Bitcoin was intended to be MONEY, instead it's pretty fucking useless for anything other than hoarding.
I think it will remain an asset class, but history will not be kind to it. It's going to remain relevant and valuable as an "antique", but likely there will come a cryptocurrency that realizes the original goal at some point.
It may not have been apparent how ground-breaking or important digital scarcity was at the time. Most of the time when we think of money, we think about how we use it in our everyday lives. We buy coffees, we pay for an Uber. But underneath all that, there is a deeper meaning to money. Why do we value money? It really just boils down to scarcity, liquidity, demand.
Money has all 3. However, the scarcity factor of traditional money is flawed. It relies on centralized parties, for which money is not actually scarce. They can and do alter the supply at any time. It's a tradeoff we make because fiat is so liquid / demanded / transactable.
Bitcoin is less transactable than fiat money in most regards, but it makes up for it in the transparency of its scarcity. If you were going to lock your wealth up for 25 years, would you put it in USD or BTC? More and more people would say BTC. I can tell you how many BTC will exist in the year 2050. I would have no way to do the same for any fiat currency.
The main risk to BTC is some sort of technological breakthrough which greatly improves upon the concept of cryptocurrency. It's not that cryptocurrency will suddenly disappear or lose its value. Cryptocurrency is here to stay. We have witnessed the birth of a new asset class.
But uncertainty has many types. The other digital currency tried to handle eg contract uncertainty. Bitcoin tried to solve the general one and hence it is used as an anchor. The original article pointed that out.
The gold is another possible Gov independent solution. Problem is it is too good in that. Save digging more gold or nuclear transmutation (per Newton effort?) is feasible using say solar, real scarcity is achieved. But it was opted out as it is not human manageable. Instead we have weapon based forced option of US dollars. Japan, euro now Rmb ... we are in a different regime for a reason.
The scarcity cannot be enforced like US dollars and is more like gold. Hence it is not weapon backed and it is not flexible scarcity. It might not be useful in our current environment.
You may think that is the whole point of asset not centrally controlled. But then we back to uncertainty over time which we as a human group cannot manage. How to control which to opt for a as Bitcoin is just a commodity subject to demand even if it is supply constrained.
Whilst so far another clone is not successful still it could be. If it threaten certain government it can block the cash chain. Who guarantee that.
Also, there is no issue within that is breakable by say quantum computing like cloning the whole tree say ...
The time dimension always meant there could not be one money or asset as it has to be tailored to individual human and human group.
Money is a contract with the future to handle uncertainty. Supply constrain is only one of the feature of Bitcoin. It may not be sufficient to be a good money supply. We will see or wait to the stage when mining is only for transaction and supply and demand react.
It's not mutually exclusive. It can be a store of value while still meeting these goals.
That's an extraordinary statement. The scaling aspects of Bitcoin was apparent to everyone involved in the project from the start, including Satoshi.
The limits of an architecture where everyone processes everyone else's transactions should be obvious to anyone reading the whitepaper. It is also the focus of the very first email replies. Few respondents chose to focus on what is possible instead of what is impossible.
Contemporarily, lightning is a thing that covers most of the gripes that I've seen above your comment.
https://youtu.be/agppUdX9YvI?t=65
These techniques will eventually get ported over to Bitcoin or whatever survives long-enough to need it. We'll get 20, 50 and 100-year rebroadcasting chains. Fees will be higher if the data needs to be stored longer. Spectrum of uses from investment to cash with different degrees of value-persistence.
The idea that someone discovered these in 2017 seems oblivious to what actually happened. Support for payment channels with nLockTime was likely influential for implementing transactions with smart contracts in the first place. It was there from the first Satoshi release, and payment channels was described already in 2013. It probably wasn't first on the list of things to fix as long as transactions were heavily subsidized by inflation.
I recommend this technical article on how Bitcoin (in its Cash fork) can scale to worldwide adoption (50 tx per day for each of 10 billion humans) even on today's hardware: http://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks-...
Computers are fast, Bitcoin payments are simple, and we can get data on roughly how common payments are. Even with the hardware of 2011 it wasn't implausible to keep up with PayPal with optimised software, and with multiple-machine nodes you could even keep up with the bigger credit card processors. That was in 2011. Since then we have things like AMD Rome and 128 core machines, NVRAM that's only 10x slower than DRAM and so on. Satoshi bet on hardware improvements and his bets were solid.
Meanwhile, there is no requirement in the architecture to never truncate the on-disk copy of the block chain. Some people should keep it for historical reasons and to preserve the low-trust nature of the system, but there's no requirement for every full node to keep it, and no requirement that everyone use a full node.
Bitcoin and scaling is unfortunately a topic that became horribly corrupted around 2015 by ideology, full blown information warfare and an overtly political manipulation of the community. As a consequence there are a lot of people who think, incorrectly, that they understand the design of Bitcoin better than Satoshi did, and who think it needed to be completely replaced with the "Lightning network". The reason this accompanied massive levels of censorship, DDoS attacks, intimidation and outright extortion is because the arguments were bad and the proposed alternatives, even worse. The original Bitcoin design was fine for what it needed and represented some pragmatic engineering that balanced complexity against scaling and decentralization. What Blockstream forced on the community was in contrast, significantly worse.
Adoption will grow as the infrastructure continues to be built out. It's still early days for Bitcoin - no one sends AT commands to their modem to get online any more.
Once it gets a few user-friendly wallet and merchant apps, I'd expect to see adoption. Especially since it's much safer for merchants as they do not need to wait for confirmations, and transactions fees are fractions of a penny so merchants actually benefit compared to creditcard interchange fees.
It's been well over five years since the Lightning white paper. By this point in Bitcoin's own timeline, the MtGox scandal was in rear view mirror; in another year, the Lightning network will be as old as Bitcoin was when Lightning was proposed.
If Lightning is going to provide the mainstream digital currency Bitcoin promised but failed to deliver, why is it taking so much longer for Lightning to be adopted than Bitcoin?
The internet itself at the backbone/isp level is a decent analog as ISP peering can be complex and often involve cost. It took awhile to get BGP right and determine the right cost metric for selecting a route.
There don't seem to be any blocking issues though and many of the large wallets have announced that they will be supporting it eventually.
The same could be said for bitcoin. The reality is bitcoin still suffers from a scaling flaw, one that appears to be unfixable. The workaround is to layer any entirely new protocol on Bitcoin, Lightning. It has been 4 years in deployment. It is couldn't be said to be successfully deployed as Lightning's creators have noticed bugs that make it unsuitable for prime time. https://medium.com/@antoine.riard/why-we-may-fail-lightning-...
I'm no expert, but they don't appear to be bugs that run as deep as bitcoin's scaling flaw, however they do require changed to both bitcoin and Lightning to fix. And implementing the fix is bogged down by the need to keep the patient alive and functional during the operation. The serious mistakes created by a "moving fast and break things" doesn't work for this style of project.
And for "why" bitcoin / Lightning isn't working splendidly after all this time, I think it's fair to say creating a functional digital currency that is secure and scales infinitely turned out to be far harder than anybody imagined, and I'd say far harder than anybody could have possibly predicted.
Lightning still has some rough edges (async payments) and unsolved issues (spam resistance) but it’s a lot closer to being a convincing private scalable p2p payment network than many realise.
[1]: https://breez.technology/ [2]: https://phoenix.acinq.co/