Thread by @VinnyLingham

I don’t think I’ve been clear on my thoughts on Bitcoin and the various forks, so here is a quick summary. I still believe peer to peer digital cash will win over “Store of Value”, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s BCH or BSV.

Outside of BTC, BCH and BSV - the other forks are largely unsupported with tiny communities that have little chance of longevity and are, by and large, either outright scams or very poor attempts at forking a protocol and building community & adoption. They may survive sub-scale.

The main forks (BTC, BCH and BSV) are all competing to solve problems relating to a combination of scale, utility, adoption and security, amongst other goals.

Right now, I’m agnostic on all three forks for various reasons, but specifically, as it relates to how the various communities relay their world views and try to compete.

BTC is the clear winner and incumbent and it’s going to take a Herculean effort for BCH and BSV to overtake it. That said, the over-reliance on lightning network for scaling and extreme focus on decentralization with the risk of high fees at any moment is a major limiting factor.

BCH and BSV could not resolve their respective differences and this resulted in a clear rejection by the market which reflects in the price. Right now BCH is in the lead and one of these forks would need to establish a clear lead on the other before either could challenge BTC.

This battle may play out over the coming months and years, but for now BTC is clearly Bitcoin. That said, these are just my thoughts as to where I believe the communities went wrong and why I’m very agnostic right now.

BTC should have increased the block size. Clearly LN was not going to be ready “in 18 months” as claimed over 2 years ago. “Store of Value” hypothesis is flawed sub-scale and getting to scale is limited by the block size, possibly a catch-22. Merchant adoption has been stunted.

BCH should not have implemented CTOR in a hurry, especially given the clear contentiousness within a small community and they should have tried to keep the community together, instead of fracturing further.

BSV supporters, in opposition to CTOR should have instead mined the original BCH chain and not simultaneously increased the blocksize at that point in time. This would have probably resulted in the BCH community not fracturing into two forks, imho.

All said and done, I’m an observer and my opinion does not matter and I cannot control the outcomes here. Que sera sera. These are just my humble thoughts. So if you ask me which Bitcoin I support - it’s the one that wins over the long term and is still around 10 years from now.

Ultimately the early miner (who may or may not be Satoshi) with the 1m+ coins, will have a strong say in influencing which fork ultimately wins, if they ever resurface. But, for now, BTC is Bitcoin.

I also don’t have a religious belief that Bitcoin is pre-ordained to be the best digital money for the world and can never be beaten but it’s clear that the underlying Bitcoin technology is better suited to being money and being used for P2P payments than say, Ethereum or Ripple.

So while BTC, BSV and BCH communities fight it out for existing market share, we may have to contemplate that we will live in a world where there are a few major crypto currencies catering for different needs, including upcoming competitors like Facebook.

In the spirit of decentralization, it’s probably better that the world eventually has multiple at scale crypto currencies to rely on, rather than a single one, in the same way that we have USD, GBP, EUR, etc. Time will tell...