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Comment by arzt | Hacker News Reader

You'd hope the chain with the most utility wins out.

They'll all continue. Who wants one bubble when you can have three? The last fork resulted in people doubling their coin holdings. Another fork means another doubling and people will buy/sell on that chain, too. Once again, the current market participants will by extracting wealth from new market participants.

Except that Bitcoin Cash is pretty much worthless (~300USD) compared to BTC (5500USD). I wish my money had doubled, it's closer to a 5-6% increase instead.

To be pedantic, I said doubling their coin, not doubling their USD equivalent. And who's gonna complain about 5-6% in free gains?

And that's assuming speculation doesn't continue to inflate the price of those alternative coins.

Full-history forks (or "dividend forks", to give the hot new euphemism) are all the rage. I'm actually surprised in retrospect that it took until 2017 for someone to think of this trick, particularly given ETH vs ETC a whole year before ... https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2017/10/06/bitcoin-gold...

The overwhelming use case for cryptos is speculation. Drugs and ransomware are a distant second and third. (Not sure which is winning at the moment - lotta darknet markets are down right now, and users are increasingly just not paying ransomware. Of course, solid data on any of this is hard to come by, even as I try to follow it closely ...)

So the question would be "which is most useful for speculation?" You'd need to think about exchanges, exchangeability (to other cryptos or to actualmoney), liquidity, how manipulable the price is (which could be an advantage or disadvantage for these purposes) ...

While I don't disagree that speculation is the primary use case, I think the criminal side is way overstated. I use Bitcoin monthly to pay bills in my origin country, and I do it because the banks there suck and transfering money is bureaucratic and online access basically doesn't work from abroad (you get frequently blocked due to "suspicious access" and told to unblock "at a nearby ATM").

Nobody writes articles about people like me because that story doesn't attract clicks.

Which is the fundamental problem with this analogy. Having more people who use the same cryptocurrency as you increases its utility to you. Having more people on the same train as you mostly just makes your journey more cramped and miserable.

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