This author confuses a hard fork for a github fork:

> The bitcoin chain has been hard-forked at least five times, [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bitcoin_forks

Ouch! Those aren't hard forks— they are forks of the github repo!

In reality Bitcoin has only been hard-forked twice. Once, to fix the bug as described in BIP 50, and once for Bitcoin Cash.

Here's a better resource: http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/patrick.mc-corry/atomically-tr...

Flowdalic

A common mistake made by "self-appointed" bitcoin experts and IMHO a good indicator for more red flags.

> On one side are those who believe that Bitcoin is … money, currency, …. On the other side are those who believe that it is a commodity, ….

That is the other red flag: Trying to construct two different exclusive camps. This goes along with not mentioning the Lightning Network (LN). Some people still don't see that LN could enable bitcoin to be both: A currency and a commodity.

olegkikin

LN has been vaporware for a long time, and it's always 18 months before it's ready. Recently the developers openly admitted they don't know how to scale it beyond 10000+ channels, because they don't know how to solve distributed routing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/719vis/lightning_dev_t...

https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...

Flowdalic

That is a very pessimistic view on the current state of LN. There are three independent open-source LN implementations [1, 2, 3] out there that are being worked on and already implement basic functionality. All three contribute to an document, called Basics Of The Lightning Network (BOLT) [4], which forms an open standard for LN.

I wouldn't call it vaporware. Yes, there are unsurprisingly open questions. But nothing which can't be solved.

1: https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd 2: https://github.com/ACINQ/eclair 3: https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning 4: https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc