> The truth is that the game really isn’t zero sum.
You're right in the wrong direction. The game Core is playing is negative sum. Because if Bitcoin loses dominance there will never be an alternative to fiat. Because any dollar alternative will be subject to the rebuttal of “well, everyone used to say Bitcoin was going to be money, but now it’s an artifact of history. I can’t store value in this new crypto thing because there will always be a newer technology.” It will be the end of the experiment.
Any given shitcoin, longterm, is worth more with Bitcoin ascendant than not. When Bitcoin falls, the speculative value of their shitcoin will fall with it, and all that will remain is fee economies for Tether transfers.
Now, the issue at the core of all this is actually Core itself. They did everything they could to reject sustainably viable fee economies and real world use cases. Tether started as a project on Bitcoin, for example. Luke and Core did everything they could to chase Tether away. Now on almost all days the volume of USDT on TRON alone surpasses the daily volume of Bitcoin. The killer crypto money for payments is the US dollar.
Similarly, Core refuses to make the base layer fungible even though Satoshi himself described an implementation of ring signatures and said making the base layer private, if a solution was possible, would create “a much better, easier, more convenient implementation of Bitcoin”:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=770.msg8637#msg8637So now, similarly, everyone who needs to have reliable money has moved to Monero, because Core prematurely ossified the base layer, spent a decade dictating to the market that they actually wanted Lightning, and refused to implement a feature that Satoshi himself advocated because useless retarded faggots like Saylor said it was dangerous to their business model.
Core then reverses course, flying off the cliff at the last minute, and bends over backwards to implement Taproot, facilitate NFTs in Ordinals and EVM contracts via Citrea, but it is too little too late. These are *settled markets*. The winners and losers are already chosen. It would have been useful to have Ordinals at the height of the NFT craze, and it would have been useful to have Citrea back when people were actually building the products that defined the EVM. But this is a decade late, a Bitcoin short.
The “Bitcoin must solely be money” crowd refuses to make Bitcoin money. Instead of BIP110, what is needed is to implement fungibility in the base layer with Full Chain Membership Proofs and simply depreciate taproot, only allowing taproot transactions to flow out of taproot addresses. Get rid of the witness discount and “spam” stops immediately, because once again every byte is paying its fair share. That’s how you know Luke is a manipulative schemer who simply wants Patreon and Github Sponsors gibs: he advocates nothing that turns Bitcoin into money.
Anyways, Bitcoin is probably doomed. Paul might pull the plane up from its descent, but Bitcoin is probably going to continue to shed users because Core refuses to allow real world uses of blockchains in a timely manner, when there is still a chance to create a sustainably viable fee economy for Bitcoin, and the sole feature that is actually hands down required for Bitcoin to be money, one that was even advocated by Satoshi himself, is off limits because Core is under sway of useful idiots like Saylor and a bunch of scheming glowniggers who don’t want competitors to the dollar.
Regardless, Monero is the one thing that actually fulfills Satoshi’s vision of an alternative, useful, fungible and private currency. If you want to actually fulfill the vision of an alternative currency not under the control of the state, you should stop using Bitcoin and explain to people the above problems. Only a severe, sustained, long lasting bear market with an extremely low price can possibly save Bitcoin from the treasury companies. To save Bitcoin, we need to keep Bitcoin’s price low enough for long enough that Saylor kills himself.
