I have been spending the past couple days or so reading into bitcoin (and eventually its competitors). Data is here https://coin.dance and the main site has good introduction (but none of the downsides or history)
It is an unmitigated disaster. This thing is nowhere near ready for mass adoption with constant infighting and promoters who aren’t honest about the flaws. Extremely knowledgeable and intelligent people get things horrendously wrong, as we saw with Mike Hearn declaring the bitcoin experiment dead and this guy who went short Ethereum and long Bitcoin after the theDao hack and subsequent hard fork.
Security is always an issue with altcoins and it is as fundamental as computer security itself. It will take regular people a lot more time to become comfortable with altcoins.
At the same time, the price waits for no man. As of right now BTC is at 1755, up 76% from the start of the year. ETH is at $87.65, up 10.75x (not a typo) from the start of the year.
There is something going on here and I am obsessed with trying to understand what it is. I understand I am simultaneously too late and too early at the same time and it is confusing the hell out of me.
I find the most persuasive framework to be Balaji’s circa 2015, even though he is a massive shill that has been wrong about everything in the Bitcoin ecosystem so far, he has still fundamentally been correct on tracking the value of Bitcoin by its network effect.
It is interesting to contrast this with Ben Thompson who I suspect would agree with Chamath that bitcoin must be divorced from its libertarian leanings. Ben has also gotten the economics of bitcoin horrendously wrong but he nails the fundamental problem between the need to fork to address flaws and the importance (to bitcoin’s value) of “code as law”.
Then there is the matter of the 10x price rise in ETH this year. The most complete accounting I have found is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13864912 in particular all of wall street getting behind ethereum in a big way (paper, video) was a major cause.
That’s all i know at this point.
Edit: here is a nice technical but simple tutorial and a primer on the scaling problem