Quote from: smooth on February 09, 2015, 12:10:23 AM

Quote from: cypherdoc on February 08, 2015, 11:21:20 PM

Quote from: smooth on February 08, 2015, 10:45:52 PM

Quote from: justusranvier on February 08, 2015, 10:39:14 PM

Who controls bitcoin?

Quote

Coinbase, BitStamp, and Blockchain.info upgrade. These nodes provide a lot of the infrastructure for Bitcoin, so if they do not upgrade, Bitcoin New will be a lot less useful. However, these nodes are in it for profit, so they will tend to go where the money is. They cannot necessarily afford to wield the influence they might have at the risk of short-term losses.

He's totally wrong about that. All three of those are startup companies that exist and are funded in order to achieve a large future payoff, generally at the explicit cost of short term losses. They will do what they feel provides the best long term payoff. Avoiding short term losses is relatively to entirely unimportant to them.

That still may not be the choice of fork that he or you or I would prefer however.

right. small start ups can also be investors.

altho generally, i think he's right. the bigger they get, the more they are beholden to other shorter term investors in the company, to payrolls, to fixed and variable expenses, and then to IPO's and being public.

The recent Coinbase funding round was at a valuation of $400 million. There is likely at least a factor of 10 from that to where they want to be before cashing out. (Of course if things go poorly they may cash out lower or not at all.) The other companies on his list are probably valued lower.

They won't sacrifice, or even jeopardize, the longer term potential for a level of meaningful success that would make a difference to a VC portfolio to protect the tiny revenues they are getting now from transaction fees. (Again, unless they give up on the longer term potential and are looking to recover something.) Although they haven't disclosed numbers, I doubt the current transaction fees come close to supporting even the current valuation. In a sense there is nothing in way of current revenues to protect.

Long shot VC backing of companies like Coinbase is a sort of leveraged play on BTC itself. They can't really succeed without BTC going much higher than 4 billion USD total cap. So I think he's wrong in considering them distinct from investors. His whole entrepreneurs vs. investors thread makes this mistake.

+1

And more generally, I think a lot of people make a misjudgment in assuming that actors in the bitcoin ecosystem will behave with only very short-term focus. Tim Swanson (@ofnumbers) is particularly bad about taking these absurdly narrow views and spitting out blog posts full of "analysis". Unfortunately his analysis is often not particularly useful because his assumptions are broken.