Well, how about trying to move $200 in Bitcoin - it's the most expensive funds transfer. You cannot "move" $50 as it's cost-prohibitive!
Note that the transfer of monetary value/energy is final settlement (i.e. it's not just an IOU that will be settled at later date, like most bank payments).
Ultimately the base layer network will be used for settlement between banks, national reserve asset/currency etc. and faster, cheaper payment rails will be built on top of it (e.g. the Lightning Network)
The fact is that Bitcoin is very likely to absorb a vast percentage of the worlds value simply as it is. Once this has happened its value will stabilise and it will become useful as a unit of account/day-to-day currency. By this point, there will be far more motivation to focus on developing solutions (such as Lightning) to allow smaller and faster transactions.
You present this as a fact, but the actual valuation of Bitcoin doesn't seem to support this claim. John McAfee bet (and proverbially lost) his testicles on broad estimations of Bitcoin's continued growth. Without extraordinary evidence, you can't make claims of extraordinary provenience.
> there will be far more motivation to focus on developing solutions (such as Lightning) to allow smaller and faster transactions.
If you need an L2 transaction layer to solve an issue inherent to an L1 chain, you're kinda just admitting that the base layer is flawed. Why use Bitcoin at all if we need mediators to settle regular transactions?
The "we'll fix it later" mentality works for shitty altcoins that have nothing to lose by reinventing themselves, but I'm not convinced Bitcoin can change. I was mining Bitcoin about a decade ago now, hearing people say "Lightning will work soon" or "a good interchain bridge will exist eventually" in 2024 leaves me convinced nothing has changed. It's a race between the economics and the technology to see which becomes outdated first.
On a similar note, TCP is an admission that IP is flawed. And HTTP is proof that the entire networking stack is a scam.
Clearly, any decent networking protocol would handle any and all information interchange anyone could ever need.
The fact that HTTP is on its third iteration, and it’s still built in top of the same Internet Protocol from 1974, proves that _nothing_ has changed. /s
Unlike the OSI model, Bitcoin's solution to finance is not modular or all-encompassing. If it's not going to adapt to modern demands, it will get replaced. There's no point in keeping around a financial solution that is impossible to fix when it breaks.
Your prediction for the future that a ledger with the throughput of a 28.8 modem will absorb the world's value is "fact"?
By this point, there will be far more motivation to focus on developing solutions (such as Lightning) to allow smaller and faster transactions.
It has been in the works for a decade and no one wants it. Why would someone use that when any other cryptocurrency (except for ethereum) already do small and fast transactions?
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-doge-lt...
Yes, the base layer network is ideally suited for storing extremely large amounts of wealth, for large amounts of time. No other asset has qualities that come close, they all leak value compared to bitcoin.
Are you copying some talking points or can you explain on a fundamental level why you believe this?
As far as clones. Network effect takes care of that. They would have to be substantially better than bitcoin to beat it and that is extremely unlikely to happen as bitcoin is close to perfect.
You realize that ethereum already surpasses bitcoin in transactions and litecoin and even dogecoin do too right?
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth-lt...
Also you still haven't linked where you are getting these ideas. When you believe in predictions of the future with no evidence and no possibility in reality, that's called religion.
Bitcoin refuses to increase their throughput and at the current rate, everyone on earth gets a single transaction every 50 years. What part of this actually makes sense to you?
First off, the transactions on the main bitcoin network will be the largest transactions in the world. All the smaller transactions will take place on different bitcoin networks. Lightning is a decentralised example, VISA and Paypal are centralised examples.
This sounds like you have been soaked in /r/bitcoin propaganda. You realize that subreddit is completely censored so that anyone who goes against the narrative of more throughput or the absurdity of the lightning network gets banned right? Try going there an questioning the common narrative to experiment for yourself then see what happens.
You aren't confronting why anyone would do what you're saying. Why would anyone transfer money onto a network where they have to pay huge amounts of money to move it around? What problem does that solve? It isn't like people can't already move money around much cheaper than a bitcoin transaction.
The lightning network has been promised for over a decade now. No one uses it because you have to make a little cluster of transactions that have no impact on the actual chain until you pay the enormous fees. That's like a little village coming up with their own currency of swapping IOUs with everyone else and not being able to use their money until they pay $12-$37 to convert it something Other people will use. If your IOU is less that the transaction amount, it's frozen. It's an absurd idea that no one wants.
Most of all you aren't confronting why anyone would put themselves through all this when they could either use traditional finance or other cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is right now useful for and used for only speculation and nothing else. Knowing that why would anyone put their money into unless they were speculating on it?
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth-et...
Ultimately, I see Bitcoin as Gold. You do not touch your gold savings for buying your daily coffee. For that, you have USDs in your wallet. But you still transact with Gold once in a while when it makes sense.
Indeed it is crazy. Who is advocating for that though?
Think about it, running an exchange has costs. I really don't understand how people can be so easily tricked by "free" offers that are actually more expensive when you do the math. PFOF (i.e. legal theft), unfavorable spread, etc... They get their money one way or another. It can technically make sense when you're trading something like $50 worth of a stock, because of course that would not be reasonable with a brokerage using a traditional fee structure. But frankly trading such low figures is silly. You have to invest a lot of time (=money) in research when stock picking, else you're guaranteed to lose sooner or later. But the reward simply isn't there. Even if you make 100% profit you now have $100. Better put that money into an index fund savings plan and forget about active trading. You're guaranteed to receive a better reward on your investment just getting a part time job selling fast food or something like that.
In crypto, the margins are much wider than in any traditional financial services, which rely on volume and wide adoption!
The great thing about cryptocurrency is you can trade it any way you like. You can take your tokens in self custody. You can in theory trade with a random guy on the street, without any third party involvement and with zero fees. I know a guy who does this because he's worried about a coming police state, so he buys everything with cash during meetups.
I think the high fees CEX are currently charging, which you're right about, has multiple reasons. One is it's a completely new and largely unregulated space. There are a lot of risks, they need to set aside a lot for litigation. FTX had very low fees for example while stealing customer funds to lobby Washington ;) Coinbase is legit but has to spend a lot on legal fees and compliance, because they're in it for the long run. Also a huge part of the reason is surely simply because they can. Crypto traders are making so much money that they're more likely to accept paying high fees than the average stock trader. That won't last forever, it's just because the market is new and volatility is crazy.
I was reading a book about that recently, it boils down to: "You're not [just] the customer, you're [also] the product."
Key term: Payment For Order Flow (PFOF) [0], with the book-paragraphs I was thinking of down below:
____________
> Retail investors have one hugely attractive property when considered by a professional – they’re dumb money. Not only are they unlikely to have private information, a lot of the time they haven’t taken care to consider all the public information. When the party on the other side of the trade is a small investor (or a lot of orders from small investors all over the country, ‘bundled’ by a retail stockbroker), you can be reasonably sure that you’re not taking too big a risk that the person selling stock to you knows something about it that you don’t.
> This makes retail orders very valuable to the market. One of the reasons why stock brokerage commissions are so cheap these days is that retail brokers have actually realised how valuable they are. They charge a quite substantial fee to players like the high-frequency traders for the privilege of dealing against their order flow, and they rebate some of this fee to their customers. But the retail orders would eventually dry up if the customers lost too much or felt that they weren’t being given a fair chance. And without a steady flow of ‘dumb money’ lubricating the wheels, the professionals would find it a lot harder to trade, as they’d always suspect each other’s motives for buying or selling.
-- Lying For Money by Dan Davies
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/paymentoforderflow.asp
/s