Bitcoin Forum

Why has Satoshi's vision for the Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system failed?

How did the investors ruin the vision which was similar to the Napster where data was shared at its own expense and received free of charge?

Because it still remains too fundamentally complex for the average person to understand, let alone use - its fairly abstract, and although people are willing to except abstraction, when it comes to their money it takes a while for a notion, any notion, to catch on (think of old ladies at a grocery store who still write checks by hand). I'd say that only recently has it moved beyond a mere "novelty" for most people, and even then, their understanding of it is mostly now as an asset class and not yet as a currency (and, based on the talk on this very site, I'd say thats the case even for most so-called "true believers".) The problem is though, that this very misunderstanding (that its a speculative asset and not a currency) has essentially made it so that it can't really function as a currency in almost any meaningful way, since a functioning currency needs enough stability that it can be used predictably, while, as we all know, crypto suffers from extreme fluctuations at present. If the price ever stabilizes (and I don't mean for a month, but for a long time) then perhaps it could eventually be "restored" to its original purpose.

Now bitcoin has problems due to its low bandwidth, and therefore has a massive hang of its transactions and even high commission fees. Apparently, Satoshi Nakamoto did not count on such popularity of bitcoin, having established scalability in ten transactions per second. However, one can not say that his vision was not justified. Bitcoin is created with open source, that is, it remains open for improvement and it was precisely this vision of Satoshi for the growth of bitcoin as the main type of crypto currency.

I don't think the vision is failed. Satoshi introduced the blockchain technology and even if bitcoin is not used for peer to peer transactions, for sure another cryptocurrency will be used in future for such transactions. Blockchain technology is still new.

The investors have not ruined any vision. On the contrary, they are the ones which keep Bitcoin alive and running, together with the miners. I acknowledge that it is still fairly complex for mass adoption, but the fundaments remain. And it is evolving and in my opinion, the implementation and use of the blockchain is changing the world.

Nothing is free in this world. If you want to provide free service then go ahead - be the altruist and pay for it.
Life will always find a way to verify business plan of every possible endeavour. When Satoshi designed Bitcoin no one could be aware of what future will bring.
We have no idea how Bitcoin will evolve - it is far too soon to cry about it and claim that 'electronic cash system failed'.

I strongly believe that Satoshi didn't personally wanted others to go for his vision of things, but he rather steeped out of the project and let others - the community to decide how they want this bitcoin to be and what path it should go for.

I don't really understand what investors have to do with bitcoin being "centralized" (I draw this centralized conclusion based on you saying Napster)? Most investors simply have paper wallets, hardware wallets etc. and they simply create value by trading and they don't influence on the bitcoin network, I mean they could through mining but so far we haven't had any problem with that, or at least I don't see this as some big issue.

Plus I don't have big issue with paying few cents with LN/SegWit at the moment. If you are looking at free transactions then check some other coins such as IOTA.

His vision paved the way for crypto currencies as we know them. It was a way to move banking back to the people and away from big banks. Everyone sees their self as investors in bitcoin. If transactions were 100 percent free then there would be no incentive for miners. For bitcoin to flourish we need to have miners.

Satoshi bitcoin was successful. Don't be negative at it! Without bitcoin we don't know blockchain and every altcoins in the marketcap should be valuable they are the promising coin of the future alot of talented developer are onto it.

We cant say that it is already ruined since we are really still using it that way but somehow we can able to see on the views on how most people do treat it which is on making money without really minding too much into its benefits when it comes to money transactions or innovation of new way payment system. For now all the thing we need to do is to see adoption rising on each places of the world and one of the reason why we dont still achieve it because government would really be the worst enemy.

The "vision" of satoshi nakamoto is still in process. It is not yet compromised. We still have chance. Why? Because of the dip, people are now screaming that we don't have now the chance in enjoying crypto? You're dead wrong. Bitcoin is only starting. It is not dead yet. Once a thing isn't dead, it still has the chance for self bettering.

The investors did not do a thing, bitcoin is a currency, of course it was going to be traded and people will try to make money out of it, that is just natural, second you seem to be talking about miners as well, miners are taking the biggest risk here since they have invested a fortune in specialized hardware that is completely useless except to mine bitcoin and they cannot do this for free they need to get profits, so the vision of satoshi has not failed we are still in the early stages and we do not know what it is going to happen at the end.

No it has not yet failed but due to the huge volume of transactions sent daily, it is encountering some issues and when it gets solved, it would get mostly solved.Its actually spammers who were responsible for network congestion with spam transactions.Another aspect is that most of bitcoin holders today view it as a high return giving asset and not ready to spend it or use it as a currency.

What was "Satoshi's vision" -- exactly? And how has it failed?

Today, payment channels are being integrated, just like the original client. And fees have also dropped to the point where I barely notice them. I'm paying < 5 satoshis/byte now. When I first started using Bitcoin in 2013, the recommended fee was 0.0001BTC/kB, or 10 satoshis/byte. Some clients defaulted to 0.0001BTC regardless of transaction size, and IIRC some clients defaulted to 0.0005 BTC.

Here's a trip through memory lane: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=245552.0

So, I'm paying significantly lower fees today than I was in 2013. I could probably pay even lower fees, but I haven't found a good way to estimate Segwit fees yet.


The investors ruined the vision by......using Bitcoin? :)

bitcoin is what its users decide they want it to be. satoshi created it and sent it out into the world. it's down to the rest of the world to mould it. satoshi is now irrelevant.

In short, his job is done already and yet bitcoin is a decentralized thing and even he would tend to changed things he wont able to do such thing because the entire community is the one who do really moulds up on its future. Either it would followed satoshis plan or aim or would go into the different direction. No one knows but seeing on things now we are really heading that way.

Totally agree with this. Bitcoin is still young in the market and Satoshi didnt knew Bitcoin would grow so much in such a small time. The huge growth has resulted in many scaling issues which Satoshi wouldn't have thought of because if he would have then he would surely have created a solution for it as well. His vision is not yet achieved because only a few % of people in the world are using it right now. Once the amount of people using it reaches a substantial % I am sure his vision would surely be achieved.

It didn't fail, people are using Bitcoin as a currency, maybe just not at a scale that some people would like to see.
Also, if you are referring to the fact that it's main use case is investment/speculation vehicle, then it can easily be explained: Bitcoin is still very new, and only recently started going really mainstream, so there's still a lot of uncertainty, whether it is going to work or not, so this causes volatility and discourages big companies from accepting it (and even those companies that claim to accept it now, like Microsoft, are actually using proxies), so we don't see any global adoption yet. But it's going to come sooner or later, when public will get more confident.

it has not failed, not yet anyways. bitcoin has been a peer to peer digital cash all these years and it has been used as a currency. in fact the usage has been growing a lot. specially after the adoption of bitcoin as a legal way of payment aka a currency in Japan things changed a lot in 2017.
BitPay is reporting to process $110M+ in bitcoin payments per month.[1] that has to count for something don't you think?

i believe you are caught up in the past 2-3 months of high fees and some negative news that you think bitcoin has failed as a currency.

[1] https://blog.bitpay.com/bitpay-growth-2017/

First we have to understand what vision did satoshi had when he invented bitcoin.His vision was to have digital transaction with a revolutionary system called blockchain and currencies would flow all over the globe to erase all the boundaries.And almost everything is done but in a negative way.Currencies are flowing all over the globe but just to gain profits.Only 05% of bitcoin is used as a payment option is some market which was not satoshi's vision soo yes his vision is yet to achieve but i would say we need to achieve it in a positive way

I don't think his vision is achieved completely.We have achieved something but not fully.Bitcoin is yet to legalized,infect governments are still against bitcoin.His vision was that everybody should achieve something from this concept but here only rich are getting richer and they are manipulating the whole market making it difficult for the small investor to make any profit.Still we have to go long way inorder to achieve the vision of arguably the legend of cryptoworld.

I agree it is already succesful blockchain has become famous and use all over the world. Lot of the company wants to be same as bitcoin now thats why they do icos.

Strange, but Bitcoin is exactly this.

It's too early to say that satoshi's vision has not been achieved, right now bitcoin is facing some serious problem and what you said is true bitcoins transaction fee is getting larger but i think that is normal, for bitcoin to evolved or to be a better crypto of course it need to overcome those problems and no one can say what satoshi's vision is maybe it is already achieved and if it's not bitcoin still has a long journey up ahead.

No,it is not failed.Because we are still talking about bitcoin after the ten years since it was launched.But we didn't use bitcoin in our daily usages because we still not yet ready for it.People using fiat currency system for centuries but digital currency has been in practice for less than a decade so it needs time to achieve the satoshi's vision.
Why?
Because we are the reasons still it is not yet achieved,we use bitcoin as an asset rather than currency so it is not circulating as much but in future everything will change.

I agree with you, he mainly developed it as a medium of transaction. People are using it as an investment option.

This thread is making me feel sick. The amount of crap that can be stored into people's head is astonishing.

I feel good, because these are the people that panic sell. Money has to come from somewhere yknow ...

Afterall, bitcoin has fulfilled it's function and has advanced the block chain to the masses. And bitcoin itself hasn't died yet, and in any case there's gonna be growth, it has yet to delight us with it's prices.