At the helm of BSV we have a duo whose strategy has been based on lying, threatening, extorting, abusing patents and flirting with the state in order to get their way, among other attitudes more typical of a mafia than of an entity devoted to separation between money and state. In the absence of good ideas, the megalomaniac personality is usually inclined to impose bad ideas (hence their approval of the monopoly of force, positive law, "intellectual property", etc), and bad ideas, once put into practice, have the habit of causing bad consequences. I doubt that the Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre experiment will be the exception.
But the main problem of BSV is not the unscrupulousness or the ideological derailment of its leaders. In the germ of this project we can already find the most costly mistake an entrepreneur can make in Cryptoland: splitting up to start from scratch whenever a trivial difference of opinion arises.
For a fork to make sense and have potential, the dominant crypto-oligarchy must have made monumental mistakes, such as shooing hundreds of thousands of users and boasting about it. Otherwise, we will have a frivolous fork, that is to say a fork that the market considers unjustified, and so it will tend to widen the gap between the prices of the resulting coins until the loser remains in an irreversible vegetative state.
Someone could object that there is no objective method that allows us to determine if a particular fork is frivolous, except in retrospect, and therefore "Majamalu's law" actually have zero predictive value. Well, I will add the following to specify what I mean when I speak of a "frivolous fork": it is reasonable to assume that, in general, if you don't understand the reasons for the split, you are facing a frivolous fork, or maybe one that is motivated by inadmissible reasons. Otherwise, the fork may be necessary, if not indispensable.
There is no more conspicuous example of an indispensable fork than the one that gave rise to BCH on August 1, 2017. Anyone capable of tying their shoelaces is also able to understand that a $ 50 fee for a transaction that could be confirmed in the next 10 minutes or in the next two weeks, or never, is enough reason to justify a fork.
But if we already have a functional and scalable coin, there's no better way to delay its adoption and, consequently, to hinder the development of the network effect, than to divide us into ever smaller tribes clashing over increasingly insignificant issues. A cryptocurrency doesn't have to be perfect in order to keep gaining users; it does not have to be an imperturbable store of value right now, or a superplatform on which it is possible to build every conceivable application, nor can it be such things without first having a broad and solid userbase. It does have to continue to function normally, bothering as little as possible those who need it. That's all.
The day will come when all the applications that are languishing today due to lack of users, scattered in a thousand isolated protocols, in addition to all those that have not yet been conceived, will be implemented in the winning chain. Meanwhile, focusing on anything other than adoption motivated by the monetary qualities of BCH proves that we have not understood the crucial importance of the network effect.
The winning chain will simply be the most used chain. And the most used chain will be the most economical, efficient, reliable, predictable, friendly and, above all, the most respectful of the inherited infrastructure and the existing user base. It will also end up being, by virtue of the incentive system created by Satoshi Nakamoto, the safest chain.
Many bitcoiners have been seduced by one or another reductionist view of the problems faced by any pretender to the throne of universal money. They believe they have embraced an all-encompassing theory, when the truth is they just placed themselves at an extreme where they can comfortably rejoice, along with other members of their tribe, in the collective illusion that they already have all the answers, so they don't need to reflect on of their past decisions, or consider alternative solutions, or negotiate with "those outside." I hope there's a special place in hell for them.
Just quoting this post because it is so good!
