Thanks for this interesting infodump, I haven’t looked hard at EOS yet (I am biased towards only bothering to learn about things which are actually “live in production” in a meaningful way, as a kind of bozo filter) but I will promote it in my attention.
I agree that Bitcoin could sort of tack on scalability with payment channels and tack on smart contracts with RSK. It just seems really unlikely that it’s a better idea to do these things on top of a PoW blockchain layer that has tire fire governance. It’s definitely true that some kind of worse-is-better network effect* could keep Bitcoin at the top in a way that’s hard for me to understand—I don’t even have any explanation for why Bitcoin is at the top as of right now! At the end of the day, though, my original decision to buy Bitcoin and later Ethereum was based on my assessment of the technical usefulness of the work being done, and since that turned out so well, I’m going to keep riding that heuristic until I see it not work.
*Although it’s interesting to speculate what the network would be. Ethereum has mostly caught up in terms of ease-of-obtaining-and-transferring; exchanges, wallets, node software, etc. Bitcoin never really hit the mainstream in terms of people transacting in it for everyday things, and due to congestion it probably won’t now until payment channels are running and the kinks get worked out. One interesting thing that might be a “network effect” is the number of people with non-portable investments into Bitcoin’s future, e.g. miners with Bitcoin ASICs. That’s a lot of capital which is incentivized to make Bitcoin in particular succeed, and competitors don’t have that.
Thanks for this interesting infodump, I haven’t looked hard at EOS yet (I am biased towards only bothering to learn about things which are actually “live in production” in a meaningful way, as a kind of bozo filter) but I will promote it in my attention.
I agree that Bitcoin could sort of tack on scalability with payment channels and tack on smart contracts with RSK. It just seems really unlikely that it’s a better idea to do these things on top of a PoW blockchain layer that has tire fire governance. It’s definitely true that some kind of worse-is-better network effect* could keep Bitcoin at the top in a way that’s hard for me to understand—I don’t even have any explanation for why Bitcoin is at the top as of right now! At the end of the day, though, my original decision to buy Bitcoin and later Ethereum was based on my assessment of the technical usefulness of the work being done, and since that turned out so well, I’m going to keep riding that heuristic until I see it not work.
*Although it’s interesting to speculate what the network would be. Ethereum has mostly caught up in terms of ease-of-obtaining-and-transferring; exchanges, wallets, node software, etc. Bitcoin never really hit the mainstream in terms of people transacting in it for everyday things, and due to congestion it probably won’t now until payment channels are running and the kinks get worked out. One interesting thing that might be a “network effect” is the number of people with non-portable investments into Bitcoin’s future, e.g. miners with Bitcoin ASICs. That’s a lot of capital which is incentivized to make Bitcoin in particular succeed, and competitors don’t have that.