Over the years, Bitcoin (BTC) certainly has grown to be the one that has attracted the most attention and traction, being the original; and with its simple design and makeup, it is the proof of an effective decentralized financial system. The cryptocurrency came into the spotlight ever since its price action was noted by traditional media.

Bitcoin has been leading as the most used cryptocurrency especially because of the ability to act as a store of value. The security of Bitcoin has also been better than its much younger counterparts with usage by almost every metric exceeding that of altcoins.

Apart from this, Bitcoin is more accessible, with more exchanges, more merchants, more software and more hardware that support it. Bitcoin is far more liquid, with much larger volumes than every altcoin. It also has the largest developer ecosystem with more software and more implementations than any altcoin.

Despite being the flagship cryptocurrency, many still argue that there are better alternatives to BTC. At first, the project was criticized due to the scalability issues that slowed down the network. To address this as soft fork dubbed Segregated Witness or was activated on the bitcoin network.

SegWit is “unfairly cheap”

Segregated Witness or SegWit was a soft fork that targeted the scalability issues of bitcoin. The proposal was made in the late 2015s by Pieter Wuille, a developer. The mechanism of SegWit allows the separation of the signature data from the transaction data which allows the data to be stored across separate blocks, thus increasing the overall capacity without a split in the bitcoin blockchain.

SegWit did see its fair share of critics, but as it proved to reduce transaction costs on the network, haters have been having a hard time criticizing bitcoin. In fact, some even start preaching in favor of bitcoin. The latest in the list is perhaps the most infamous bitcoin critic Roger Ver, former CEO of Bitcoin.com.

Ver is known to be a diehard BCH proponent who once championed the world’s number one cryptocurrency. Ver split away from Bitcoin when he endeavored to create a coin that would be closer to cash and easier to spend as a cryptocurrency – this saw the creation of Bitcoin cash (BCH) which, for one aspect, had much bigger blocks enabling it to be cheaper and faster to use.

Since then, Ver has been greatly criticizing bitcoin, until now, when he seems to have changed his stance. The flipping was first pointed out by crypto twitter personality Armin Van Bitcoin. The crypto commentator tweeted screenshots of two of Roger Ver’s tweets. One tweet dated February of 2018, Ver seems to be criticizing bitcoin for being “expensive.” In a much recent tweet, Ver says “SegWit transactions ARE unfairly cheap.”

SegWit did take some to be adopted by BTC users but has drastically reduced transaction fees from $20 in 2017 t0 near about $0.50 in 2020 with an almost equivalent amount of network load. Furthermore, the upcoming bitcoin halving in May is also set to cut bitcoin’s inflation down to 1.8%. The number is lower than the set inflation target of 2% of most central banks around the world.

Bitcoin has turned out to be a tough competition for most cryptocurrencies trying to provide the same utility especially because of its much larger user base, development team, and mining operation.

The Golden debate

Lately, Ver isn’t the only critic who’s pointing out the pros of bitcoin. From a traders perspective, Gold bug Peter Schiff, who has time again criticized bitcoin and spoken in favor of gold, recently admitted that Bitcoin, if invested into 10 years ago, would have made anyone incredibly rich. The same thing can be said about gold, the primary asset of Schiff’s expertise, and an asset well known for its slow and incremental gains over long periods of time whereas Bitcoin has the same traits, but with more volatility and speed. He said: