Over the past few months, the Bitcoin community has been debating about the purpose of the Bitcoin network. Is it supposed to serve its global network of users as a settlement network? Or should it perform as digital gold for investors using it as a safe haven asset and to process large sums of money?
Bitcoin is best described as a peer-to-peer digital currency. Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto described the Bitcoin network in its official white paper as an electronic cash system designed to facilitate payments from one party to another without the presence of a mediator or financial institution.
Growing mempool
Processing transactions within a peer-to-peer network with a complete absence of mediators, network administrators and third-party participants is difficult, expensive and technologically challenging, which is the reason why Bitcoin needs an open source community of developers to maintain its codebase.
Bitcoin is still at its early stage of development and adoption. Anonymity is yet to be introduced to Bitcoin users and scalability is an urgent problem still to be dealt with by Bitcoin developers within the open source community.
Currently, Bitcoin operates as digital gold. Average transaction fees are valued at $0.32 per transaction and the network requires at least one hour for a transaction to be verified. As of late, the traditional system of transaction approval based on six confirmations from miners has been delayed due to the Bitcoin network’s limited block size and growing mempool of transactions.
Full Read Here:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/what-bitcoin-lacks-to-become-major-currency
