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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

No one who owns BTC wants it used for transactions. They want it to be an investment and go up forever, so they'll never go with a fork that allows it. It's like home owners in a neighborhood locking out new construction so their own homes raise in value.

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Of course Bitcoin is the digital crypto analogy for SF Bay Area NIMBYism :)

Christ, that's some deep snark!

Seems like the miners have a strong incentive to keep the "supply" of transactions artificially limited too, since it results in sky-high transaction fees for them.

Those who want an appreciable asset own it, those who want transactions use it.

You know, that's quite insightful. HOAs (Home Owners' Associations) are also responsible for some pretty egregious local/municipal legislative blockage as well.

That's a pretty broad generalization. Many of us work very hard to make Bitcoin usable for day-to-day transactions.

Sometimes a broad generalization is generally applicable even if not always specifically applicable.

But that was the original goal of Bitcoin — the paper states specifically transaxtions. I personally found it interesting when I bought shoes over Overstock via BTC earlier this year; only problem was my phone didn’t have a default QR scanner.

The original goal was to have transaction fees cover network processing costs, but anyone who does the math can quickly see that the number of transactions allowed by the current block size is an issue, and prevents bitcoin from scaling to visa/mastercard levels of usage.

The reason why this flaw was accepted back then was because "space is cheap", and "we can always make the blocks bigger later".

Basically, it was a known issue all along, and the plan all along was to evolve as needed. It was never intended to be a perfect solution from the get-go.

The problem now, is that people are actively preventing bitcoin from evolving.

> The problem now, is that people are actively preventing bitcoin from evolving.

So an 'evolving' BTC market is not a stable market. Doing something that increases the transaction speed is good, but doing something that changes the fundamental rules is not.

If your income is based upon artificial scarcity, then you're going to be invested in keeping it that way.

>they'll never go with a fork that allows it

Actually, I think that people would race to buy BTC before any fork, in order to get free money. (that explains why BCH has that volume/market)

I own bitcoin (and have for nearly five years) and I want it to be spendable as a currency again.

It realy seems the libertarian utopia story the way non libertarians envision it.

The main joke is satosi's people skills. A coin needs a community to launch it. It wil forever be asociated with it. Ponzi coin wil stay ponzi coin, porn coin wil stay porn coin etc

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