Has Bitcoin Killed Alt Season?

Bitcoin is up 50% since last year, with only the stock like token of Binance, BNB, increasing by more over the same period.

BCH is down 43% over a year. Eth -32%. XRP is in the red by 17% with only LTC the other green at 25%.

It used to be alternative coins to bitcoin, or altcoins for short, would gain a lot more than bitcoin because they were smaller, and thus needed less liquidity to increase in value.

They would take turns. XRP would rise, ETH, BCH, sometime Litecoin, even EOS, as well as all the other ones.

Arguably LTC and XRP sort of have this time too, but not quite to the same extent. While eth and bch seem reluctant to go up when bitcoin goes up, and far too keen to run down when bitcoin goes a bit down.

Neither has yet had their own show, with bitcoin firmly in command of the stage. So, is alt season dead?

The featured image above may be one reason why bitcoin is now 70% of the entire crypto market.

Some bitcoin sports betting site, sportsbet.io, has taken out advertising space on Watford FC’s sponsor board, with Watford being a football club that plays in the Premier League, the top division of English football.

This bitcoin company has decided to take advertising space not just for itself, but also for bitcoin too, with both so showed on Sky News or BBC Match of the Day when interviewing after Watford wins or loses or whatever.

That brings to mind all those early tacky internet ads, which gradually got a lot less tacky and a lot more professional and then they weren’t called internet ads anymore, just ads.

The bitcoin logo. Not eth, or XRP, or… well it’s in red so it could be BCH or bitcoin cola or whatever, but most people would probably just take it for BTC.

That’s symbolic of a far bigger theme. However much other cryptos may or may not like it, there’s bitcoin, which kind of stands for crypto and as an alternative to fiat, and then there are all these other cryptos that are an alternative to bitcoin, or for some of them, claim to be bitcoin itself.

BTC, however, is the one first integrated, most accepted for payment, in most, if not all, crypto exchanges, with the biggest ecosystem, the one attacked by bankers from JP Morgan to Roubini, and the one mentioned by Trump when he wanted to talk about Facebook’s Libra.

So bitcoin killed the alt season if it is indeed dead, but why did it die?

The crashing ethereum ratio is met by developers tentatively approving an algorithmic change, ProgPoW, that rumors now claim has some connection to Calvin Ayre of Craig Wright infame.

In cheap copies and perhaps even in an admission of sorts that eth is nothing more than a copy of bitcoin, now we have marketing guys playing eth maximalist and trying that two minutes hate thing with the “anger” directed at none other than Coinbase.

Pathetic as that may be, due to the tone of it rather than necessarily the content, there is a question whether ethereum is becoming the very thing that it kind of stood against, and thus attracted many to eth.

Tech wise, it is pretty much the same for now. Three years on since its rise due to the scalability debate, and of course there is no scaling at all in eth.

There won’t be for another two years by their own, perhaps optimistic, estimates. Nor do we really know what sort of scaling there will eventually be as it will turn out in practice.

In the meantime, employees of bitcoin dev studios – and their paid marketing idiots – like to go on about eth’s blockchain size being so big under the belief it has more capacity, and so to argue: but look at the costs.

That’s while eth runs at 1MB per 10 minutes, less than even bitcoin which with segwit can get to 2MB.

Obviously eth has different measures with gas and all that, but we did the napkin calculations once in bytes to compare, and found out there’s no difference in bytes.

There are obviously small differences in that eth has smart contracts and defi can be pretty cool, but without scale, it is small differences which can be counteracted just by Bakkt itself.

So they botched it, for now, at least going by the market reaction. That may change, but, it may change in bitcoin too where maybe they’ll figure out this two way peg thing and get their own smart contracts and perhaps other cool things and maybe even become less… wankers.

XRP is in perhaps an even bigger mess. Their own company – here there is actually one – is selling the coin below market rate or just giving it to their buddies so they can do it for them.

Their business model kind of has been exposed . There’s only so many banks you can bribe give rebate and there’s only so far you can go with: buy XRP on one exchange, sell it on another, and call it SWIFT.

No one accepts it for payments, and obviously this is not a store of value, so the gig is maybe up for Ripple which at times comes across as more arrogant than even the volunteer coders in BTC or other chains.

Like BCH. Here the problem starts with the name itself, and the logo because what logo does it even have, but in substance, it can actually be an outlier.

Because ultimately, Nakamoto may well be proven to actually be right. The problem there for them is that bitcoin is actually decentralized. So if “objective” opinion concludes Nakamoto was right, then bitcoin moves in that direction.

Meaning such things hanging off bitcoin like Liquid, Lightning Network, whatever, may eventually be seen as decoration.

To develop here a bit, Blockstream lost, if it was an attack or if their plan was to force some sort of settlement layer.

They lost because the people gave them the finger. There was the BCH fork, and generally the people said: yes, yes, but we’re buying, so f off.

Bitcoin thus is doing compressions and all that, trying all sorts of things, working on some potential breakthrough, and scaling but slowly, gradually, with consensus if you like.

So if there is a realization that Nakamoto was right, there is also the realization of: how exactly would this work at scale?

You thus have BSV with their three-chain split, BCH with scale, but not that fast, and BTC with compress all the things and grow data, but slowly. Then you have eth with: let’s just launch a new blockchain and start from scratch, see where we land.

Making it not quite a settled matter, but as arguably none of them has quite “objectively” addressed scalability, none of them can quite claim they’re better than bitcoin.

Sharding may well be cool and all, but can they really solve the two way peg in a decentralized way, or will they lipstick like they did with eth can do however many transactions until the kitties showed it’s actually the same 1MB.

Changing that 1 to 32 can be cool and all too, but what then? Do we just give it to corporations without at least trying to keep it in our hands?

Obviously that may well be the end result, but why not enjoy it for a bit, like maybe a century, give breathing space to freedom land and see if some other genius shows up.

On the other hand, if it barely moves then it is useless, but bitcoin devs are moving, although somewhat slowly and somewhat primarily for their own Liquid.

Point is though, at least currently, that it may well be the case it isn’t bitcoin that won, but bitcoin that showed just what is this technical problem, and though others tried to show it ain’t so, in the end it was shown it is thus.

Prove it wrong, then you have alt season, if you can’t, then you have bitcoin. Thus the judgment of the people, or at least the ones buying and selling all this stuff.

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