Opportunity Cost

[rogerver]

In the field of economics there is a term called "opportunity cost". The basic idea is that if you spend time or resources doing one thing, that is time and resources that you can't spend doing something else. Yesterday I tweeted about how I had to pay about $8 in fees for BTC transactions while BCH transactions cost me 1.5 cents. An [urlhttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6xmo3 ... ow_how_to/]army of Core supporters[/url] and Bitcoin High Fee Deniers instantly appeared pointing out that I could have paid a lower fee, and that I must be intentionally misrepresenting the situation to create pro big block propaganda. This is a mistake in logic on their part. In suggesting that I should spend hours of my time reconfiguring my entire company wallet and payroll system to save a few dollars in fees they are missing the big picture. If these people understood the concept of opportunity cost, they wouldn't be suggesting such things because they would realize that my time is more valuable being spent on other things. In other words, the opportunity cost of spending time to figure out how to get low fees on the Bitcoin network is too high. If there are multiple solutions to one problem, but one of them requires far less work and effort, that is the one people will gravitate towards. From a marketing perspective, the goal with Bitcoin should be to give users the absolute best user experience we possibly can, with the least amount of effort being required on their part. Instead, Core supporters are advocating for the exact opposite and demanding that the entire ecosystem retool their systems to deal with a dramatic change to the way Bitcoin works. The real winner in the big vs small block camp has been alt coins, due to the fact that in many cases simply switching chains has the lowest opportunity cost.

[marcelchuo]

Spot on!

The terrible thing is that so many resources have been spent on building infrastructure (like websites, exchanges, atms, wallets) around bitcoin since 2009 and now bitcoin 2.0 (cash) has to build up that accessibility and mainstream adoption that bitcoin core had so long to build. We know that segwit won't solve scalability the way the larger blocks in bitcoin 2.0 will and so all the resources which was spent building infrastructure around core was wasted. Resources that could have been spent on building infrastructure around a bitcoin that has low fees and quick transaction times (opportunity cost again).