Whenever you hear the corporate media talking about the "blockchain," that is not about re-branding bitcoin. Quite the contrary it's about displacing bitcoin and indroducing their own corporate blockchains. The banks and corporations are all investing in "blockchain research," it's about co-opting blockchain technology for their own centralized purposes. Once they've set up their own blockchains that's when they'll order their lackey governments to start moving against bitcoins and criminalizing it just like they did with drugs. Then shit will get real
The blockchain is expensive. It is expensive to store, expensive to process, and expensive to secure. That cost is the cost of decentralization. It is the cost of a payment system with no trusted authority. The 100x the annual bitcoin transaction volume could be processed by a single server with central authority. There is absolutely no point to a centralized, decentralized currency. You take all of the cost of decentralization and pile it on top of all the problems of a centralized currency.
in reflection of the idea above, lets say transaction fees where set to 0.1%, then the cost to secure Bitcoin as Block rewards diminished and the network grew, would equalize at about 0.1% of GDP to maintain the decentralized system. at the moment as a % of GDP the cost of managing money is greater than the the cost of global manufacturing, who knows what the correct ratio is, but i sure know that the guy that makes stuff is more valuable than the middle man i use to pay him, and i can see how Bitcoin can can reduce the cost of the middleman to the minimum needed to transact in a global way.
but a better solution is to offset all incentives so that everyone is incentivized to be as efficient as necessary and to operate in a competitive environment, this is the Bitcoin we have today, all costs will evolve to the marginal profit on the basic cost of utility, provided we are able to scale with out eroding the current incentive sachems reflected in the Bitcoin protocol.
