Good morning, fellow Steemians and cryptothusiasts. Today I thought I'd take a bit to talk about the huge white elephant that's sitting in the corner. Well... I suppose today in particular it's not sitting in the corner, exactly. It's pretty much in the center of the room if you're involved in crypto at all. It's Bitcoin. And it's trying to recover from a Bad Day. In the last five days bitcoin has lost nearly half of it's value, from a top of almost $20,000 to a low of $10,400 (so far), and since rebounded to some degree.
I started writing this post some time ago and then let it sit. I suppose it's fitting that it should get published on a day when BTC has been through a significant retracement.
The interesting thing to me about bitcoin, is that it's managed to find such huge success despite having such gigantic flaws. I've recently found myself thinking of bitcoin like the paternal Grandpa sitting in a place of authority at the head of the table. Everyone pays deference to him, because he's the oldest. He doesn't speak very often, but when he does it's with the authority and weight of his position within the family. Meanwhile the kids gathered around the table giggle and make fun of him because he doesn't understand all these new-fangled technologies, and he speaks in such an old dialect without ever using any of the trendy 'cool' words.
He even has a whole slew of siblings from his generation. Some of them are members of the family we'd rather not talk about, and some of them are vying for attention right alongside Grandpa Bitcoin. Uncle Bitcoin Cash, for instance. Oh wait... you didn't know that there were a bunch of other brothers and sisters out there? A lot of people don't. To date there are seven official bitcoin forks, with more in the works. Seven.
Do you know why there have been seven bitcoin forks in the last four months? It's because every developer working on the project is perfectly aware that bitcoin is a truly terrible technology in terms of being a usable currency. Even as a store of wealth it has significant problems. The challenge for bitcoin developers has been to evolve bitcoin into something that doesn't just get sent to the rest home to live out it's final days.
What's wrong with bitcoin, you ask? Anyone who has ever actually tried to use it to transfer value from one point to another will tell you that it is expensive to send, and slow to get there. There's also the lack of any privacy functions to the coin to consider, the fact that it has some major security weaknesses, and there's no consumer protection ability built in.
The other major problem with Grandpa Bitcoin (and indeed all of his siblings) is that they have essentially become centralized currencies. The whole idea that was originally penned in the bitcoin whitepaper was to take the control out of the centralized authorities and return it to the people. That's obviously not happening for bitcoin, ever. There's far too much money invested in mining farms at this point for the powers that be to allow a reversal of the centralized mining concept for bitcoin.
An interesting side effect of the endless forks is that it has made bitcoin even worse than it was. Hash power within the mining oligarchies gets diverted to other coins (coughbitcoincashcough). This only serves to further slow down the bitcoin network, making transactions even slower and more expensive.
Meanwhile, the second generation is sitting around the table and really enjoying their rise to power. Ethereum, Ripple, Dash, and Litecoin are all coming into their own positions of authority and influence. They've seen tremendous gains within the last year and are really feeling on top of the world. What they don't realize though, is that they are getting closer and closer to retirement age every day. The next generation is already coming along, and it's starting to nip at the heels of their authority.
This new generation incorporates a whole slew of new ideas that the old coins just can't wrap their heads around. Privacy. Speed. Safety and Security. Ease of use. Integration with existing platforms.
Want to send something to someone but you don't think it's anyone's business what you're sending? Want to use a cryptocurrency as a store of wealth but you don't think that should be public information? Zcash, Monero, Hush, and others are there to fill the bill.
Need to integrate blockchain technology into your transactional network so that you can log hundreds of thousands of transactions a day on a blockchain? Examples of this are real world retail transactions, the oncoming advent of the Internet of Things, or Access Control Cards for a secure manufacturing facility. Forget using any of the old coins. Universa and others are on the way to fill these needs.
Want to build your own enterprise-level decentralized app (d-app) for use inside your company to leverage blockchain technology without having to reinvent the entire thing? Hello, QTUM. Nice to meet you.
Would like to partcipate in an online community where the quality of someone's content is rewarded monetarily, giving incentive to the users to create only good quality content? Hello, STEEM.
None of the older generation is going to ever be able to do these things for us. Or if they ever get around to making it possible, they'll be too late because the others are way ahead of them. Integration and ultimately ease of use simply aren't what they were built for. Does that make them instantly irrelevant? Obviously not, as they will still be large and in charge for a while until the youngsters grow up a bit. The day is rapidly approaching though, when the next generation will graduate college and join the workforce.
When that time comes, what do you suppose is going to happen?
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