Welcome to financial slavery 2.0 the Lightening addition.
Satoshi is rolling over in his grave, the Banking Cartels will have destroyed everything he set out to do.
That said, bitcoin (and yes, also LTC) contained this in its initial design anyhow. This is why I claim that bitcoin's design wasn't set up to do what was claimed it would do. Whether that was clumsiness or on evil purpose, I leave in the middle (though I tend to think the former).
The questions what everyone has wondered for years is...... What was Bitcoins real sole purpose and evolution in Satoshi's eyes when he created it, the communities involvement upon release, then his departure + what the Core Developers think with their ideas.
My take on that is that whatever were the *intentions* of whoever was Satoshi, doesn't really matter. My personal opinion is that it was a quite bright guy in his basement, but it can be just anything, from the Chinese government to a terrorist organisation. It doesn't matter.
Satoshi did some brilliant things, and set up a system which has its own dynamics.
That dynamics does not correspond to what Satoshi claimed he made it for, but are the natural consequences of how it was designed.
When we see that, there are some logical possibilities about intention:
a) Satoshi knew perfectly well how this system would evolve, but needed to tell something else to trick people into using it (conspiracy view)
b) Satoshi, bright as he was, made some fundamental mistakes and had some fundamental misunderstandings (my personal opinion)
c) Satoshi came as close as one can get to what was doable at that point, and anything seriously different would not have worked ; in other words, at that point, it was simply impossible to have a system as he pretended, and he came as close as was possible, but no cigar.
I say this, because bitcoin is based upon a totally flawed economic understanding of ideal money, inspired by the "gold bugs" doctrine of sound money ; and has as its core, a deflationary spiral like rarely one has seen any. As such, bitcoin can never be a mainstream currency, because there is no system included that will provide sufficient elasticity in its offer for its value to remain constant, which is a requirement of ideal money (which will be also a unit of account) ; on the contrary, it is heavily publicized as something that will strongly grow over time, and will make you rich if you adopt soon enough. Bitcoin is hence designed as a very strongly speculative asset, to be hoarded and to be traded, with high volatility, and high deflation (=gain in value).
Many choices in the design of bitcoin make that it is not going to be a widespread, largely decentralized, generally used payment system ; however, it has everything to be a speculative asset that would make the toxic derivatives that caused the 2007 crash to look like stable money compared to it.
Was it just another one of those online Internet Tokens/Virtual Currencies that came and went in the early 90's - 2000's but this time by one of the said failed projects collaborators ?
I think bitcoin was a kind of next logical step, and it had the right timing, after the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Note that this financial crisis had nothing to do with the fiat payment system ; but rather with the reckless speculation of financial institutions on "virtual" complex derivatives. The ironic thing is that bitcoin took as economic model, exactly something that leads to a highly speculative asset, while pretending to replace the "broken" fiat payment system. It is this irony - the fact of being able to speculate heavily (which was the main cause of the 2007 financial crisis) while pretending to cure a non-broken system (the fiat payment system) - that was the success story of bitcoin.
On the other hand, without the lure of high speculative prospects, to turn $27 investors in future billionaires, something like bitcoin would never have taken off (hinting at my (c) option above). So maybe it was necessary to have this irony, of pretending to make an "honest robust payment system" based upon the most heavily charged greater fool speculative asset one has seen in ages ; as no truly honest payment system would ever have taken off.
