It starts with one of the most condescending, patronizing statements it could make, given the subject matter: moves on to perhaps the most tortured metaphor in modern financial journalism: ...and then proceeds to ignore the words "gold" and "china" despite the fact that one of the forks is called Bitcoin Gold and despite the fact that 70% of all bitcoin miners are in China, behind the Great Firewall, where transaction speeds are a non-issue because the Chinese use BTC as a longterm store of value, not an exchange medium. Bitcoin will do what the Chinese want it to do. The Chinese want to use it to hide money from Xipeng. They don't care if takes four days to clear a payment; they rarely touch the shit anyway. All this cypherpunk/silicon valley nonsense ignores the true issue: the illicit use case will dominate until a legitimate use case becomes more prevalent, and the illicit use case needs no forking. .0587, mofo. Down from .12.An excellent article.
At its most basic level, the question that divides the community is a seemingly trivial one: how to upgrade the network to accommodate more transactions at any given time.
But because we’re talking about Bitcoin, we’re not just building one house. We’re making one house roughly every 10 minutes. And it’s not the same person or organization producing each house. The constructors can be anyone who buys the right equipment (in Bitcoin, these are called miners and are the people who own the equipment designed to solve the math problems that enable someone to add a new block to the blockchain) — and they can be located anywhere in the world, because after all, these “houses” (blocks of Bitcoin transactions) are virtual and live in the cloud.