What's wrong with Bitcoin?

In the last article, we discussed examples of cryptocurrencies that did not meet our selection criteria at all and threw them in the trash.

And they began to ask me: “Nadya, why rummage through all the garbage? Why not just buy bitcoin, which is already recognized everywhere, even by banks, and be done with it?”

But my dear friends, let's see how bitcoin meets our criteria for eligible cryptocurrencies. Together we will check it on all our points. You and I already know what can happen if these criteria are neglected. And bitcoin should not be an exception, as we have to carefully check every cryptocurrency.

More than 13 years have passed since the appearance of Bitcoin, and during this time a lot of interesting and important things have happened to it. But it is noteworthy that propaganda prefers to hush up a lot of information about bitcoin. Therefore, we will first have to understand the history of bitcoin and understand what path it has traveled during this time and what it is today.

And today I will be happy to share with you this unique information that you will not find anywhere else in Russian, and which is key to understanding the entire current state of cryptocurrencies. And we will check the compliance of bitcoin with our criteria in my next article.

So let's get started. As far as we know, Bitcoin appeared in 2009 with the slogan “a system of electronic cash transferred from user to user without intermediaries.”

If you speak English, be sure to read the original white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto.

https://www.bitcoin.com/bitcoin.pdf

Today, many have forgotten, and even more people never knew, that in the early years the attitude towards bitcoin was completely different from what it is now. Bitcoin was not treated as a way to speculate and get rich.

Then bitcoin was perceived as an alternative to money, independent of the system, capable of making a revolution. Articles, videos, blogs about bitcoin - everyone was around this very topic, and not at all the topic of speculation, as it is now. Why has everything changed so much? And I will explain to you now.

You can learn more about the course of events yourself by clicking on these safe links.

https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-debate-a-timeline-6108081dbada - a complete timeline of events (a lot of text and links)

https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-history-of-censorship-in-r-bitcoin-c85a290fe43 - a brief and incomplete history of censorship in the r/bitcoin subreddit

But, of course, all the information there is in English. Therefore, for those who find it difficult to do this, I will briefly describe the essence of what happened.

Everything is as usual. Of course, for the current money masters, the function of money independent of them that Bitcoin brought was like a pain in the neck. The money masters, convinced that it was impossible to stop Bitcoin, decided to lead it, and, as they used to, direct people along the path that does not threaten their power. They managed to capture the main communication channels of early bitcoin users in the reddit community (r/bitcoin) and on the bitcointalk forum. Through their moderators, they were able to establish their own censorship there, as well as launch a massive disinformation campaign.

By the way, in Russia censorship does a comptelety hatchet job. The bitcointalk forum has been blocked in Russia for a long time.

 As a result of this censorship and disinformation in these communities, which the public considered and still consider to be the main ones, there was a quiet and imperceptible change in the essence of bitcoin from “electronic cash system” to “digital gold” and “store of value”. The exiled early bitcoin users who continue to stick to Satoshi Nakamoto's idea of electronic cash have united in another community on reddit (r/btc).

 The split of the community culminated in the split of the bitcoin blockchain itself on August 1, 2017, into two parallel independent branches. Since both branches are a continuation of the same blockchain, the coins continued to exist in both branches. That is, if, for example, someone had one bitcoin before the split, then after the split he had one bitcoin in both branches.

The branch, which was headed by the money masters, kept the BTC ticker on the exchanges. The development of this branch continues under the control of the money masters by the Blockstream company. This company was established in 2014 by the AXA banking group.

https://www.axavp.com/avp/blockstream/ - AXA Group is the main investor in Blockstream.

 In this branch, the number of transactions that the network is able to process is limited, which makes it impossible for it to be widely used as a means of payment. Therefore, this branch has turned from electronic cash into “digital gold” and “store of value”.

The other branch, which retained and developed the function of electronic cash, became known as Bitcoin Cash, and received the BCH ticker. The development of this branch is continued by several independent development teams who continued the development of bitcoin, as intended by Satoshi Nakamoto's plan. Satoshi himself noted back in 2010 that all temporary restrictions introduced to protect the developing network could easily be lifted.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg15366 – Satoshi back in 2010 explains plan to increase block size

Therefore, in this branch, the number of transactions is limited only by the technical capabilities of the network, which are constantly growing both in the process of developing computer technology and the Internet, and as a result of improving the network itself.

 Of course, after such a surprise in the form of a parallel blockchain branch, all the power of censorship, disinformation and propaganda, owned by modern money masters, was brought down on Bitcoin Cash in order to discredit and demonize it. And in order to win most of the hash power of the miners, after the split, the BTC branch was simply pumped with money by buying up coins, because the money masters have lots of this very money.

An explanation needs to be made here. The maximum hash power with which it is still profitable to mine, that is, to earn on transaction processing, is proportional to the block reward in dollar terms, and this reward is proportional to the price of the cryptocurrency.

Thus, due to the actions of the owners of money, it has become more profitable to earn on the mining of "golden bitcoin" than on Bitcoin Cash.

As a result, hash power simply follows price. Having won hash power in such a simple way, the conquerors announced that BTC is the real Bitcoin, which the miners allegedly decided so.

Translating the above into philistine language, I want to clarify the following. Every transaction is processed by computers of people. The owners of such computers are called miners. As a reward for this activity, miners receive transaction fees and new minted coins. And the higher the price of the cryptocurrency, the greater their earnings.

As a result of the artificial increase in the value of bitcoin, most miners have become involved in Bitcoin instead of other cryptocurrencies.

As a result of such actions, the topic of "electronic cash" was pushed far into the background. And the topic of speculation on bitcoin, on the contrary, was bulged out so that it was evident everywhere.

Censorship of the owners of money is fully operational. For example, on YouTube channels that have comment filtering enabled, you will not be able to write any mention of Bitcoin Cash in the comments, as such a comment is automatically deleted by the system. But lately YouTube has turned off comment filtering on most channels.

What are the consequences of such a takeover of Bitcoin? In 2016, Bitcoin was processing over 200,000 transactions per day. Major retailers such as Microsoft and Steam began accepting bitcoin as payment, and it seemed like the newly born currency was breaking through to the mainstream. But all this collapsed because the Bitcoin seized by the banks was unable to cope with the increased number of transactions. The cost of a transaction in many cases began to exceed the amount of the transaction itself.

And the working Bitcoin, that is, Bitcoin Cash, was pushed far into the background by propaganda, as an allegedly losing branch. As a result, major retailers stopped accepting bitcoin as payment.

But over time, smaller merchants, understanding the performance of Bitcoin Cash, began to accept it. And today, Bitcoin Cash is the most common cryptocurrency accepted by merchants as payment both online and offline, that is, in ordinary stores.

https://map.bitcoin.com/ - a map showing stores that accept Bitcoin Cash around the world.

So, friends, the propaganda system wants to turn every good idea into shit. But thinking people, like you and me, can look into this and choose things that really help development and evolution.

In the next article, we will check both Bitcoin branches according to the eligibility criteria and draw our conclusions.