Bitcoin Forum

Look at the Bitcoin whitepaper once more: a peer-to-peer electronic payment system indeed. Was Satoshi really envisioning a payment system so widespread that it became a preferred way of paying for goods and services? What's happening today? Bitcoin is now more of an investment than a payment tool. In fact, it's as if all the cryptocurrencies are businesses for their inventors, bar Satoshi—a means of becoming automatic millionaires rather than a peer-to-peer payment system. In fact, the quickest way to get rich these days seems to be by starting a crypto project.

Not even the guy that started Bitcoin Satoshi Vision is exempted.

Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer payment system? Nah... more of a decentralized speculative investment platform.

I agree. It’s sad how the primary reason why people tell others about bitcoin is the fact that they can make money of its volatility. This wasn’t what Satoshi envisioned. I don’t even think that he knew that they’ll be such volatility. While we enjoy and reap the fruits of it, let us not forget that it was actually built as a currency. Let’s not forget the pizza story that happened on this forum… it was meant to be an example which we should follow and walk in. 

Satoshi created Bitcoin and thought it will be used as a payment system between peers and to be honest Bitcoin still is a P2P payment solution and people are still using it for transactions without any doubt. But, it's also true that Bitcoin is now more considered as an asset to invest in rather than a P2P payment solution.

I believe Bitcoin needs both of those tags as a P2P payment solution and as an asset. The ones who consider it as an asset will hold it and the holding will increase Bitcoin's value overtime and the ones who consider it can use it as P2P payment solution. The fees a little bit high these days due to ordinals issue but they'll gradually come down to normal levels in some time.

Bitcoin have not deviated from Satoshi's vision for its creation rather it is doing exactly what it was created to do... to be a form of value and a medium of exchange. People keep the dollar in their bank accounts as a means of saving for the future, that does not mean others are not paying for goods and services with the dollar. In my country, many people have become millionaires by simply holding the dollar, which experienced explosive growth against our local currency.

That people are even holding Bitcoin and profiting from it is a good indication that Bitcoin is doing very well in line with the purpose of its creation.

Bitcoin as an asset, or so-called digital gold, defeats its purpose as a payment tool. Assets are what people hold unto or even horad. Why do you think the big players are moving in? There's money to be made. Down the line, we'll have a lot of greedy people behind the institutions grabbing as much BTC as they can get their hands on, and no one would even think of using Bitcoin as a payment tool. Like gold, Bitcoin will retire into digital vaults all over the world.

That's a fake Bitcoin. (https://bitcoinsv.com/)

As you can see, Satoshi himself was saying Bitcoin is like a collectible or commodity, there's nothing wrong for us to use Bitcoin as a speculative asset.

Even most people use Bitcoin as a speculative asset, it can be used as a peer to peer currency, as long as the marketplace/store accept it. That's a freedom to choose.

Satoshi had envisioned bitcoin as digital gold, so I wouldn't say his vision is deviated. Rather, "do what you think is worth with it" was sort of his opinion on that matter. No question, the problem described on the whitepaper is a money one, but as an old saying goes, bad money drives out good (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bad_money_drives_out_good#English).

Bitcoin is still money; it's just used less than fiat, because people rather to hold it.

Samsung started as a grocery trading store but it's among the world leading providers of mobile phone in the world. Where we're today mightn't have been where satoshi envisioned but it has given Bitcoin the publicity it needed and that's an achievement that could have taken us centuries to achieve but we have done that in just a decade. As Bitcoin keep improving we'll achieved it been widely use as a currency more as satoshi wanted but this is a process and we have to believe in the process.

Bitcoin is still a currency but it's features are making it more appealing as a store of value (investment opportunity), that doesn't mean Bitcoin has stopped been a currency. As more countries adopt Bitcoin and more companies recognised it as a payment option, the use of Bitcoin as a currency will increase. You don't expect people to use Bitcoin as much as you have loved when there aren't enough institution to facilitate that.

Bitcoin hasn't deviated but its assets quality is what is been focused on and things would be different in the future when more adoption comes onto the industry and businesses that using Bitcoin more frequently. For the meantime what I think is important is for Bitcoin to not die. It still been relevent is a positive thing and gives room for more development and improvements.

Right you are! Bitcoin is more of an investment rather than a currency system. But that's what the mass wants. That's how a free market should function. When an innovation is launched and made it available to the mass, it's the public that decides the course of it. That's exactly what happened to Bitcoin as well.

Also, looking at the current situation of the transaction fees, Bitcoin is just not competitive enough to become a currency system. To be a currency system, Bitcoin needs to be cheap and fast, which is not the case. So take it as an investment only!

It no longer is cheap.  That is certain.  I remember people recommending me bitcoin to get advantage of the low fees.  That has not aged well!

Satoshi's vision was not just for today it is for the future because he's so far into it. Bitcoins right now may not to be a peer to peer system, but the future is not yet here, and what we are experiencing right now are all the activities that will occur before the final goal of bitcoins are achieved. We may not live to see bitcoins become a globally accepted means of payment, but we are getting there, and there is a greater chance for it to occur, than for it not to.

Patience!

Bitcoin has been a speculative assets even before Satoshi disappearance from online, he was here in 2010 and it bitcoin price has started to behave the way it's today. It was even more volatile those days because of low liquidity as it now today. You are not discussing the real challenge of bitcoin, we have more other than it been speculative assets since Satoshi left it to be open for everyone.

Bitcoin isn't longer for Satoshi, it's  now a big digital currency for the world  but the debate of mempool is never ending. This boiled down to the fees and I'm just curious why some BIP(bitcoin improvement proposals) where rejected and they allow bitcoin transaction mempool to be spam. I want to be convince otherwise that we have many other people from miners that love this crazy fees. It's the bitcoin community that are complaining but miners are enjoying everything they ever wanted in this cost of transactions. It still baffle how they stylishly even allow segwit for people to cut down fees only to be spending this huge fees when Satoshi whitepaper has vision and it's clearly stated and yet we want adoption.

It surprised me to learn just today that when Satoshi wrote the Bitcoin whitepaper, the idea was to create a cool way for people to buy stuff without the hassle of banks and stuff which is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. So Bitcoin has turned into more of a digital gold for investment than something you'd use to grab your morning coffee like cash but isn't that good news? It created something more.  It may be true that everyone's jumping on the crypto bandwagon not to revolutionize payments but to make quick millions but i think it is something to celebrate. Maybe it is just disappointing for those people who initially envisioned a widespread alternative to traditional payment systems. There are still a lot of things that bitcoin has to offer and we should welcome and study it of course.

Bitcoin is still decentralized, that's what matters the most. If it scarificed being peer-to-peer for the sake of better usability as a currency, it would have just become another centralized payment system. There is still a chance that some developer will find a clever way how to get more transactions without any drawbacks for decentralization. If that will happen then we'll be able to say that Bitcoin is fully following Satoshi's vision, right now we can say that it follows the most important parts.

satoshi didnt have a vision. it was not like he was a messenger of god having a vision of a burning bush

satoshi invented something from an idea. satoshis idea solved the problems other peoples similar ideas failed to solve

his idea was:

he didnt want "digital gold" (vaulted/locked asset) he wanted circulating cash

..
many things have changed over the years since satoshi's design
for instance mining is not done via a CPU of the computer running the node
for instance the dev politics of who decides the way forward of the bitcoin protocol
for instance the dev politics of fee wars to care more about over stimulating pools instead of using spot market economics to incentivise pools
for instance the devolution of onchain features to make it more annoying to use and less validated, allowing for more junk to be put into the blockchain

In my opinion, what we have today is more than what Satoshi has envisioned for bitcoin.
I don't think he thought about btc being adopted by countries to be legal tender, or big companies getting a hold on this.
Or having bitcoin ETF? So for me, we already achieved a lot more than what he planned for this currency.
Deviate from his vision? I don't think so. It even surpassed his visions I believe. If he is seeing how this market is currently right now, I would say he is more than happy to see his creation becoming mainstream.

The thing is that bitcoin's volatility rate's not just placed there as a coincidence, there's a reason why it's there, and I reckon Satoshi knew from the get-go that cryptocurrencies could be traded/invested upon like commodities and stores of value, just not entirely sure about whether he envisioned it to be this big really. But yeah, bitcoin hasn't at all deviated from what Satoshi wanted it to be at least for me. It remains a peer-to-peer payment system that people can depend upon if they want money transferred across distances, it gets its job done, but what I just can't understand is if he wanted bitcoin to become a global payment system that's on par with bank transfers and money remittance, why in the hell are is the network weak? We get network congestions for breakfast almost every week and if we're looking to expand bitcoin's reach this could become even more common in the future, is this really what he wanted? Did he really imagine bitcoin to be just big enough that a couple people could use it every now and again? I don't think so and for some fucking reason I cannot for the life of me figure out why these things even came to be lol.

Money first has to be owned before it can be used. We are still pretty early in the phase of getting people to own it. And the reason people want to own it is that it is a hard currency and therefore increases in value over time - which was part of Satoshi's vision for Bitcoin. You can't just skip straight to people using a currency when barely anyone has the currency, because you need enough people owning it and therefore accepting it for people to be able to readily spend it. Using it for payments is literally the last step in the evolution of a organically adopted currency. Bitcoin is still just very far from that final stage.


And not sure why you are mentioned other cryptocurrency as they have nothing to do with Satoshi or Bitcoin.

The sad truth is that the majority of people who get into bitcoin or crypto for the matter is for personal gain, they aren’t in it for the technology.
Most people deposit their fiat into their exchange, buy some crypto, leave it there and sell it in a few months or so and withdraw. They just do it out of speculation.
So whenever there is a huge rally it’s when we get this huge surge of people who just want to get rich quick. Pretty sure this wasn’t Satoshis original vision.

 Valery Chalidze (physicist and human rights defender) // with his book Entropy Demystified: Potential Order, Life and Money (2000)

You must read this book to understand how Satoshi created Bitcoin by anchoring it in physics, with proof of work. Make copies of this book (PDF) if it is not possible to obtain it. This is the last source I know of. Download it and copy it.

It can only be found on Wayback Machine, I add a description of this book which can be found at the beginning of the book, written by Valery Chalidze himself, who died in 2018. (1938-

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Entire book - PDF // Entropy Demystified: Potential Order, Life and Money (2000)

https://web.archive.org/web/20221004134003/http://www.worksofvalerychalidze.com/uploads/1/0/2/8/102863812/entropy.pdf

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About This Book (Valery Chalidze // 2000)

Although the concept of entropy has been under discussion for one and a half centuries, its philosophical depth has still not been properly explored and it is still one of the most complicated and controversial concepts of science. Its application to the study of social processes has started only in recent decades and no doubt this trend will continue. The author’s first goal in this book is to provide those who are interested in social studies, but not familiar with physics, with a comprehensible explanation of the concept of entropy. The value of the knowledge of entropy for the social scientist is at least two-fold:

Entropy is characteristic of a level of disorder in any statistical system and for this reason can be successfully used for the description of the communication process, music or economic activity as well as the behavior of inanimate matter. In this use, one is dealing with the order and disorder of a system independently of physics: entropic characteristics can be used no matter what makes a system orderly or disorderly, be it the laws of mechanics or our manipulations with symbols, like the alphabet letters of musical notes. The example of the use of the entropy concept as a characteristic of any statistical system is the well known Shannon’s Theory of Information which found its application not only in the technology of communications but in biology, linguistics and other areas.

Whenever we are dealing with matter and energy be it heat machines, biology, economy or the use of natural resources, we must take into account the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the level of disorder (entropy) in an enclosed system can not decrease and that one has to spend energy to decrease disorder in any part of the system. The processes of life and social life are characterized by increasing local order, but are still subject to limitation as dictated by the second law of thermodynamics. This brought scientists to the development of the physics of open systems thanks to the ideas of Schrodinger, Prigogine and others. Now we understand that the world is a place where destructive tendencies coexist with creative forces.

For many decades the traditional topic for passionate debate among scientists and moralists has been whether we are masters of our behavior or whether and to what extent we follow biological prescription - instincts. In this book, the author tries to go one step deeper, to the following inquiry: what are the inevitable consequences of the fact that we are built from matter, and how much our willing - together with instinctive - behavior is defined and limited by the laws of physics? Limitations imposed on life, social life, economics and the use of environment by the second law of thermodynamics are particularly interesting.

After an extensive explanation of what entropy is as a measure of disorder, the author shows how entropy can be used as a bulk characteristic to measure order. He introduces the concept of potential order, which characterizes the ability of an open system to become orderly or to create order in another system. Potential order is a property of fields of subatomic particles and atoms which provide for the primary organization of matter. It is also a property of complex molecules within the living cell which provide for the organized behavior of living entities. Further, human will and economic enterprise possess potential order to increase order around us, be it material order or the creation of information.

The author is showing that the second law of thermodynamics is fundamental in putting limitations on certain automatic behavioral patterns of all living creatures - including humans - such as entropy lowering activity and self-isolation from the disorderly matter surrounding us.

The entropic approach permits the author to do further inquiry into the connection between physics and economics. It is well known that the ideas of classical mechanics provided the basis for the development of mathematical economics since the time it was established in the nineteenth century. In recent decades more economists started to realize the limitation of such an approach and started to connect economic thinking with a thermodynamic approach as well as with systems’ theory.

The concept of entropy in relation to economics and sociology was under discussion in the works of Faber, Georgesku-Roegen, and others. More authors started to see the deep analogy of economic development and the behavior of a thermodynamic system. After all, human activity, which is the subject of economic study, is a local entropy lowering process and it is exactly physics which can permit us to see the unavoidable limits of this activity.

The author shows that the low-entropic component of an economy, which is the order producing activity of people, should not be treated in theory the same way as the purely energetic component. On the basis of this, the author shows the limitations for the use of variational calculus in economics, discussing particularly the maximization of utility function.

In his analysis of the monetary measurement of order and potential order, the author shows that some important problems connected with the evaluation of goods produced by economy, inflation and monetary policy come from the fact that the same measuring device—money— is used for both—the purely energetic and low-entropic components of the economy.

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It is clearly because of the current attacks by ordinals that is why it is not as convenient to use Bitcoin as payment compared to it being used as an investment. High fees hurts our every transactions that is why Bitcoin developers must find an alternative way to drive fees down or else I can call it a failure of maintaining it's intended purpose of existence. I can also see negative effects of Bitcoin on this like investors will divert to Altcoins just to have a reasonable transaction fees.

bitcoin does not deviate from satoshi's vision as a decentralized payment that can be used by everyone, but now do you see that bitcoin can be used as a means of payment that can be used by people in their daily transactions? no, because the fees are quite high. moreover, the use of bitcoin in daily transactions to replace fiat is still prohibited by the government, so until now people still prefer to trade it as an instrument.

so if today more people trade bitcoin it doesn't mean that bitcoin has deviated from satoshi's vision, it's just that bitcoin is not yet suitable for use as a means of payment on a massive scale, it's just still limited to people who want to make international transactions or those who want to pay fees.

satoshi vision has become a term for faketoshi
no one cares about SV

lets stick with thoughts about the real satoshi's invention and its evolution/devolution(pro/con)

bitcoin core protocol management is not the same landscape or roadmap compared to the era/ideas of satoshi
satoshi actually cared about lean byte utility where every byte counted and had purpose, unlike these days

Bitcoin is valuable because it has all the essential properties of paper money: acceptability, divisibility, durability, fungibility (interchangeability), portability, and scarcity.

Bitcoin did not deviate at all.So long as its popularity increased,exposure and indulgence has a positive impact globally,its here to stay.
It's a decentralized currency,a peer-to -version of electronic cash and that's it

Yes, it's not a payment system for the masses in a true P2P sense. The Bitcoin of today is a stored value compared to its original intent as greed has taken over. Take a look at the amount of wallets that control more than 50% of the coins in circulation. Less than 2k wallets with the top wallets controlling the top 20% of the coins in circulation.

Source:


2024-01-02
Balance, BTC   Addresses   % Addresses (Total)   Coins   USD   % Coins (Total)
(0 - 0.00001)   4006042   7.62% (100%)   21.13 BTC   $950,400   0% (100%)
[0.00001 - 0.0001)   10076664   19.16% (92.38%)   434.31 BTC   $19,532,705   0% (100%)
[0.0001 - 0.001)   13477469   25.62% (73.23%)   5,270 BTC   $237,025,182   0.03% (100%)
[0.001 - 0.01)   12285120   23.36% (47.6%)   44,837 BTC   $2,016,481,292   0.23% (99.97%)
[0.01 - 0.1)   8167920   15.53% (24.24%)   274,732 BTC   $12,355,690,871   1.4% (99.74%)
[0.1 - 1)   3559673   6.77% (8.71%)   1,100,284 BTC   $49,483,733,204   5.62% (98.34%)
[1 - 10)   868545   1.65% (1.95%)   2,157,581 BTC   $97,034,149,104   11.02% (92.72%)
[10 - 100)   139390   0.27% (0.3%)   4,428,137 BTC   $199,149,231,116   22.61% (81.7%)
[100 - 1,000)   13899   0.03% (0.03%)   3,916,788 BTC   $176,152,024,971   20% (59.09%)
[1,000 - 10,000)   1920   0% (0%)   4,681,942 BTC   $210,563,759,225   23.91% (39.1%)
[10,000 - 100,000)   103   0% (0%)   2,283,007 BTC   $102,675,012,751   11.66% (15.19%)
[100,000 - 1,000,000)   4   0% (0%)   692,085 BTC   $31,125,554,271   3.53% (3.53%)

Src:https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin-distribution-history.html
 

Blame Satoshi. Satoshi made Bitcoin so well people won't let go a Sat. Instead of spending, people are hodling and are stacking up as many Sats as possible.

And blame fiat. Why spend Bitcoin when I have some fiat which is fast losing its value? Fiat is for spending as Bitcoin is for hodling.

And perhaps blame Bitcoin as well for being slow and expensive. Why should I be spending a currency that grows in value over time and which is also inconvenient to use as payment?

I don't think it's a deviation. it's just that this vision has not been achieved. Don't care about the thoughts of current new project creators who think crypto is a safe and profitable digital investment asset for the future.
The current problem is regulation. Some countries accept Bitcoin as a tradable asset, not a means of payment. Unfortunately, the thought of Bitcoin as an investment asset has taken root when exchange platforms branded Bitcoin as an investment asset.
but I will believe it, someday, when there are problems with conventional payments, even uncontrolled fiat. Bitcoin will be the best solution in the future.

The question is do you really understand Satoshi's entire intention? I'm not sure if I see the problem wrong or not, but the introduction of bitcoin has made us see an opportunity to develop " a peer-to-peer electronic payment system indeed ", I also don't want to associate it. The only crypto brand is bitcoin, and bitcoin's current problems make more people view it as a speculative asset than popularize it. But clearly the solution still exists, along with the developments of altcoins, I personally do not like to insist on something immutable, it's just that its properties are similar and are helping bitcoin develop more, perhaps our understanding is contradictory and I also think it is all part of Satoshi's calculations.

How long has it been since Satoshi's mysterious departure? Well over a decade by now. Bitcoin has existed without Satoshi for far longer than the 2 years that he was around. There is no need for a decentralized network to adhere strictly to the vision of a single leader. In his absence, the protocol still needs to continue operating. Changes will be made when bitcoiners as a collective agree to them. At this moment, the community has decided that being able to pay for a cup of coffee with an onchain payment is the not an urgent priority.

Not at all!!
Bitcoin has not deviated from satoshi's vision because it still operate according to the expectations of the founder.Despite the mysterious departure or disappearance of the founder,bitcoin is still in order.It progresses as it is ought to.
 But I'm still trying to understand how something can remain this effective and operate confidently without any form of interference.But that's the major thing about its existence,to work for the people without any interference and interruption