Bitcoin advocate | www.bulltrap.io – Crypto Talk Blog Oct 25 BTC vs BCH aka Bitcoin vs Bitcoin I speak from my own experience and my personal level of knowledge about cryptocurrencies on what the real Bitcoin is to me. I’ve been following the crypto space since 2015. I was at a point where I had to reassure myself whether I was doing the right thing. This is my story. Bitcoin Advocate I’ve been an advocate of Bitcoin (BTC) on Quora for over a year with a decent number of followers. I stick up for Bitcoin and defend it when I see unjustified accusations and general misinformation.
I take pride in helping out the newcomers who don’t yet understand what Bitcoin is, what purpose it’s meant to serve, how it works and how it could benefit them and the rest of the world. Not long ago, I’ve decided to check myself and verify the facts.
I wanted to ensure I was still on the right track in what I was doing. What pushed me to do it was the fact that my passion for Bitcoin advocacy has slowly started fading away.
Day after day, the inner drive I used to have was diminishing. It felt strange because I never lost my interest in cryptocurrencies as the whole. My why was getting stronger and I had to know what was causing it.
These are the conclusions.
White Paper I’m not a developer and so aren’t most people to whom understanding a typical white paper might pose a challenge. I’ve read tons of crypto white papers and realized it’s best to keep things simple. The most descriptive information is included on the first page of any white paper. It will tell you what the coin is about and what problems it’s meant to solve.
The deeper you get, the more you’re going to learn about the underlying mechanics of the coin.
Bitcoin’s paper is simply-worded, easy to understand and renders no confusion to anyone. You neither have to be a developer nor do you must be involved in the technical aspect of the blockchain technology. I’m neither, but I do understand the concept. Satoshi’s vision was to create a decentralized payment platform to be used as electronic cash.
Any level of centralization is frowned upon and the network should stay a simple structure. There’s not much more to it, it’s as simple as that. And that’s all I need to know to find out what Bitcoin is about. The same applies to other white papers, too — if the concept cannot be articulated in a few opening paragraphs, it’s most likely not worth your time. Follow The White Rabbit (or The White Paper) I’ve been asked many a time on Quora to what extent a white paper should be executed for any coin to stay true to its original premise. Scrap that, quite recently I have asked exactly that question myself, too. I was hoping for an easy way out instead of doing the work myself.
It didn’t happen. Most of the answers I got were biased toward the authors’ subjective beliefs which didn’t align with my reality. I could smell from a mile that some of those answers were blindly repeated without doing any due diligence and some shouldn’t have been any sort of advice in the first place. It was time to roll up my sleeves and go to work on this one.
Here’s the logic I’ve used along the way to come up with the answer. As of today, there are over 2,000 cryptocurrencies, most of which had been created on top of existing coins. Most of those coins don’t introduce anything groundbreaking. Some bits inside them are tweaked or replaced altogether, but everything is still based on the original coin that is being tweaked, improved or copied.
Whatever you want to call it. Once such a frivolous development is complete, it is also ready to be released to the public — most likely as a new coin and under a new name. I might be right or wrong, depending on your perspective, but in my books it makes such a project an altcoin by default. So to answer my own question, I truly believe that the white paper should be honored and executed as close as possible to the original premise to prevent creating an altcoin.
My conclusions I never thought it would happen, but the facts speak for themselves. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is in fact the real Bitcoin. I will tell you why I think that’s true. As a true Bitcoin advocate, I was fighting it.
But my arguments seemed to be getting out of whack. How things have developed in the crypto-world for the past year was sort of the a-ha moment.
It took a turn for me to see it much clearer. This is how I’ve convinced myself. BTC is an altcoin It’s not a secret that BTC is the most popular cryptocurrency as of today. And it has been ever since Satoshi introduced it to the world. It isn’t the best electronic cash to make peer-to-peer payments (or act as store of value), but it surely has the momentum to be portrayed as such. That confuses a lot of people already involved in cryptos and especially those who are new.
The main driver for this confusion to thrive is the fact that it operates under the original symbol of “BTC” as proposed by the white paper. It’s sad because BTC isn’t the true Bitcoin. In fact, it has less to do with the original concept of the electronic cash the more it’s developed. To me, and it pains me to say that, BTC is an altcoin that broke away from Satoshi’s original vision. I’m sure the above sentence will cause havoc for many BTC supporters, exactly like it used to enrage me. How could BTC break away when it was BCH that forked to start a new chain. At first glance, it makes no sense. But there’s more to it.
I spent some time debating with myself on this.
Just with myself so I wouldn’t be influenced by subjective thinking of others. At this point, I was still trying to come up with this one last thing in favor for BTC that would reverse my thinking. Perhaps I have hard forked myself and I am no longer backwards compatible. So I failed miserably. I didn’t find any and it was too late go back anyway, because I’ve stumbled upon this: I have compared the BCH hard fork to Ethereum. And it all made perfect sense to me. The Ethereum hard fork created a new chain (ETH) and left behind the flawed Ethereum (ETC).
ETH acted as the superior Ethereum chain since. Why didn’t it happen for BCH, I thought. The circumstances are somewhat similar, but the outcomes are totally different. The reason for it was the absence of Satoshi Nakamoto. When Vitalik Buterin forked the chain to create ETH, he stood behind it as the founder and creator of Ethereum from day one.
Most have followed and it was the obvious choice to make. Bitcoin Cash never had the support of Satoshi Nakamoto. That might be the sole reason why most people didn’t follow through with it either.
It’s hard to know what a person thinks and wants. Or thought and wanted. Especially when they don’t exist anymore. Or at least they don’t want to anymore. We all can speculate on what Satoshi would have wanted to a certain degree of accuracy. This, however, could be verified against the white paper. Let’s start with the intended simplicity. Bitcoin core developers The white paper states that Bitcoin should be used as “purely peer-to-peer electronic cash […] on a network that requires minimal structure”.
The above sentence isn’t complicated. It’s in fact as transparent as it gets and couldn’t be of a more singular meaning.
The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of BTC, is how messy and complicated it has gotten over the last year or so. Like I’ve said earlier, I’m not a programmer. If I was, I would have probably known that my field of expertise lies in developing. That’s why it surprises me that the political involvement for the core developers in Bitcoin’s future rose to such a ridiculous level. It’s just wrong.
BTC has become the guinea pig in a sandbox, where everyone comes to to test their new toys on.
It sort of reminds me of running a country by somebody who shouldn’t be running a country. You know what I’m talking about. Scalability is a serious problem and most of us had experienced the pain of long transaction times and high fees when the chain was congested. But Satoshi had already expressed in the paper that the block size should be as large as it needs to be. We as the human race are more than capable of delivering technology that can sustain that philosophy — whether it comes to the internet speed or storage capacity. I feel like the involvement of the core developers had spun out of control and they took the matter in their own hands.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, they are experimenting on the original symbol of Bitcoin which divides the community in half. Why do I have strong feelings about that? Because BTC has almost nothing to do with the white paper of Bitcoin. The complexity is going through the roof, both for the newcomers and people already involved in it.
I take off my hat to all BCH developers who do their own thing and stick to the premise of the original paper. They bear the brunt of being mocked, but all those guys are doing is stick to their guns. Good job. LN vs 0-conf I’m not going technical on this. I want to keep it as simple as possible, so everyone can understand what I’m saying.
BTC’s Lightning Network proposes a secondary layer to Bitcoin protocol that is confusing as heck. To be frank, the above sentence is confusing itself. Much less the mechanics behind it. It takes a great deal of time for a person who was never involved in cryptocurrencies to understand blockchain on its own. How long will it take for someone new to understand what LN does and how it works and then how to transact within it? It negatively impacts the end-user experience.
It creates unnecessary hurdles and road blocks for mass adoption.
It’s off putting to me and I’m sure it is for a lot of people. But most of all, it goes against the white paper in every form and shape. And if that’s a true statement to you, it makes BTC an altcoin. BCH’s zero confirmation is already working and it couldn’t be easier to use.
The main argument against this concept is that it isn’t 100% secure. Yet, it never happened that one had successfully double spent the same coins. It offers instant transactions that cost almost nothing to send or receive. Exactly like it was foreseen in Satoshi’s vision. I’m embarassed I haven’t seen it earlier. And I hope you don’t make the same mistake.
Conclusion Arguing that LN allows for completely secure transactions at the cost of a horrible user experience and drastically increased complexity isn’t feasible to me. Especially when there’s already a sound, secure and working solution that honors the white paper.
That’s why Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is the closest to the real Bitcoin to me. Whether Satoshi steps in or not to make a statement on this, I hope it’s just a matter of time before that happens regardless.
Good luck in your own journey to discovering what’s real and what’s not. All the best! Originally posted on bulltrap.io If you like my posts, please share, spread the love and follow! I appreciate any constructive criticism and I welcome all challenging debates.
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