Better link (no sign-in): <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/04/24/143425/lets-destroy-bitcoin/" rel="nofollow">https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/04/24/143425/lets-dest...</a>
The article presents some long term and optemistic possibilities of making bitcoin irrelevant but I'm not that convinced.<p>I'm by no means a bitcoin maximalist but the trust and network effect of bitcoin is something every other cryptocurrency struggles with and difficult to replicate.<p>I believe a government run blockchain is a likely outcome, but this doesn't share many similarities with Bitcoin. The currently common rhetoric is that Bitcoin's 21 million limit is a hedge against inflation and a government blockchain won't satisfy people looking for this.<p>The Facebook sneak attack it proposes has two avenues - it's own token (and we saw how that went) or taking over. The possibility of an more insidious takeover is already a possibility now that vendors like PayPal allow you to buy cryptocurrency. PayPal's version of Bitcoin is already nothing like Bitcoin - only PayPal can hold it for you, you cannot sent it to others or spend it and others cannot send you more.
The problem is that even if PayPal or Facebook could capture a large user market that doesn't give miners much incentive to switch to their fork. When they forked it would be world news and I'm sure they'll have lawsuits and people demanding their private keys.<p>I find the third option the most likely, but who knows how long it will take and if it will happen. As a new digital currency bitcoin has had the fairest distribution, currently the greatest hashrate and if you include wBTC and it's variants it still finalises a lot of value. For an already complex idea it has name recognition and is <i>relatively</i> simple and understandable in design. It's hard cap of 21 million and stage in the distribution cycle can only be replicated in time.
Even now by many metrics Ethereum has an advantage over Bitcoin but as the article point out is only a third of its market cap. Even if Bitcoin's market dominance dropped in the short term it's unlikely that the distribution would favour a single project.<p>To conclude I'm not convinced that Bitcoin's stop of greatest cryptocurrency market cap will be replaced in the short to medium term of 10-20 years.
(2018) -- so bits of this already seem dated, for instance the idea of a profusion of coins being a feature, not a bug, of the crypto space:<p>> “Think of this as an incredibly efficient barter system,” says Harvey. “Barter is generally inefficient, but if you have a network and you tokenize the goods and services and enable it with a blockchain, it can become very efficient.”<p>Maybe I just lack imagination, but I am missing where the benefit of this lies. When Apple has a coin and Toyota has a coin and Kodak has a coin (as seemed would be the case at the time this was published) why is it any better to hold any one of these, barter through a set of intermediaries to get to ConvenienceStoreCoin, and settle your candy purchase with that, versus holding investments, selling them for cash, and using that everywhere? Even putting transaction costs aside, my sense is that a natural, shared unit of account / means of exchange will end up predominating and this "incredibly efficient barter system" won't be the paradigm shift the article implies.
While I hold a modest amount of Bitcoin, it’s pretty clear that it’s just digital gold at this point, and not really a currency in a practical sense. And the mining situation is ridiculous, both from a power usage perspective and a miner centralization perspective.<p>I’ve been digging into this project lately and it’s pretty exciting: <a href="https://www.chia.net" rel="nofollow">https://www.chia.net</a> especially considering Bram Cohen is the brain behind it (the BitTorrent guy).<p>Really good real time community on Keybase, I also launched a forum that I’m trying to get some traction with to preserve knowledge for the project at <a href="https://chiaforum.com" rel="nofollow">https://chiaforum.com</a><p>It’s a lot of fun building and running the chia farming rigs, feels way more accessible than the mining stuff. Also, since it’s barely just launched, and it’s on good tech foundation, it’s exciting to be in “early” on a new coin.
My only complaint about Bitcoin is the energy use. And I think it would be reasonable to whitelist things that are allowed to use so much electricity (or make their prices rise as a function of use)
The most probable decline of bitcoin imo is regulation or societal collapse from ecosystem loss from climate change. Both are a 10-30year timeframe kind of thing imo.