This sounds a hell lot like changing the goal posts.

No, plenty of us have been saying this for a long time. Here is a HN post from 5 years ago where I say:

“even if it's only ever used for politically sensitive transactions, and it never takes off as a consumer payment service, it will be a very big economy” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5526684#5526972

The goalposts for Bitcoin have always just been “can it sustain its market cap?”

Also it's not like everyone you see on the Internet is the same person.

Anyone who was hoping for it to replace credit cards didn't understand the system. Lots of other folks have known the limitations of Bitcoin for years and what we're seeing today was totally predictable.

To be fair, becoming a quarter trillion dollar store of 'digital gold' is a hell of a pivot.

Does that matter? If you're looking to develop a drug to treat hypertension but end up with Viagra by accident instead, do you throw it away because that wasn't the original goal?

It certainly matters if you've still got a lot of people running around telling anyone that will listen that the drug is a sure-fire cure for hypertension.

There's a lot of people in the world running around telling people all kinds of things.

If the production of Viagra at scale winds up causing global health problems, then yes, you throw it away.

This may be straining the metaphor a bit, but I think you underestimate how much individuals want a magic sex pill.

Tell that to the FDA...

Oh it absolutely is. I'll acknowledge that. If Bitcoin is amazing at 7/12 of the things it set out to do, and sticking to those seven will pave the way for the other five to be done by other cryptocurrencies, that's fair to me.

Yeah, well.... It would seem "transactions" should be among the things that a currency does well.

Not necessarily. Bags of grain or N cows did not do transactions well. Yet they were successful as currencies for millennia.

times have changed since...

I'm pretty sure bags of grain are still a significant unit of value exchange[1].

[1] yep: http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/wheat.aspx

They have, and we have bitcoins instead of bags of grain.

"Use a different cryptocurrency."

I started using Bitcoin Cash instead and I'm loving it. All the good parts about Bitcoin Core w/o the brain dead approach to scaling.

Yep. I expect the fee market alone will drive normal people toward Bitcoin Cash.

Dogecoin has much cheaper fees than Bcash and its block confirmation target is around 1 minute -- roughly an order of magnitude cheaper and faster than Bcash.

A note to readers: "Bcash" is a derogary term used by Core supporters to undermine and discredit Bitcoin Cash. Always be mindful when someone uses it.

“Bitcoin cash” is a name chosen to confuse newcomers and attempt to steal the bitcoin brand. The CEO of bcash refers to Bitcoin as “SegwitCoin” and their official /r/btc subreddit regularly claims to be the real bitcoin.

Bcash is an appropriate name for the altcoin to eliminate confusion.

This is the kind of propaganda Core is pushing.

Note that there is no CEO and the very same people who refer to Bitcoin Cash as Bcash refer to Ethereum Classic, Bitcoin Gold and others by their proper name...

Of course there’s a CEO. Here’s an official statement from him: https://falkvinge.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/letter-from...

Doge has unlimited inflation it is nothing like Bitcoin Cash.

That doesn't matter if you only use it for transactions. Step in, transact, step out.

Who is going to pay you for your Dogecoin if no one wants to hold them?

This is indeed the folly of only valuating a coin for its transactional properties.

Who's going to work for USD if no one wants to hold them?

No one, but that's an irrelevant hypothetical because people do want to hold them and that's unlikely to change. Even if people in the US did want to get paid in a different currency, they would still need some USD to pay their tax bill.

United States persons with tax or debt obligations, obviously.

Bcash is already over-inflated relative to Bitcoin due to its mining algorithm. When the block reward diminishes enough, and fees don't supplant it, Bcash will hard fork to infinite inflation.

It's 0.001% over-inflated? So it reaches the 2020 halving earlier, and wins then too.

In the ~4 months since its creation, 115,975 Bcash tokens were mined ahead of schedule.

It is about 60 days ahead at most and it doesn't matter because the hard cap of 21 million coins is till the same. This has gotta be the dumbest argument I've ever heard.

The hard cap is the same until it isn't -- when Bcash has to hard fork to infinite inflation in order to incentivize mining because fees won't supplant the mining reward.

Not gonna happen.

Explain to me what will incentivize mining on Bcash when the fees are too low compared to Bitcoin? The mining subsidy, by design, is eventually supplanted by transaction fees.

For those interested in this "inflation", there is a good chart here:

https://fork.lol/blocks/height

As it says, "Block height. BCH is currently ahead by 9272 blocks." with the block height of both being about 500k.

In fact, with the rate that BTC gains hashing power, and its comparatively less responsive difficulty adjustment algorithm, it is expected to overtake BCH's block height in the next couple of years.

If i gave you a search algorithm with a big db then asked if it could done quicker would you prefer to spin up more cpu's or try to improve the algorithm?

I would spin up more CPUs. Because changing code in the near term is expensive and hard. Spinning up more CPUs is cheap and easy and ensures my company remains successful while I optimize the algorithm.

Using your analogy Bitcoin Core is saying they are going to shut down Bitcoin service to all new users until they implement a new algorithm that hasn't been proven yet and is still years away from being ready.

^ Exactly. The answer should almost always be spin up more cpu's.

Depends on the search algorithm; if it can be parallelized, then modify the algorithm to take advantages of multiple CPUs. If not, then start throwing more threads at it.

In Bitcoin’s case, I don’t think we have a lack of CPUs though.

the velocity of money increases price, look at how the price of litecoin is rising when bitcoin mempool is congested, if Coinbase didnt play politics, Bitcoin Cash will be pumping right now too, decentralized exchanges are coming though in the coming years it will change the whole market dynamic

Exactly. But the critical fight is public acceptance and a lack of government interference. To win that, all Bitcoin needs to do is keep doing what it's doing.

> If Bitcoin ends up only being a settlement layer, it'll still be a colossal success just being a decentralized, supply-limited, uncensorable, world-accessible payment system and store of value.

So, what happens when all the bitcoin are generated and mining is complete?

Mining is still very profitable due to transaction fees.