I'm surprised by the 2x shelving but not pessimistic. My guess is the miners aborted because they really did think it would be a showdown that was too dangerous to have now, especially as Bitcoin seems to be continuing its fairly smooth, fairly predictable two-year exponential rise with no signs of slowing down - despite what we see as being perilously hamstrung by the 3 TPS barrier.
Log chart, see from late 2015:
The lack of reliable-looking prediction markets also continues to be a key issue, as without that bellweather they need to rely on various other mercurial signs that make certainty elusive.
Assembling a few facts, a picture emerges:
Fact 1) The whole cryptocurrency complex is in a bubble. People are buying things like Doge and Monacoin without any understanding of what they are. Bitcoin is benefitting from this as well. It is being bought without regard to fundamentals.
Fact 2) The fundamentals for BTC are bad, but only by "choice." At any time they could be changed by a fork, even "2x rides again" when fees reach $50. But see (1). It doesn't seem to matter right now. The speculation is radically future-oriented all across the cryptocurrency space.
Although I never would have believed this in 2014, now based on what I have seen since then I think and have stated earlier this year that BTC could go to $50,000 without even raising the blocksize cap, and I think this disregard for current utility has been shown to run very deep. We here have been at the very forefront of understanding all this stuff about governance, blocksize, and so on. However, our understanding of how things eventually
have to be can easily blind us to the way the market will treat Bitcoin in the near term.
In fact the Core side has been more correct about the near term moves, in that most of us would not have thought Bitcoin could do so well in the markets with such a glaring weakness. Time to update our mental models. The markets are simply not very mature yet.
Fact 3) Big blockers are continually proven right about the harm arising from small blocks and centralized governance and the safety of larger blocks, and this continues to reinforce our belief that we are correct. Rightly so. Yet we are continually surprised by how slow the market and general ecosystem is to come around. It's long past the point where "the rule is it takes longer than you think, even when you take this rule into account."
Perhaps it's time to rethink our approach to timescales so we stop being continually surprised?
If we assume for a moment that the investors (including miners) are indeed radically more long-term oriented than we had guessed and really don't care much about present utility as it can just be changed later anyway, and are also right to be unconcerned about altcoin encroachment (perhaps since no one is going to use the altcoins for anything either, as if all these actual use cases in the crypto space are being considered as way in the future, at least during the mindset of this bubble), we get what is actually a pretty comfortable view on things: 1x keeps rising regardless. If there are big enough problems to finally spook the market, 2x rides again. Meanwhile Cash waits in the wings for a "flight to quality," likely a bubble pop where all boats sink but BCH emerges from the wreckage of the crash as the actual commerce has quietly switched over to it while everyone was busy
not looking at actual utility.
Putting all this together, imagine the following:
1x continues its exponential rise, with Cash in toe at 1/8 or so, and a bunch of altcoins hanging on for the ride. In the quintuple digits the bubble finally pops, everything crashes, even Cash. But after the fear subsides people start looking at fundamentals, and Cash emerges with the commercial network effect, backing by many major players, miner support, and support from tons of disillusioned Core moonkin.
