One does not simply replace Bitcoin. Especially without overwhelming consensus.

I thought I’d outline why Bitcoin (legacy / Core) has some significant advantages vs any hard fork without huge support:

1/ Bitcoin is the reserve currency of the ‘crypto’ world. In the past 24hrs over half a billion USD of (non-fiat) tokens were traded vs BTC. Bitcoin’s market is deeper than any other by a country mile. No new token can compete with that.

Even if all the big altcoin exchanges added ‘B2X’ (for lack of a better ticker) pairs for everything (and they won’t for quite some time, if ever), they may never reach the volume vs Legacy BTC.

2/ Certainty vs uncertainty. Any new fork is plagued by questions over the dev team, roadmap, industry support, etc.. Legacy Bitcoin has no such questions as it has the longest track record and the largest pool of developers supporting it. As the most friendly towards decentralisation and true peer-to-peer architecture, it has the least chance of being shut down or heavily damaged by attempts at government control. The ‘Core’ development community is known to care about other issues like anonymity & censorship … we have no such information about those controlling the BTC1 Github repo.

3/ Track record. A lot of people have become rich while Core have maintained their position as the ‘default’ Bitcoin client. This buys a lot of loyalty from the very people that matter most … those buying and hodl’ing Bitcoin. People are unlikely to sell the token they trust the most.

4/ Investors vs Miners. A common thread among big-blockers is that miners are all that matter. Only their nodes count. Their decisions regarding forks are final. “We have 90% hashrate support”. All hail our miner overloads?

Sorry, but no.

It is the investment community … the traders, hodl’ers, users, etc. that put money IN to Bitcoin. Miners are for-profit organisations and therefore slaves to economics & subservient to the investors … they simply cannot and will not mine a coin at a loss for any length of time. Miners follow the money, they do not lead the money. This has never been illustrated more clearly than by Bcash and the joke that is their difficulty adjustment algo.

A rational miner fears the market negatively valuing the tokens they are trying to mine. They are extremely sensitive to profit & loss (no matter how rich they pretend to be). The richest people in Bitcoin are the Bitcoin hodl’ers … and they have no overheads.

When Bitcoin crashed to around $1800 over fears of a ‘split’ caused by UASF, the miners started to signal for BIP91 (SegWit activation) the very next day. Investors wear the trousers. QED.

5/ Forks / air-drops. The more of these that happen, the more people will want to hold Legacy BTC … as the coin that has the strongest history for such events.

6/ Development talent. No elaboration necessary.

7/ Businesses will not commit commercial suicide. The largest Bitcoin companies are already showing they will support both tokens in the interim and therefore allow the market to decide the victor. Advantage Legacy Bitcoin … a new token cannot practically be called Bitcoin / $BTC as that name is already taken and it would invite chaos. See the Coinbase and Bitfinex announcements.

… so, in the absence of enormous market manipulation (that would only succeed for a short time anyway – see Bcash), it is nearly unthinkable to anyone of sound commercial mind that $B2X trades above 1 BTC in value. Which therefore means it will not be the chain with the most cumulative work for any significant period … which means no-one will be able to sensibly argue it is Bitcoin.

The largest available futures market for $B2X currently values it at around 0.25BTC. I doubt the market is 300% wrong.

Whatever happens, I welcome the fact that those with differing opinions may support the fork/chain/dev team of their choice.

Any tips to my son, please:

Bitcoin address: 1AzmnauEdrTZbhrE7z3o4JPe2bTJKMXLyv