I agree with mostly everything he said, to be honest. I've stuck with Bitcoin now for the last 3+ years and interestingly, that was only -because- Bitcoin made it so hard to do anything useful. I would need to learn how all kinds of niche areas of cryptography worked and the fun of hopelessly trying to outsmart Bitcoin's god-awful restrictions is what kept things fresh to me.
Sure, it did teach me a lot of obscure things about crypto + game theory, and some of those things actually turned out to be quite useful. But I also can't deny how much longer it takes to do the most basic things in Bitcoin and I think that now we're progressing towards using blockchains to solve problems outside of Bitcoin -- Ethereum seems more up to the task than Bitcoin.
That's not to put Bitcoin down though. There has definitely been some tremendous innovations there recently: segregated witnesses and sidechains are pretty cool. But I've also seen the community change significantly since I first got involved and I'd argue most of those changes have been bad. For example: /r/Bitcoin seems to have become a toxic echo chamber for irrational hatred against former high contributing core members and almost any kind of counter-views are censored which is honestly quite disturbing. Most of Bitcoin's current media is also controlled by only a handful of individuals so its very easy to manipulate the crowd into "consensus" but I won't even go there.
I'll personally always love Bitcoin but I can't see that these problems can be fixed at this point. The Bitcoin project was largely hijacked as far as I can tell and since the crowd has been won there's no going back now.
Sure, it did teach me a lot of obscure things about crypto + game theory, and some of those things actually turned out to be quite useful. But I also can't deny how much longer it takes to do the most basic things in Bitcoin and I think that now we're progressing towards using blockchains to solve problems outside of Bitcoin -- Ethereum seems more up to the task than Bitcoin.
That's not to put Bitcoin down though. There has definitely been some tremendous innovations there recently: segregated witnesses and sidechains are pretty cool. But I've also seen the community change significantly since I first got involved and I'd argue most of those changes have been bad. For example: /r/Bitcoin seems to have become a toxic echo chamber for irrational hatred against former high contributing core members and almost any kind of counter-views are censored which is honestly quite disturbing. Most of Bitcoin's current media is also controlled by only a handful of individuals so its very easy to manipulate the crowd into "consensus" but I won't even go there.
I'll personally always love Bitcoin but I can't see that these problems can be fixed at this point. The Bitcoin project was largely hijacked as far as I can tell and since the crowd has been won there's no going back now.