The Hard Forks That Didn't Dilute Bitcoin

"Sure, bitcoin is scarce in its supply, but since it's effectively costless to clone the software and fork it, it's not scarce overall. Forks constitute effective dilution and render the Bitcoin system's commitment to a hard cap irrelevant."

For a moment in 2017, it seemed like Bitcoin was being forked on a weekly basis.

I'll confess to feeling a twinge of concern when bitcoin cash launched on Coinbase at $4,000 and it seemed like a genuine possibility that it might surpass bitcoin.

Some particularly confident promoters have even gone as far as to claim their forks actually constitute the original Bitcoin, with the legacy chain being the imposter.

If any of these forks had meaningfully gained ground relative to Bitcoin, the critics would have had a point.

The fact that Bitcoin went through it and we saw what happened and we saw that the community would defend Bitcoin, that's what gives a person like me confidence to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into bitcoin.

Bitcoin sv accounts for a measly 1%.Transaction fees, used to guarantee the sustainability of miner revenue and hence network security in the long term, are robust in bitcoin and practically nonexistent in BCH and BSV. If they can't muster demand for their blockspace - and I don't see any catalysts to reverse this trend - they will be forced to reintroduce inflation, centralize block signing, or devise some new consensus mechanism.

If you eliminate non-monetary OP RETURN transactions, Bitcoin Cash settles about 12,000 transactions a day, compared to Bitcoin's ~350,000.

Three years on, the core hypothesis of Bitcoin Cash - that cheaper blockspace would be more amenable to vibrant on-chain commerce - looks more remote than ever.

Bitcoin is designed such that users agree over a very narrow set of principles, in order to obtain global convergence on a UTXO set.