Looking back to the teachings of Plato, we'd see that anarchy is not just bliss, but VERY SHORT in time vs the other forms of government (and by government we REALLY mean societal structure). So while we agree the world WOULD SHOULD and WILL go 100% de-centralized, it won't last bc wicked men with big stakes in competitive concepts to the freedom of decentralization wont' allow it. Just look at the dollar itself, if you held billions of the stuff, you wouldn't let some artificial digital currency cause it's value to plummet, you'd hire mercenaries and pay off politicians before you let that happen. So expect a battle in the future, and expect crypto to be made illegal to own. It's one thing to SAY you can hold a hidden decentralized coin, but it's another thing to risk jailtime to do so. Not many of us are criminals at heart, humans generally obey authority MOST of the time. And if the majority of humans obey the law, they don't take kindly to those who don't, it's like cheating. It doesn't matter if the cheater feels justified, what matters is the majority of people do NOT agree with him out of sheer "jealousy" but really it's just that "unfair" gene we all have-- the one that drive's all those psych experiments like "Prisoner's Dilemma" etc...
At some point in the future, when the powers make it all illegal, one will have to decide whether to join the dark side or the light side of the force. Ironically, the "dark side" is probably the moral superior to the light side, but that doesn't mean good honest hard working people will choose the dark side.
In theory the forking makes total sense. In practise, well, that's another matter. Most votes will be cast in self-interest, not for the "better product" or "better game". This is why many times a benign dictator is far superior than a democracy. Democracies, in the purest form, quite frankly are dark dark things, similar to how people VIEW anarchy. Ironic, but true. Benign dictatorship is the thing of Solomon and David in the Bible, whereas democracy is the thing of mob rule and the crucifixtion. Not getting religious here, just referencing stories most everyone knows due to Bible being one of the oldest books. We'd use Beowulf but the story just isn't as broad, eh?
Our big question is, how flawed is bitcoin, and will this lead to a Google vs AltaVista moment in the history of this stuff. If bitcoin is AltaVista, then what is the next Google? That's what we should be researching. Which lead's us into the next article planned-- Raiblocks. They may have arrived at something even Satoshi and Szabo didn't vet.
your last statement is true, so long as the bad fork goes to zero value. But in say Bitcoin Cash, it's not, and in fact it's been gaining in Bitcoin since inception. So effectively it's been acting like a doubling of the 21mm bc indeed, there MIGHT be room for both, as you say.
I guess I put the possibility at zero that the right arrangement or rollout happens for any project/coin/platform/protocol/consensus. So the ideas will need to evolve. Without running the experiments and seeing which ones work as they scale, we will be stuck in endless debate. Technology doesn't wait for endless debate -- it moves on without us.
I agree that the best technology may not win out, but I think that will have to do with how a given platform combines a series of variables and ultimately how they help people get from A to B (transferring money, data, identify, etc...). In the end, there will not be a single winner, but a series of winners who best address their respective problems. And the variables at play include the tech, transaction fees, open vs closed source, game theory, economic incentives for all participants, and many more... The bigger a platform gets, the more people/businesses have serious money tied up in it, the more likely a community is to fracture over how these variables combine.
No one knows how their platform will work in the wild any more than a poet knows how readers will interpret the poem.Dan Larimer found easier to move onto new projects to refine his ideas than change the existing projects -- and so he forked himself from BitShares to Steem to EOS.
So you're right ... we need to keep an eye out for the next thing. And you're also right -- the next thing might already be here now.
Exciting times, huh?
If history is any judge, typically only a handful survive. Internets of 1999 now boiled down to VERY few long term winners: Netflix, Amazon, Expedia, and maybe ebay yahoo and aol depending on how you view long term success. same should be true of crypto, only we'd argue there's less technology in crypto, so possibly even less than a handful of winners.
Last comment ... need to see how far we can push the boundaries on the right side of this page ... 👉👉👉
I wonder if it will be difficult to tell how many companies emerge as successful. Could a bunch of decentralized platforms emerge that allow for a wide spectrum of companies successfully innovating on top. There will certainly be some huge winners, but there may be a long tail of smaller businesses making a run of it, too. That's my hope, anyway.