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Comment by MichaelBurge | Hacker News Reader

It's not really designed to handle every little transaction. I would expect it to be used by exchanges and banks as a settlement layer, with most transactions happening off-chain.

It's a mistake to look at recent news, because this has been known since the very beginning.

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There is a thread on the site with the original Bitcoin paper right now. The first sentence of the abstract:

> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

A peer-to-peer network without going through a financial institution. The design was certainly intended to scale up to large numbers of small transactions.

it would and it will imo. I just don't think bitcoin is it.

It has however bootstrapped a few potentials. Until its decided which that might be, bitcoin kinda serves its purpose.

root DNS services do not service _every_ lookup _but_ they back delegated authorities, which does scale. Same for blockchain tech.

So you're saying Bitcoin needs banks like every other currency then?

So what's the point of it again?

There is a group of people who want to alter the purpose of Bitcoin away from the original goal away from "p2p cash" to purely a "store of value".

The design can of course support more transactions than it currently does but that is being worked against by this group.

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