I've been on Steem for over 20 months now, when I first got around to read the whitepaper it felt like I was reading something that sounded "too good to be true". The fact that I stayed and didn't listen to FUD'ers was primarely cause I had happened to read upon Proof-of-Stake coin earlier in time when many were saying that they were "too experimental" and "unsafe" since they didn't require miners on the network but stakeholders. I had recently also been involved with Lisk so I was aware of how DPoS worked too.
Over time I've fallen in love with the currency more and more and to this day I don't understand how not more people are aware of its technological advantages, it reminds me a bit about the early days of blockchain when I felt the same. How can people not understand that you can send Bitcoin for no fees worldwide within a few hours and how different it is from banks or other transaction services such as Western Union. It took the world some time to get around it, when they did I had already moved on to Ethereum because Bitcoin started feeling like I was playing on a Game Boy when there was a Playstation I could spend time on instead. Now I'm here, again, getting bored of the Playstation but have just found out that there is another currency that let's me do so much more and at the same time earn more of it for my time playing with it. Compared to the Game Boy and Playstation it feels as if I've upgraded to the latest PC hardware with a 4k screen and unlimited frames per second. #pcmasterrace
Yet I am confused why most others are still throwing so much money at the old machines and don't seem to want to play on the new ones even though it offers them to try it out for free and if you spend enough time playing it you get one yourself.
It seems weird looking back that Bitcoin used to be known about its low transaction costs and how much better it was compared to older middlemen services. It thrived on it. Even today on Bitcoin.org you still see this on the front-page.
Yet only one of those stays true to this day which you can probably guess which one it is.
Some of you might know I may not be a fan of Blockstream and their future plans of a Lightning Network but its so early to be able to tell what really is going down so I don't want to misguide readers or that my words convince them to some trading actions they might later regret. For all I know these things I keep hearing lately could just be FUD attacks for another clone which could end up being worse than Bitcoin.
So please take the next video with a grain of Salt, the good thing about these hardforks is that if you haven't touched your Bitcoin which have been secure in cold wallets it probably means you still have an equal amount of your Bitcoin Cash too. Being on a platform that thrives on its censorship resistance though and knowing a lot of places where discussions about these would instantly get silenced or never even see the light of day - I think its important for us to try and look from all perspectives at things and how they are evolving.
For disclosure, I own neither BTC nor BCH and won't touch them unless I'm actively trading something else with them. I don't really understand why else they would on purpose leave blocks at 1 megabyte and make the confirmation times so slow, there are currently over 130,000 unconfirmed transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain and the recipients have no certainty in knowing when they will confirm to be usable. Even Ethereum has unconfirmed transactions now even though its over 50x faster than Bitcoin and can fit in more transactions per blocks, all because of some kitties.
Looking at blockchain.info this is a chart of the average cost per transaction in USD for Bitcoin right now.
It just feels so silly to me that a currency that marketed low transaction costs is becoming worse than the services it wanted to eliminate. It feels even more silly considering as Steemians we pay absolutely zero transaction fees and in the inner market don't even have to pay for trading fees which is what is making all these exchanges around us rich.
Are we just really really early adopters of a technologically advanced blockchain and the rest of the world hasn't caught up to us yet? Or are they just hearing about Bitcoin and it will take some time for them to find out about alternatives? For all we know the next pump in Steem price could be a few unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions away.
