And the ability for cryptocurrencies to evolve and update over time means that the network effect could be the single largest factor in determining it's worth.
Right now you can use bitcoin's network effects to some degree with altcoins. eg. You use xmr.to to buy anything that you can buy with bitcoin with Monero.
This is a band-aid of sorts for the time being but I don't see why services that currently allow you to use bitcoin could not upgrade to include a better currency/currencies?
Well, the security of a cryptocurrency (assuming Proof-of-work based) comes from the total amount of work that has happened in the chain since your transaction.
Because of that, the largest cryptocurrencies with the most work behind them will naturally be the most secure the quickest.
Monero might have some very good benefits, but the much smaller size of the network means it's a magnitude easier to attack from a state level adversary.
And the fact that Bitcoin can (and will) evolve over time means that the benefits from other cryptocurrencies can be put into Bitcoin as they become useful or proven.
This is already happening with Bitcoin, and it's not going to stop.
That being said, I don't think that other cryptocurrencies are pointless, and I do believe that they can continue to happily coexist. Ethereum is focused on the "smart contract" side of things. Monero is focused on privacy. They can all have their uses and specializations, and they can all exist together in the same ecosystem.
Even if Bitcoin ends up not being able to adapt and evolve for whatever reason, being a "store of value", your cryptocurrency savings account, is still a valid use case, and can continue to be one even if there are cryptocurrencies that do everything else objectively better.
Bitcoin radically gimped their VM at the start, destroying the inherent value of the coin.
BTC is going to die to a gen 3 VM that learns from the ETH mess of gen 2 and just ungimps the BTC VM.
I don't believe BTC has the political leadership to fix that poor decision, given that a) they've demonstrated poor leadership until now and b) some of the people involved in the gimping are still in positions of influence.
I can't find a single reference on them that contains actual details on the computational model because the internet is full of vapid circular search bait, particularly about cryptocurrencies.
The last I checked, the BTC VM disabled most useful opcodes, which meant you couldn't actually make money automatically redeemable for a large number of constraints you would want to impose.
How do you verify 3-SAT? Just plug in the values and check if it evaluates to TRUE? I assume the idea is to pay people to solve NP-hard problems via TX's, which is a kinda neat idea imo.
It's just asking if many 3 term clauses ANDed together are true for a given input set, so you'd give the inputs to spend it to your wallet. Automatic bounties on optimization (sub)problems, yep.
For various reasons, you probably want to use arithmetic and string operations for encoding certain problens. You could do it in bit operations, but efficiency.
I can't take credit for it -- it's one of those things that was floating around as a usage early on, but the features were killed.
Which features? Looks like (arithmetic, not bitwise) AND/OR/NOT are supported, I'm not an expert but it seems like this could be do-able. I'll have to think about this more maybe I'm missing something.
