BCH

Remora_101

The only bad thing about BCH is its perception (its shaped by maxis) and its price. But that also means it is a great buying opportunity if you care for fundamentals.

big--if-true

Most Bitcoin holders can sell below current Bitcoin prices and be in profit since its been below current prices for 3.5 of the past 5 years. For BCH that amount is 4 months of the past 5 years. Cost basis is an important stat when investing.

big--if-true

Expect selling pressure to be low at current prices as BCH has only been below $190 for 4 months out of 5 years, which means anyone selling now is likely selling at a loss, which people are hesitant to do. Even miners likely would take a loss. The Winklevoss twins spent 11M on 100k Bitcoin and became crypto billionaires. BCH is cheap enough that 100k BCH still costs 19M, so probably some smart whales are buying during the recent crash and will be next next crypto billionaires. With BCH at record low prices it seems like there are panic sellers taking losses and subsidizing coins below even mining prices over the past 5 years, its unlikely that the sellers have a significant supply to sell at such losses and it is expected they will run dry and cause the market liquidity to dry up as the price recovers.

Br0kenRabbitTV

When this happend to me at the end of 2017 I added BCH, LTC and ETH... ..though ETH soon suffered the same fate. The bad thing about all this is, merchants that are not following the crypto scene much who started to accept BTC were burnt and it has put them off. Valve/Steam probably being the most well known example of this, losing them was horrible.

Br0kenRabbitTV

I already accept BCH. have done for years now. Find it odd the comment above this is getting downvoted, do these people just expect merchant to add coins that will rarely get used? Was it what I said about POS? I often find people who have no experience actually accepting crypto have a lot of bold ideas about what coins should be added, but can never answer my legitimate concerns.

Hiyashichuka

Most of them had to stop as the fees were too high. People don’t realize how many companies accepted crypto until BTC was fucked over. BCH is slowly rebuilding a lot of merchant usage, but it hasn’t regained the same level of usage in the US

nick83487

I have $5 of BCH some guy tipped me on reddit so don't worry, I won't sell.

Br0kenRabbitTV

It's cool man, I'm more than open to discussion about coins that have potential to actually be used and spent. Yep, BTC, BTCLN and ETH are dead payment gateways on my stores these days. My coin of choice is BCH. BCH and LTC are the most spent coins with me in 2022, but I don't like the LTC project much, it's a carbon copy of BTC and if it ever got a huge price increase, they would also move over to LN/sidechains.. it works well now and has 4x the capacity by design than BTC but ultimately it would have the same fate if popular and expensive. Also the community don;t seem intereset much in merhcnat opinions or views. XMR is my second choice, but it is kinda clunky, with the bonus of great privacy.. running an XMR node uses a huge amount of resources compared to other coins, and without using a third party payment processor it is much harder to integrate as a payment option on a store. When selling legal products it's kinda overkill IMHO.

Br0kenRabbitTV

Maybe. I've actually been considering removing BTC and BTC LN options from my existing stores, and no longer add it to new projects, because since 2017 barely anybody spends it with me, in 2022 it's only around 5% of my total crypto income, even with an LN option. In the main bitcoin sub the majority of people are not interested in spending it any longer, but <2017 it was actually the only coin I had listed as a crypto option. but as long as all these coins have at least some value, even if it is below £0.01, it is still useful to me and any other merchants. Coins I'm currently accepting are BTC, BTCLN, BCH, LTC, DASH, XMR, DOGE, ETH and VTC. ETH is also useless now as p2p cash but around 2018 a lot of people were spending it with me.

Remora_101

True, but not the question. OP is talking about legal tender status, which BCH currently doesn't have. But it will be legal tender soon.

grndslm

Eww.... Are you familiar with the throughput of BTC over the LN versus BCH ?

Stop_The_End

Coinbase is currently being sued by Dr Craig Wright who owns the copyright for Bitcoin. Coinbase falsely pushed BTC as Bitcoin when it was actually BCH, and now BSV that is Bitcoin. BTC and BCH forked twice by changing the protocols, but keeping the name due to the fraudulent actions of coinbase. If you care to look it up, the Bitcoin Whitepaper specifically states a value creating, usable currency, BSV, not this weird money sponge that BTC has become.

CointestAdmin

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from the last round** > > In general, the typical crypto enthusiast has accepted that Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other DLTs technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, there is no way Bitcoin would make it into the top 10 by market cap, and likely not even the top 100. It's still #1 only because it continues to maintain strong security because it was the first, and thus has the largest adoption and protection against Sybil attacks. > > ------------- > > These are its flaws: > > **Redundancy inefficiencies**: To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater redundancy. The more miners (specifically mining pools) there are, the harder it is to execute a 51% attack. This also means that there could be a million miners performing redundant actions vying for the next Bitcoin block. Nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, and inefficiency present for nearly all cryptocurrencies. > > **Mining energy Inefficiency**: PoW mining is inherently extremely energy inefficient because it's a competition. The more miners there are, the harder the mining puzzle becomes, adjusted every 2 weeks. The amount of energy needed for a single Bitcoin transaction in [Sept 2021, ~1800 kWh](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption), is roughly the same as the amount of energy used by a typical US household over 62 days. Blockchains require extra redundancy for computations and storage from each node that interacts with or validates the transaction. In comparison, other Byzantine Fault Tolerant distributed consensus methods such as BFT-Paxos and RBFT, SBFT used by Hyperledger Fabric are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x) and 10^4 x for storage. > > **Mining Centralization**: Mining is not something the average crypto user can do by themselves unless they join a mining pool. You also need an expensive and specialized high-end ASIC miner for SHA-256 mining in order to have a good chance of making a profit. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes or verify their mining pool operator's decisions, leading to centralization with mining pools. > > **Fees and Rising cost of transactions**: Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $2-10+ USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee). That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. The fees are so high you can't use them for everyday transactions. People complain about bank fees, but if I had to use Bitcoin for everday transactions for my bank and credit cards, I'd be racking $10000+ in fees yearly. As halvings continue and the BTC price can no longer keep up, the block reward will keep decreasing. Either transaction costs will eventually rise to cover the cost of block rewards, or Bitcoin will experience an ice age where all miners drop out except for the few miners who can acquire cheap ASIC rigs and the cheapest energy costs, leading to more centralization. > > **Layer 2 adoption issue**: In general, Layer 2 solutions have much less decentralization (e.g. fewer validation nodes) than Layer 1 and face low adoption issues. The Lightning Network, a Layer 2 network of state channels that use Hash TimeLock Contracts for Bitcoin, has seen very little adoption by volume even years after introduction. It's a hassle to use for many reasons. It requires you to lock funds in a state channel, which also costs a transaction fee to open and close. It requires nodes to be online most of the time for connectivity. If the node you're connecting to goes offline, you lose your connection, and you could have your channel auto-closed. Channels can also be unilaterally force-closed, which is a common complaint among users. Basically, it's still too much of a hassle for the average crypto user. > > **Slow Finality**: Transactions take 10 minutes to record, but exchanges generally wait up to [60 minutes](https://academy.binance.com/en/glossary/finality) for probabilistic-finality. Given that the largest mining pools have 30% hash power, that's still only a 74% chance of actual finality after 6 block recordings due to possibility of a withholding attack. (The probability of a successful 51% attack given in Satoshi's original Bitcoin whitepaper was greatly underestimated because it did not take into account PoW block withholding attacks.) > > **Lack of privacy**: All transaction history is public. Public blockchains are only pseudononymous, and one can use a Transaction Graph Analysis or Taint Analysis tool to figure out who you are by linking transactions. People can also guess your wealth by tracing your transactions through the blockchain. It only takes 1 mistake to link the rest of your transactions. Individual tokens are also not fungible for this same reason. > > **Slow updates**: Bitcoin evolves slowly due to requiring social consensus and Blockchain bureaucracy. Hard forks are voluntary and can take weeks to complete. The Bitcoin Core foundation is extremely conservative and averse to hard forks, as seen with the fork that created Bitcoin Cash. That's not necessarily bad, but it does mean that most developments to Bitcoin end up turning into separate coins instead of evolving the canonical chain. There are often months-long debates and years between before making updates. As a result, it is a conservative blockchain while other DLTs have evolved technologies and features way beyond it. > > **Limitations to transaction speed**: Due to aversion to change, Bitcoin is likely at its limit for transaction speed. It is a poor Medium of Exchange due to slow transaction speeds. > > - Increase block size: requires a hard fork, results in longer network propagation time) > - Decrease block time by lowering puzzle difficulty: increases chance of natural forks, increases acceleration of block size, leading to more storage bloat, all exchanges need to adjust the number of blocks until probabilistic finality, and increases the chance of miners holding orphaned blocks. > - Decrease the transaction size: requires a hard fork (e.g. SegWit 2017 fork, which after all that work, only reduced the size by 50%) > > **Smart Contracts**: Bitcoin doesn't support complex "smart" contracts with its very basic (procedural, stack-oriented, Forth-like) Bitcoin Script. The contracts enabled by Bitcoin Scripts are so basic that they're often non-script features built directly into other blockchains like timelock releases and multi-signature. It's extremely limited because you can't easily validate them, and miners typically put huge restrictions on what is allowed for security purposes. It's possible taproot could change that if it gets a ton of developer support, but Bitcoin Script is way behind all of its competitors in adoption, and it won't evolve fast enough due to Bitcoin's conservative governance. It would be pretty tedious to program anything complex using Bitcoin Script, but I suppose there's always someone who enjoys a challenge. > > **Unstable Store of Value**: Like most non-stablecoins, it has too much volatility to be considered a stable store of value, losing up to 80% of its purchasing-power after crashes. Like gold/silver, it is more of a speculative investment. > > (Disclaimer: I only own trace amounts of BTC.) ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz3duc/rcc_cointest_top_10_bitcoin_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

Remora_101

And what did that do besides Schnorr? BCH had Schnorr for 1,2? years already. And how many tps does BTC have no after Taproot? They rely on LN to scale and that is objectively a big mess.

Remora_101

Back in the days you used it, you know: "Bitcoin: a p2p electronic cash system" Unfortunately BTC got overtaken by small blockers aka number go up boys. They made digital Gold and a settlement layer out of it. But the p2p cash people forked in 2017 to keep building Bitcoin. That chain is called BitcoinCash. And you can use it. In a few locations you can already live solely on BCH. http://map.bitcoin.com

CointestAdmin

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from the last round** > > In general, the typical crypto enthusiast has accepted that Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other DLTs technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, there is no way Bitcoin would make it into the top 10 by market cap, and likely not even the top 100. It's still #1 only because it continues to maintain strong security because it was the first, and thus has the largest adoption and protection against Sybil attacks. > > ------------- > > These are its flaws: > > **Redundancy inefficiencies**: To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater redundancy. The more miners (specifically mining pools) there are, the harder it is to execute a 51% attack. This also means that there could be a million miners performing redundant actions vying for the next Bitcoin block. Nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, and inefficiency present for nearly all cryptocurrencies. > > **Mining energy Inefficiency**: PoW mining is inherently extremely energy inefficient because it's a competition. The more miners there are, the harder the mining puzzle becomes, adjusted every 2 weeks. The amount of energy needed for a single Bitcoin transaction in [Sept 2021, ~1800 kWh](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption), is roughly the same as the amount of energy used by a typical US household over 62 days. Blockchains require extra redundancy for computations and storage from each node that interacts with or validates the transaction. In comparison, other Byzantine Fault Tolerant distributed consensus methods such as BFT-Paxos and RBFT, SBFT used by Hyperledger Fabric are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x) and 10^4 x for storage. > > **Mining Centralization**: Mining is not something the average crypto user can do by themselves unless they join a mining pool. You also need an expensive and specialized high-end ASIC miner for SHA-256 mining in order to have a good chance of making a profit. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes or verify their mining pool operator's decisions, leading to centralization with mining pools. > > **Fees and Rising cost of transactions**: Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $2-10+ USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee). That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. The fees are so high you can't use them for everyday transactions. People complain about bank fees, but if I had to use Bitcoin for everday transactions for my bank and credit cards, I'd be racking $10000+ in fees yearly. As halvings continue and the BTC price can no longer keep up, the block reward will keep decreasing. Either transaction costs will eventually rise to cover the cost of block rewards, or Bitcoin will experience an ice age where all miners drop out except for the few miners who can acquire cheap ASIC rigs and the cheapest energy costs, leading to more centralization. > > **Layer 2 adoption issue**: In general, Layer 2 solutions have much less decentralization (e.g. fewer validation nodes) than Layer 1 and face low adoption issues. The Lightning Network, a Layer 2 network of state channels that use Hash TimeLock Contracts for Bitcoin, has seen very little adoption by volume even years after introduction. It's a hassle to use for many reasons. It requires you to lock funds in a state channel, which also costs a transaction fee to open and close. It requires nodes to be online most of the time for connectivity. If the node you're connecting to goes offline, you lose your connection, and you could have your channel auto-closed. Channels can also be unilaterally force-closed, which is a common complaint among users. Basically, it's still too much of a hassle for the average crypto user. > > **Slow Finality**: Transactions take 10 minutes to record, but exchanges generally wait up to [60 minutes](https://academy.binance.com/en/glossary/finality) for probabilistic-finality. Given that the largest mining pools have 30% hash power, that's still only a 74% chance of actual finality after 6 block recordings due to possibility of a withholding attack. (The probability of a successful 51% attack given in Satoshi's original Bitcoin whitepaper was greatly underestimated because it did not take into account PoW block withholding attacks.) > > **Lack of privacy**: All transaction history is public. Public blockchains are only pseudononymous, and one can use a Transaction Graph Analysis or Taint Analysis tool to figure out who you are by linking transactions. People can also guess your wealth by tracing your transactions through the blockchain. It only takes 1 mistake to link the rest of your transactions. Individual tokens are also not fungible for this same reason. > > **Slow updates**: Bitcoin evolves slowly due to requiring social consensus and Blockchain bureaucracy. Hard forks are voluntary and can take weeks to complete. The Bitcoin Core foundation is extremely conservative and averse to hard forks, as seen with the fork that created Bitcoin Cash. That's not necessarily bad, but it does mean that most developments to Bitcoin end up turning into separate coins instead of evolving the canonical chain. There are often months-long debates and years between before making updates. As a result, it is a conservative blockchain while other DLTs have evolved technologies and features way beyond it. > > **Limitations to transaction speed**: Due to aversion to change, Bitcoin is likely at its limit for transaction speed. It is a poor Medium of Exchange due to slow transaction speeds. > > - Increase block size: requires a hard fork, results in longer network propagation time) > - Decrease block time by lowering puzzle difficulty: increases chance of natural forks, increases acceleration of block size, leading to more storage bloat, all exchanges need to adjust the number of blocks until probabilistic finality, and increases the chance of miners holding orphaned blocks. > - Decrease the transaction size: requires a hard fork (e.g. SegWit 2017 fork, which after all that work, only reduced the size by 50%) > > **Smart Contracts**: Bitcoin doesn't support complex "smart" contracts with its very basic (procedural, stack-oriented, Forth-like) Bitcoin Script. The contracts enabled by Bitcoin Scripts are so basic that they're often non-script features built directly into other blockchains like timelock releases and multi-signature. It's extremely limited because you can't easily validate them, and miners typically put huge restrictions on what is allowed for security purposes. It's possible taproot could change that if it gets a ton of developer support, but Bitcoin Script is way behind all of its competitors in adoption, and it won't evolve fast enough due to Bitcoin's conservative governance. It would be pretty tedious to program anything complex using Bitcoin Script, but I suppose there's always someone who enjoys a challenge. > > **Unstable Store of Value**: Like most non-stablecoins, it has too much volatility to be considered a stable store of value, losing up to 80% of its purchasing-power after crashes. Like gold/silver, it is more of a speculative investment. > > (Disclaimer: I only own trace amounts of BTC.) ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz3duc/rcc_cointest_top_10_bitcoin_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

DexM23

dont forget the BTC-BCH-flippening try they somewhat where involved

Dwaas_Bjaas

Spot on. Just put 2 people together: one who has invested in BCH and the other in BTC. Watch as the storm unfolds

Dwaas_Bjaas

BCH last all time high was in 2018 It used to be a top 10 crypto Even Litecoin has a higher market cap now

donaudelta

what if some day the SEC drops the bomb? BTC as security and BCH as money... they are referring to Bitcoin in general, not his variants

ToddlerPeePee

You guys missed the memo that Bitcoin Cash is widely being used in St Kitts? https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/t8kbzi/the_advantages_of_bitcoin_cash_in_st_kitts/ When I was there, I used BCH everywhere I go, even in Tokyo or Slovenia. It is unstoppable world money and I love it!

Evideyear

Funny enough his constant talking points and distaste for talking about the flaws of BTC are what drove me to research and read the white paper for myself. Thanks to that I've inadvertently become a BCH fan (not a maximalist though just a fan)

DebonairJayce

Surprise BCH, I bet you thought you’d seen the last of me

MaximumSandwich5

BCH 45? Not bad

magus-21

> BCH is sub penny forever due to large block technology: https://whybitcoincash.com/ It’s actually because there’s no demand for BCH block space. Median block size for BCH is in the 100-200kB range. Median block size for BTC is literally 10x bigger despite having a lower block size.

ManyArtichoke

100% of BCH will be lost forever when the chain finally dies.

big--if-true

Theres only been sell pressure on the BCH/BTC pair for 5 years. Once it finally stops there may be a depeg from BCH to BTC.

big--if-true

It is between a few dollars and $50 when blocks get full, it can be even more in the future, BCH is sub penny forever due to large block technology: https://whybitcoincash.com/ BCH is for regular people who dont want to pay high fees for their transactions.

big--if-true

Actually someone obviously absorbed those 10.5 Million BCH sales (not me), I think mostly regular people on exchanges, but surely some major billionaires as well. Without more pressure on the BCH/BTC pair, it can actually depeg from Bitcoin at some point.

CointestAdmin

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from the last round** > > In general, the typical crypto enthusiast has accepted that Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other DLTs technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, there is no way Bitcoin would make it into the top 10 by market cap, and likely not even the top 100. It's still #1 only because it continues to maintain strong security because it was the first, and thus has the largest adoption and protection against Sybil attacks. > > ------------- > > These are its flaws: > > **Redundancy inefficiencies**: To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater redundancy. The more miners (specifically mining pools) there are, the harder it is to execute a 51% attack. This also means that there could be a million miners performing redundant actions vying for the next Bitcoin block. Nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, and inefficiency present for nearly all cryptocurrencies. > > **Mining energy Inefficiency**: PoW mining is inherently extremely energy inefficient because it's a competition. The more miners there are, the harder the mining puzzle becomes, adjusted every 2 weeks. The amount of energy needed for a single Bitcoin transaction in [Sept 2021, ~1800 kWh](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption), is roughly the same as the amount of energy used by a typical US household over 62 days. Blockchains require extra redundancy for computations and storage from each node that interacts with or validates the transaction. In comparison, other Byzantine Fault Tolerant distributed consensus methods such as BFT-Paxos and RBFT, SBFT used by Hyperledger Fabric are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x) and 10^4 x for storage. > > **Mining Centralization**: Mining is not something the average crypto user can do by themselves unless they join a mining pool. You also need an expensive and specialized high-end ASIC miner for SHA-256 mining in order to have a good chance of making a profit. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes or verify their mining pool operator's decisions, leading to centralization with mining pools. > > **Fees and Rising cost of transactions**: Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $2-10+ USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee). That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. The fees are so high you can't use them for everyday transactions. People complain about bank fees, but if I had to use Bitcoin for everday transactions for my bank and credit cards, I'd be racking $10000+ in fees yearly. As halvings continue and the BTC price can no longer keep up, the block reward will keep decreasing. Either transaction costs will eventually rise to cover the cost of block rewards, or Bitcoin will experience an ice age where all miners drop out except for the few miners who can acquire cheap ASIC rigs and the cheapest energy costs, leading to more centralization. > > **Layer 2 adoption issue**: In general, Layer 2 solutions have much less decentralization (e.g. fewer validation nodes) than Layer 1 and face low adoption issues. The Lightning Network, a Layer 2 network of state channels that use Hash TimeLock Contracts for Bitcoin, has seen very little adoption by volume even years after introduction. It's a hassle to use for many reasons. It requires you to lock funds in a state channel, which also costs a transaction fee to open and close. It requires nodes to be online most of the time for connectivity. If the node you're connecting to goes offline, you lose your connection, and you could have your channel auto-closed. Channels can also be unilaterally force-closed, which is a common complaint among users. Basically, it's still too much of a hassle for the average crypto user. > > **Slow Finality**: Transactions take 10 minutes to record, but exchanges generally wait up to [60 minutes](https://academy.binance.com/en/glossary/finality) for probabilistic-finality. Given that the largest mining pools have 30% hash power, that's still only a 74% chance of actual finality after 6 block recordings due to possibility of a withholding attack. (The probability of a successful 51% attack given in Satoshi's original Bitcoin whitepaper was greatly underestimated because it did not take into account PoW block withholding attacks.) > > **Lack of privacy**: All transaction history is public. Public blockchains are only pseudononymous, and one can use a Transaction Graph Analysis or Taint Analysis tool to figure out who you are by linking transactions. People can also guess your wealth by tracing your transactions through the blockchain. It only takes 1 mistake to link the rest of your transactions. Individual tokens are also not fungible for this same reason. > > **Slow updates**: Bitcoin evolves slowly due to requiring social consensus and Blockchain bureaucracy. Hard forks are voluntary and can take weeks to complete. The Bitcoin Core foundation is extremely conservative and averse to hard forks, as seen with the fork that created Bitcoin Cash. That's not necessarily bad, but it does mean that most developments to Bitcoin end up turning into separate coins instead of evolving the canonical chain. There are often months-long debates and years between before making updates. As a result, it is a conservative blockchain while other DLTs have evolved technologies and features way beyond it. > > **Limitations to transaction speed**: Due to aversion to change, Bitcoin is likely at its limit for transaction speed. It is a poor Medium of Exchange due to slow transaction speeds. > > - Increase block size: requires a hard fork, results in longer network propagation time) > - Decrease block time by lowering puzzle difficulty: increases chance of natural forks, increases acceleration of block size, leading to more storage bloat, all exchanges need to adjust the number of blocks until probabilistic finality, and increases the chance of miners holding orphaned blocks. > - Decrease the transaction size: requires a hard fork (e.g. SegWit 2017 fork, which after all that work, only reduced the size by 50%) > > **Smart Contracts**: Bitcoin doesn't support complex "smart" contracts with its very basic (procedural, stack-oriented, Forth-like) Bitcoin Script. The contracts enabled by Bitcoin Scripts are so basic that they're often non-script features built directly into other blockchains like timelock releases and multi-signature. It's extremely limited because you can't easily validate them, and miners typically put huge restrictions on what is allowed for security purposes. It's possible taproot could change that if it gets a ton of developer support, but Bitcoin Script is way behind all of its competitors in adoption, and it won't evolve fast enough due to Bitcoin's conservative governance. It would be pretty tedious to program anything complex using Bitcoin Script, but I suppose there's always someone who enjoys a challenge. > > **Unstable Store of Value**: Like most non-stablecoins, it has too much volatility to be considered a stable store of value, losing up to 80% of its purchasing-power after crashes. Like gold/silver, it is more of a speculative investment. > > (Disclaimer: I only own trace amounts of BTC.) ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz3duc/rcc_cointest_top_10_bitcoin_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

big--if-true

Bitcoin by up to 28% and BCH by 36% However less supply means each coin is more scarce.

big--if-true

Bitcoin-Cash (BCH) is not trying to compete with other cryptos like Bitcoin and Ethereum, it is trying to compete with FIAT transactions and payment companies like Legacy banking institutions, VISA, Mastercard, WesternUnion BCH is cheap internet money. To create BCH it costs hardware and electricity, you effectively destroy (“proof of burn”) these 2 values to gain a digital token. The idea is that the value from the proof of burn will be transferred to this token. Over time more electricity and mining power is needed while the amount of tokens given in exchange for mining become lower. This raises the creation price of each token. These tokens are used as a value placeholder for trading with each other, barter/trading goods and services are traded for a placeholder token, and then swapped to goods and services at a time and place when you want those. Cheap transaction fees are essential for this economic activity. So the idea is to have a valuable token placeholder that isnt subject to government inflation/devaluation/control and have our own economy run by people for the people. Currently the prices are controlled by speculators and margin traders. Eventually they will lose their power as crypto leaves their wallets and a large economy develops and uses these tokens for real world activities. Bitcoin-Cash (BCH) is not trying to compete with other cryptos like Bitcoin and Ethereum, it is trying to compete with FIAT transactions and payment companies like Legacy banking institutions, VISA, Mastercard, WesternUnion, etc.

CointestAdmin

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from the last round** > > In general, the typical crypto enthusiast has accepted that Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other DLTs technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, there is no way Bitcoin would make it into the top 10 by market cap, and likely not even the top 100. It's still #1 only because it continues to maintain strong security because it was the first, and thus has the largest adoption and protection against Sybil attacks. > > ------------- > > These are its flaws: > > **Redundancy inefficiencies**: To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater redundancy. The more miners (specifically mining pools) there are, the harder it is to execute a 51% attack. This also means that there could be a million miners performing redundant actions vying for the next Bitcoin block. Nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, and inefficiency present for nearly all cryptocurrencies. > > **Mining energy Inefficiency**: PoW mining is inherently extremely energy inefficient because it's a competition. The more miners there are, the harder the mining puzzle becomes, adjusted every 2 weeks. The amount of energy needed for a single Bitcoin transaction in [Sept 2021, ~1800 kWh](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption), is roughly the same as the amount of energy used by a typical US household over 62 days. Blockchains require extra redundancy for computations and storage from each node that interacts with or validates the transaction. In comparison, other Byzantine Fault Tolerant distributed consensus methods such as BFT-Paxos and RBFT, SBFT used by Hyperledger Fabric are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x) and 10^4 x for storage. > > **Mining Centralization**: Mining is not something the average crypto user can do by themselves unless they join a mining pool. You also need an expensive and specialized high-end ASIC miner for SHA-256 mining in order to have a good chance of making a profit. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes or verify their mining pool operator's decisions, leading to centralization with mining pools. > > **Fees and Rising cost of transactions**: Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $2-10+ USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee). That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. The fees are so high you can't use them for everyday transactions. People complain about bank fees, but if I had to use Bitcoin for everday transactions for my bank and credit cards, I'd be racking $10000+ in fees yearly. As halvings continue and the BTC price can no longer keep up, the block reward will keep decreasing. Either transaction costs will eventually rise to cover the cost of block rewards, or Bitcoin will experience an ice age where all miners drop out except for the few miners who can acquire cheap ASIC rigs and the cheapest energy costs, leading to more centralization. > > **Layer 2 adoption issue**: In general, Layer 2 solutions have much less decentralization (e.g. fewer validation nodes) than Layer 1 and face low adoption issues. The Lightning Network, a Layer 2 network of state channels that use Hash TimeLock Contracts for Bitcoin, has seen very little adoption by volume even years after introduction. It's a hassle to use for many reasons. It requires you to lock funds in a state channel, which also costs a transaction fee to open and close. It requires nodes to be online most of the time for connectivity. If the node you're connecting to goes offline, you lose your connection, and you could have your channel auto-closed. Channels can also be unilaterally force-closed, which is a common complaint among users. Basically, it's still too much of a hassle for the average crypto user. > > **Slow Finality**: Transactions take 10 minutes to record, but exchanges generally wait up to [60 minutes](https://academy.binance.com/en/glossary/finality) for probabilistic-finality. Given that the largest mining pools have 30% hash power, that's still only a 74% chance of actual finality after 6 block recordings due to possibility of a withholding attack. (The probability of a successful 51% attack given in Satoshi's original Bitcoin whitepaper was greatly underestimated because it did not take into account PoW block withholding attacks.) > > **Lack of privacy**: All transaction history is public. Public blockchains are only pseudononymous, and one can use a Transaction Graph Analysis or Taint Analysis tool to figure out who you are by linking transactions. People can also guess your wealth by tracing your transactions through the blockchain. It only takes 1 mistake to link the rest of your transactions. Individual tokens are also not fungible for this same reason. > > **Slow updates**: Bitcoin evolves slowly due to requiring social consensus and Blockchain bureaucracy. Hard forks are voluntary and can take weeks to complete. The Bitcoin Core foundation is extremely conservative and averse to hard forks, as seen with the fork that created Bitcoin Cash. That's not necessarily bad, but it does mean that most developments to Bitcoin end up turning into separate coins instead of evolving the canonical chain. There are often months-long debates and years between before making updates. As a result, it is a conservative blockchain while other DLTs have evolved technologies and features way beyond it. > > **Limitations to transaction speed**: Due to aversion to change, Bitcoin is likely at its limit for transaction speed. It is a poor Medium of Exchange due to slow transaction speeds. > > - Increase block size: requires a hard fork, results in longer network propagation time) > - Decrease block time by lowering puzzle difficulty: increases chance of natural forks, increases acceleration of block size, leading to more storage bloat, all exchanges need to adjust the number of blocks until probabilistic finality, and increases the chance of miners holding orphaned blocks. > - Decrease the transaction size: requires a hard fork (e.g. SegWit 2017 fork, which after all that work, only reduced the size by 50%) > > **Smart Contracts**: Bitcoin doesn't support complex "smart" contracts with its very basic (procedural, stack-oriented, Forth-like) Bitcoin Script. The contracts enabled by Bitcoin Scripts are so basic that they're often non-script features built directly into other blockchains like timelock releases and multi-signature. It's extremely limited because you can't easily validate them, and miners typically put huge restrictions on what is allowed for security purposes. It's possible taproot could change that if it gets a ton of developer support, but Bitcoin Script is way behind all of its competitors in adoption, and it won't evolve fast enough due to Bitcoin's conservative governance. It would be pretty tedious to program anything complex using Bitcoin Script, but I suppose there's always someone who enjoys a challenge. > > **Unstable Store of Value**: Like most non-stablecoins, it has too much volatility to be considered a stable store of value, losing up to 80% of its purchasing-power after crashes. Like gold/silver, it is more of a speculative investment. > > (Disclaimer: I only own trace amounts of BTC.) ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz3duc/rcc_cointest_top_10_bitcoin_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

abesWaves

Crypto in general is a casino speculation game, I doubt BCH is an exception

abesWaves

BCH/BTC is not a good look for BCH on most time frames

big--if-true

Billionaires purchased Bitcoin at $40k-$70k and couldnt keep it up because it has no use case or scaling. At least BCH is going the adoption route (sub 1 cent fees forever through big blocks), vs Bitcoin $50 transaction fees and using margin loans to play musical chairs on its price.

nanaymonaenae

It's been like a year since i saw someone shill BCH lol, I'll let this one slide.

big--if-true

We tried warning Billionaires spending billions on Bitcoin at all time highs that it had no use case due to fees and no scaling, and despite their reputations, they never even did basic due diligence. This is what we have to deal with in the crypto space. People just ignore common sense. (15-20% interest rate "stablecoin" companies collapse, non scaling blockchains with $50 fees get pumped) Utility matters. And Bitcoin with $50 transaction fees was just pure speculation with no use case. BTC could easily crash and not recover, all it has is the brand name. Maybe they need to do better research on projects that actually scale like BCH: https://whybitcoincash.com/

big--if-true

Utility matters. And Bitcoin with $50 transaction fees was just pure speculation with no use case. BTC could easily crash and not recover, all it has is the brand name. Maybe investors need to do better research on projects that actually scale like BCH: https://whybitcoincash.com/

BewareOfShills

>Shit, sorry. I had mixed it up with ETC for a minute. Yeah I know what BCH is, that was my fuck up there. 😂😂👍 >Imo a diverse set of compression protocols all using a single base layer for security and interopability provides much greater benefit than a siloed approach does. Maybe, I haven't looked at all L2s . I still like the L1 approach much better >If I stop using my VISA I'll start using an L2 like they were using, and if you want me to start using BCH it has to compete with all of that technology. Sure, but I truly think it can compete there very well. VISA is out of the question if you want self custody, which we should promote anyway. L2s I don't know I haven't found one that I like better than L1.

big--if-true

Maybe do better research on projects that actually scale like BCH: https://whybitcoincash.com/ Utility matters. And Bitcoin with $50 transaction fees was just pure speculation with no use case. BTC could easily crash and not recover, all it has is the brand name.

big--if-true

Utility matters. And Bitcoin with $50 was just pure speculation. Maybe do better research on projects that actually scale like BCH: https://whybitcoincash.com/

Giga79

>That depends on your L2 but if there weren't any drawbacks you would just make that L1. Imo a diverse set of compression protocols all using a single base layer for security and interopability provides much greater benefit than a siloed approach does. >Wtf are you smoking. >Have you ever used BCH? Seems like you got your information from Maxis. Shit, sorry. I had mixed it up with ETC for a minute. Yeah I know what BCH is, that was my fuck up there. A better comparison I guess would've been BTC/Strike to BCH and not BCH to ETH/VISA. Ethereum is a smart contract platform so would have a different approach than BCH. I don't like the way BTC is scaling and I think with a tiny bit more space a lot more complexity becomes possible without relying on 3rd parties, but that complexity (compression algos) still needs to occur before blocks fill up or people will rely on 3rd parties again anyway. My point was just if BCH is competing with *companies* using compression algos on some L1 they're competing with that L1 too, until the same algorithms are available freely on BCH. If I stop using my VISA I'll start using an L2 like they were using, and if you want me to start using BCH it has to compete with all of that technology.

BewareOfShills

>Woosh you've missed my entire point. Lol no XD it seems like the whole point of Satoshis invention wooshed you pretty fucking hard. If you use VISA or Strike you can just burn the whole fucking blockchain, there is no point to it. > If BCH has physical cards and can compete with VISA in a noncustodial way I'd like to hear it. Actually yes, I don't even thin BCH is alone in this. And there is no reason why a smart card can't sign a tx from an internal wallet or a phone wallet. Again this has been already demonstrated. >What do you have to 'give up' to use an L2? That depends on your L2 but if there weren't any drawbacks you would just make that L1. >BCH takes 3000 or 9000 block confirmations to settle because of how unsecure it is. Wtf are you smoking. Merchants use 0-conf exchanges use 1-6 conf. And the BCH haters use 12 conf. And so far there were zero successful attacks on BCH. Have you ever used BCH? Seems like you got your information from Maxis.

CointestAdmin

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from the last round** > > In general, the typical crypto enthusiast has accepted that Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other DLTs technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, there is no way Bitcoin would make it into the top 10 by market cap, and likely not even the top 100. It's still #1 only because it continues to maintain strong security because it was the first, and thus has the largest adoption and protection against Sybil attacks. > > ------------- > > These are its flaws: > > **Redundancy inefficiencies**: To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater redundancy. The more miners (specifically mining pools) there are, the harder it is to execute a 51% attack. This also means that there could be a million miners performing redundant actions vying for the next Bitcoin block. Nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, and inefficiency present for nearly all cryptocurrencies. > > **Mining energy Inefficiency**: PoW mining is inherently extremely energy inefficient because it's a competition. The more miners there are, the harder the mining puzzle becomes, adjusted every 2 weeks. The amount of energy needed for a single Bitcoin transaction in [Sept 2021, ~1800 kWh](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption), is roughly the same as the amount of energy used by a typical US household over 62 days. Blockchains require extra redundancy for computations and storage from each node that interacts with or validates the transaction. In comparison, other Byzantine Fault Tolerant distributed consensus methods such as BFT-Paxos and RBFT, SBFT used by Hyperledger Fabric are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x) and 10^4 x for storage. > > **Mining Centralization**: Mining is not something the average crypto user can do by themselves unless they join a mining pool. You also need an expensive and specialized high-end ASIC miner for SHA-256 mining in order to have a good chance of making a profit. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes or verify their mining pool operator's decisions, leading to centralization with mining pools. > > **Fees and Rising cost of transactions**: Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $2-10+ USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee). That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. The fees are so high you can't use them for everyday transactions. People complain about bank fees, but if I had to use Bitcoin for everday transactions for my bank and credit cards, I'd be racking $10000+ in fees yearly. As halvings continue and the BTC price can no longer keep up, the block reward will keep decreasing. Either transaction costs will eventually rise to cover the cost of block rewards, or Bitcoin will experience an ice age where all miners drop out except for the few miners who can acquire cheap ASIC rigs and the cheapest energy costs, leading to more centralization. > > **Layer 2 adoption issue**: In general, Layer 2 solutions have much less decentralization (e.g. fewer validation nodes) than Layer 1 and face low adoption issues. The Lightning Network, a Layer 2 network of state channels that use Hash TimeLock Contracts for Bitcoin, has seen very little adoption by volume even years after introduction. It's a hassle to use for many reasons. It requires you to lock funds in a state channel, which also costs a transaction fee to open and close. It requires nodes to be online most of the time for connectivity. If the node you're connecting to goes offline, you lose your connection, and you could have your channel auto-closed. Channels can also be unilaterally force-closed, which is a common complaint among users. Basically, it's still too much of a hassle for the average crypto user. > > **Slow Finality**: Transactions take 10 minutes to record, but exchanges generally wait up to [60 minutes](https://academy.binance.com/en/glossary/finality) for probabilistic-finality. Given that the largest mining pools have 30% hash power, that's still only a 74% chance of actual finality after 6 block recordings due to possibility of a withholding attack. (The probability of a successful 51% attack given in Satoshi's original Bitcoin whitepaper was greatly underestimated because it did not take into account PoW block withholding attacks.) > > **Lack of privacy**: All transaction history is public. Public blockchains are only pseudononymous, and one can use a Transaction Graph Analysis or Taint Analysis tool to figure out who you are by linking transactions. People can also guess your wealth by tracing your transactions through the blockchain. It only takes 1 mistake to link the rest of your transactions. Individual tokens are also not fungible for this same reason. > > **Slow updates**: Bitcoin evolves slowly due to requiring social consensus and Blockchain bureaucracy. Hard forks are voluntary and can take weeks to complete. The Bitcoin Core foundation is extremely conservative and averse to hard forks, as seen with the fork that created Bitcoin Cash. That's not necessarily bad, but it does mean that most developments to Bitcoin end up turning into separate coins instead of evolving the canonical chain. There are often months-long debates and years between before making updates. As a result, it is a conservative blockchain while other DLTs have evolved technologies and features way beyond it. > > **Limitations to transaction speed**: Due to aversion to change, Bitcoin is likely at its limit for transaction speed. It is a poor Medium of Exchange due to slow transaction speeds. > > - Increase block size: requires a hard fork, results in longer network propagation time) > - Decrease block time by lowering puzzle difficulty: increases chance of natural forks, increases acceleration of block size, leading to more storage bloat, all exchanges need to adjust the number of blocks until probabilistic finality, and increases the chance of miners holding orphaned blocks. > - Decrease the transaction size: requires a hard fork (e.g. SegWit 2017 fork, which after all that work, only reduced the size by 50%) > > **Smart Contracts**: Bitcoin doesn't support complex "smart" contracts with its very basic (procedural, stack-oriented, Forth-like) Bitcoin Script. The contracts enabled by Bitcoin Scripts are so basic that they're often non-script features built directly into other blockchains like timelock releases and multi-signature. It's extremely limited because you can't easily validate them, and miners typically put huge restrictions on what is allowed for security purposes. It's possible taproot could change that if it gets a ton of developer support, but Bitcoin Script is way behind all of its competitors in adoption, and it won't evolve fast enough due to Bitcoin's conservative governance. It would be pretty tedious to program anything complex using Bitcoin Script, but I suppose there's always someone who enjoys a challenge. > > **Unstable Store of Value**: Like most non-stablecoins, it has too much volatility to be considered a stable store of value, losing up to 80% of its purchasing-power after crashes. Like gold/silver, it is more of a speculative investment. > > (Disclaimer: I only own trace amounts of BTC.) ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz3duc/rcc_cointest_top_10_bitcoin_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

Bladeyy21

Ok I'm going to put 1k USD in 10 different coins. I've decided on 9 and need 1 more. The 9 are XRP, TRX, BCH, LTC, BSV, LUNA, ETC, ADA and XVG. Need 1 more to make complete my investment. Thoughts?

Giga79

Woosh you've missed my entire point. It doesn't make sense to compare BCH to VISA without comparing BCH to the blockchain VISA is using..... Of course VISA is permissioned. The tech VISA is using **isn't** permissioned, non custodial, or even centralized. If you want to compare BCH to *a business* of course one is custodial and the other isn't. You can't do the same things using both though so it's a dumb thing to compare. It's like saying my garage sale is going to overtake Amazon because I don't ask for a login, like what that's not what we're talking about. If you're purposing BCH can overtake VISA then at least compare the tech not *your* access to it. Comparing tech it's cheaper and faster to use Ethereum than BCH. If you want access to cheap payments *without a physical card* (ie no longer competing with VISA) you would use an L2 instead. **If BCH has physical cards and can compete with VISA in a noncustodial way I'd like to hear it. ** What do you have to 'give up' to use an L2? Let's pick a real one, Arbitirium as an example, because I agree with you LN is wack. Same trust and security assumptions only now my data is compressed, I've given *nothing* up to save 99% on fees. The L2 is paying the L1 for blockspace so as fees grow larger (necessary for a sustainable security budget without inflation) individual fees shrink smaller. POS doesn't *scale* Ethereum. It reduces the *energy consumption* required to maintain security and not a thing more. L2's scale Ethereum and run on POW currently. BCH takes 3000 or 9000 block confirmations to settle because of how unsecure it is. That's like a 1-2 month wait to move from a CEX to wallet.. It's not realistic to use in almost any circumstance *especially* for payments. I don't know why comparing it to VISA was even purposed - if you're going to do that at least be honest with a direct comparison.

CointestAdmin

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from the last round** > > In general, the typical crypto enthusiast has accepted that Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other DLTs technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, there is no way Bitcoin would make it into the top 10 by market cap, and likely not even the top 100. It's still #1 only because it continues to maintain strong security because it was the first, and thus has the largest adoption and protection against Sybil attacks. > > ------------- > > These are its flaws: > > **Redundancy inefficiencies**: To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater redundancy. The more miners (specifically mining pools) there are, the harder it is to execute a 51% attack. This also means that there could be a million miners performing redundant actions vying for the next Bitcoin block. Nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, and inefficiency present for nearly all cryptocurrencies. > > **Mining energy Inefficiency**: PoW mining is inherently extremely energy inefficient because it's a competition. The more miners there are, the harder the mining puzzle becomes, adjusted every 2 weeks. The amount of energy needed for a single Bitcoin transaction in [Sept 2021, ~1800 kWh](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption), is roughly the same as the amount of energy used by a typical US household over 62 days. Blockchains require extra redundancy for computations and storage from each node that interacts with or validates the transaction. In comparison, other Byzantine Fault Tolerant distributed consensus methods such as BFT-Paxos and RBFT, SBFT used by Hyperledger Fabric are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x) and 10^4 x for storage. > > **Mining Centralization**: Mining is not something the average crypto user can do by themselves unless they join a mining pool. You also need an expensive and specialized high-end ASIC miner for SHA-256 mining in order to have a good chance of making a profit. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes or verify their mining pool operator's decisions, leading to centralization with mining pools. > > **Fees and Rising cost of transactions**: Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $2-10+ USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee). That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. The fees are so high you can't use them for everyday transactions. People complain about bank fees, but if I had to use Bitcoin for everday transactions for my bank and credit cards, I'd be racking $10000+ in fees yearly. As halvings continue and the BTC price can no longer keep up, the block reward will keep decreasing. Either transaction costs will eventually rise to cover the cost of block rewards, or Bitcoin will experience an ice age where all miners drop out except for the few miners who can acquire cheap ASIC rigs and the cheapest energy costs, leading to more centralization. > > **Layer 2 adoption issue**: In general, Layer 2 solutions have much less decentralization (e.g. fewer validation nodes) than Layer 1 and face low adoption issues. The Lightning Network, a Layer 2 network of state channels that use Hash TimeLock Contracts for Bitcoin, has seen very little adoption by volume even years after introduction. It's a hassle to use for many reasons. It requires you to lock funds in a state channel, which also costs a transaction fee to open and close. It requires nodes to be online most of the time for connectivity. If the node you're connecting to goes offline, you lose your connection, and you could have your channel auto-closed. Channels can also be unilaterally force-closed, which is a common complaint among users. Basically, it's still too much of a hassle for the average crypto user. > > **Slow Finality**: Transactions take 10 minutes to record, but exchanges generally wait up to [60 minutes](https://academy.binance.com/en/glossary/finality) for probabilistic-finality. Given that the largest mining pools have 30% hash power, that's still only a 74% chance of actual finality after 6 block recordings due to possibility of a withholding attack. (The probability of a successful 51% attack given in Satoshi's original Bitcoin whitepaper was greatly underestimated because it did not take into account PoW block withholding attacks.) > > **Lack of privacy**: All transaction history is public. Public blockchains are only pseudononymous, and one can use a Transaction Graph Analysis or Taint Analysis tool to figure out who you are by linking transactions. People can also guess your wealth by tracing your transactions through the blockchain. It only takes 1 mistake to link the rest of your transactions. Individual tokens are also not fungible for this same reason. > > **Slow updates**: Bitcoin evolves slowly due to requiring social consensus and Blockchain bureaucracy. Hard forks are voluntary and can take weeks to complete. The Bitcoin Core foundation is extremely conservative and averse to hard forks, as seen with the fork that created Bitcoin Cash. That's not necessarily bad, but it does mean that most developments to Bitcoin end up turning into separate coins instead of evolving the canonical chain. There are often months-long debates and years between before making updates. As a result, it is a conservative blockchain while other DLTs have evolved technologies and features way beyond it. > > **Limitations to transaction speed**: Due to aversion to change, Bitcoin is likely at its limit for transaction speed. It is a poor Medium of Exchange due to slow transaction speeds. > > - Increase block size: requires a hard fork, results in longer network propagation time) > - Decrease block time by lowering puzzle difficulty: increases chance of natural forks, increases acceleration of block size, leading to more storage bloat, all exchanges need to adjust the number of blocks until probabilistic finality, and increases the chance of miners holding orphaned blocks. > - Decrease the transaction size: requires a hard fork (e.g. SegWit 2017 fork, which after all that work, only reduced the size by 50%) > > **Smart Contracts**: Bitcoin doesn't support complex "smart" contracts with its very basic (procedural, stack-oriented, Forth-like) Bitcoin Script. The contracts enabled by Bitcoin Scripts are so basic that they're often non-script features built directly into other blockchains like timelock releases and multi-signature. It's extremely limited because you can't easily validate them, and miners typically put huge restrictions on what is allowed for security purposes. It's possible taproot could change that if it gets a ton of developer support, but Bitcoin Script is way behind all of its competitors in adoption, and it won't evolve fast enough due to Bitcoin's conservative governance. It would be pretty tedious to program anything complex using Bitcoin Script, but I suppose there's always someone who enjoys a challenge. > > **Unstable Store of Value**: Like most non-stablecoins, it has too much volatility to be considered a stable store of value, losing up to 80% of its purchasing-power after crashes. Like gold/silver, it is more of a speculative investment. > > (Disclaimer: I only own trace amounts of BTC.) ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz3duc/rcc_cointest_top_10_bitcoin_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

Loose_Screw_

Are you a BCH person then?

Br0kenRabbitTV

It's a hard one for me with LTC, on one hand I like it right now as it is massively used as a payment coin and is about 40% of my crypto income currently, at the start of 2018 it was about 90% of my crypto income for a while but at that point I only had BTC, ETH, and BCH added.. BCH was so new, most people knew of LTC and used that mostly. but last year BCH caught up with it and they are almost neck to neck for what people pay me in now. What I don't like about LTC is it follows the same development plan as BTC, which includes LN. For now we don't need it, but many years down the line, if the price gets much higher, the fees will become too much, they are already quite a bit higher than BCH, and instead of trying to scale on chain, they will just start using LN which I'm not a massive fan of (though do have it as an option for BTC), but hardly anybody uses it and I need to run an extra server just to accept it. Also I don't really like the community much, it seems to be populated more by investor types that want to see the price rise loads, rather than being mainly focused in peer to peer cash use. It's hard work being a merchant that accepts many coins, very few communities value my opinion and I get a lot of toxicity towards me because I'm not "all in" on one coin. The only communities where I really fit in are BCH and XMR sadly.

CointestAdmin

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from the last round** > > In general, the typical crypto enthusiast has accepted that Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other DLTs technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, there is no way Bitcoin would make it into the top 10 by market cap, and likely not even the top 100. It's still #1 only because it continues to maintain strong security because it was the first, and thus has the largest adoption and protection against Sybil attacks. > > ------------- > > These are its flaws: > > **Redundancy inefficiencies**: To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater redundancy. The more miners (specifically mining pools) there are, the harder it is to execute a 51% attack. This also means that there could be a million miners performing redundant actions vying for the next Bitcoin block. Nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, and inefficiency present for nearly all cryptocurrencies. > > **Mining energy Inefficiency**: PoW mining is inherently extremely energy inefficient because it's a competition. The more miners there are, the harder the mining puzzle becomes, adjusted every 2 weeks. The amount of energy needed for a single Bitcoin transaction in [Sept 2021, ~1800 kWh](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption), is roughly the same as the amount of energy used by a typical US household over 62 days. Blockchains require extra redundancy for computations and storage from each node that interacts with or validates the transaction. In comparison, other Byzantine Fault Tolerant distributed consensus methods such as BFT-Paxos and RBFT, SBFT used by Hyperledger Fabric are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x) and 10^4 x for storage. > > **Mining Centralization**: Mining is not something the average crypto user can do by themselves unless they join a mining pool. You also need an expensive and specialized high-end ASIC miner for SHA-256 mining in order to have a good chance of making a profit. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes or verify their mining pool operator's decisions, leading to centralization with mining pools. > > **Fees and Rising cost of transactions**: Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $2-10+ USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee). That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. The fees are so high you can't use them for everyday transactions. People complain about bank fees, but if I had to use Bitcoin for everday transactions for my bank and credit cards, I'd be racking $10000+ in fees yearly. As halvings continue and the BTC price can no longer keep up, the block reward will keep decreasing. Either transaction costs will eventually rise to cover the cost of block rewards, or Bitcoin will experience an ice age where all miners drop out except for the few miners who can acquire cheap ASIC rigs and the cheapest energy costs, leading to more centralization. > > **Layer 2 adoption issue**: In general, Layer 2 solutions have much less decentralization (e.g. fewer validation nodes) than Layer 1 and face low adoption issues. The Lightning Network, a Layer 2 network of state channels that use Hash TimeLock Contracts for Bitcoin, has seen very little adoption by volume even years after introduction. It's a hassle to use for many reasons. It requires you to lock funds in a state channel, which also costs a transaction fee to open and close. It requires nodes to be online most of the time for connectivity. If the node you're connecting to goes offline, you lose your connection, and you could have your channel auto-closed. Channels can also be unilaterally force-closed, which is a common complaint among users. Basically, it's still too much of a hassle for the average crypto user. > > **Slow Finality**: Transactions take 10 minutes to record, but exchanges generally wait up to [60 minutes](https://academy.binance.com/en/glossary/finality) for probabilistic-finality. Given that the largest mining pools have 30% hash power, that's still only a 74% chance of actual finality after 6 block recordings due to possibility of a withholding attack. (The probability of a successful 51% attack given in Satoshi's original Bitcoin whitepaper was greatly underestimated because it did not take into account PoW block withholding attacks.) > > **Lack of privacy**: All transaction history is public. Public blockchains are only pseudononymous, and one can use a Transaction Graph Analysis or Taint Analysis tool to figure out who you are by linking transactions. People can also guess your wealth by tracing your transactions through the blockchain. It only takes 1 mistake to link the rest of your transactions. Individual tokens are also not fungible for this same reason. > > **Slow updates**: Bitcoin evolves slowly due to requiring social consensus and Blockchain bureaucracy. Hard forks are voluntary and can take weeks to complete. The Bitcoin Core foundation is extremely conservative and averse to hard forks, as seen with the fork that created Bitcoin Cash. That's not necessarily bad, but it does mean that most developments to Bitcoin end up turning into separate coins instead of evolving the canonical chain. There are often months-long debates and years between before making updates. As a result, it is a conservative blockchain while other DLTs have evolved technologies and features way beyond it. > > **Limitations to transaction speed**: Due to aversion to change, Bitcoin is likely at its limit for transaction speed. It is a poor Medium of Exchange due to slow transaction speeds. > > - Increase block size: requires a hard fork, results in longer network propagation time) > - Decrease block time by lowering puzzle difficulty: increases chance of natural forks, increases acceleration of block size, leading to more storage bloat, all exchanges need to adjust the number of blocks until probabilistic finality, and increases the chance of miners holding orphaned blocks. > - Decrease the transaction size: requires a hard fork (e.g. SegWit 2017 fork, which after all that work, only reduced the size by 50%) > > **Smart Contracts**: Bitcoin doesn't support complex "smart" contracts with its very basic (procedural, stack-oriented, Forth-like) Bitcoin Script. The contracts enabled by Bitcoin Scripts are so basic that they're often non-script features built directly into other blockchains like timelock releases and multi-signature. It's extremely limited because you can't easily validate them, and miners typically put huge restrictions on what is allowed for security purposes. It's possible taproot could change that if it gets a ton of developer support, but Bitcoin Script is way behind all of its competitors in adoption, and it won't evolve fast enough due to Bitcoin's conservative governance. It would be pretty tedious to program anything complex using Bitcoin Script, but I suppose there's always someone who enjoys a challenge. > > **Unstable Store of Value**: Like most non-stablecoins, it has too much volatility to be considered a stable store of value, losing up to 80% of its purchasing-power after crashes. Like gold/silver, it is more of a speculative investment. > > (Disclaimer: I only own trace amounts of BTC.) ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz3duc/rcc_cointest_top_10_bitcoin_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

Delta3Angle

I'm actually a huge fan of Litecoin for a few reasons. It can handle four times as much workload, it's merge mind with Doge which is also a fantastic payment coin, It doesn't compete with Bitcoin for hashrate which helps secure it further, It has all the scaling features of Bitcoin and more, and they just implemented privacy protocols to increase fungibility. BCH is a cool project but the deal breaker for me is that it shares a hashing algorithm with Bitcoin which means it's always going to be susceptible to a 51% attack. I also find the community to be insufferable. All the snobbiness of BTC maxis with extra angst after the blockwars.

pharmacoli

My mushroom spore guy takes payment in crypto - BTC, ETH, BCH, LTC, or DAI.

CointestAdmin

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from the last round** > > In general, the typical crypto enthusiast has accepted that Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other DLTs technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, there is no way Bitcoin would make it into the top 10 by market cap, and likely not even the top 100. It's still #1 only because it continues to maintain strong security because it was the first, and thus has the largest adoption and protection against Sybil attacks. > > ------------- > > These are its flaws: > > **Redundancy inefficiencies**: To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater redundancy. The more miners (specifically mining pools) there are, the harder it is to execute a 51% attack. This also means that there could be a million miners performing redundant actions vying for the next Bitcoin block. Nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, and inefficiency present for nearly all cryptocurrencies. > > **Mining energy Inefficiency**: PoW mining is inherently extremely energy inefficient because it's a competition. The more miners there are, the harder the mining puzzle becomes, adjusted every 2 weeks. The amount of energy needed for a single Bitcoin transaction in [Sept 2021, ~1800 kWh](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption), is roughly the same as the amount of energy used by a typical US household over 62 days. Blockchains require extra redundancy for computations and storage from each node that interacts with or validates the transaction. In comparison, other Byzantine Fault Tolerant distributed consensus methods such as BFT-Paxos and RBFT, SBFT used by Hyperledger Fabric are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x) and 10^4 x for storage. > > **Mining Centralization**: Mining is not something the average crypto user can do by themselves unless they join a mining pool. You also need an expensive and specialized high-end ASIC miner for SHA-256 mining in order to have a good chance of making a profit. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes or verify their mining pool operator's decisions, leading to centralization with mining pools. > > **Fees and Rising cost of transactions**: Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $2-10+ USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee). That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. The fees are so high you can't use them for everyday transactions. People complain about bank fees, but if I had to use Bitcoin for everday transactions for my bank and credit cards, I'd be racking $10000+ in fees yearly. As halvings continue and the BTC price can no longer keep up, the block reward will keep decreasing. Either transaction costs will eventually rise to cover the cost of block rewards, or Bitcoin will experience an ice age where all miners drop out except for the few miners who can acquire cheap ASIC rigs and the cheapest energy costs, leading to more centralization. > > **Layer 2 adoption issue**: In general, Layer 2 solutions have much less decentralization (e.g. fewer validation nodes) than Layer 1 and face low adoption issues. The Lightning Network, a Layer 2 network of state channels that use Hash TimeLock Contracts for Bitcoin, has seen very little adoption by volume even years after introduction. It's a hassle to use for many reasons. It requires you to lock funds in a state channel, which also costs a transaction fee to open and close. It requires nodes to be online most of the time for connectivity. If the node you're connecting to goes offline, you lose your connection, and you could have your channel auto-closed. Channels can also be unilaterally force-closed, which is a common complaint among users. Basically, it's still too much of a hassle for the average crypto user. > > **Slow Finality**: Transactions take 10 minutes to record, but exchanges generally wait up to [60 minutes](https://academy.binance.com/en/glossary/finality) for probabilistic-finality. Given that the largest mining pools have 30% hash power, that's still only a 74% chance of actual finality after 6 block recordings due to possibility of a withholding attack. (The probability of a successful 51% attack given in Satoshi's original Bitcoin whitepaper was greatly underestimated because it did not take into account PoW block withholding attacks.) > > **Lack of privacy**: All transaction history is public. Public blockchains are only pseudononymous, and one can use a Transaction Graph Analysis or Taint Analysis tool to figure out who you are by linking transactions. People can also guess your wealth by tracing your transactions through the blockchain. It only takes 1 mistake to link the rest of your transactions. Individual tokens are also not fungible for this same reason. > > **Slow updates**: Bitcoin evolves slowly due to requiring social consensus and Blockchain bureaucracy. Hard forks are voluntary and can take weeks to complete. The Bitcoin Core foundation is extremely conservative and averse to hard forks, as seen with the fork that created Bitcoin Cash. That's not necessarily bad, but it does mean that most developments to Bitcoin end up turning into separate coins instead of evolving the canonical chain. There are often months-long debates and years between before making updates. As a result, it is a conservative blockchain while other DLTs have evolved technologies and features way beyond it. > > **Limitations to transaction speed**: Due to aversion to change, Bitcoin is likely at its limit for transaction speed. It is a poor Medium of Exchange due to slow transaction speeds. > > - Increase block size: requires a hard fork, results in longer network propagation time) > - Decrease block time by lowering puzzle difficulty: increases chance of natural forks, increases acceleration of block size, leading to more storage bloat, all exchanges need to adjust the number of blocks until probabilistic finality, and increases the chance of miners holding orphaned blocks. > - Decrease the transaction size: requires a hard fork (e.g. SegWit 2017 fork, which after all that work, only reduced the size by 50%) > > **Smart Contracts**: Bitcoin doesn't support complex "smart" contracts with its very basic (procedural, stack-oriented, Forth-like) Bitcoin Script. The contracts enabled by Bitcoin Scripts are so basic that they're often non-script features built directly into other blockchains like timelock releases and multi-signature. It's extremely limited because you can't easily validate them, and miners typically put huge restrictions on what is allowed for security purposes. It's possible taproot could change that if it gets a ton of developer support, but Bitcoin Script is way behind all of its competitors in adoption, and it won't evolve fast enough due to Bitcoin's conservative governance. It would be pretty tedious to program anything complex using Bitcoin Script, but I suppose there's always someone who enjoys a challenge. > > **Unstable Store of Value**: Like most non-stablecoins, it has too much volatility to be considered a stable store of value, losing up to 80% of its purchasing-power after crashes. Like gold/silver, it is more of a speculative investment. > > (Disclaimer: I only own trace amounts of BTC.) ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz3duc/rcc_cointest_top_10_bitcoin_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from the last round** > > In general, the typical crypto enthusiast has accepted that Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other DLTs technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, there is no way Bitcoin would make it into the top 10 by market cap, and likely not even the top 100. It's still #1 only because it continues to maintain strong security because it was the first, and thus has the largest adoption and protection against Sybil attacks. > > ------------- > > These are its flaws: > > **Redundancy inefficiencies**: To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater redundancy. The more miners (specifically mining pools) there are, the harder it is to execute a 51% attack. This also means that there could be a million miners performing redundant actions vying for the next Bitcoin block. Nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, and inefficiency present for nearly all cryptocurrencies. > > **Mining energy Inefficiency**: PoW mining is inherently extremely energy inefficient because it's a competition. The more miners there are, the harder the mining puzzle becomes, adjusted every 2 weeks. The amount of energy needed for a single Bitcoin transaction in [Sept 2021, ~1800 kWh](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption), is roughly the same as the amount of energy used by a typical US household over 62 days. Blockchains require extra redundancy for computations and storage from each node that interacts with or validates the transaction. In comparison, other Byzantine Fault Tolerant distributed consensus methods such as BFT-Paxos and RBFT, SBFT used by Hyperledger Fabric are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x) and 10^4 x for storage. > > **Mining Centralization**: Mining is not something the average crypto user can do by themselves unless they join a mining pool. You also need an expensive and specialized high-end ASIC miner for SHA-256 mining in order to have a good chance of making a profit. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes or verify their mining pool operator's decisions, leading to centralization with mining pools. > > **Fees and Rising cost of transactions**: Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $2-10+ USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee). That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. The fees are so high you can't use them for everyday transactions. People complain about bank fees, but if I had to use Bitcoin for everday transactions for my bank and credit cards, I'd be racking $10000+ in fees yearly. As halvings continue and the BTC price can no longer keep up, the block reward will keep decreasing. Either transaction costs will eventually rise to cover the cost of block rewards, or Bitcoin will experience an ice age where all miners drop out except for the few miners who can acquire cheap ASIC rigs and the cheapest energy costs, leading to more centralization. > > **Layer 2 adoption issue**: In general, Layer 2 solutions have much less decentralization (e.g. fewer validation nodes) than Layer 1 and face low adoption issues. The Lightning Network, a Layer 2 network of state channels that use Hash TimeLock Contracts for Bitcoin, has seen very little adoption by volume even years after introduction. It's a hassle to use for many reasons. It requires you to lock funds in a state channel, which also costs a transaction fee to open and close. It requires nodes to be online most of the time for connectivity. If the node you're connecting to goes offline, you lose your connection, and you could have your channel auto-closed. Channels can also be unilaterally force-closed, which is a common complaint among users. Basically, it's still too much of a hassle for the average crypto user. > > **Slow Finality**: Transactions take 10 minutes to record, but exchanges generally wait up to [60 minutes](https://academy.binance.com/en/glossary/finality) for probabilistic-finality. Given that the largest mining pools have 30% hash power, that's still only a 74% chance of actual finality after 6 block recordings due to possibility of a withholding attack. (The probability of a successful 51% attack given in Satoshi's original Bitcoin whitepaper was greatly underestimated because it did not take into account PoW block withholding attacks.) > > **Lack of privacy**: All transaction history is public. Public blockchains are only pseudononymous, and one can use a Transaction Graph Analysis or Taint Analysis tool to figure out who you are by linking transactions. People can also guess your wealth by tracing your transactions through the blockchain. It only takes 1 mistake to link the rest of your transactions. Individual tokens are also not fungible for this same reason. > > **Slow updates**: Bitcoin evolves slowly due to requiring social consensus and Blockchain bureaucracy. Hard forks are voluntary and can take weeks to complete. The Bitcoin Core foundation is extremely conservative and averse to hard forks, as seen with the fork that created Bitcoin Cash. That's not necessarily bad, but it does mean that most developments to Bitcoin end up turning into separate coins instead of evolving the canonical chain. There are often months-long debates and years between before making updates. As a result, it is a conservative blockchain while other DLTs have evolved technologies and features way beyond it. > > **Limitations to transaction speed**: Due to aversion to change, Bitcoin is likely at its limit for transaction speed. It is a poor Medium of Exchange due to slow transaction speeds. > > - Increase block size: requires a hard fork, results in longer network propagation time) > - Decrease block time by lowering puzzle difficulty: increases chance of natural forks, increases acceleration of block size, leading to more storage bloat, all exchanges need to adjust the number of blocks until probabilistic finality, and increases the chance of miners holding orphaned blocks. > - Decrease the transaction size: requires a hard fork (e.g. SegWit 2017 fork, which after all that work, only reduced the size by 50%) > > **Smart Contracts**: Bitcoin doesn't support complex "smart" contracts with its very basic (procedural, stack-oriented, Forth-like) Bitcoin Script. The contracts enabled by Bitcoin Scripts are so basic that they're often non-script features built directly into other blockchains like timelock releases and multi-signature. It's extremely limited because you can't easily validate them, and miners typically put huge restrictions on what is allowed for security purposes. It's possible taproot could change that if it gets a ton of developer support, but Bitcoin Script is way behind all of its competitors in adoption, and it won't evolve fast enough due to Bitcoin's conservative governance. It would be pretty tedious to program anything complex using Bitcoin Script, but I suppose there's always someone who enjoys a challenge. > > **Unstable Store of Value**: Like most non-stablecoins, it has too much volatility to be considered a stable store of value, losing up to 80% of its purchasing-power after crashes. Like gold/silver, it is more of a speculative investment. > > (Disclaimer: I only own trace amounts of BTC.) ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz3duc/rcc_cointest_top_10_bitcoin_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from the last round** > > In general, the typical crypto enthusiast has accepted that Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other DLTs technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, there is no way Bitcoin would make it into the top 10 by market cap, and likely not even the top 100. It's still #1 only because it continues to maintain strong security because it was the first, and thus has the largest adoption and protection against Sybil attacks. > > ------------- > > These are its flaws: > > **Redundancy inefficiencies**: To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater redundancy. The more miners (specifically mining pools) there are, the harder it is to execute a 51% attack. This also means that there could be a million miners performing redundant actions vying for the next Bitcoin block. Nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, and inefficiency present for nearly all cryptocurrencies. > > **Mining energy Inefficiency**: PoW mining is inherently extremely energy inefficient because it's a competition. The more miners there are, the harder the mining puzzle becomes, adjusted every 2 weeks. The amount of energy needed for a single Bitcoin transaction in [Sept 2021, ~1800 kWh](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption), is roughly the same as the amount of energy used by a typical US household over 62 days. Blockchains require extra redundancy for computations and storage from each node that interacts with or validates the transaction. In comparison, other Byzantine Fault Tolerant distributed consensus methods such as BFT-Paxos and RBFT, SBFT used by Hyperledger Fabric are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x) and 10^4 x for storage. > > **Mining Centralization**: Mining is not something the average crypto user can do by themselves unless they join a mining pool. You also need an expensive and specialized high-end ASIC miner for SHA-256 mining in order to have a good chance of making a profit. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes or verify their mining pool operator's decisions, leading to centralization with mining pools. > > **Fees and Rising cost of transactions**: Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $2-10+ USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee). That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. The fees are so high you can't use them for everyday transactions. People complain about bank fees, but if I had to use Bitcoin for everday transactions for my bank and credit cards, I'd be racking $10000+ in fees yearly. As halvings continue and the BTC price can no longer keep up, the block reward will keep decreasing. Either transaction costs will eventually rise to cover the cost of block rewards, or Bitcoin will experience an ice age where all miners drop out except for the few miners who can acquire cheap ASIC rigs and the cheapest energy costs, leading to more centralization. > > **Layer 2 adoption issue**: In general, Layer 2 solutions have much less decentralization (e.g. fewer validation nodes) than Layer 1 and face low adoption issues. The Lightning Network, a Layer 2 network of state channels that use Hash TimeLock Contracts for Bitcoin, has seen very little adoption by volume even years after introduction. It's a hassle to use for many reasons. It requires you to lock funds in a state channel, which also costs a transaction fee to open and close. It requires nodes to be online most of the time for connectivity. If the node you're connecting to goes offline, you lose your connection, and you could have your channel auto-closed. Channels can also be unilaterally force-closed, which is a common complaint among users. Basically, it's still too much of a hassle for the average crypto user. > > **Slow Finality**: Transactions take 10 minutes to record, but exchanges generally wait up to [60 minutes](https://academy.binance.com/en/glossary/finality) for probabilistic-finality. Given that the largest mining pools have 30% hash power, that's still only a 74% chance of actual finality after 6 block recordings due to possibility of a withholding attack. (The probability of a successful 51% attack given in Satoshi's original Bitcoin whitepaper was greatly underestimated because it did not take into account PoW block withholding attacks.) > > **Lack of privacy**: All transaction history is public. Public blockchains are only pseudononymous, and one can use a Transaction Graph Analysis or Taint Analysis tool to figure out who you are by linking transactions. People can also guess your wealth by tracing your transactions through the blockchain. It only takes 1 mistake to link the rest of your transactions. Individual tokens are also not fungible for this same reason. > > **Slow updates**: Bitcoin evolves slowly due to requiring social consensus and Blockchain bureaucracy. Hard forks are voluntary and can take weeks to complete. The Bitcoin Core foundation is extremely conservative and averse to hard forks, as seen with the fork that created Bitcoin Cash. That's not necessarily bad, but it does mean that most developments to Bitcoin end up turning into separate coins instead of evolving the canonical chain. There are often months-long debates and years between before making updates. As a result, it is a conservative blockchain while other DLTs have evolved technologies and features way beyond it. > > **Limitations to transaction speed**: Due to aversion to change, Bitcoin is likely at its limit for transaction speed. It is a poor Medium of Exchange due to slow transaction speeds. > > - Increase block size: requires a hard fork, results in longer network propagation time) > - Decrease block time by lowering puzzle difficulty: increases chance of natural forks, increases acceleration of block size, leading to more storage bloat, all exchanges need to adjust the number of blocks until probabilistic finality, and increases the chance of miners holding orphaned blocks. > - Decrease the transaction size: requires a hard fork (e.g. SegWit 2017 fork, which after all that work, only reduced the size by 50%) > > **Smart Contracts**: Bitcoin doesn't support complex "smart" contracts with its very basic (procedural, stack-oriented, Forth-like) Bitcoin Script. The contracts enabled by Bitcoin Scripts are so basic that they're often non-script features built directly into other blockchains like timelock releases and multi-signature. It's extremely limited because you can't easily validate them, and miners typically put huge restrictions on what is allowed for security purposes. It's possible taproot could change that if it gets a ton of developer support, but Bitcoin Script is way behind all of its competitors in adoption, and it won't evolve fast enough due to Bitcoin's conservative governance. It would be pretty tedious to program anything complex using Bitcoin Script, but I suppose there's always someone who enjoys a challenge. > > **Unstable Store of Value**: Like most non-stablecoins, it has too much volatility to be considered a stable store of value, losing up to 80% of its purchasing-power after crashes. Like gold/silver, it is more of a speculative investment. > > (Disclaimer: I only own trace amounts of BTC.) ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz3duc/rcc_cointest_top_10_bitcoin_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

SuperDuperPower

Isn’t that what BCH is?

bitcoincashautist

"Bitcoin" is an invention, not necessarily a particular blockchain, so both BTC and BCH are Bitcoin even if they took different path. However, the market made its decision back in 2017 and so the term "Bitcoin" applies to both the invention and a particular instance of it. When it comes to "true vision" arguments, I know some BCHers like to argue-ad-whitepaper but I don't like that argument, it's essentially an argument from authority fallacy. The whitepaper is not forward-binding in how the invention continues to evolve. No man is perfect and can see it all, and serve everyone, not even Satoshi. Future of P2P cash depends not on people executing (their view of) Satoshi's vision but THEIR OWN VISION for P2P cash. I'm not here to execute a "dead" man's vision, but my own vision, and I want to see P2P cash exists, I want to see it be uncensorable, unstoppable, empowering, enabling! Many want to see such P2P cash, and having visions of many people aligned around P2P cash will move things forward, and I'm seeing some good alignment in BCH community.

BewareOfShills

Yeah thank the BTC maxis for brigading everyone that talks about BCH. Outside the crypto bubble BCH is doing really well. Ton of development and adoption. Will be one of the strongest coins when the hype bursts and it is more about fundamentals-

BewareOfShills

Everything you mentioned is custodial. Flexa - custodial Strike - custodial Visa - of course custodial >People can use L2 on either to send payments cheaper than a BCH transaction without giving up custody. L2s have their use case but you also give something up if you rely on them. LN for example is a mess, almost all wallets are semi or fully custodial to work around the problems. ETH will go PoS to scale, which has its own drawbacks so I do not consider it for sound money. That is the reason why Big blockers forked. There is nothing like self custodial on chain PoW transaction. And BCH is king in that category.

big--if-true

Could easily happen with more adoption on Bitcoin-Cash (BCH) for actual local economies around the world: https://whybitcoincash.com/

CointestAdmin

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from the last round** > > In general, the typical crypto enthusiast has accepted that Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other DLTs technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, there is no way Bitcoin would make it into the top 10 by market cap, and likely not even the top 100. It's still #1 only because it continues to maintain strong security because it was the first, and thus has the largest adoption and protection against Sybil attacks. > > ------------- > > These are its flaws: > > **Redundancy inefficiencies**: To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater redundancy. The more miners (specifically mining pools) there are, the harder it is to execute a 51% attack. This also means that there could be a million miners performing redundant actions vying for the next Bitcoin block. Nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, and inefficiency present for nearly all cryptocurrencies. > > **Mining energy Inefficiency**: PoW mining is inherently extremely energy inefficient because it's a competition. The more miners there are, the harder the mining puzzle becomes, adjusted every 2 weeks. The amount of energy needed for a single Bitcoin transaction in [Sept 2021, ~1800 kWh](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption), is roughly the same as the amount of energy used by a typical US household over 62 days. Blockchains require extra redundancy for computations and storage from each node that interacts with or validates the transaction. In comparison, other Byzantine Fault Tolerant distributed consensus methods such as BFT-Paxos and RBFT, SBFT used by Hyperledger Fabric are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x) and 10^4 x for storage. > > **Mining Centralization**: Mining is not something the average crypto user can do by themselves unless they join a mining pool. You also need an expensive and specialized high-end ASIC miner for SHA-256 mining in order to have a good chance of making a profit. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes or verify their mining pool operator's decisions, leading to centralization with mining pools. > > **Fees and Rising cost of transactions**: Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $2-10+ USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee). That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. The fees are so high you can't use them for everyday transactions. People complain about bank fees, but if I had to use Bitcoin for everday transactions for my bank and credit cards, I'd be racking $10000+ in fees yearly. As halvings continue and the BTC price can no longer keep up, the block reward will keep decreasing. Either transaction costs will eventually rise to cover the cost of block rewards, or Bitcoin will experience an ice age where all miners drop out except for the few miners who can acquire cheap ASIC rigs and the cheapest energy costs, leading to more centralization. > > **Layer 2 adoption issue**: In general, Layer 2 solutions have much less decentralization (e.g. fewer validation nodes) than Layer 1 and face low adoption issues. The Lightning Network, a Layer 2 network of state channels that use Hash TimeLock Contracts for Bitcoin, has seen very little adoption by volume even years after introduction. It's a hassle to use for many reasons. It requires you to lock funds in a state channel, which also costs a transaction fee to open and close. It requires nodes to be online most of the time for connectivity. If the node you're connecting to goes offline, you lose your connection, and you could have your channel auto-closed. Channels can also be unilaterally force-closed, which is a common complaint among users. Basically, it's still too much of a hassle for the average crypto user. > > **Slow Finality**: Transactions take 10 minutes to record, but exchanges generally wait up to [60 minutes](https://academy.binance.com/en/glossary/finality) for probabilistic-finality. Given that the largest mining pools have 30% hash power, that's still only a 74% chance of actual finality after 6 block recordings due to possibility of a withholding attack. (The probability of a successful 51% attack given in Satoshi's original Bitcoin whitepaper was greatly underestimated because it did not take into account PoW block withholding attacks.) > > **Lack of privacy**: All transaction history is public. Public blockchains are only pseudononymous, and one can use a Transaction Graph Analysis or Taint Analysis tool to figure out who you are by linking transactions. People can also guess your wealth by tracing your transactions through the blockchain. It only takes 1 mistake to link the rest of your transactions. Individual tokens are also not fungible for this same reason. > > **Slow updates**: Bitcoin evolves slowly due to requiring social consensus and Blockchain bureaucracy. Hard forks are voluntary and can take weeks to complete. The Bitcoin Core foundation is extremely conservative and averse to hard forks, as seen with the fork that created Bitcoin Cash. That's not necessarily bad, but it does mean that most developments to Bitcoin end up turning into separate coins instead of evolving the canonical chain. There are often months-long debates and years between before making updates. As a result, it is a conservative blockchain while other DLTs have evolved technologies and features way beyond it. > > **Limitations to transaction speed**: Due to aversion to change, Bitcoin is likely at its limit for transaction speed. It is a poor Medium of Exchange due to slow transaction speeds. > > - Increase block size: requires a hard fork, results in longer network propagation time) > - Decrease block time by lowering puzzle difficulty: increases chance of natural forks, increases acceleration of block size, leading to more storage bloat, all exchanges need to adjust the number of blocks until probabilistic finality, and increases the chance of miners holding orphaned blocks. > - Decrease the transaction size: requires a hard fork (e.g. SegWit 2017 fork, which after all that work, only reduced the size by 50%) > > **Smart Contracts**: Bitcoin doesn't support complex "smart" contracts with its very basic (procedural, stack-oriented, Forth-like) Bitcoin Script. The contracts enabled by Bitcoin Scripts are so basic that they're often non-script features built directly into other blockchains like timelock releases and multi-signature. It's extremely limited because you can't easily validate them, and miners typically put huge restrictions on what is allowed for security purposes. It's possible taproot could change that if it gets a ton of developer support, but Bitcoin Script is way behind all of its competitors in adoption, and it won't evolve fast enough due to Bitcoin's conservative governance. It would be pretty tedious to program anything complex using Bitcoin Script, but I suppose there's always someone who enjoys a challenge. > > **Unstable Store of Value**: Like most non-stablecoins, it has too much volatility to be considered a stable store of value, losing up to 80% of its purchasing-power after crashes. Like gold/silver, it is more of a speculative investment. > > (Disclaimer: I only own trace amounts of BTC.) ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz3duc/rcc_cointest_top_10_bitcoin_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

Br0kenRabbitTV

In it's current state and price range yes it is. This wouldn't be the case if it got big though with a high price, take a look at how the fees and scaling system works. But can confirm, even with LN option, it is used more than BTC on my stores in 2022. BCH and XMR are the best options, DASH is not bad either... a lot of people pay me in LTC though it has the same path plan as BTC and is only good in it's current low price state without needing a side chain, though still 4x better than BTC... If privacy is not a concern BCH wins hands down, next XMR if privacy is needed.

big--if-true

Just use scaling blockchain like Bitcoin-Cash so the same amount of power will process VISA levels of transactions, which actually is more ECO-friendly than current companies. Unlike Litecoin and Bitcoin, Bitcoin-Cash (BCH) scales on chain with bigger blocks. https://whybitcoincash.com/

Giga79

But Ethereum is non custodial...? And so is Bitcoin? I don't grasp your point. People can use L2 on either to send payments cheaper than a BCH transaction without giving up custody. I simply mentioned a few centralized entities have started using this to service their own needs, so by competing with them you're in essence competing with the L1 they're using to provide that service. You can DIY without VISA and reap the same benefit, it's not like they have special access.