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Education and time. There is a limited number of people who can not see that PoW does not work long term and more importantly that we have working alternatives like FBA consensus. Once all (most) of these people bough BTC it can only go down hill long term because people who actually want to use it will move away as its simply to expensive.

Side-chains dont solve the problem no matter how many and how performant they are. On the main-chain the fees need to eventually cover the cost of running the network i.e. the whole energy, hardware and human labor. Currently this is still mostly paid by the block reward (aka paid by inflation). This pays about a quarter million USD every 10 minutes. It doesn't need much common sense to figure out that if the combined fees of all peoples transaction need to result in a quarter million USD every 10 minute then transaction can not be cheap. Bitcoin is currently running on subsidy by its own block reward that pays about as much as google pays for operation.

The average Tx fee is currently a few dollar but a subsidy of about 140 dollar is added form the block reward. Non-PoW based systems have outperformed bitcoin in terms of transaction for years with average Tx fees of less than a cent. Shouldn't this be enough incentivize? Surely it is for thous who actuality want to use the system. The gamblers and maxis will probably hodl their bag forever but once it loses market relevant it will sharply become insecure as well and the whole thing should collapse. Might take another 10 years, who knows but it eventually has to fail. Its like ICE cars vs. EVs it was always just a matter of time but it felt like it took forever.

>How exactly do you think you could dethrone Bitcoin, overcoming its gigantic first-mover advantage?

If you look at the bigger picture BTC loses market share and there is no sign that this will change. The gains are below average so people who only gamble have an incentive to gamble with something else.



Looks like FBA is not "trustless", which is actually excellent, but I'm not sure how that would fly in the current (criminal and fraudulent) cryptocurrency economy.




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