Just about everyone asking "should I buy Bitcoin?" is doing so because they want to know how high it will go. They don't really give a shit whether the technology has the potential to disrupt centrally planned economies.
Bitcoin being worth $5,000 right now is all about not being the last guy holding the bag when the value collapses again...
Just because its a currency doesn't mean it's not going thru the technology adoption cycle, like the internet did and the smart phone did.
More people owning bitcoin means more demand means higher price in the face of relatively fixed supply... so "Just speculation" doesn't really make sense as a criticism--- ALL investment is speculation, all investment in early stage technologies is higher risk, and more "speculative".
This is coming from a bitcoin enthusiast that loves the technology.
Not to mention, we're about a year away from Lightening Networks being deployed into production, and he theoretical capacity of that is infinite, since it happens off chain. (LN will eventually be multiparty-- so you could get paid in your channel and then pay from your channel to various other receivers, though that capability may be more than a year off.)
Further, segwit enables side chains so you can have bitcoin as a hub and any number of side chains with special purposes (including possibly very high transaction velocity) adding... with even less on chain load than lightening network, depending on how they are used.
The tech is advancing rapidly, though it's highly involved and obscure to even most developers, so they propagandists are great at spreading FUD in favor of their particular choices.
All of the above applies to Ethereum as well, to varying degrees of implementation.
Bitcoin is dominant in large part because it has the best development team and they are delivering code at a huge rate-- even compared to ethereum.
Thus 14 transactions become 2.
For example let’s say we first lock coins into a condition that both your key and mine are required to spend. Then I “send” you money by signing my half of a transaction sending the payment to you and returning the change to me. If I later want to pay you again, I send you a new partially signed transaction with the sum of all the payments so far. Either one of us can broadcast the most recent to when we need the funds for other purposes. Since one tx is needed to set this up, and one tx is needed to close out/settle then this makes sense as long as there is payment, or even for single payments if the close out is used to setup a new payment channel at the same time (my change address sets up a similar 2-of-2 with someone else).
This protocol as written is not safe, but only because it’d be too tedious to write out a full protocol in a HN comment. With tools that are available besides signing, such as relative lock times and malleability-free transactions it is possible to construct safe versions that don’t fall down in the face of DoS or rebroadcast of old state etc.
If everyone uses such transactions, which they will eventually once the tools are more mature, then you only need proper block chain access for the rebalancing transactions.
Off chain transactions are not censorable because they are between offline parties in direct communication with each other. And settlement aka rebalancing transactions are not distinguishable from regular payments if MAST is available and cooperative closure is achieved.
It's a way to lock up funds so you can tx with low fees and quick confirmations because you aren't hitting the main chain until you want to withdraw your funds.
It's performing a wire transfer to venmo, once you do it you don't have to pay to move it around in venmo, except with the lighting network there is no counter party risk. If venmo gets hacked you don't lose your funds, they can't try and steal them, they can't prevent you from withdrawing.
The technical details are, a bit hairy though.
However, these barriers do not mean Bitcoin is doomed to fail. Logically, there are two paths to success: (1) Bitcoin is rearchitected to handle high volumes or (2) Bitcoin succeeds in low-volume applications.
Here is a quote from the bitcoin.pdf white paper: The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions...
If your vision of the future of Bitcoin is simply "a store of value" then I think you are missing out. There is a lot more value to disrupt by making transactions more efficient, and I hope the Bitcoin of the future will evolve to tackle this problem.
transactions are limited to ~10/s
[...]
At high volumes, this will approach the petabyte scale
With capped coins, transaction fees must be large enough to prevent major miners from defecting. So, they need to support large number of transactions to have a stable value store.
Segwit makes it a lot harder, and as segwit adoption happens it will be a lot cheaper to transact, even when the spammers are spamming.
That of course doesn't say why someone would want to buy any cruptocurrency, but if you primary concern is the low TPS on Bitcoin and Ethereum then there's plenty of other options.
Stay away from Ripple.
BCASH is a miner sorta scam, they will mine 60 blocks in a minute for awhile until the difficulty shifts, then not mine any blocks for 12 hours.
Sucks to wait 12 hours for a transaction to clear.
Beware.