Quote from: chopstick on November 09, 2017, 03:50:52 PM

As someone who bought their first Bitcoin in 2012 for $20,

Indeed, I can't help but laugh at all the thousands of newcomers who just read r/bitcoin and suddenly think they are scaling experts. That Bitcoin should be able to run a node on every Raspberry Pi in Afghanistan. Yada yada yada. This is psychologically manipulated groupthink. Let's face it - many of the people getting into Bitcoin today are "newbies" who weren't very smart or educated in the first place. But they all like to act like they are, ESPECIALLY when it comes to their opinions on the Blocksize debate - an opinion that was only formed through reddit. Oh boy do they love repeating those opinions, and screaming down anyone who disagrees, like a bunch of drunken fratboys who think they are about to lose their virginity. Only a very small minority are capable of using logic or reason.

It's both amusing and kind of sickening to watch happen.

Anyway, now that the dust has settled and the "1mb forever" crowd has won, Legacy Bitcoin will likely never scale in any meaningful kind of way - Meaning Legacy BTC will never be anything more than a speculator's toy to get rich, a gateway to altcoins and FIAT and a settlement layer.

However, I still fully expect the combined speculator and institutional investor money to take Legacy Bitcoin to 50 - 100K and beyond. However, it will become impossible to move coin at some point on the main chain , with $100+ fees, making a very large percentage of BTC wallets unspendable. At that point, the vast majority of Crypto users and commerce will have already moved to either Bitcoin Cash, Monero or Ethereum. In the long long run, 5+ years, I fully expect either Bitcoin Cash, Monero or Ethereum to become the #1 coin with the highest market cap. It's inevitable now that Bitcoin will never scale - and let's be honest, Lightning Network will either never exist or will never deliver as promised --- which means BTC is going to be stuck where it is now from the scaling perspective, with only a few band-aids thrown on top, likely forever -- unless the miners finally grow a pair, say enough is enough and stand up to the bought out Corporate shills at Blockstream, but I'm not holding out hope for that outcome at all.

Pretty much how I see things, too. what was the original bitcoin project is now scattered to the wind, not that segwit2x was any better. The actual process of getting people onto the payment network and putting a little cash into a decentralised value system is now on hold until the people who object to the fintech takeover of bitcoin can agree on which of the myriad other options to have as a new common standard. This may take ages. I personally have stopped introducing people to bitcoin and getting them to try it out because it no longer works very well, and core's plan is to never improve the situation. Not to mention that the ASIC arms race is turning into an environmental disaster.