1 - Propose flawed argument.
2 - Insert pink unicorns.
3 - When asked for proof, don't give it and instead claim this is exactly what's best for the world but that we are too short minded to understand it.
The rest of the world at large (EDIT: that knows about bitcoin as sub intended by the rest of the sentence) that is not part of the bitcoin cult, looks at the thing for its technological prowess - or lack of it - and mostly sees it as a cryptographic experiment gone right and a financial experiment gone very wrong.
When I referred the world at large, I referred the world at large that already knows bitcoin, not the world population. And from those, most of them obviously didn't get in bitcoin (in fact the ones that did get in bitcoin are pulling out as can be clearly seen in the volume of bitcoin transactions since 2014).
And it is a clearly failed financial experiment because:
1 - It concentrated all the wealth in the hands and very few people in only a couple of years (http://www.bitcoinrichlist.com/top100)
2 - The majority of bitcoin transactions are used for ilegal purposes (http://www.coindesk.com/dark-web-markets-processed-more-bitc...)
3 - It's more inconvenient than existing payment systems to use so people don't use it (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-is-dead-says-prominent...)
4 - People are so uninterested and suspicious of bitcoin that you actually loose money if you present bitcoin as a payment/donation method (http://bitcoinist.net/mozilla-study-shows-bitcoin-negative-i...)
5 - Complete unregulation keeps meaning high scale theft and complete unreliability of bitcoin markets (MtGox and many others)
All in all, the world at large - in this case not only the ones that know bitcoin - clearly understands that the financial system needs more regulation not less, and yet, you put bitcoin in the table with is utter lack of regulation and try to claim its a great thing that will solve the world's financial problems but you don't give absolutely no sane argument or metrics about how it is doing that. And that was exactly my original point.
You cannot have a functioning financial system that is constrained to seven transactions per second.
The real question is, what is the maximum real throughput of the system if we could adjust the tuning parameters to be as high as possible? It's well north of 7 but I bet also well south of, say, 1,000.
Lol, that's the best "it's a feature, not a bug" spin I've seen on the blocksize issue to date.
I find your comment funny because it reminds me of this: https://youtu.be/whnms4CLJys?t=44s
Setting the number of blocks at 2,016 per two weeks is completely arbitrary, as is setting the block size at 1 MB. None of these are "fundamental flaws" because they can be changed. They're hard-coded constants that can be changed in code in a trivial amount of time. The hardest part about changing them is getting consensus on the change and the time it takes the change to roll out to most of the clients on the network before cutting over. The existence of altcoins that have changed these parameters is proof that it's not a technological flaw.
A technological flaw would be some kind of vulnerability in ECDSA or SHA256 that would allow people to spend other's Bitcoins. Now that would be a fundamental flaw that would destroy Bitcoin over night. But coding constants that can be changed, and as time goes on, most likely will be? You are seriously over-dramatizing things.
All I'm getting from you is flippancy, Simpsons references, and strawman arguments. You have failed to make your case at all. If what we are talking about is a fundamental flaw, then every program you have ever written is fundamentally flawed, because I'm sure they've all initially had bugs in them that were much worse than what could be changed by adjusting the values of constants.
The block size can't be changed because a small number of miners control it, and they stand to profit from the increased transactions fees resulting from the increased competition on smaller blocks. It's tragedy of the commons.
This is a fundamental flaw with Bitcoin- that the people who control the software can also benefit from inhibiting transactions per second. For a payments network, it's not going to get more than 7 tx/s, until someone else is in control. Other enthusiasts have reconciled this by looking to bitcoin as smart contracts, or to side-chains.
But you can continue to spin this as good for bitcoin or as "payments tuning parameter" propaganda if you like, just understand that I'm going to laugh at you for it, cydeweys.
You argument that miners will always want small block sizes is flawed. Miners stand to benefit a lot more from a widely-used functioning currency than one that fails because it is incapable of scaling. They want Bitcoin to succeed in the long run, because a lot of them hold a lot of Bitcoin. Particularly, there is little reason to keep block sizes small for this reason because while the average transaction fee might go down, the total number of transactions in a block will go up, with an overall neutral effect on total transaction fee. Additionally, the vast majority of a miner's reward still comes from the block reward, so miners don't care too much about transaction fees yet.
Segwit is already close to rolling out and block size increases could happen in the medium term. Or, if all else fails, there's always side-chains and altcoins. The fundamental technology (blockchain) is fine, even if a particular implementation of it with a specific set of tuning parameter values happens to stagnate. I don't foresee that happening though, as the incentives for everyone in the ecosystem are aligned for Bitcoin not to fail, and if limited transaction volume truly starts changing that, then changes (beyond what's already on the current roadmap) will be made.
You're making the same fallacious assumptions about miners that people do about individuals in tragedy of the commons. You think that the individual cares more about the system rather than their own rational goals, but they don't.
The same resource economics that apply to international fishing also apply to bitcoin - both the fisherman and the miners care more about personal gains than they do about the system as a whole. They don't restrain their profit because you project your idealism onto them.
And it doesn't matter who promises what - there needs to be a consensus for the change to happen, and that's why bitcoin is flawed. The previous four forks to fix this block size failed, four times, which is evidence to back this up.
You can keep spinning the flaw as a speed hole though, it's pretty entertaining :)
LN is one of the better side-chain ideas to date, but it's still a bunch of I.O.U.s that have the bitcoin bottleneck. With LN, two people can reasonably send hundreds of thousands of transactions to each other, but hundreds of thousands of people cannot reasonably send two transactions.
And then there's centralization, off-network volatility, etc. issues as well. Side-chains are still not a viable fix for the blocksize issue.
The FTC recognizes it as a commodity, something that can be bought and sold. In it's current incarnation, it is the equivalent of bartering with baseball cards in lieu of cash.
If your point is true, then the purpose has been abandoned for the popular and current realization of Bitcoin as a means of electronic monetary value transfer.
I personally followed development and the community from the time it was introduced. It was always pitched as an 'anonymous' electronic currency.
The US government has a stake in the failure of non-state-controlled currencies, though, so this isn't really evidence of anything.
The point is it isn't commonly purported to be a 'settlement layer' but something else entirely.
That's quite a confidently presumptuous tone for an opinion that is clearly controversial at best.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/49c7ij/so_consens_...
That's why it makes the front page of HackerNews when some random company starts accepting Bitcoin payments?
Which begs the question, exactly what what means being "one of their own", and if they have any kind of plans to re-instate the Spanish Inquisition.
It seems to me like the community's reaction to a fraudster was remarkably productive, outside of Gavin / Matonis getting suckered.