I've noticed so many ads on Crypto "investing" recently, that makes me think we might be in the last stage of this bubble. I've had a discussion with a family member and their friend, and they were talking to me about investing in crypto, and how XRP is backed by gold, and how they have cold storage with their phone to hold their "assets" in case the Internet is taked down, and how the stock market will crash and big companies will disappear (like Google, Amazon, etc). And I'm like what the heck.. If the Internet is taken down, why do you even need to have your crypto on cold storage, it's just bits.. you've got bigger problems at that time. But nope, they're adamant crypto is the future, even if they have bo idea how it works. Fascinating, and terrifying when thigs go South.
It's worth noting that if the internet splits up into large pieces, the blockchain splits, and the coins will suddenly lose a lot of their value. That's because there's no telling which fork of the blockchain wins when there's a merge later. Double-spending galore!
> there's no telling which fork of the blockchain wins
That's the point of proof of work: longest chain wins.
Yes in a netsplit you can spend on both chains, but you would need access to both chains to do so. And you don't even ever have to merge them again, there could just be AmericanBTC and RussianBTC from here on out.
The problem with keeping them separate is that there's no singular "you" who decides; there's no telling what will happen, causing an inherent uncertainty.
