What is Bitcoin? Such a simple question, such a variety of answers. A correct answer would be avoiding the question and answering it at the same time — what Bitcoin is depends on who you’re asking. To many people this isn’t a very satisfying answer. Surely there must be someone who knows. No, sorry, there isn’t. There’s no authority in Bitcoin because Bitcoin is not about authority. Bitcoin is the antidote to authority. It is whatever we, the community, decides that it is. As long as we can agree to do nothing to it unless we all agree, it will stay the same as it was the day before. This is why it’s so precious and valuable. It refuses to change prematurely. We all need to think it’s a good idea to change it before it changes.
A lot of participants disagree of course. Some of the first investors in the space set up online stores and built business models around Bitcoin’s cheap transaction fees in the network’s early days. Bitcoin didn’t always evolve into what they had envisioned which ruined a lot of business ideas and left a lot of these daredevils frustrated. One of these early investors happens to own a very influential dot com address for example. Another patented a way to use ASIC miners that doesn’t work with SegWit. The whole low fee narrative has been quite damaging to the network since there never really was any consensus about scaling to begin with. Higher fees shouldn’t really have come as a surprise to anyone. But, those who scream loud tend to be heard and now we’re in a situation where the average user has an even harder time to separate facts from fiction than before. What is fake and what is real when there’s no authority?
Luckily, Bitcoin is designed so that clever and well informed people will always win in the long run. If you see value in decentralization, scarcity and immutability then Bitcoin is for you and you will profit in the long run by just not spending it. If you care about transaction fees you should read up on the Lightning Network and try to help the community find real, long term scaling solutions instead of falling for some short sighted scam. Be patient.
If I’m wrong and there is some big corporate take-over conspiracy going on on that we maximalists all missed then cryptocurrency on the whole is a failure because then we failed to sustain decentralization. Bitcoin cash is a mutiny attempt at best and the block size increase that already happened on that chain legitimizes further increases. This will inevitably lead to more centralization. The bigger the block size, the bigger the cost of managing it. It’s all about incentives. Who benefits from what decision? Figure that out and you’ll also figure who’s trustworthy and who isn’t.