I just finished reading Hijacking Bitcoin by Roger Ver. I was interested in reading this book because Catherine Austin Fitts said it was an important book to read about BitCoin (BTC) as a warning. After the recent publication of this book, it looks like the US gov is going after Roger for taxes over 10 years go (which is interesting timing to me). In addition, I have been curious about other BitCoin coins that use the same open source base code (like BCH & BSV).
In short, there was/is a code war that pits the BTC crew (who have a close monopoly on fees) and the competing coins. The BTC crew appear to be restricting code changes to benefit themselves financially via higher fees charged to the network (by restricting block sizes) and may have other goals (state actors? CIA?, WEF?). The public text about this is called “big blockers” versus “small blockers.” Big blocks allow faster transaction processing for less fees because more data can be put in a big block. The downside its that nodes on the network need to have more hardware to process transactions, cutting out the small guy. The original payment process in BTC does not appear to be implemented in a serious way. This feeds into the argument that BTC is a “store of value” which may be a lie. In addition, competing coins who switched code often found themselves with denial of service attacks.
To “solve” the speed/ fee problems, layer 2 software (I call them a bolt on) such as Lightning are created to solve the issue with BTC (“layer 1”). It means more revenue and control. A stunning fact presented is that transaction numbers have been going down since 2018. Apparently more people are using custodial wallets on exchanges, etc.
To me it looks like the BTC crew have a good thing going and are not about to change anything until the network fails (which it has apparently done two times). The other BitCoin platforms are implementing changes and are competing as separate forks of the open source code. Roger easily convinced me that they probably are superior to BTC as it stands now. The BTC could make things better for users, but why would they if the money is flowing in and adoption is growing? The blocker argument reminds me of the statement made by Bill Gates in the 1980’s that 640K is all the RAM you need.
I have lightly tried several other coins and I can see they are apparently superior as far as cost and performance. For example, “Litecoin is the right coin as a means of exchange.”
This review was largely outputting Roger Ver’s ideas. He spoke a bit about coder personalities and I could relate.
