The bitcoin network and community has unfortunately become split across 3 main forks.
A project that is a fork of the original bitcoin protocol, maintained by a private venture capital backed company... Blockstream. They control the Bitcoin Core implementation of Bitcoin, and have changed and restricted the protocol in dramatic ways, rendering some of the originally intended functionality of the platform redundant. They seem to have leveraged corporate money to exert influence on the cryptosphere in many ways. To what end, I'm not sure. But BTC no longer is the "" it promised to be. Bitcoin gained popularity as a virtually free, unrestricted, p2p pseudonymous digital cash system for the internet, which the original protocol intended to become. Supporters of Blockstream's current implementation of Bitcoin (BTC) believe that Bitcoin should not be a digital cash system at all, but should instead become a sort of "digital gold"... costly to transact in, and only to be used as a store of value, not as digital cash. The fact that BTC transactions will soon become prohibitively expensive for the average user to use (i.e. >$100 fee / transaction) means it will be effectively rendered useless as digital cash. It will lead to huge amounts of small bitcoin accounts who will never be able to move their funds again, without using 2nd layer payment solutions like the Lightning Network, which only use the distributed blockchain ledger to settle large blocks of transactions at the end of the trading day. Blockstream have essentially introduced the requirement of trusted 3rd parties to relay your transaction for you. They have made the network fragile. They have sown the seeds of their network's ultimate destruction.
A project supported initially by Dr. Craig Wright and Roger Ver, as well as many other Bitcoin Maximalists, who disagreed with Blockstream's intentions for the future of the Bitcoin Protocol, citing that their restriction of the blocksize would prevent massive scaling of the network and rendering BTC useless as a digital cash system. They instead supported the idea of "big blocks", which in theory would mean that only larger mining operations with huge capital investments would ultimately be able to profitably mine bitcoin. They argue that this was the originally intended scaling solution, and that individual users were never expected to run full nodes, and that big companies should compete to increase the efficiency of the network instead. They argue that this should not be seen as "centralisation" of the network, but rather, niche specialization of the network. They believe that the economic incentives originally intended would ensure that the network remains a level playing field for everyone - miners and users alike, and that this network schema preserves the ability to maintain low transaction fees and facilitate micro-transactions. Unfortunately, interests within the Bitcoin Cash faction subsequently lobbied to make further amendments to the original Bitcoin protocol which others in the community disagreed with - i.e. features that would help to facilitate anonymous transactions and coin tumbling, things which only criminals would benefit from.
This implementation of Bitcoin is maintained and developed by nChain and it's chief scientist - Dr. Craig Wright. Many believe him to be the original creator of the Bitcoin Protocol... Satoshi Nakamoto, or at least the driving force behind the team of people who developed it. He is currently embroiled in legal proceedings with the estate of one of his now deceased friends / colleagues, who helped him develop, mine and establish the original Bitcoin Protocol... Dave Kleinman. Wright has recently been ordered by a Florida court to pay $5 BILLION of bitcoin to the estate of his now deceased firend, who the court has deemed to be entitled to a fraction of the bitcoin in Craig Wright's possession. The court has not stated that Wright is Satoshi, but still have compelled him to pay half of his bitcoin holdings to the estate of his dead college... hmmm. Much more to come on this front I would imagine. The cryptosphere does not believe that Craig is Satoshi, not because of the mountains of evidence of the work that he has done, but rather because they want bitcoin to continue to be anarchist money that facilitates online crime... or else they believe the propaganda put forward by these same people. They don't believe it because he has to date refused to "cryptographically prove" himself as Satoshi by signing a transaction with Satoshi's original keys or by moving coins allegedly belonging to Satoshi. Many large exchanges decided to delist their BSV markets, after Wright finally decided to take on the troll armies of contending forks and fight back aggressively. He has lodged patent applications for the original whitepaper, and is currently fighting for his legal right to be known as the creator of Bitcoin. He meanwhile has expanded upon his original vision of the protocol as "fully truing complete", meaning that features previously removed by Blockstream were originally intended to provide the same functionality as the currently popular smart contract platforms like Ethereum and EOS. He has also submitted multiple patents related to blockchain technology, which in the future will likely see other blockchains having to pay him royalties for their use of the technology. Or cease and desist.
This is the current state of Bitcoin.
While I personally believe that Craig Wright is indeed Satoshi, and that BSV will be the only fork that fulfills the original promise of the protocol, the markets take time to digest the facts.
Stop watching the BTCUSD ticker, and instead start watching the combined market cap of all 3 forks.
BTC might in fact be doomed, but Bitcoin itself will march onwards and upwards.
