really interesting, but if you think about the liquidity of BCH vs BTC, there are far fewer BCH able to be sold on the market, so all it takes is a concerted effort by relatively few traders to increase the price of BCH until it looks like the market cap is comparable.
BCH liquidity is a fraction of BTC. If you are the owner of BCH because you held BTC at the time of the fork, there
's little chance you have gone to the trouble to copy wallets to a separate computer, move your original coins (to prevent a double spend) and install a BCH wallet.
Funny thing is if you have been holding Bitcoin since at least Aug. None of this affects you because you got an equal amount of Bitcoin Cash and the combined value of Bitcoin Core + Bitcoin Cash has hardly budged from all time highs.
Some people said their Bitcoin Cash was "free money" and sold it instead of seeing it for what it was, a hedge against developer hubris. Those folks that sold aren't in a good place right now.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 71.8 ms ] thread«The percentage represents how close BCH is to reaching half of the combined market cap of BTC and BCH.»
$30B / ($130B/2) = 46%
Very little surprising about this at all except for maybe the speed with which it is happening.
This isn't entirely objective. BCH has 25% of its market cap trading today in volume. There's something weird going on. As for the developers, BCH has very little Github activity while Core is being actively worked on and improved.
I don't have a horse in this fight as I am into other cryptocurrencies but your statement is not very fair.
Back then, the price dropped to around $3k. One of the questions was "What makes now a good time to buy?" And the answer was simply "Bitcoin has been crashing."
The counterintuitive thing is, if you want to get into bitcoin, you need to wait for a crash and then buy.
Bitcoin is crashing. Again, it's a good time to buy.
If you were paying attention to the s2x cancellation and were a first mover into BCH and out of BTC you are making a killing right now.
It's simply hard to assign logical motives to overall movements in the market. As scientific minded individuals, we would love to believe there must be a motive. But sometimes there isn't one.
I think what's been happening is that the price has been going up and up, and it's been looking for an excuse to unwind. We're seeing it unwind now. That means the time to get in is now.
You should be equally suspicious of my words too, though. That's the tough part about trying to call the market. I'm just admitting it's hard.
Back when it was $10 or $40, it was a great speculation. The ship has long since sailed.
Has it? Many learned people believe BTC's ceiling is in the five digits. And back when it was $10-40, no one would believe you that it would go to $6000-8000.
The only thing we know about BTC and cryptocurrency in general is that we're looking at serious variance, regardless.
There was recently a compromise struck among the largest bitcoin exchanges and mining pools. It was called the Silbert Agreement, or New York Agreement, or Segwit2x. The agreement was to deploy a feature upgrade that the current developers had been pushing (called Segwit) alongside a block size increase from 1MB to 2MB. It broke a stalemate in which the big blockers had been preventing Segwit from going live, and the Segwit supporters had been refusing to increase the block size.
The deal was that Segwit would go live immediately, and several months later, the block size increase would go live. Segwit did go live as agreed, but then its proponents refused to honor the rest of the agreement (since they already got what they wanted).
That was a few days ago, and now we're seeing the backlash: lots of users and capital fleeing to "Bitcoin Cash," a separate branch that recently forked off from the traditional Bitcoin. Proponents (including Gavin Andresen) consider this new branch to be the true Bitcoin, because it's willing to scale with user demand as Satoshi Nakamoto intended. Opponents consider it to be an altcoin that's fraudulently calling itself Bitcoin, since its block size increase is a departure from the original spec.
Why did the majority of developers not want to raise the block size? / How exactly does it make nodes much more expensive to operate?
The direction of development is really controlled by a handful of people and they also have control of 3 of the historically important Bitcoin discussion forums so they were able to control the narrative for years and push out anyone who brought up contrarian opinions on the block size.
The fear is that eventually, only major companies and universities will be running Bitcoin nodes. This could make it easier for governments to threaten all involved parties into changing or dismantling the system.
However, those who want to raise the block size say that government agents threatening Bitcoin node operators is not a realistic fear. Whereas, if transactions can't go through because the network refuses to scale, then businesses will abort their plans to accept Bitcoin. To big blockers, such a scaling failure is much more likely to kill Bitcoin than government agents in dark suits.
All of those are relative, and part of tradeoffs with other values. If you think those are the only important properties of a currency, you're missing the entire motivation behind crypto currencies.
BCH liquidity is a fraction of BTC. If you are the owner of BCH because you held BTC at the time of the fork, there 's little chance you have gone to the trouble to copy wallets to a separate computer, move your original coins (to prevent a double spend) and install a BCH wallet.
Some people said their Bitcoin Cash was "free money" and sold it instead of seeing it for what it was, a hedge against developer hubris. Those folks that sold aren't in a good place right now.