The Winner Takes It All. (Part 1)

How EPIC Cash will become Number 1 in Stealth Mode.

To better understand why EPIC Cash is bound to knock Bitcoin Core off its throne, it is necessary to know Bitcoin Core's main weaknesses and then compare them to EPIC Cash. Since its birth in 2009, Bitcoin Core (BTC) has been by far the undisputed Number 1 in a sea of so-called "shitcoins", as all other cryptocurrencies are pejoratively called by BTC maximalists. But as we all know, pride comes before a fall. 

Unnoticed by blinded BTC maximalists, the EPIC Cash network is growing and thriving. A cryptocurrency that is vastly superior to Bitcoin Core in all areas of monetary function. It's what Satoshi Nakamoto had in mind when he launched Bitcoin in 2009. A true alternative to the existing fiat money system that does not rely on a third party. As we will see, BTC is not even close to being able to do this. It is only a matter of time before EPIC Cash is discovered by the masses.

The FTX collapse will result in a major purge of the barely-overseeable crypto market. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is getting ready to classify anything that cannot be categorized as a commodity as unregistered security and take action accordingly. 

Cryptocurrencies with pre-mining, venture capital and a company or foundation behind them are suspected to be non-SEC registered securities. Very few cryptocurrencies besides Bitcoin Core will be able to survive this tsunami.

BTC maximalists are rubbing their hands together as they are trapped into believing Bitcoin Core is the only cryptocurrency that could survive the oncoming tsunami. Bitcoin Core has already been clearly classified as a commodity, not a security. Thousands of cryptocurrencies will probably disappear from the market altogether. The ones that are left then will eventually be in the center of attention. The first mover advantage that Bitcoin Core has successfully relied on so far will become unimportant when naked facts come into focus. EPIC Cash will stand out as the only viable currency alternative.  

To understand why BTC is incapable of serving as an alternative to the fiat money system, one must take a closer look at Bitcoin Core. Bitcoin's use case, according to its inventor Satoshi Nakamoto, was a person-to-person (p2p) means of payment with no reliance on an intermediary third party. For this reason alone, Bitcoin Core can no longer be described as the Bitcoin that Satoshi Nakamoto had in mind (Bitcoin whitepaper).  With 300k to a maximum theoretically achievable 600k transactions per day, Bitcoin Core is already at its limits today and not remotely usable as a p2p payment system for daily use on a larger scale. Transactions are too slow and too costly for daily use. 

The remedy for the poor scalability of Bitcoin Core should be the Lightning Network (LN). However, meaningful use of the LN is only possible with intermediary financially strong hubs, which are operated by the very institutions that Bitcoin was originally intended to replace according to its inventor. Connecting to these hubs often requires KYC. In addition, users become dependent on a third party again. Bitcoin maximalists ignore this fact and celebrate the Lightning Network as the solution to BTC's slowness and poor scaling. This can hardly be topped in terms of ignorance and absurdity.

BTC cannot be a generally recognized unit of account, because it would be necessary to be able to carry out all transactions, at least theoretically, in BTC, which is simply impossible. Of the three fundamental properties of money (medium of exchange, unit of account, store of value), the only function of Bitcoin Core that remains is store of value. The labeling of Bitcoin Core as "digital gold" is meant to euphemistically disguise this fact and gloss over these flaws. The claim to be an alternative for the fiat money system or the planned CBDCs cannot be remotely fulfilled by BTC.

If one wants better money, Bitcoin Core additionally lacks other important properties. (Quest for superior money, A Dangerous Misperception of BTC) One of the most important features, which will become increasingly important in the course of proliferating surveillance by the state, is privacy, which Bitcoin Core completely lacks. Pseudonymity may have been sufficient in the early years of BTC, but today an entire industry specializes in monitoring and matching all transactions to individuals (for example Chainalysis. Inc). There may be ways to disguise one's identity, but they are too cumbersome for the average person and easily foiled. 

For centuries, the privacy of money was taken for granted and not given much thought. Today, in the digital age, there is a lot of talk about data protection, but blockchain-based transactions are public and can be viewed by anyone on most blockchains, including BTC. Obviously, most users do not think about how seamlessly BTC, and thus themselves, are monitored. 

However, after the widespread introduction of programmable CBDCs and the abolition of the possibility to use cash, this will catapult into people's consciousness very quickly. Events in Canada already gave a taste of what is to come. Frozen fiat money accounts of people who donated BTC to the trucker protests should give everyone pause for thought. CBDCs allow absolute control of every individual from a central location, with the ability to cut off and make compliant any disagreeable citizen from the monetary system at the push of a button.   

Complete monitoring and allocation of all transactions to individuals, even after years, additionally inevitably leads to a lack of fungibility and erosion of trust in Bitcoin Core. BTCs that have been involved in illegal transactions are blacklisted and can still cause problems for the person who unsuspectingly accepted them years later. Large mining farms in the U.S. are already required to stop processing BTC on blacklists ("tainted coins") and report them to the authorities. (Marathon Miners Have Started Censoring Bitcoin Transactions)

Bitcoin Core is called the most decentralized network, yet mining is now only carried out with ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit), highly specialized computing units that are built and optimized solely for Bitcoin mining. After a few years, these become obsolete, no longer competitive and need to be renewed. Profitable Bitcoin mining can now only be done on a large scale by mining farms and no longer, as in the early years, with any simple home computer. Inevitably, this leads to an ever greater concentration of mining on a few mining farms. As a result, centralization increases as the years go by.  

The original Bitcoin protocol has a maximum output of 21 million coins, which means that block rewards will run out around the year 2140 and all mining rewards will have to be paid for through transaction fees. 

However, when the maximum possible transactions are exhausted, the transaction fees increase extremely, so that for smaller amounts the fees exceed the value of the transaction. The way out of this is supposed to be the Lightning Network (LN) already mentioned above, but this leads to a further erosion of revenue through transactions for the miners. A way out of this dilemma could be either an increase in block size, as envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto, or, suggested by some, an expansion of the maximum 21 million coins. 

An increase in block size was already rejected years ago (Block Size War).  Whether an expansion of the maximum 21 million coins will occur remains to be seen. In any case, underpaying the miners will inevitably lead to a die-off, or a further reduction in the decentralization and network security of the BTC network. 

The problems of Bitcoin Core are manifold, and solutions are not in sight. For EPIC Cash, based on the ingenious Mimblewimble protocol, all the problems Bitcoin Core has are non-existent. In the next part, I will go into more detail about the difference between EPIC Cash and Bitcoin Core. (Spoiler: If Satoshi Nakamoto had the technology of 2019 when he created Bitcoin in 2009, Bitcoin would look like EPIC Cash.)