Bitcoin Forum

I feel that blockchain is here to stay but can't help thinking there might be a SLIGHT possibility that BTC wont get mainstream. In the UK, I don't know of one place that accepts BTC on the high street and I'm not a hermit.

I was filling the car up a few days ago and thought what it would be like to pay with BTC.
Maybe it will never be illegal in the UK or my government would have said so already but it may never become mainstream and ONLY niche.

The price we dream of for a BTC to be 5 figures is the day my mum has her own BTC account which she takes travelling and she 55 years old. Blockchain is staying but can it force its way into mainstream if given time. Will it happen or NOT. Is the fact that japan have adopted it and they are a developed country means that its ONLY a matter of time the west adopts it.

10-15 years is hard to imagine and so far down the road...

It wil go mainstream, in the sense that more people will use it than now.

Not sure if it would ever get 10% of world population for example, because we don't have a road map for that beyond LN, which is confusing to noobies anyway.... we will see.

First requirement of going mainstream as currency - solving the scaling problem. Otherwise Bitcoin will be a "digital gold" - expensive to move, suitable mostly as storage of value or used only for very expensive purchases.
We may be getting close to it as offchain and sidechain solutions are being developed, so this problem might be solved in a few years.
The second problem is regulation and competition - some governments might start actively opposing Bitcoin, banks will start offering their clients better deals to prevent them switching to crypto. Average people probably don't really care much about decentralization and financial freedom, they want fast and cheap transactions, which was the original promise of Bitcoin, described in Satoshi's whitepaper.

It's possible but not very probable. If things like the current situations in Venezuela keep occuring I confident bitcoin will be adopted at a higher rate than it is now. Right not bitcoin has still a couple of flaws that need fixing but they're so insignificant compared to the bigger roadmap of bitcoin.

We've already seen Russia and China putting heavy restrictions on trading bitcoin. There's no chance of an entire country adopting bitcoin into it's
central economy because of the main message of it being a decentralized currency. I can see various independent businesses allowing people to pay with
cryptos. And BTC has already started going mainstream ever since major news networks have started talking about it which caused more people to become
involved.

As it is, the complex PoW process in Bitcoin makes transactions horribly inefficient in terms of electricity use.  Microtransactions may appear "free" or "cheap" to the user when the blockchain is supposedly scalable, but it's certainly not cheap for the planet.

Another example of a problem problem is that forks hurt the Nash equilibrium - they can be more profitable while using the same mining algorithm, and they could be mined using BTC ASICs.

I don't know where you're getting this information from, but the vast majority of merchants in Japan do not accept BTC.  It's still only a small niche.
In BTC's current state, it wouldn't make much sense for a physical store to accept BTC unless people are buying expensive products (say in IKEA for example).  Transactions are too expensive and they require waiting for confirmation.  In a physical store, you can't just stand there for twenty minutes or whatever waiting for your transaction to confirm before you walk out with the product.

Online stores sometimes accept it.  If you're in the US, there's enough online stores for you to buy most products (not food).  In the UK it's a bit harder but there are still a fair few.

Basically I'm just saying that BTC is not ready for mainstream adoption.  It's far from bad, but it will take time for the technology to develop into a fully working cryptocurrency.

From technical perspective, Bitcoin would have LN and this has to drastically increase the transaction capacity. Instant transactions, low fees, user adoption.

Bitcoins volatility might be stopping some merchants from accepting it, but as bitcoin price increases and user demand for bitcoin as a payment option rises, more merchants would start accepting it, merchant adoption.

I think the biggest barrier that is stopping bitcoin from going mainstream is a good number of people don't understand the technology behind bitcoin or how it works and then there are some misconceptions. It would take some time for people to grasp what is bitcoin/blockchain technology.

Another good number of people even don't know bitcoin exists because they don't have internet access, maybe in the future, Blockstream Satellite will overcome this barrier, global adoption.

I believe in the coming years more countries would legalise bitcoin and it is possible for bitcoin to attain global adoption in the next 10 to 15 years.

According to Andreas Antonopoulos bcoin mainstream adoption will take 15 to 20 years, https://youtu.be/y3cKBDBabtA

:D I actually have tried that and did with no problems. I had no car, walked 6km through the woods in Winter to reach a store and lived a full year in a place where you have to walk out to get reception. Just saying to let you know that anything is possible. What for one person is the end of the world for another is just another day.
Yes, it can remain a currency of the Internet and never go mainstream. By mainstream I mean at least 50% worldwide adoption.

While the capitalization of bitcoin is about 78 billion dollars. This is almost half of what is invested in the crypto currency. Therefore, in the near future, there is no alternative to bitcoin as the main crypto currency. True, bitcoin has its drawbacks. This is too long a transaction time and a relatively high commission fee. This prevents its use in small purchases. These lacks are lacking in many altcoyins. In this connection, it is possible that in the long term, if these problems are not solved, bitcoin will give up its leader's place to more successful digital coins.

It might! I see no reason why it shouldn't go mainstream. However, like litecoin boss mentioned, bitcoin may end up just being a digital gold which will be good only for its value and for people to spend they may have to change into other digital currency. But who knows what tomorrow holds? I guess if all these current issues are solved, going mainstream shouldn't be a challenge.

Back in the good old days, when there were only gold and silver coins to pay for goods and services, people were smart enough to choose which coin is needed to pay for something. If they wanted to buy a house, they just took out the gold from the hidden (treasure)chest, and escorted by two strong guards, they went to pay for the house. But, if they wanted to buy some bread for the family, they took only the silver coins. They have never used gold for small purchases, because it was too expensive to deal with it.
Silver was the most common "currency", but nobody would told that the leader's place is other than the gold...
Maybe this would be a possible solution, BTC will be the gold, and LN will be silver, or an alt could act like a silver, who knows...
As long as exchanges uses BTC to determine the price of many alts (and they don't list, just a few alts with USD or EUR pairs), BTC will remain.

what i see, is there is a small chance for bitcoin going to mainstream, since there will be a lot of hindrances, but in the future, when bitcoin is accepted worldwide, bitcoin will go mainstream. We need to check on who are behind the hindrances for bitcoin to go mainstream, first the media, non of them don't know what bitcoin is, so they need to conduct interviews, but they are only limited to that, they don't have any shows whatsoever promoting the use of bitcoin, rather the want a juicy scoop that bitcoin is being used in the deep web, rather than saying how bitcoin could be of use to us. Second, the banks, banks knows that they cannot regulate the use of bitcoins, and that they will loose a lot of money if they do so, since bitcoin a digital currency far from what they are used to, which is fiat. We should also consider that the media is being backed up by banks, and they don' want to loose their war against cryptocurrency. then we also have the governments, they know they cannot tax bitcoins, so they will loose your precious taxes, but hopefully they can find a way in order to make things work, since bitcoin can generate a lot of income and can produce thousands of jobs if they do so. I think this generation of bitcoiners will not be able to see bitcoin going mainstream all over the world, but the next will surely will, since we all need to adopt in the changes the world is giving us.

It's been just 9 years since Bitcoin developed. It is too early to conclude that Bitcoin won't be mainstream. There are Billions of people who don't have any idea of Bitcoin's existence. There is a lack of awareness and advertisement. Efforts need to be made on individual level.

Demand has sharply increased this year as mainstream media is now covering Bitcoin, many celebrities are showing interest as recently by john Cena on his Instagram page, Bitcoin has came out of the illegal market as use of Bitcoin in darkweb has reduced by half, various countries are making it legal which not only make it popular in that country but also gain attention from other countries. Give Bitcoin some time, it is still in its intial phase. Enjoy knowing Bitcoin this early when users are only in millions where Bitcoin targets Billions of world's population.

no because it has already happened in some countries like Japan and it has already started slowly and on a smaller scale on some other countries. so your question is somewhat moot now.


it doesn't matter how big or mainstream bitcoin gets, some people will never use it. the same way they are not using other technologies such as computers, cell phones, credit cards,... i hear some old people who say they don't trust or understand them so they don't use them. it will be the same with bitcoin.

i think with all of these problems presented, especially with scalability, im of the opinion bitcoin itself wont be going mainstream. if anything, a new cryptocurrency based on bitcoin that aims to solve these issues with long term use and scaling in mind will probably be the one to take the torch and be the first real result from the experiment that is bitcoin. who knows, maybe not even that hypothetical cryptocurrency will go mainstream, it'll take a lot of time before we have anything with all the right attributes to actually implement into a large scale economy.

also true; no matter what, people will resist change, especially change in something that has remained unchanged in their lives up until that point.

It depends on what you define as mainstream. If you think it is going to replace a majority of the economic system then you're probably long as it stands right now; there's simply nothing to really determine whether or not there is going to be a replacement of that scale, meaning that it is unlikely in the first place. Plus the governments won't rescind their power.

Now if you are wondering about when it becomes something a lot of people use in conjunction with their current financial situation, then it really doesn't have a general time when we could see the switch for the common man. It'll likely happen over the course of a week or two, if it happens, in a sort of viral "everyone is doing it" way. That's the most likely way we could see a change. Otherwise, a very long, drawn out and potentially full-of-legal issues problems.

Totally agree with your point of view. If Bitcoin will remain a kind of digital gold it will never become mainstream, because it will be used just for investment purposes and investors (in any market) are generally a minority compared to the whole world population.
So Bitcoin can get mainstream only if it is used as a currency and a payment method. Otherwise, if Bitcoin will be used just for investments and speculation, it won't get mainstream. Never.

Bitcache will make Bitcoin mainstream

I think bitcoin can go mainstream two different ways. Either it becomes the investment of the 21st century, or it is used as a currency.
As an investment, some kind of digital gold, I don't think it is really necessary to solve the scaling problem. People do not buy or sell gold every day.
In that case the number of transactions would not increase that much. And if you invest, you have more time to wait until your transaction is done.
Bitcoin going back to be a currency, then we need a solution for the scaling problem. And I think that would lead to many disappointed investors as well.

We have nothing to worry about as Bitcoin is still relatively young compared to other fiat currencies we have. We have to give it more time because we are still in the speculative stage...once the value of Bitcoin could start to plateau then we can expect more and more merchants to be getting into the Bitcoin ecosystem.

it will get mainstream in the sense that some parties will do their best to regulate and exploit it.

There is a possibility that soon enough ETH and other ICO bubbles will go down (ICO is overpriced af) and it will drown bitcoin. At least for some time. Anyway BTC still have enough problems to deal with.

The way Bitcoin has maintained its dominance in cryptocurrency market, Bitcoin will stay the most popular cryptocurrency in future as well. I agree blockchain technology is revolution but Bitcoin is no less. Until cryptocurrencies will exist, Bitcoin will remain mainstream. But mainstream as in financial landscape beating all traditional monetary system is possible but it will take time.

the mainstream you're talking about is different from the op. you're talking about popularity and dominance of bitcoin among cryptocurrencies only but whats on the

op is its popularity as well as acceptance over countries. mainstream means dominant trend. yes in terms of cryptocoins it is mainstream but not in general-- i mean if it

is then most people that you know must also know it. back to the question, if its a remote chance, yes there is, i mean theres no guarantee on this field right?

People's definition of mainstream adoption is too vague which makes it difficult to explain to them. As for me, mainstream adoption includes merchants and customers filling up that gap in the economy that is mainly consisted of traders and bagholders. Down the road, bitcoin may still be a heavily traded asset, yes, but if it still haven't picked up any merchants along the way, I don't think it's really fun to use bitcoin as a form of payment knowing that you can't buy anything using it.

It would probably will go mainstream soon. It is now popular in many countries. And I really think it will only takes years for bitcoin to overcome the world. It will be good if it will be well-known as it gives a lot of benefits and it helps people a lot. I don't mind if a lot of people will use bitcoin as for me sharing is caring. But I do hope that people will use bitcoin professionally.

No I don’t think so that bitcoin will never be the mainstream, besides I think that it would be the number one currency of the world in the coming future. As we can see the value in the last 8 years so much increase, while no other currency has gain so much popularity and acceptance throughout the world. so it is obvious that soon it will dominate the world and will be the mainstream compare to other currencies.