Bitcoin is slower and more expensive to transact than ever before. I think it's very safe to assume that Bitcoin will never be used as a mainstream currency as long as it uses the blockchain architecture in the backend.


I find this rather bizarre, and I didn't think what I had said was particularly controversial. Bitcoin was invented in the context of P2P networks, which are only necessary when you don't want governments able to observe or stop the transactions. Otherwise there is no reason to just use a central server, which is the way almost all of the internet works already. The p2p approach is slower, more expensive, more complicated, harder to use, and can easily be very dangerous for end-users. The only reason you resort to something like that is because you have to, e.g. you could be prosecuted if you don't.


This reminds of me of a famous quote: "640k ought to be enough for anybody" .

Credit card transactions are still pretty slow in computing terms, and are still pretty expensive. But more importantly, they require an exchange of personal information in the transaction, which is a major limitation.


Touché .

But if transactions are fast and cheap enough, you can presumably have processes inside of your wallet to move your store of value to thing(s) that are more stable. Then you could only expose yourself to Bitcoin's volatility when that's what you wanted.


Maybe. Or maybe Bitcoin being used by 100x more people in the world will make the price go way up. Who knows.

If you actually read the whole article, you'd understand the context in which is was written, and you'd have the answer to your question (?).

(And it's not like the article is very long...).

Getting rid of PoW would be the whole point.

Bitcoin's software could be changed by the core developers just like any software system could be changed. The process to move Bitcoin to a centralized architecture would be a complicated one, but straight-forward, on the whole.

And the only reason miners are even relevant is because of the software as well. They could be written out of existence with a few lines of code .


There are lots of ways to achieve security besides the way Bitcoin does it. And if Bitcoin was faster and cheaper to transact, that seems like it would only make it more liquid, not less.

Most users of Bitcoin today don't even know what "decentralized" means, and since they use it through an app or a broker, they aren't even exposed to this feature in any way.

We're talking about getting rid of a feature that only perhaps 1% of this product's users even care about, in exchange for broadening it's appeal massively.




If Bitcoin's core devs wanted to centralized Bitcoin, they could centralized Bitcoin. There's nothing stopping them.

Today, I'll offer the forum a thought experiment.

Imagine that one day, the core devs of Bitcoin would come to a consensus that:

• Today, Bitcoin is simply an investment and value store, not a "currency" for most of its users.
• Today, most holders of Bitcoin do so in a centralized way, e.g. with a broker or an app.
• Bitcoin has failed its original purpose of being able to thwart government subpoenas since it is subject to chain analysis (and hence has opened the door to competitors like Monera for this niche need).
• Bitcoin could never become a mainstream currency since it was intentionally designed to be slow and expensive.
• With so much adoption and awareness from its popularity as an investment instrument, Bitcoin could become a mainstream worldwide currency if it were made to be fast and cheap, allowing it to be used for everyday transactions e.g. a parking meter or a cup of coffee.
• Mainstream adoption of Bitcoin like this would probably send the price of Bitcoin into orbit.
  
  

The only way that you could make Bitcoin fast and cheap enough to transact such that it would be superior to (say) ordinary credit card transactions would be to centralize the architecture. In other words, instead of a consensus algorithm among thousands of anonymous servers, Bitcoin would be backed with an architecture controlled by a single legal entity and a trusted set of servers, eliminating the need for proof-of-work and eliminating vast amounts of complexity to the system, immensely streamlining Bitcoin transactions.

In this scenario, Bitcoin could truly take over as a worldwide mainstream currency, with consumers replacing their everyday transactions with Bitcoin transactions.

However, also in this scenario, Bitcoin would lose some of its "mythology" or "religion" since it started as a way to transact without the possibility of a government discovering the parties of its transactions.

But in this scenario, almost all of Bitcoin's current users--and millions (or potentially billions) more--would only notice that Bitcoin is very fast and very cheap to transact with, and that millions of ordinary vendors now accept Bitcoin as retail payments, for instance.

All it would take is for Bitcoin's core devs to change their minds.


Could this happen? If not, why not?

What I read from this post is that "naturalnews.com" is a hoax site that panders to Trump supporters.

I think what the OP meant is that it is not a mainstream digital currency that people would want to use to buy everyday things. It's not impossible to buy your lunch with Bitcoin, but almost nobody would want to do that since it's impractical.

All that, and also that Bitcoin is, defacto, almost never used that way today, and is instead an investment instrument like gold, stocks, or whatever.

You could also use shares of AAPL or slivers of gold as a trading mechanism too, but... why would you?

I think the OP needs to clarify somewhat that Bitcoin is not now, nor will ever be mainstream digital cash.

Satoshi made Bitcoin for one reason, which is to thwart government subpoenas into transactions.

That's it. That's the only reason Bitcoin--and the blockchain architecture--exists in the first place.

Only a tiny, tiny number of people on any given day have the "problem" for which Bitcoin's original purpose is a solution. Most people are perfectly fine using a trading mechanism that can potentially be scrutinized by a government with a legal subpoena. Most people don't need to evade their government, and/or don't want to try.

If Bitcoin never became popular beyond its original purpose, it would only have a few thousand users today, and its price would probably still be around a dollar or two.

But at some point, people--now probably 99% of Bitcoin's users--found a new use for Bitcoin, which is as a speculation instrument.

And to answer the OP directly, my answer is: please treat Bitcoin for what it is, not what people fantasize it is. It's not going to "take over" sovereign currencies. It's absolutely evil to lobby your government to force Bitcoin on people in order to make the price go up (aka "legal tender").

Bitcoin works perfectly fine as a meme investment and it arguably the biggest one in the world. There's nothing wrong with that.

And as for true "digital cash" for a mainstream audience, as I have myself built such a system that can scale to millions of transactions per second, the trick is to not try to solve the very narrow problem of thwarting government subpoenas, and instead focus solely on creating a system with low latency and low cost. This must necessarily be done without blockchain, which is an architectural impediment to any kind of mainstream scale as it was actually designed to be slow and expensive to transact in on purpose.

Some might take offense, I suppose, but I've pointed the same thing out in other posts and most people agree with me. After 14 years of Bitcoin trying to be something else, it has never evolved past a simple meme investment for almost all of its holders. People who have been around Bitcoin for a long time are tired of waiting for "something" to happen to prove this wrong.

As for blockchain as an architecture, I have posted here several times asking for documented design wins for blockchain as an architecture outside of the realm of crypt/NFTs. I've posted the same question in many other places as well. So far I have received zero documented cases of blockchain increasing ROI, reducing costs, adding to customer functionality, and so forth--in other words, all of those things that every other new technologies are judged on (not that blockchain is "new" anymore).

And to be clear, I didn't say all use cases, I said most. Most holders of Bitcoin and other cryptos don't hold their own keys, for instance, which means they are not actually using blockchain. Very few people have a need to hide their transactions from government subpoenas, and are fine with the sort of privacy that a trusted company gives them like their bank or broker.

So there is clearly a niche need for those needing to keep their transactions secret from governments, but that niche is pretty small.

The only significant difference between Bitcoin and the other top-10 currencies, from the standpoint of the average consumer, is the price. All of these products do exactly the same thing. If there are technical differences between Bitcoin and Solana, for instance, they are not visible in any way to almost all of the users of these products.

This is unlike, say, electric car technology, wherein there are cars with greater range, a cheaper price, more performance, faster charging, and longer lifespan--and much more.

Cryptocurrencies have very limited practical use and are simply investment instruments for nearly all of their users.

As such, I would say there's no geopolitical significance to these products at all.

"Isn't Apple a distraction to Microsoft Windows adoption?"

"Isn't Unix a distraction to IBM mainframe adoption?"

"Isn't Bitcoin a distraction to PayPal adoption?"

I could go on and on. Imagining the current top dog in technology is going to stay that way "forever" is the height of foolishness.

And if you want to make +20% on your investment in the next few years, then maybe Bitcoin could do it. If you want to make 10x or 100x on an investment, it will need to be a new technology that most people don't consider mainstream yet. There's room for both.

Wow. Okay. How about I lobby the government to make my current favorite investment, NVDA, have these special privileges instead of Bitcoin? Does that sound fair to you? Why not have the government pump GOLD instead? Or APPL? Or Soybean futures? Or some other stock?

Bitcoin investors begging the government for free handouts so their investment will increase in value--like what you are asking for here--is... quite the evolution from Bitcoin's origins, that's for sure .

All I have to say is that the old adage about "live by the sword, die by the sword" applies here: if you want to use the power of the government in order to make your investment increase in value, be prepared for that same government to want something in return. People don't vote to make a certain part of the population rich without wanting something back from them--and they often take back twice as much as they gave.

And I must say, after Bitcoin has gone up 500% during the Biden presidency, it's amazing to me that for some people it's still not enough and they want Bitcoin to go up even more and want the government to force people to buy it. This is the textbook definition of greed on display here.

Um, Trump has done all kinds of things in his personal life. Nobody, including Trump himself, cares about that.

As I said (several times) above, the "leave it to the states" thing has run out of gas for the Republicans. The only way abortion in the USA will be curtailed the way those wanting it to be made illegal want it curtailed is for there to be Federal laws against it. The current pending case against the abortion pill is just one example: all Trump would need to do is stop fighting that, and abortion will be effectively illegal across the country--and that's just one of many examples.

The the Federal government, per the constitution (and for obvious practical reasons), must get involved with interstate commerce, which means with allowing or disallowing abortion pills and/or people leaving their states to have an abortion.

No matter how desperately (some*) Republicans are trying to dodge this issue, there's simply no getting out of it. And in this context, Americans aren't going to believe the party who has spent 40 years calling the procedure "murder" when they say they don't want to make it illegal.

(* And it's notable that many Republican voices out there are not dodging this at all, and are clearly calling for 50 state bans because they actually mean what they say they mean when they say they are opposed to abortion).


LOL. The 1980s called and are asking for the GOP back . Today's Republican party has nothing to do with that anymore. Today the party is Trump, Trump and Trump.

That's nonsense. Bitcoin doesn't make sovereign currencies drop in price per se, and no serious person believes that.

And if they did, they'd make Bitcoin illegal, which almost all countries do not do.

You seem to think "legal tender" means the same thing as "legal". It doesn't. The law passed in El Salvador has been a boondoggle and didn't do anything to increase retail adoption there. It was just a pump-and-dump scheme for the country's elites.

Trump didn't remove the "Deep State" in his first term, and instead expanded it. What makes you think he will remove it in his second term?

And why especially do you care about the abortion issue if all you really care about is the "Deep State"?

And abortion laws are very divisive. If you are for peace, why are you in favor of abortion laws?

So if Trump vowed to pass a law overriding the states, guaranteeing a woman's right to an abortion, you'd still support him with every fiber of your being as you demonstrate all of the time here, right?

If Trump vowed to start a war with some country (say Mexico for instance) if he were elected,  you'd still support him with every fiber of your being, right?

My problem with understanding what you are for is that it seems to change weekly at the same time Trump changes his own mind about things. The only constant I see in your views is that that they line up with whatever Trump says on a day to day basis.

I understand being in favor of Trump because you want certain policies enacted that he supports. But when Trump contradicts himself, y'all seem to just change your own mind at the suspiciously exact same moment.

You know quite well that the US is not going to cancel Social Security, Medicare, income taxes, and basically the entire US government as it is today. You know quite well that Trump surely would never do that, and he will in fact expand the federal government's powers in ways that other presidents haven't, as he already did while he was in office before.

And yet you are effectively saying that abortion--the thing you keep calling "murder"--should be illegal (presumably, punishable as murder)--in all 50 states.

What this tells me is that what you really want is for Trump to win the election, and you are willing to say anything, on any given day, in order for that to happen.

In other words, once again, you seem willing to forgo everything you purport to believe in exchange for Trump being elected, which seems to be an end in itself for you.

So I'll ask this question of you once again, as I have several times here with no answer so far: what could Trump actually do in order for him not to get your vote in November? Is there any line he cannot cross?

That you can't answer this tells us the whole story: there is no answer. You prioritize Trump over all other values.

You are making my point for me. If Trump wins in November, people with your exact views will be running the country. That's why it's likely abortion will be made illegal--or effectively so--in all 50 states if Trump wins.

The way I explain it to people is that if Trump is elected, there will be a 50/50 chance that abortion will be outlawed in all 50 states in 2025.

If you want to be sure abortion is legal in 2025, your only choice is voting Democrat.

This just isn't practical. Most abortions these days are done using the pill, and that can easily be transported across state lines. And people can transport themselves the other direction. Since the Republicans overturned Roe, abortions have actually increased even though individual states made it illegal.

And the ruling on the FDA action on the abortion pill shows just how easily Trump could effectively ban all abortions in the USA without an act of Congress.

Republicans are trying to "states rights" this issue away, but it won't work. And probably two thirds of their voters don't want it to work anyhow as they want an abortion ban that actually works instead of this "return it to the states" nonsense.

That's because most Americans want higher taxes on people other than themselves--and most agree that "rich people" aren't themselves.

Republicans used to run principally on tax cuts for the rich, but that is super-duper unpopular, and that kept making them lose elections, so they dropped that (and so many of their other old policies like reforming SS and healthcare), and now they just talk about relatively meaningless social issues like bathrooms and beer commercials.