alleged 'illusion of bitcoin liquidity'? Citation requested.

alleged 'illusion of bitcoin liquidity'? Citation requested.

Perhaps the Bitcoin guys will eventually get their act together and figure out some way to fix the more egregious problems. But how often do you want to fork the blockchain getting there?

The difference between Bitcoin and Linux is that for Linux to advance, all that needs to happen is Linus Torvalds putting new changesets into git. With Bitcoin, you need to convince a large swathe of the user base that what you want to change is actually a good idea, and there is people's money involved (even if to a considerable degree it is only Monopoly money). This means that even changes that are fairly simple from a technical POV (like increasing the block size) become huge issues when viewed from the social/political angle, and it tends to limit the scope of technical fixes you can actually accomplish within an existing crypto-“currency”. Imagine what would happen if whenever Linus Torvalds was to publish a new version of the Linux kernel, more than half of the existing user base had to decide to adopt that new kernel before it could become official (and that's without these people having a financial stake in the old kernel).

OK, so you say that at some point there will be a completely new cryptocurrency that takes care of all of Bitcoin's problems and starts without Bitcoin's historical baggage, and we will all be using that instead of Bitcoin. Leaving aside the fact that it is unclear whether taking care of all of Bitcoin's problems is even possible, the problem with that is that Bitcoin takes up not just considerable mindshare but also billions of dollars' worth of people's “money”, and that makes it even more difficult for new alternatives to gain traction. Bitcoin had the big advantage that when it came out it was basically the only game in town, but anything new and different must be obviously better than Bitcoin to get anywhere at all – and that means “obviously better” to people who even now have no clear picture of how Bitcoin actually works and where its problems really are. If businesses have a hard time justifying buying into the major incumbent cryptocurrency, what makes you think they'll go for the flavour of the week instead? (Since you're so fond of comparing Bitcoin to Linux, imagine where Linux would be if when it came out people hadn't already been used to using Windows, and the computer industry hadn't been convinced – by hook or by crook – that Windows was the way to go. After all, in the real world, the fact that Linux was obviously better than Windows in various important and tangible respects, like being virtually virus-proof, didn't help its widespread adoption at all. Now imagine that Windows is Bitcoin and Linux is your favourite new cryptocurrency.)