Bitcoin's market share has dropped to a record low of 70%. Peter Todd suggests considering changing PoW to prevent miners from launching 51% attacks

Bitcoin’s scaling struggle has caused its share of the cryptocurrency’s total market capitalization to fall to an all-time low as investors turn to alternative coins for hedging.

As the user base expands, the volume of Bitcoin transactions is also growing, which has caused Bitcoin's 1MB block size to approach fullness. As a result, transaction speeds have slowed down and transaction fees have soared. The Bitcoin scaling issue has led to a civil war between the Core development team and supporters of the SegWit soft fork and the BU miner-led block size hard fork and its supporters.

Compared with previous hard fork attempts (XT, Classic), BU has quickly gained a lot of support and even surpassed SegWit's miner support rate. Recently, the world's largest mining pool Ant Pool announced that all computing power would be switched to BU, and BU has secured a solid leading position.

“Bitcoin Jesus” Roger Ver is a leading figure against the current state of Bitcoin and the 1MB hard limit. He believes that the instability of the solution to the expansion problem has cost Bitcoin billions of dollars:

The losses caused by the full block fee market orchestrated by Core may have cost Bitcoin billions of dollars in market value.

Investors hedge against Bitcoin, and altcoins rise

Due to the growing uncertainty, lack of usability, and conflict surrounding Bitcoin, Bitcoin’s growth has stagnated — and even declined, while other altcoins have taken advantage of the opportunity to profit.

Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency, has seen significant growth recently, with its market cap and price doubling in the past 10 days alone. Ethereum currently has a market cap of about $4 billion, a single ETH of $45, and a daily trading volume of more than $200 million.

Dash’s rise has been even more frenetic, with its price and market cap now quintupling from where it was just before January. Dash has broken through the triple-digit threshold and looks set to surpass $100, making it more than a tenth the price of Bitcoin. As a result of this growth, Dash’s treasury — 10% of block rewards reserved for development and other projects — has been growing by more than $500,000 per month, and the third-largest cryptocurrency is approaching a $1 million monthly budget. Monero, which has also attracted some of the Bitcoin outflows, has doubled in price over the past 10 days and is now fourth on the cryptocurrency charts with a market cap of more than $300 million.

The development and reshuffle of the cryptocurrency space has led to a decline in Bitcoin's dominance. Bitcoin's market capitalization share of the entire cryptocurrency market has shrunk to 70%, which is another record low since the 74% during the heyday of Ethereum last year. The total market capitalization of the cryptocurrency market is currently slightly lower than its historical high, while the total market capitalization of altcoins has grown from $2.2 billion at the beginning of the year to more than $7 billion at present, an increase of nearly $4 billion in the past month alone.

The scaling debate turns ugly

Despite the shift in Bitcoin’s market cap share, the battle to scale Bitcoin continues to intensify. Ver claims that many BU nodes identify themselves as Core to avoid DDoS attacks, an issue that has plagued Bitcoin.com over the past week. BU supporters have documented an alleged censorship mode on the Bitcoin Reddit forum, filtering out comments that support alternative Bitcoin implementations.

Meanwhile, facing increasing resistance from large mining pools, such as AntPool, Core developer Peter Todd has publicly considered changes to the proof-of-work algorithm to restructure hashrate as a “backup plan.”

Given that some miners are threatening to launch a 51% attack on Bitcoin, researching changes to PoW could be a good backup plan: btcpowupdate.org

In addition, Bitcoin network congestion is still a problem. Although the low-end transaction fee remains below 50 cents, the average confirmation time is getting longer and longer. Although the backlog of transactions in the memory pool has decreased, there is still an average of 20MB of unprocessed transactions per week.