The people coordinating Bitcoin made an explicit technical decision to focus on it being a store-of-value, which made it too expensive to use as a means-of-exchange.
Smaller transactions like the ones you described became too slow and expensive to be viable anymore, because of these decisions.
The decision to not expand block size limits was 100% coordinated by a huge amount of chinese mining capacity because the ingress routes to their networks of miners would not have handled the higher throughput, and like six dudes who controlled 80% of the miners sat up on a stage together and talked about it. How is that not coordinated? Bitcoin had every chance to improve it's ability to be a currency, but guess what, the oligarchs who controlled all the mining thought it would give them less money to go that route, so they stopped it. It's almost like a system that allows you directly more power based on how much wealth you personally control doesn't work "For the people"
> It's almost like a system that allows you directly more power based on how much wealth you personally control doesn't work "For the people"
That's proof of stake. Mining isn't about how much wealth you control but about how much hardware.
But wouldn't this have happened over time anyway as transaction size and network volume increased? The exponential increases in electricity usage to mine BTC would have to be paid for somehow?
Also you seem to think that network usage is related to some way to electricity usage. Even today, a single person with a laptop could be the only miner, and the network would still run just fine.
The current block reward on Bitcoin is 900 coins per day, so the upper bound on electricity usage is however much power 900 BTC will get you. That number gets cut in half every 4 years, so generally, the max electricity expenditure is actually going down, except that the price of BTC is currently going up faster than the rewards are going down.
Energy usage is directly correlated to price, not utility. There is a loose connection between utility and price, but since utility got capped in 2015 or so, the price has continued to go up, so that connection is pretty tenuous.
There is this weird assumption that Bitcoin was "managed" or that political forces were at work. It was simply a war between some developers and others.
Not to you specifically, but in this thread: I find it troubling, this new reflex of ascribing to dark conspiracies what are banal historical facts.
The growth of the blocksize was inevitable once it took off; now we have lots of shitcoins, and a few that are stores of value and some that are means of exchange. Lots of hucksters showed up, but no one planned anything. (And looking at the state of things now, it clearly shows).
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/17/bitcoin-x...
never ascribe to conspiracy what can be ascribed to stupidity.
A conspiracy is just a group of people working towards a goal and keeping most of their actions secret, i.e. many groups.
The amount of fees is unlimited, and the total possible energy usage is currently unlimited and will remain unlimited, and scales with use.
The year 2140 isn't my definition of soon.
My (admittedly, limited) understanding is that standard fiat currencies are stores of value, media of exchange, and units of account. Being a store of value doesn't mean it needs to appreciate in value, just that it doesn't depreciate to nothing over reasonable timescales.
From what I've seen, the main problem with Bitcoin specifically as a currency is that it makes a terrible unit of account: its volatility compared to regular currencies means that no one's going to denominate any prices in BTC.
If you transact on Lightning network, it's much cheaper still.
Anyway that just makes my point even stronger.
Bitcoin went through a period when transaction fees were very high, and wait times were unreasonably long. During this period, they essentially lost all their users who were using Bitcoin for retail-type transactions: moving money across borders, sending payments to friends and family, making small illicit purchases, paying sex workers, etc.
Some they lost to Monero and other altcoins. Some went back to traditional finance. Some went to new non-crypto fintech. Those people did not come back to Bitcoin (they may have held some, but no longer use it for transactions).
The lower prices now reflect not only that some of the issues were resolved, but also the vastly reduced demand. Today, the vast majority of flows are related to speculation, or the use of Bitcoin in other parts of the crypto economy.