Sztorc v. Armani debate

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5 years ago

For those of you who don't have 2.5 hours to sit through yet another BTC v. BCH debate, here's my tl;dr as a non-technical layperson.

Sztorc favors BTC because he believes that it will be too hard for BCH to overtake BTC. He says that even if the tech is indeed better with BCH, the network effect of BTC (number of users, number of txs, etc.) is so much greater that BCH has virtually no chance. He also thinks the path of just constantly increasing the block size is not viable. One major factor being that at some point you will reach a state where regular individuals will no longer be able to afford to run a full node. To mitigate the high fee problem, he believes in scaling with layer two solutions like Lightning Network. He also points out that despite BCH having much lower fees, we have seen over the last two years that users don't seem to care. They'd rather choose the network that is more secure despite the higher fees. In his mind, two years is a long time in crypto, and if people haven't switched over to BCH by now, it will most likely never happen.

Armani frames his support for BCH as a bet he has made on which chain has the best chance of succeeding as peer-to-peer electronic cash. He likens it to making a real estate investment in an area he thinks is undervalued. He acknowledges that in today's world, there are technical limits to scaling on chain, but he also believes we are so far from hitting those technical limits that the BCH community has time to find solutions to raise those limits before it is needed. He has built his business on BCH because his business requires low transaction fees in order to survive, and that is not something BTC can offer. He thinks other entrepreneurs will see the situation similarly. As far as he is concerned, BTC thought leaders don't care what is needed by entrepreneurs like himself, even though it will be the work of such entrepreneurs that give any of the Bitcoin networks their best chance of survival. Regarding Sztorc's concerns about the average person being able to run a full node, he says the average person doesn't need to run a full node. Nodes should be run by those who have an incentive to do so such as his business, and in the future, enough businesses will run nodes so that the network remains decentralized. As for the fact that BTC has ten times the number of transactions as BCH, Armani counters that the transactions on the BTC network today are almost entirely made up of speculators trading BTC on exchanges, and as such don't reflect the number of people actually using it as p2p electronic cash. He thinks Bitcoin is a generational project and there is still plenty of time for BCH to prove itself.

Overall, I think the debate did a good job of illustrating the main differences between BTC supporters and BCH supporters. What do you think?

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Avatar for Cain
Written by
5 years ago

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Awesome summary, Cain! I think a link to the actual debate would be really useful.

EDIT: Ok, found the livestream https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkJt20f8tw4&feature=youtu.be

EDIT2: We should detect links in comments.

EDIT3: And we do detect links now.

$ 0.31
5 years ago

good idea! i'll add it to the actual post.

$ 0.11
5 years ago

Great summary! Not my fave work from Vin, but that said also not bad. I know Steve Patterson was hammering him for his statement of BCH vision not to scale on-chain. I think that's a reasonable stance. As Justin Bons says, the block size is about striking that balance b/w what's technically possible w/o compromising security/integrity of the system by making less decentralized via raising cost to run node. Second Layer solutions, where trust is involved, will be a natural progression for utilizing the Bitcoin Blockchain. I believe tipprbot is an elegant Layer 2 pmt solution, if I'm not mistaken...

Also, I much more enjoyed the Bons vs Zucco debate. I love the technical stuff they were digging into, and the extremely rare civility & common decency of the debate was so refreshing & enjoyable/encouraging to see

$ 0.00
4 years ago

My first upvote...missed this!

$ 0.00
5 years ago