BTC has no role to play in the real world affairs. People who try to create such a role are confused between asset and currency. The design itself only considers pure virtual activity with no touch with real world. People also mistake the buzz words such as "peer-to-peer", "border-less", "decentralised" etc as the problems to be solved. But sadly these are not real problems. The insignificant problems (speed and fees) are hardly enough to sell and these problems are going away anyway. I have no respect to Nakamoto because he ignored the most important element (govt and authorities) in social situation and still want to sell it as some solution to social situations. Hardly any country has regulatory framework that deals with btc.
The problems are rooted in the philosophy of crypto, not in the code. So, the beauty of blockchain tech is irrelevant for btc. It is like selling a bad app by showing how great Android is.
1) Bitcoin does not provide controlled visibility, because it doesn't recognise the existence of governments. Now if you make changes to provide visibility to authorities, ALL privacy is gone. If you don't, then ALL visibility is gone.
2) Fees are rooted in the design. Whatever consensus you invent for a public blockchain, you can't escape rewarding the work of validating transactions. So zero fees are not possible.
Public blockchains sacrifice all good qualities of a business application for the sake of trust-less environment which is not even actually a problem to solve in many contexts. Also they make it extremely costly to run small amount of code or small storage. Who wants their business code to be validated by all arbitrary people in the world?
Most ICOs are sharing economy concepts similar to uber model. Lack of a responsible intermediary and costs will make these "innovations" to fail, if they ever have to touch real-world activities.
Bulk of the blockchain activity will move to business collaborations which might not even look like a blockchain. Crypto coins will be used in most business blockchains, but these coins will be value-less tokens and very specific to the business or institutional activity.
I think whether it has a role to play is not even a question any longer. If anything, people will look back and think of Bitcoin as the cryptocurrency that changed the way the world works. Whether you see it used in business or not at the current point in time is just about factually wrong.
There are Bitcoin ATMs, there are people currently using it at the moment, there are businesses created around Bitcoin. So, technically, it is already playing a role.
If I understand you correctly, you are stating that it will NOT play any future roles in business. To that point, I can maybe agree a bit more.
Businesses are interested in the technology, in the DLT: Blockchain. More so, permissioned blockchain. Why? Well, you have the best of both worlds. More control over the newest (most secure) tech in the world, poised to change the way we do business now and in the near future.
At the end of the day, Bitcoin will at least be the cryptocurrency that started it all. Sort of the 'shot heard 'round the world'.
Whether you believe in Bitcoin or not, it deserves its respect whether you take it from a business or strictly public/decentralized system for the individual.
My question however is, where are all the forums around blockchain? It seems that business is taking off with applying many use cases, yet little talk on forums about the technology.
I think it would be wise to focus on the technology as well and not just on the thing that currently is making you money. If the Bitcoin does fail, I'd hate to be left in the dust.
#my2pennies
