Well, well, well look who I found on HIVE 😄

I like teasing the bitcoin maximalists by talking about XRP as a settlement layer for BTC. You can hear the teeth grind. Ha.

> The first of course, is the STUPID RIDICULOUS amount of energy it takes to mine bitcoin.

This is how Bitcoin is supposed to work. The waste of energy generates security of the underlying chain. In order to maliciously change the protocol, any attacker must waste an enormous amount of energy in order to double spend or make protocol changes. With proof of stake blockchains, a super staker or staking cartel can strong arm changes just by having a majority / large amount of staked coins. Steem wasn't able to prevent Justin Sun's hostile takeover from enacting chaos and leading to the chain split. Granted there is little incentive to undermine the monetary policy of PoS chains, the fact that these changes are more easily possible is a potential security issue. The inefficiency of PoW was unintuitively part of the innovation that made Bitcoin work.

> I think to consider the first implementation and iteration of a new technology to be the "end-all-be-all" is at the very least, hubris. Think of it this way; The Model T was the first major mass produced vehicle ever made.

Bitcoin wasn't the first digital currency and is a synthesis of different technologies that preceded it. The underlying protocol is also continuing to change in order to better improve the protocol. Comparing protocols to motor vehicles as a metaphor doesn't really make a lot of sense because protocols are a set of rules that dictate permissible behavior rather than a product that is obsoleted after time. Bitcoin is more similar to say a constitution rather than a Model T. Not to say there aren't better constitutions out there, but the amending process makes constitutions robust in ways that single-use products aren't.

> Developers are stuck with what they have, and it seems rather infeasible to say, get the ENTIRE NETWORK to fundamentally change after the fact.

This is probably Bitcoin's strongest weakness, but I would argue that Ethereum suffers from this issue much more significantly (and other protocols do as well including Hive). It really depends if Bitcoin is clean and sturdy enough as it is to be a sufficiently concise and feature-rich layer to be built on. I think the all-in-one-layer approach doesn't work with protocols as they become too complex and cumbersome and more vulnerable to bugs and harder to maintain and grow. As a software engineer, there is nothing worse than over-complicated behemoths. Even if Bitcoin struggles with this issue, all blockchains (that behave as decentralized blockchains) will also struggle with the issue. Protocols are never universal so there will always be some deficiency in the protocol (Bitcoins transaction speed, PoS staking attacks, Steem/Hive incentive structures). 

> there are a lot of points here that makes it seem absolutely inevitable that other blockchains and tech would eventually arise to challenge Bitcoin.

As Bitcoin is structured and designed, I don't really see comparable technology that "challenges" Bitcoin and sufficiency addresses all the problems that Bitcoin is solving. That doesn't mean that parallel and **collaborative** technologies can't exist. I'm not a Bitcoin maximalist by any means, but Bitcoin is the only coin that I have confidence can survive the next twenty years based on what technological problems it solves. I haven't reached that point with other coins, but that doesn't mean I haven't dabbled with other blockchains. Maybe I have yet to understand how they really work. At one time I thought that Bitcoin was outdated from many of the same reasons explained in this post but through time, experience and familiarize myself in the space I have begun to understand that perspective. It would be short-sighted not to try and understand the new technology and figure out what works and what doesn't work with that protocol. The biggest issue with the space is the bias those monetizing innovation. Too many projects are focused on making money rather than developing with the spirit of innovating and experiencing. Coins like TRON that plagiarize whitepapers and rely on hype to generate speculation aren't moving us forward and they might be wasting potential money in the space. So in some sense I can understand that perspective from Maximalists, although I encourage the development of technology both as a layer cake on top of Bitcoin or in the form of new protocols that we can trial new ideas on. 

I'm as happy as anyone else to tear apart the Bitcoin-Only crowd, but I do take issue with your first argument.

21 million coins as a cap with decreasing inflationary growth is a good thing, and if it proves too granular when divisible into Satoshis at 8 decimal places, a simple change increases the number of decimal places. And as adoption increases, so will price stability. any deflationary trend (increasing buying power over time) would be gradual and easily taken into account. It makes more sense than inflation and interest rate chaos we have now anyway.

>"Money is different from all other commodities: other things being equal, more shoes, or more discoveries of oil or copper benefit society, since they help alleviate natural scarcity. But once a commodity is established as a money on the market, no more money at all is needed. Since the only use of money is for exchange and reckoning, more dollars or pounds or marks in circulation cannot confer a social benefit: they will simply dilute the exchange value of every existing dollar or pound or mark. So it is a great boon that gold or silver are scarce and are costly to increase in supply. But if government manages to establish paper tickets or bank credit as money, as equivalent to gold grams or ounces, then the government, as dominant money-supplier, becomes free to create money costlessly and at will. As a result, this 'inflation' of the money supply destroys the value of the dollar or pound, drives up prices, cripples economic calculation, and hobbles and seriously damages the workings of the market economy." ~ Murray Rothbard

Of course, cryptocurrencies are an entirely new idea all around, but scarcity is no bad thing in a monetary unit, provided it is sufficiently divisible.

I quite agree that competition in pursuit of innovation and improvement is essential. Bitcoin may be a superb proof-of-concept, but the Wright Flyer of 1903 wasn't the template for all aircraft to come, and Bitcoin may not prove ideal in the long run, either.

Maximalists seem to have their heads in the sand when it comes to other use cases besides money, as well as the feasibility of implementing those use cases in the Bitcoin code. Just not gonna happen for most crypto use cases.

Decentralized social media has huge potential value. Bitcoin developers are highly unlikely to try to implement social media on the BTC blockchain, at least for the foreseeable future. Which means if you want immutable social media content it has to be on a separate blockchain. Which is what we have here.

All we need now is an easy way to convert Hive to BTC from frontends, and it becomes a layer 2 solution. Could something like OpenSeed make this possible?

Frist and forth most, I don't believe Bitcoin should be the sole cryptocurrency; nor do I believe other projects are shit. So we are in concordance here. But I disagree on other points.


> Presumably, bitcoin is supposed to be a currency - meaning that it should have a relatively stable value in order to be a store of value.


Stable value compared to what? US Dollars? Euros? The sole reason these currencies are relatively stable against each other, is because of Government intervention on the forex market through reserves and debt.


If Bitcoin's proposition is to compete against those corrupt currencies, then its price going up is of no problem. It just proves that the other currencies are losing attractiveness, or there's a shortage of Bitcoin available for sale. Note what's going on with USD against EUR or GBP.


Now, if your assumption of volatility is because we need converting to fiat to operate on the retail market, then I agree with you - it's volatile. However, that's not how it should be envisioned. The way I see its function, is in a society where prices of goods and services are in Bitcoin. 1 loaf is x Bitcoins, you pay the bills with y Bitcoins (or sats).


Keep in mind that society's problem is over expansion of the monetary base through debt inflation and enslavement. Gold and Bitcoin fix that.


> The first of course, is the STUPID RIDICULOUS amount of energy it takes to mine bitcoin.


I won't enter the protocol argument (pow vs pos vs dps) as it's not on my reach. But saying Bitcoin consumes a lot of energy is unfair. Gold consumes more than Bitcoin comparing 1oz worth of Bitcoin; let alone the oil sector, from extraction to diesel, to fuel all the machinery. So, in comparison to other forms of money (Gold) , Bitcoin is better.


> The Model T was the first major mass produced vehicle ever made. For its time it was a hell of a car.


It was actually pretty shit compared to other cars of that time; it was the first to be mass produced. You should compare Bitcoin to the combustion engine; without combustion engine and the Otto-cycle we couldn't have cars; they are both ground zero, a foundation for evolution.


>That's what happens in Captialism and a free market; people find better ways to do things and then try to make a living by making it a reality for everyone. 


What you described sounds exactly as Governmental currencies, when they try to manipulate the nature of money, historically they fail. That's why Gold is money for thousands of years, and perhaps Bitcoin will to. Unless someone creates a project with the same core values to compete with Bitcoin for a **hard money** position.


I believe Bitcoin will remain as the foundation, alongside Gold, on a reconstructed monetary system. But it can only be reached if the society is intelligent enough to understand how Central Banks work, how currency is created and so on. From there, other blockchains will come as decentralized enterprises.

What I believe goes fundamentally against maximalism (not just BTC) is that there is in general a lot of tolerance in the world for other things/people/products to exist and thrive. That's just human nature. BTC might maintain a lot of dominance sure but there will certainly be other winners!

I think in general, any maximalist believes they have the universal truth (that doesn't exist) and closes their eyes for possibly better alternatives. That's the truth for anything in live (politics, religion, lifestyle, crypto).

I was reading somewhere how around 70% of the energy used for bitcoin mining is from renewable sources.

It's true, and we have to remember that Bitcoin's market dominance was around 85% when the scaling issues really hit. Such a monstrous network effect advantage is extremely difficult to overcome, yet here we are at a recent-ish high point of 63%, when it used to be much lower. With Lightning the way it is, I can't see that ever going higher for a meaningful period of time. The dominance days are numbered.

Note that scaling isn't necessarily that hard, if "hard" is to mean "unlikely." It's definitely not a walk in the park either, but just like mass adoption it's an entirely surmountable obstacle. Bitcoin didn't scale for primarily political reasons (I'd say 60-80%).

always good to keep one eyes open for new ideas