There's a significant difference between the social consensus you use to pick Bitcoin and the social consensus that you use to resolve a proof of stake fork. With Bitcoin, you choose it once and then it's stable forever.
With Etherum's social consensus, you have to re-choose your platform every time someone creates an alternate history. It's an ongoing process which can cause a lot of confusion and disruption in the future. It's a lot worse than a system you can be confident will not change once you have gotten set up.
The value of Bitcoin is that it is very difficult to manipulate. In this, we have already seen it succeed repeatedly. The inflation is the same, legacy nodes all still work, nobody has ever invalidated addresses or taken money they didn't have the keys to.
Yes, with bitcoin you lose your money if someone can find you and decides to hit you with a wrench repeatedly, and then somehow they get away without conviction of assault. In PayPal, you can lose access to your account simply because some low salary moderator flagged your account as violating their restrictive terms of service.
Just because bitcoin hasn't solved the problem entirely doesn't mean that it's not a big step forward. It's a big step forward!
> There's a significant difference between the social consensus you use to pick Bitcoin and the social consensus that you use to resolve a proof of stake fork. With Bitcoin, you choose it once and then it's stable forever.
A government with sufficient means can freely create a new history for Bitcoin and make that history canon. The work in blocks originating earlier in the chain is exponentially less than the blocks succeeding it.
>The value of Bitcoin is that it is very difficult to manipulate. In this, we have already seen it succeed repeatedly. The inflation is the same, legacy nodes all still work, nobody has ever invalidated addresses or taken money they didn't have the keys to.
The value of Bitcoin is whatever people believe it's worth. Control of the hashing power is trivial, and actually free, for the government of China. All they have to do is march their army into the mining warehouses and seize the means of production. Then there's nothing to stop Bitcoin from becoming the PBOCoin, with blacklists, inflation, and so on.
You could argue that, "Wait, it has the most work but it's not the valid chain! People elsewhere will continue the original chain." Okay, so which is the real chain? The answer is: whatever people believe is the real chain! And it comes back to being 100% established socially and emotionally by human beings.
Fun history of Bitcoin/cryptocurrency forks:
1. Value overflow bug in Bitcoin creates two Bitcoin chains, one with a person with 2 billion Bitcoins and one without. Which chain is the real Bitcoin chain? This is the first incident where 'the code is the contract except when no wait it's not'.
2. Berkeley DB bug makes two Bitcoins, just pick one and roll with it.
3. Ethereum DAO bug fiasco inadvertently creates two socially constructed versions of Ethereum, Ethereum Spicy Rollback Edition and Ethereum Classic. Which is the real Ethereum?
4. Bitcoin people can't agree with one another on anything, so one group of Bitcoin people make 8 MB Malleable Cash Bitcoin and another group makes Segwit2X Bitcoin, but some other people don't agree with the 2X part so maybe they'll make Segwit-not-2x Bitcoin too.
Which is the 'real' cryptocurrency that merits 2000 cheeseburgers of purchasing power today? Why, whatever we believe it to be!
> With Etherum's social consensus, you have to re-choose your platform every time someone creates an alternate history.
IIUC to get to the "every time" you're talking about just once, more money would need to be invested by attackers than it would cost to 51% attack bitcoin.
With Etherum's social consensus, you have to re-choose your platform every time someone creates an alternate history. It's an ongoing process which can cause a lot of confusion and disruption in the future. It's a lot worse than a system you can be confident will not change once you have gotten set up.
The value of Bitcoin is that it is very difficult to manipulate. In this, we have already seen it succeed repeatedly. The inflation is the same, legacy nodes all still work, nobody has ever invalidated addresses or taken money they didn't have the keys to.
Yes, with bitcoin you lose your money if someone can find you and decides to hit you with a wrench repeatedly, and then somehow they get away without conviction of assault. In PayPal, you can lose access to your account simply because some low salary moderator flagged your account as violating their restrictive terms of service.
Just because bitcoin hasn't solved the problem entirely doesn't mean that it's not a big step forward. It's a big step forward!