Hacker News Reader

Comment by liquidify | Hacker News Reader

Keep in mind that bitcoin is software. It can, and will be upgraded. If Ethereum ends up leading the way with proof of stake and it ends up being a success, then there is no reason to believe that bitcoin wouldn't follow in its footsteps. Crypto is a concept, as much as it is an individual coin game. Bitcoin may not end up being the leader, but your money will definitely change in the future, and it will absolutely be because of crypto currencies.

View on HN

> Keep in mind that bitcoin is software

Sort of. The miner pools have a lot invested in special-purpose hardware. It's not clear what would happen if people tried to make a change miners weren't interested in. Yes, you can threaten a hard fork, but angry miners could freeze transactions, revealing how not-so-decentralized it really is, destroying confidence in it as a currency.

This same logic was paraded around in 2017 and it's gone mostly nowhere in the years since.

Primarily because the bitcoin codebase got taken over by some bad actors. However, if ETH takes over in market share, BTC can either improve or become irrelevant. The people controlling bitcoin may be dumb, but they aren't dumb enough to let something else take over without a fight.

Exactly. If other currencies prove a better way, and especially if they start taking significant market share, there's nothing stopping bitcoin from following in its footsteps. There's just no point making such a big change when there's plenty of other coins out there to experiment with first.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com