Note:Author of this op-ed is Laomao, founder of Yunbi, which recently announced ETH connected with MLM.He is also a Chinese columnist on 8btc.

The recent plummet of BTC price is because some people worried that Bitcoin may split due to the scaling divergence and they dumped their coins on the market.

In fact, I am afraid to talk about this topic, because my readers’ understanding on Bitcoin varies a lot. If I intend to elaborate on the difference between the different scaling roadmaps and the logic behind these roadmaps, and even talk about the origin of different scaling programs and the implication of collisions from political, economic, humanities and value perspective, I could have written a book. Those who may have the patience to go through such lengthy contents could be numbered by fingers.

While many of my followers are mostly blockchain investors, therefore I just say something about BTC scaling from an investor’s perspective.

There is no doubt that investors are facing an awkward situation because of the sharp decline of BTC. If they continue to buy, they are afraid to be long-term holder with book value loss. If they choose to sell, they are afraid that there will not be enough price spread to buy them back.

I know that some friends show no different to the Bitcoin price fluctuation as it’s only an asset in their investment portfolio. They even made a significant gain from the rise of hedging assets. But let’s keep in mind that BTC is still the most important asset in terms of blockchain investment, no one of them. Therefore, it is necessary to fully explore the investment logic of Bitcoin.

If the investment time span is confined to a few months, people, especially rookies, may be a bit overwhelmed. But viewing from a longer period of time, I, as a observer of Bitcoin scaling issue, think that the market is over-reacting. Bitcoin scaling itself is a constant topic like “Big Auntie” (Chinese metaphor for menstruation), which often appears as a debate. Last time it showed up in March 2016 centering around Bitcoin Classic. We might be dealing with “Big Auntie” in an annual scale instead of months?



The purple line on the figure above is the number of Bitcoin Classic nodes. In March 2016, the numbers of Classic nodes amounted to over 50% to that of the Core nodes, much more than the current number of BU nodes. Meanwhile, the price of Bitcoin was tanked to 2,500-2,700 from 3,400 at the end of 2015. It was around 26% loss and many people who had been holding Bitcoin chose to dump their coins as well.

As for this round of scaling drama, Bitcoin has fallen around 30% from the relative high price, combined with Chinese authority regulation. At the point, before you choose to dump your coins, you had better figure out whether the scaling debate is a life and death war or another drama that is being pulled off by well-trained actors.

In addition, let’s have look at the situation from another point of view. What is the worst case even if Bitcoin did hard fork? You may get 2 kinds of Bitcoin! Ethereum hard forked and ETC was born. But still ETH made all time high recently because the market would eventually attribute value to valuable things. If Bitcoin is viewed as a kind of “stock”, the spinoff of Bitcoin hardfork may be considered as some kind of dividends. So what? In the long run, the future growth of Bitcoin could be guaranteed as long as the scaling is resolved no matter which way it takes.

The market has demonstrated that a fork was not the end of the world. Those who are truly afraid of the fork are the capitals and the interest-groups. It’s a war that they couldn’t afford to lose. If the ordinary melon-eating people (Chinese metaphor for bystanders) buy and sell following the tides, they were just like “eating gutter oil and worrying about national policy”.

Bitcoin scaling issue will be resolved eventually, but we don’t know when and how? We do not know if there is a hardfork. We don’t know whether the issue will come back like “Big Auntie”. But I do know that the final solution will simply not be earth-shattering as you had expected. It is just like the millennium bugs that people worried about in 1998, or the doomsday prophecy of 2012 that worried people in 2008. Finally, nothing could stop the pace of the world evolution.

Little advice from me at the end of this article:

Internet has the property of value because of blockchain, which has expedited human migration from real world to internet. As the hedging tool against the fiats with infinite supply, it’s worthwhile to take risks of holding some assets with core values. How bad a few price crash could be?