what glaring flaws?
It continues to function as it set out to be.
It continues to function as it set out to be.
Satoshi's paper is literally titled, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", but it's generally considered to have failed at that. (Even most Bitcoin events don't allow you to pay in Bitcoin, for example.)
Bitcoin folks now talk about it as "digital gold" or "a store of value", which is fine, but very different than what it was set out to be.
Meanwhile adoption does continue to rise with apps like https://gethaven.app
I can appreciate how off-chain overlays can allow Bitcoin to achieve transactions at scale. What I don't quite get is why this kind of recentralization[1] is good for Bitcoin. It feels like the endgame may be a kind of "worst of both worlds" solution — no longer decentralized, but still not as efficient as centralized solutions.
Unless: Can Bitcoin users prevent off-chain transactions, to avoid Lightning?
[1] "10 percent of [Lightning] nodes control 80 percent of funds on the network." https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoins-lightning-network-is-growi...
Gold is a poor medium of exchange, too, but that has not prevented it from being a satisfactory store of value.
(Yes, I know that gold actually was a common medium of exchange at one time; it was displaced centuries ago by the greater convenience of paper money.)
Some visionary types hoped Bitcoin would disrupt government-issued (paper) money and governments and banks generally. The fact that these hopes were dashed does not mean Bitcoin will not remain an OK place to park money.
Most people would not want their asset prices to swing like Bitcoin's value does.
Developers unwilling to focus on on-chain scaling is another (leading to the high fees).
Bitcoin also has a big privacy and fungibility flaw, something that Monero aims to solve.