altoz

Not surprising: Keynesian economist doesn't like Austrian economics explanations.

Surprising: Bitcoin part is largely left uncriticized.

I would say the author of this article is clearly biased against the Austrian view that make Bitcoin attractive to the libertarian types so the criticism is largely unsurprising.

What we do see is that the author of the critique and the author of the book can't be both right, especially about history. The success of Bitcoin does seem to favor the Austrian interpretation, though I'm sure many will disagree. Whatever the case, the experiment that is Bitcoin will continue and give us more data to make the case ourselves.

Not surprising:

Nearly everyone from Silicon Valley that's progressive/liberal thinks there's no problem or that the problem is something else.

Nearly everyone not fitting the description above thinks there's a problem and that it alienates them.

> Once a transaction gets confirmed on one chain, it's permanently able to be spent on the other.

That's simply not true. If the utxo gets spent on the other chain, the two coins are permanently split.

> Also, automated system may have no way of handling it if those automated systems are not upgraded. Which means a merchant could end up with thousands of payments that they have to manually fix. And, those merchants will be forced into adopting the new software to correct the issue, they will have no choice to o ignore it.

And incur legal liability? Businesses will gladly do lots of manual work to avoid thousands of lawsuits.

Fact is, it's really only a problem for the businesses and even without any replay protection, they can very easily split coins by using either post-split coinbase coins or any coins ever mixed with any post-split coinbase coins.

If you're transacting with an exchange or a merchant and accidentally send both coins (as a result of a replay attack) instead of one, they're going to give it back. It's not nearly the disaster this article makes it out to be.

The only case where this is a problem are business to consumer transactions and p2p txs both of which you rarely do, if ever if you use BTC as a store of value.

Corrected