OK, the past few days have been totally insane. Wild price fluctuations, Bitcoin (BTC) rocketing upwards and then dipping down just as fast. Segwit2x suddenly cancelled and then Bitcoin Cash (BCH) taking off. The whole crypto community has been upset, disturbed, or otherwise rekt by all these recent spikes and dips. I mean this whole week has been absolutely crazy! Better than a reality TV show.
I have a lot of thoughts about all this, so lets get started.
There is a lot of hype, speculation, fud, fomo, and fear on twitter right now. But I agree with a comment that I saw on twitter:
To tear apart bitcoin and make it ambigious just to address something (already) addressed by other cryptos is nonsensical.
https://twitter.com/cryptoshii/status/929612167569166336
- cryptoshii
To this comment someone else replied,
Scaling transaction throughput will be massively important as time goes on. The best is off-chain scaling but that will most likely not be enough. Bitcoin can't become a network where poor people cannot perform a single on-chain transaction.
And I understand that Bitcoin was meant to be a digital cash system that catered to people all around the world, but I love the response that came next,
If you can't afford to shop at Whole Foods are you going to go to Walmart or start stealing from Whole Foods? There are alternatives. Don't be foolish.
And I agree.
There is nothing inherently WRONG with Bitcoin itself. It works. It's slow and costly -- but it works. For people who use it as a storage of wealth (not cash) there is nothing wrong with it. Trying to change it into something else like Bitcoin Cash just creates confusion, and makes a lot of headaches for the companies built upon the distribution of Bitcoin.
I agree that other altcoins could potentially serve a purpose that Bitcoin has failed to get perfectly right. Now I know some of you will shout at me "But BitcoinCash IS Bitcoin! It's closer to what Satoshi wanted!"
That may be true, but I think the only -real- Bitcoin is the one created by Satoshi Nakamoto himself, even though it had some inherent flaws. Anything else, is just a new altcoin, and even though it can be called "Bitcoin" it will not be Bitcoin.
If the masses adopt something else that scales better (whether that be by longer blocks or a faster network), we don't NEED to call it Bitcoin anymore. But people are stuck on this, and try to please Satoshi by trying to do what they think he would have wanted.
But we as investors need to be very careful of what cryptocurrency we choose to adopt or invest in with the idea that it will become what Bitcoin should have been, or what Satoshi intended it to be.
Here is another excellent tweet, to support my argument:
BCH up, everything else down? This reeks of manipulation. Roger Ver admitted on Cryptomanran's show he was dumping BTC to PUMP BCH. How many New York Agreement signatories are dumping other coins & buying BCH to paint this false picture of the market rejecting S2X being called off?
https://twitter.com/bradmillscan/status/929062673328820224
- bradmillscan
And,
Roger and many of the CEOs of the New York Agreement have their hands in the pot of all major Cryptos. If they can band together to split Bitcoin (like they attempted to do with Segwit2x), they can band together to dump prices and buy BCH in unison. Looks like propaganda. Hope they all get REKT.
His point is that BCH saw its parabolic rise thanks mostly to manipulation by rich investors (namely Roger Ver and Jihan Wu) . And when a digital asset shoots upwards as violently as this, it also tends to sharply correct (as we saw when Bitcoin Cash dropped $1,000 USD in less than 30 minutes). This said, I think its still a highly speculative investment, and its too early to say whether BCH will overtake Bitcoin as the most dominant cryptocurrency.
If you choose to invest in BCH that is your choice, but do keep in mind that BCH is highly volatile and you could see your investment go "poof" like some already have.
Final thoughts, from the chat group:
Bitcoin Cash is like your girlfriends hot cousin from out of town that looks oddly similar but is into knives and might be a murderer. Proceed with caution.
Anything I post here on steemit is not investment advice, but rather for your amusement and entertainment purposes only. Not all of the thoughts and ideas are mine, and you should always do your own research before investing in anything.
If you would like to speak with me off-chain, you can do so here: cateyes81 at yahoo dot com
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