I write this article as a long answer to @wallstreettechnologist's last post in which he claims that he sees LN(Lightning Network)'s potential success as being the death of BTC.

"The Hypothesis: LN success, precipitates the cessation of mining on the BTC legacy chain. "

If the above were to occur then BTC could lose greater than 90% of its hashpower [...] BTC chain dies.

This was an interesting read, but to be honest the idea that BTC could die of a fast hashpower decrease is not new . I even myself came up with such scenarios on reddit r/btc during the early days of BCH when we really had no idea of what to expect from the first Bitcoin Fork. But my understanding of such an event has evolved a lot since then.

To my understanding this kind of scenarios can only happen if BTC loses a lot of hashpower fast enough before the difficulty retarget kicks-in and lowers the difficulty to accomodate for a decreased hashpower. I honestly don't see LN gaining traction at such a speed for that to happen. Markets can be irrational but they are also very prudent, especially with brand new technology. It took bitcoin years to gain mass media coverage during a bubble like we saw last year. What's more, the technical complexity of LN means that it would take another bunch of years and improved UI/apps to get real world traction.

I also want to kindly remind you that many people (myself included) came with these kinds of scenarios and they all proved to be wrong. The thing is, even if it was broken and reborn by now, bitcoin was very well engineered, and the difficulty adjustment makes it highly unlikely to ever see hashpower drive any kind of event. Study of the different elements of bitcoin tend to show that hashpower is rather a following factor to price, as it should be, because mining alone does not create value if no one uses the coin for any other economic activity.

To me, the main reason that will make BTC die is either that LN finally works well (being centralized) and fees skyrocket. At that point BTC will need a hardfork to bigger blocks which seems highly unlikely to get consensus, or businesses will experience a "second disillusion" (the first one being the end of last year with 2 digits fees per transaction and Steam stopping to accept bitcoin payments). Or LN could fail and this will still be the second disillusion that BTC cannot scale for real world commerce and has become (almost) useless. I know this is not the exciting and easy to sell "and then all of a sudden it could be THE END OF BTC" kind of scenario, but I think it is the most likely one to be true: BTC will die of a slow death of successive disappointments.

In any of my two scenarios, I now think that a quick change of hashpower will NOT be the determining factor to BTC death, but rather a very slow grinding death of disillusions for businesses, users and investors, that will push the price down, or at least the BTC marketcap dominance and #1 spot, with probably a few small bubbles of hopes in between. Then, as people start to realise that another cryptocurrency (and you already know which one is on my mind) looks like it is going to become the future world currency that bitcoin initially promised to be, we will see the same story unfold as the dialogue from Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises :

- “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. - “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

will become:

- “How did BTC died ?” Greg asked. - “Two ways,” Roger said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”





As a final note, I usually try to avoid spending time thinking or writing about competitors failing, and try to focus on working on the solution instead. But I really wanted to share the evolution of my thinking on this as I see a lot of people still coming up with similar ideas. If we all used that energy into furthering the adoption of BCH I think we would all end up happier - and richer too. Especially with all the great news from the last Coingeek Conference , like purse.io adding native BCH support. I will try to stick to that in the future and make this post the (last?) exception.

Let's refocus !