eth isn't bitcoin

I guess I don't get it

If we look at the world as it is now, it seems clear that Bitcoin spawned a large number of shitcoins.

Fiat money is collapsing (do you want to bet on how many generations away that is?) But it is doing so because of its own corrupt weight, not entirely because of Bitcoin.

Gravity and Babel are beyond me. I'm saying look around you, few indeed are the enduring standards that permeate the globe. Even evolution, in its millions years work has only managed to produce resonances, not singularities.

Agreed. I am skeptical that humans organize in such a way that there is only one network that matters.

We are still speaking a lot of languages on planet earth.

I've read the page on numaraires before (I think the last time you referred me to it). But what I don't get is how it implies BTC exclusively.

If there is another source to read I'm happy to go there, but at the moment, I'm skeptical of anything that claims to be the one and only.

I'm on board with Bitcoin as censorship resistant money.

I don't understand why it can only emerge once.

Obviously many people use other chains.

Mostly the consensus rules of those chains are not even close to Bitcoin. But in a sustained high fee environment, I don't see why a second Bitcoin couldn't emerge.

Why can't the same consensus rules with a mining algo change produce similar security?

BTC doesn't scale.

What do you think stops a second Bitcoin chain from starting?

Unfortunately, there's no way around the speed of light.

I'm not really that interested in Mars. I'm just a simple earthling wondering if we shouldn't start a second Bitcoin chain here instead of soft forking...

This is one of the points I find most interesting: is there some special about btc and how it got started, such that no other chain, even using the same consensus rules, can ever duplicate it?

Disagree. They wouldn't be sats, they'd be whatever the people using the chain want to call them.

This is the difference between whether you think it is the chain history that makes it Bitcoin or the consensus rules.

Yes, for me the interesting thought experiment here is our general resistance to the idea of a second (or multiple chains), and how the "excuse" of a different planet allows for a different viewpoint on alternate chains as scaling solutions.

This is a very interesting point. I imagine people would probably agree to settle in whatever currency is most conducive to that particular trade (kinda like international trade now).

Yes. I would agree that it is already happening. But I do find it curious that there isn't a serious "almost exactly the same consensus rules as btc" chain.

No doubt it comes down to getting off the ground.

Same enough to still have roughly similar consensus rules.

But why? My question is why any of that (or a soft fork) is necessary when a new chain can follow pretty much the same consensus rules.

If we want more blockspace (or more users at a lower fee level) why not just start a second chain? Why add complexity to get the same result?

There probably isn't a straight answer. But I'm curious what people think would be necessary for a chain following Bitcoin consensus rules to be a viable scaling solution.

It seems kinda shitty. The TM is a bit of a giveaway.