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MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor responded to a tweet implying that Bitcoin’s days are numbered. In it, the poster likened the leading cryptocurrency to MySpace. Saylor answered by saying BTC trade volumes equal MySpace’s peak valuation every few hours.
With some now calling Bitcoin “boomer crypto,” due to it being relatively unexciting compared to the others, is there any truth in the MySpace allegations?
Is Bitcoin Becoming The MySpace of Crypto?
Defending Bitcoin over claims it is becoming irrelevant, Saylor said the leading cryptocurrency had grown faster than any company in history. He added that Bitcoin towers over MySpace in terms of valuation.
“At its peak, MySpace was valued for a day in a single private transaction at less than .06% of #Bitcoin which has grown faster to a larger market capitalization than any company in the history of the world. We trade one lifetime worth of MySpace in $BTC every few hours.”
MySpace was the first social network to reach a global audience. It was the dominant platform between 2005 and 2008, serving 100 million users a month.
By May 2009, Facebook’s number of monthly users exceeded that of MySpace for the first time. This was the beginning of the end, and its user count continued to fall off despite several site overhauls. Even so, it continues to this day with around 7 million users a month. In comparison, Facebook pulls in 2.7 billion users a month.
According to Lifewire, MySpace’s downfall was due to several factors, but its failure to innovate and keep pace with competing platforms was chief among them.
“one argument held that the company never figured out how to innovate well enough to keep up with the competition.”
While Saylor may argue that BTC trade volumes are substantial relative to MySpace, some would say he didn’t address the point of the argument. Bitcoin is often accused of being an innovation graveyard.
Taproot Upgrade Already In-Play
The last major Bitcoin innovation came in 2017 with the SegWit soft fork, enabling transactions to be split into blocks by separating signatures. SegWit was intended to avoid accidental transactions and make the network run faster and more efficiently.
Earlier this week, developers merged Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade with the source code. It will make Bitcoin multi-signature transactions cheaper, more private, and easier to deploy.
“It is intended to increase Bitcoin’s fungibility, improve the functionality of smart contracts, and boost privacy by making all transactions look the same to outsiders.”
Miners who approve of the upgrade can signal their support by including particular data, known as a “signal bit,” in their mined blocks. If 90% of the mined blocks up to the cutoff point of August 11 include the Taproot signal, the upgrade gets locked for activation in November.
The majority of mining pools have already signaled their approval of Taproot. But as far as crypto innovations go, some would say Taproot is still a relatively conservative innovation.
Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com
