Hi.
I created this thread to start a healthy and civil discussion, so please behave yourself. 
I was helping another person to learn more about blockchain / cryptocurrencies. I sent him a wall of text with some good information, where I stated that in my opinion Bitcoin will be overruled by other technologies in 1 / 2 / 3 years and he asked me this: (summed up)
“I have the same thoughts on BTC as you do, but after reading up on Cardano I have changed my mind a little. BTC is market leader and if Cardano succeeds, BTC can copy their work and still be the biggest, but also with the best software? Cardano is open-source, meaning they aren’t protecting it against anyone stealing it?”
I have answered, that not only the underlying technology is important, but as well the team behind it to keep up the ecosystem, where we have IMHO the absolute best one (IOHK+CF+Emurgo) so this would be a factor.
Furthermore, I think BTC would take a big, big, BIG hit by the followers and the trust of it’s followers would decrease a lot if it just changed it’s sourcecode to something completely different. (If we ignore that it might not even be possible and ADA is different on all levels, PoS vs PoW, etcetc)
What is your opinion on that topic?
What is your opinion on hard forks?
Do you think a project with more adoption (BTC) could just copy/paste sourcecode of a less adopted, but better technology? Would they succeed with it?
I hope I sparked some thoughts in your head and am looking forward to hearing some opinions
Greetings.
I really think BTC will stay for a long time!, i do not mean that will be capable of a lot Txs or mass adoption … BTC will stay because will acquire a huge value for scarcity and will become as a kind of asset ( kind a Gold as most people say )
Mining will be terrible, just little few could support the investment vs return … BTC day after day will be less decentralized until reaching the point of total control of the system by the remain miners and the owner of possible patente of better hardware! Also is terrifying the last news about the MtGox mess and critical liquidity of BTC ( dropping BTC by trustee … and what remain ) is not promising good things for the future … all this kind of things would lead eventually and
“an ideal situation” would be sidechain´Cardano could be a place for BTC ( i know its a long shot … )
I could be wrong, but from my understanding, while technically plausible, it’s essentially impossible.
Currently, for Bitcoin to change anything, it requires social consensus. It’s taken a long, long time for them just to get Segwit (Segregated Witness), and they’ve been trying to implement the Lightning Protocol for a long time now. This difficulty with social consensus is why forks like BitcoinCash exist. This difficulty in adoption from a lack of social consensus is a major problem with a decentralized coin which doesn’t have a good governance system in place.
The truth is, unless the system was designed from the ground up to be able to change, it’s very, very difficult. For example, Ethereum has been working on its Casper Protocol (PoS) for quite awhile now.
However, let’s say Bitcoin wanted to “steal” Cardano’s source code because it is later deemed to be “better”. Social consensus likely wouldn’t allow it to happen. However, even if it was to happen, there is basically no one in the Bitcoin development team who knows anything about Cardano. The likelihood is that no one would even know where to start with coding or development.
The long and short of it is that when you have open source software – you are explicitly stating to the world that the code itself doesn’t mean anything, the community behind the project is what matters.
It’s kind of like the old startup adage that an idea doesn’t mean anything without execution. See infographic below:
In my opinion, for cryptocurrency, Code doesn’t mean anything without community.
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Changing software to operate like other software is difficult. I have heard the code monkeys (developers) where I work say on many occasions that X piece of software needs a recode from the ground up (start over). Bitcoin and Ada are written in 2 totally different languages. It would be very difficult to just borrow the good parts of the code from one project and combine it with parts from the other project. The results would be like spaghetti code and the risk is high. Better to just copy all the code and make it into something else if you have the talent.
