How is Bitcoin living up to Satoshi's original vision?

[Rickeo]

you are just redefining "satoshi's vision" with your own interpretation to match your topic otherwise what you are saying here was not it. i wanted to discuss more about your subject but you ruined it by the following:

I still believe in Blockchain and I'm passionate about how Blockchain technology can revolutionise so many different industries, that's why one of my biggest holdings is in ETH.

ETH is literary the shittiest altcoin that has ever been created and if anything it is in complete contradiction of all you explained here as "satoshi's vision"
- it is centralized
- it is not immutable
- it has high fees
- it is slow
- it is not safe
- it is inflationary
- it is not even a currency
you can't even run an ethereum node since the blockchain size is around 4 TB. all people are doing is running light clients or using web wallets insecurely. saying you hold a lot of ETH only proves that you don't care about any of the things you posted here regarding bitcoin.

You're wrong actually, you've taken what I've said, took it out of context, made assumptions and put words in my mouth.

I NEVER said, at any point, that ETH was a better version of BTC or that it should be used as a form of Currency, you're comparing apples to oranges here, they're two totally different things, created for different reasons and purposes.

Do I care that a project is more centralised than Bitcoin NO do I care if it is/isn't an effective currency NO! I was comparing Bitcoin to its original vision not ETH, ETH was never set up to do what Bitcoin does.

XRP for example is said to be very centralised, do I think it's a worthless investment? NO!

To bash on me because I hold ETH is the absolute pinnacle of immaturity and shows your total lack of understanding and your very CLEAR bias for Bitcoin. Ethereum whether you like it or not is #2 and is one of the most utilised blockchains in the space, it doesn't really care whether you like it or not or accept it. It will succeed regardless, it will continue to make waves.

Does EVERY project have to be all the things I was bashing on Bitcoin for not being? HELL FUCKING NO! I based on Bitcoin because it was setup to be these things and no longer does ANY of them.

If your argument is literally just "I'LL HATE ON YOU BECAUSE YOU HOLD X TOKEN OR COIN" then you're stupid, what sensible investor does that, unless you're investing in a very CLEAR scam such as Bitconnect when that was around, then yea, but for a credible project that has weathered the storms and is still here making waves, if you're going to judge me for that then you're not someone I want to have mature discussion with anyway.

I work on contract in some third world countries and I can tell you from first hand experience that these remittance companies in some of these countries are definitely a lot more expensive than Bitcoin. I introduced Bitcoin to some people in these countries and subsequently put between 10% to 30% money back into their pockets by doing this. 

When last have you done any global transfers of money? Some of these transfers takes up to 3 days to be processed. Bitcoin might not be instantaneous like Credit card payments, but the affect on your balance is evident within a couple of minutes. I have done credit card payments at some retailers and the transaction only shown after 1 or 2 days in my account.

Also, have you heard of the Lightning Network? You might be surprised to see almost instantaneous transactions on the Lightning Network being done at a fraction of the fees being charged for on-chain transactions.   

What are you using for fees like that? Yea, people can still screw themselves over by using Western Union, there are always alternatives. You totally missed the point anyway, why WOULD you pay ANY fee at all when there are Crypto's out there like NANO, STEEM etc etc that are near instant and have ZERO fees.

Stellar, Ripple all alternative assets that are easy to liquidate and cost significantly less than BTC and are significantly cheaper.

People on here are a complete joke saying I'm shilling, you can't literally point out the positive feature of any project without being called a shill, it's a form of bullying just ganging up and name calling all because someone has a different opinion than you and dares to point out the facts.

A shill would be someone telling someone else BUY NANO BUY STELLAR BUY XRP BUY STEEM, I'm not recommending anyone do any of these things, each project has its flaws and faults, Bitcoin has some benefits over each of those, I'm not shilling just simply stating a FACT.

Give me a valid rebuttal and tell me how NANO, STEEM, XRP and XLM aren't faster and cheaper than Bitcoin.

Total joke guys, at least attempt to have a mature discussion as opposed to name calling, you don't see me sat here calling you Bitcoin shills, that's just immature, I accept that my views are just an OPINION and I very well could be WRONG, to sit there and just call me a shill and deny that there may be credit/weight/merit in anything I'm saying, well that just shows who has a clear bias here.

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[Rickeo]

A PayPal transaction takes 180 days to "clear". It easier to reverse a PayPal transaction than it is to reverse a zero-confirmation bitcoin transaction. It takes bitcoin 10 minutes (on average) to confirm; it takes PayPal 6 months. And if you need instant payments, such as to buy a coffee, then you use Lightning.


I use it to pay for stuff almost daily. It's far from useless. I'm afraid that the arguments you are making suggest that you have made one or two poorly configured transactions where you overpaid on fees, and have therefore decided that bitcoin is uniformly terrible.

1) NO It bloody well does not, let's be honest here, PayPal 99.9% of the time will work just fine, be instant and without any issues. You're talking about chargebacks and suspicious payments which YES Bitcoin does not have but there's a pros and cons to having this. Sell something with Bitcoin and get screwed over, good luck on getting those funds back.

They both have pros and cons but lets not pretend here that for all payments you're waiting 6 months, that's bloody well not true and you know it. Talking about totally misleading...

2) Oh the poorly configured argument, well if you're going to go down that route that it's 'my fault' and 'poorly configured' then I'd love to hear you argue how this is going to become globally adopted and something my Granny can use and is going to take the world by storm. It's easy to pin the blame on others to hide the GLARING flaws with Bitcoin. Get a grip man!

[o_e_l_e_o]

let's be honest here, PayPal 99.9% of the time will work just fine, be instant and without any issues.

And bitcoin 99.9% of the time will work just fine. This doesn't change the fact that PayPal transaction can be reversed for months after it has been sent, and can be done by literally sending one email. It is much harder to reverse a zero confirmation bitcoin transaction, and essentially impossible to reverse after an hour or two.

Sell something with Bitcoin and get screwed over, good luck on getting those funds back.

This betrays your entire mindset. You see decentralization and immutability as a negative, rather than the positive it is.

They both have pros and cons but lets not pretend here that for all payments you're waiting 6 months

I never said you were waiting 6 months, but similarly, lets not pretend that what you say about waiting days for every bitcoin transaction is true either.

As soon as a bitcoin transaction is broadcast, before it has any confirmations, I will still see it show up in my wallet, and I can still send those funds on to someone else. Can it be reversed and therefore cancel my ongoing transaction? Yes, for around 10 minutes, on average. As soon as a PayPal transaction is made, I will see it show up in my account, and I can send those funds on to someone else. Can it be reversed and leave me out of pocket? Yes, for around 6 months.

well if you're going to go down that route that it's 'my fault'

Please point out where I ever said it was your fault. All I said was that your transaction were poorly configured, and if you paid 25% of your transaction value in fees as you state, then that is simply a statement of fact. I agree that there is plenty of work to be done to make bitcoin as simple as possible for everyone to use, but using it poorly is hardly an argument against its entire existence.

[CarnagexD]

I work on contract in some third world countries and I can tell you from first hand experience that these remittance companies in some of these countries are definitely a lot more expensive than Bitcoin. I introduced Bitcoin to some people in these countries and subsequently put between 10% to 30% money back into their pockets by doing this.  

When last have you done any global transfers of money? Some of these transfers takes up to 3 days to be processed. Bitcoin might not be instantaneous like Credit card payments, but the affect on your balance is evident within a couple of minutes. I have done credit card payments at some retailers and the transaction only shown after 1 or 2 days in my account.

Also, have you heard of the Lightning Network? You might be surprised to see almost instantaneous transactions on the Lightning Network being done at a fraction of the fees being charged for on-chain transactions.  

Remittance Centers in my country are a commodity. They saw the opportunity to make mad bucks ok it and are now charging more than the usual charge or fee they impose. It's true that bitcoin might've strated away from what Satoshi initially wanted it to be. But this is only happening because the technology we have right now is insufficient to support bitcoin in it's utmost capabilities. It's imperative for bitcoin to stay as an asset right now, at the very least it's alive and well. Provided we have enough technology and support, bitcoin will be more than ready to take on being a bonafide currency.

[btccashacc]

Bitcoin was originally made to eliminate 3rd party which is succeed, but the one thing that make it not accepted widely is the fee just too high especially for small transaction, user should pay higher fee in order to get faster confirmation. While in some countries people are now using payment Apps backed by the bank which is cheaper and simple. So far for big transaction bitcoin doesn't have any issue, sending million dollars with cheaper fee, anytime, anywhere.

[Youghoor]

Considering the current state of the crypto ecosystem and the Bitcoin market, Bitcoin is actually not living up to Satoshi's original vision and purpose for it. Bitcoin is seen as a digital asset rather than a digital currency. In as much that people use Bitcoin for their transactions  like currency, majority of people who own bitcoins consider it as an asset than a currency. 

[DooMAD]

5) Sending microtransactions

Curious point of fact, unless the forum's search function is failing me, satoshi never actually uttered the word "microtransaction" on this board.  And the word "micropayment" was only used on two separate occasions.  A number of utterances in this post in direct response to a person asking about sending a single satoshi (and I assume that's not quite what you meant by "microtransactions").  And again in this post quoted below, but only in regard to custodial wallets:

In the meantime, sites like vekja.net and www.mybitcoin.com have been experimenting with account-based sites.  You create an account on a website and hold your bitcoins on account there and transfer in and out.  Creating an account on a website is a lot easier than installing and learning to use software, and a more familiar way of doing it for most people.  The only disadvantage is that you have to trust the site, but that's fine for pocket change amounts for micropayments and misc expenses.  It's an easy way to get started and if you get larger amounts then you can upgrade to the actual bitcoin software.

And (getting slightly off-topic), given what we know about custodial wallets now, it's a little surprising to read those words from satoshi, heh.  Still, those were the very early days and hindsight is always 20/20, etc.

So, with all respect, are you sure you aren't conflating satoshi's original vision with the vision of some early adopters who perhaps got a little carried away with the potential and subsequently raised your expectations higher than they otherwise would be?  Not everything lives up to baseless hype and there certainly was a lot of that back in the day.  People just naturally assumed that sending tiny amounts was viable and started shouting it from the rooftops.

3) For fractions of a penny

It's also worth bearing in mind that when satoshi was still around, a fraction of a penny was a vastly different sum of BTC to what it is today.

[Linkkoin]

People have the whole progression of this badly mixed up in my opinion.

You have to become a store of value first. Then you become a currency. You don't put your day to day financial needs into something as weedy and volatile as Bitcoin currently is. And layer two stuff may well solve the cash aspect. We'll have to see .

There's a lot more ground to cover. 'Cash' is the final progression, not the first.

Just to give a confirmation of your statement - it can be said we see the same with BTC. On the Pacific Ocean, there is one small state - called Vanuatu. Their traditional currency (and even you can find it on the flag)...is a boar tusk.

For many people, a boar's tusk has a very small value. But some of the locals found it very valuable and instead of breeding boars for food, they started breeding them for tusks and kept feeding them (any analogies between mining and "wasting electricity"?).
The older the boar, the more circles its tusks had been making and the more problematic, costly and time-consuming it was to feed it (halving, rising mining difficulty and effect on the price of BTC).
Finally, the boar tusks became something more just mere store of value - became a local currency, a symbol of wealth with great reputation (now BTC is a store of value thing, right?)

But anyway, it is nothing but a piece of bone, just as BTC is just a piece of code, right?

[gentlemand]

They complain because lightning is widely used yet and still being worked on and having updates but I have yet to see anyone accept nano and the majority of shitcoins. Nano is a shitcoin meme at this point where the users all parrot each other but no one spent anytime to see if what they were saying was actually true.

This is something alt fans seem to find impossible to wrap their heads around. Most of them are code with nominal value that could vapourise any second. Anyone can come up with some bells, whistles and 'partnerships'. Anything can be faster than Bitcoin if no one's using it and you cut whatever corners to manage it, or don't even check there are corners.

Building education, acceptance and trust is the absolute monster task and I'm not convinced anything other than BTC will manage it.

[Rickeo]

5) Sending microtransactions

Curious point of fact, unless the forum's search function is failing me, satoshi never actually uttered the word "microtransaction" on this board.  And the word "micropayment" was only used on two separate occasions.  A number of utterances in this post in direct response to a person asking about sending a single satoshi (and I assume that's not quite what you meant by "microtransactions").  And again in this post quoted below, but only in regard to custodial wallets:

In the meantime, sites like vekja.net and www.mybitcoin.com have been experimenting with account-based sites.  You create an account on a website and hold your bitcoins on account there and transfer in and out.  Creating an account on a website is a lot easier than installing and learning to use software, and a more familiar way of doing it for most people.  The only disadvantage is that you have to trust the site, but that's fine for pocket change amounts for micropayments and misc expenses.  It's an easy way to get started and if you get larger amounts then you can upgrade to the actual bitcoin software.

And (getting slightly off-topic), given what we know about custodial wallets now, it's a little surprising to read those words from satoshi, heh.  Still, those were the very early days and hindsight is always 20/20, etc.

So, with all respect, are you sure you aren't conflating satoshi's original vision with the vision of some early adopters who perhaps got a little carried away with the potential and subsequently raised your expectations higher than they otherwise would be?  Not everything lives up to baseless hype and there certainly was a lot of that back in the day.  People just naturally assumed that sending tiny amounts was viable and started shouting it from the rooftops.

3) For fractions of a penny

It's also worth bearing in mind that when satoshi was still around, a fraction of a penny was a vastly different sum of BTC to what it is today.

You're right, maybe it was the early community getting carried away BUT Satoshi never stopped this or corrected these people, the vision of what the technology could be and bring to the world was inspiring, right now it's a digital version of god, for the wealthy an asset and store of value.

I'd rather stick to gold.

What was Satoshi's original vision?

1) A digital, decentralised currency
2) That could be sent anywhere in the world
3) For fractions of a penny / as cheap as possible
4) In a short amount of time
5) Sending microtransactions to developing countries who were run down by poverty was a big selling point at the time

I shouldn't even be bothering to reply since you're a NANO shill, but to answer your questions (while that isn't even 'Satoshi's original vision').

1. Bitcoin is by far the most decentralized and secure cryptocurrency.
2. You can send Bitcoin anywhere in the world.
3. You can send on-chain transactions with a 1 sat/b fee or you can use the Lightning Network for smaller payments.
4. Lightning payments are instant.
5. See 4. It makes no sense since Bitcoin never had 'selling points' and Satoshi never mentioned this.

Bitcoin is electronic cash. Cash doesn't meant it should simply be cheap and instant to send. Read the Cypherpunk Manifesto if you want to understand what is truely meant by 'electronic cash'. I doubt you'll read it since you've obviously here to shill shitcoins.

They complain because lightning is widely used yet and still being worked on and having updates but I have yet to see anyone accept nano and the majority of shitcoins. Nano is a shitcoin meme at this point where the users all parrot each other but no one spent anytime to see if what they were saying was actually true.

Stop talking total rubbish, I've seen that EVERYONE is ignoring the fact that I've said NANO is unlikely to succeed or make ground, I simply complicated a few technical aspects of the project that it does well and people like yourself have got their knickers in a right twist about it and start with the childish name calling.

People like yourself have an attitude that everything but Bitcoin is a 'shitcoin' that's just stupid and immature and an uneducated VERY CLEAR biased view. There's many good coins and projects and many companies utilising the blockchain in new, innovative and interesting ways.

You can't just call every coin you don't like a 'shitcoin', to say there's NOTHING NANO does well is just stupid.

Will it be the next big thing, will it be the #1 digital form of crypto cash? No, probably not. People have a habbit here for putting words in my mouth and taking things out of context and rather than mature discussion and calid rebuttals it resorts to childish name calling and accusation of shilling.

Some people need to grow up and learn to accept that there's a wide variety of opinions on here and yours doesn't always have to be the right one.

[gentlemand]

You can't just call every coin you don't like a 'shitcoin', to say there's NOTHING NANO does well is just stupid.

But the difference between Bitcoin and almost everything else is that Bitcoin does what it does despite having the shit kicked out of it 24/7 for years on end and maxed out much of the time too. It's also managed to do that while still doing its best to uphold its principles and fighting off endless attempts to hijack it.

That's the bit that counts and that's what decides its value and position. That also overrules potential usability shortcomings. It motivates people to improve the strongest chain, not start from scratch with something effectively unproven.

The only thing that's come close is ETH in terms of usage and scrutiny and that has its own problems too.

If any other projects rose to similar prominence they'd experience the same agitation, intrigues, meddling and attempts to game and break them. Since we have no idea how most will fare most people won't bother volunteering to be the test subjects.

[Artemis3]

OK, I'm going to prepare myself for the influx of hate here but can we please attempt to have a mature discussion about this.

How in the hell can people claim Bitcoin is still in line with Satoshi's original vision?

How can we even call Bitcoin a crypto CURRENCY, it's really not a CURRENCY anymore and I'll explain why.

I sold my Bitcoin off a long while ago, mainly for the reasons I've given above, I didn't believe that Bitcoin was still in line with what Satoshi originally envisioned, I'm also sceptical about it's long term success.

I've just tried to send £1 worth of BTC to my other wallet, the fee was 25p that's literally 25% in fees.

Sure, lower the fee I hear you say but if I do, I'm going to be waiting an extremely long time for confirmations and for my transaction to go through.

So you lost a fortune by selling something that became even more valuable later. I see where your grudge is coming from...

TODAY i made a small transaction to an exchange to use fiat, as always, i used 1 sat/B. It took ONE HOUR to get confirmed.

How do you even DARE to say this is "extremely long time"? Do you think we are stupid or what? Give me a break. It was about 144 satoshis for a single hour, have you ever done bank wire transfers? Probably not, or else you are a liar.

Say what you want but Bitcoin is working as intended, and that is the reason it keeps growing in value, albeit slower and slower, exactly as designed, but still preserves its purchasing power after a decade. What you want in a coin is not "Satoshi's vision", it is YOUR vision. Go ahead, copy Bitcoin's code and execute it again, you then have your own blockchain Go make your altcoin, and hope you don't end up like BTG...

[Rickeo]

OK, I'm going to prepare myself for the influx of hate here but can we please attempt to have a mature discussion about this.

How in the hell can people claim Bitcoin is still in line with Satoshi's original vision?

How can we even call Bitcoin a crypto CURRENCY, it's really not a CURRENCY anymore and I'll explain why.

I sold my Bitcoin off a long while ago, mainly for the reasons I've given above, I didn't believe that Bitcoin was still in line with what Satoshi originally envisioned, I'm also sceptical about it's long term success.

I've just tried to send £1 worth of BTC to my other wallet, the fee was 25p that's literally 25% in fees.

Sure, lower the fee I hear you say but if I do, I'm going to be waiting an extremely long time for confirmations and for my transaction to go through.

So you lost a fortune by selling something that became even more valuable later. I see where your grudge is coming from...

TODAY i made a small transaction to an exchange to use fiat, as always, i used 1 sat/B. It took ONE HOUR to get confirmed.

How do you even DARE to say this is "extremely long time"? Do you think we are stupid or what? Give me a break. It was about 144 satoshis for a single hour, have you ever done bank wire transfers? Probably not, or else you are a liar.

Say what you want but Bitcoin is working as intended, and that is the reason it keeps growing in value, albeit slower and slower, exactly as designed, but still preserves its purchasing power after a decade. What you want in a coin is not "Satoshi's vision", it is YOUR vision. Go ahead, copy Bitcoin's code and execute it again, you then have your own blockchain Go make your altcoin, and hope you don't end up like BTG...

In the UK our bank to bank payments take a matter of seconds, wire transfers abroad take a small amount of time, it's not a lie, look up Faster Payment Service in the UK. Most bank transactions take a mater of seconds now.

Yes, transfers abroad, especially for large amounts are silly and can take awhile BUT with PayPal that rules that out, transferwise, so many options.

Even if we're looking at crypto, Bitcoin is so stupidly inefficent, use NANO, STEEM, XLM, XRP, all easily liquidated for many other tradings pairs and they do what Bitcoin does better. Am I saying these will ever beat Bitcoin and slip the rankings, No. Am I saying people should hold these as an investment? No.

I'm saying, you're giving Bitcoin praise for doing something in an hour over banks when there are dozens of projects out there, that are credible, that can do it better, faster, cheaper or free.

[pooya87]

I still believe in Blockchain and I'm passionate about how Blockchain technology can revolutionise so many different industries, that's why one of my biggest holdings is in ETH.

Do I care that a project is more centralised than Bitcoin NO do I care if it is/isn't an effective currency NO! I was comparing Bitcoin to its original vision not ETH, ETH was never set up to do what Bitcoin does.
XRP for example is said to be very centralised, do I think it's a worthless investment? NO!
[/quote]
you first criticize bitcoin, then follow it up by saying you believe in the "technology" and "revolution" then follow that up with saying you hold a lot of ETH, a coin that is in contradiction of all you said before. the conclusion i made was the only possible conclusion.

Ethereum whether you like it or not is #2 and is one of the most utilised blockchains in the space, it doesn't really care whether you like it or not or accept it. It will succeed regardless, it will continue to make waves.

it is not #2, it has a huge market cap because of its huge supply and a gigantic 72 million premine.
and it is not utilized at all. all i have seen in the past 5 years has been pump and dumps and ICO scams. that is not utility.
and i don't define success as being pumped and dumped. sure i also make profit from ETH and all other shitcoins that get pumped but i never "invest" in any of them because dump comes after a pump. and being pumped doesn't mean they have any utilities.

[kryptqnick]

Op, I agree that Bitcoin is not living up to Satoshi's vision. Bitcoin was supposed to be money, but mainly people use it as an asset or trade it as stock. Bitcoin was supposed to be used for direct transactions between people with no intermediaries, but we use exchanges and some wallets which are intermediaries. Bitcoin micro-transactions are a disaster. At the same time, it's not all that bad. Bitcoin has shown what is possible. Bitcoin is still very cheap and fast for big transactions. Projects like The Lightning Network are looking into the problem of small transactions. I think Bitcoin still deserves respect and even though it's not living up to Satoshi's vision in some aspects, I bet Satoshi could not even imagine how huge of a thing Bitcoin would become.

[Rickeo]

Op, I agree that Bitcoin is not living up to Satoshi's vision. Bitcoin was supposed to be money, but mainly people use it as an asset or trade it as stock. Bitcoin was supposed to be used for direct transactions between people with no intermediaries, but we use exchanges and some wallets which are intermediaries. Bitcoin micro-transactions are a disaster. At the same time, it's not all that bad. Bitcoin has shown what is possible. Bitcoin is still very cheap and fast for big transactions. Projects like The Lightning Network are looking into the problem of small transactions. I think Bitcoin still deserves respect and even though it's not living up to Satoshi's vision in some aspects, I bet Satoshi could not even imagine how huge of a thing Bitcoin would become.

Yea, I do agree with you, it's still functional and not bad if you're sending LARGE amounts, however even for that there are now better, cheaper, faster alternatives. It's like, why would someone use a rotatry dial phone when we now have smartphones, are there still people who will use old tech, FOR SURE! The issue is, the community had the chance to move it in a direction that was revolutionary and stuck it it's original goal and vision, in my opinion they failed.

Now, say what you want about BCH (Bitcoin Cash), I know I'm going to get tons of hate for this, and even I, as much as the next person, hate how they took Bitcoin's name and branding to potentially confuse people. Putting that aside, everything they are doing and have done, is much more in line with the direction I thought Bitcoin would go.

As many have pointed out, it's not Satoshi's project, he left it to the community, I fully understand and get that. The issue is, the community are motivated by greed and profit as much as the next man, so a lot of decisions are being made to benefit miners and hodlrs of Bitcoin as opposed to actually progressing and making the tech useful again.

Like I said though, people need to stop getting their knickers in a twist (not you personally op) but in general, people get far to offended at me having an opinion. I'm not saying I'm 100% right, I could be wrong, I'm not willing Bitcoin to fail, hopefully it returns to the usefulness of it's former days. Too many people in here are just here for the gains, just look at the counter arguments, none have them have been productive and nobody has addressed the valid rebuttals I've given, they just come back posting the same thing like @pooya87 above who goes on about ETH when I've already addressed and answered this, but he's just choosing to ignore it as opposed to telling me why my reasoning was wrong or why he disagrees with it.

[gentlemand]

Putting that aside, everything they are doing and have done, is much more in line with the direction I thought Bitcoin would go.

I can see why the concept of BCH is popular with its believers. I absolutely cannot understand how any rational person can believe its actual implementation is anything other than a squirt of diarrhoea in Satoshi's face, let alone BSV which shoves him straight up its ruined guts.

It's massively centralised, has been 51% attacked, had incredibly amateurish features like emergency difficulty adjustment shoehorned in and an unknown corporation proposed taxing miners to pay for development. If you don't pay the tax your blocks get orphaned. It looks like that idea at least is now on the scrapheap.

Once again, they're sacrificing the stuff that really counts in pursuit of bells and whistles. If BTC could be cash without setting itself on fire it would. Right now that's not achievable while remaining intact. It has to remain intact to be developed further which is what's happening.

The first things to go in pursuit of flashiness are decentralisation and prudence. If you don't preserve them then everything that comes after winds up ultimately worthless. You may as well go back to Paypal.

[DooMAD]

So, with all respect, are you sure you aren't conflating satoshi's original vision with the vision of some early adopters who perhaps got a little carried away with the potential and subsequently raised your expectations higher than they otherwise would be?  Not everything lives up to baseless hype and there certainly was a lot of that back in the day.  People just naturally assumed that sending tiny amounts was viable and started shouting it from the rooftops.

You're right, maybe it was the early community getting carried away BUT Satoshi never stopped this or corrected these people, the vision of what the technology could be and bring to the world was inspiring, right now it's a digital version of god, for the wealthy an asset and store of value.

I'd rather stick to gold.

Entirely your prerogative, but many would argue that physical precious metals are definitely harder to spend than BTC is.  BTC is easily divisible and highly portable.  You generally don't "spend" gold, you redeem it for fiat and then spend the fiat instead.  In your original post, you said:

I've just tried to send £1 worth of BTC to my other wallet, the fee was 25p that's literally 25% in fees.

Please attempt to make such a transaction using physical gold and let me know how you get on.   

BTC may not be the perfect currency, but it's much closer to being a currency than gold is.

[squatter]

What was Satoshi's original vision?

1) A digital, decentralised currency
2) That could be sent anywhere in the world
3) For fractions of a penny / as cheap as possible

Satoshi did naively hope that miners would always allow some free transactions, but I don't think he envisioned that all Bitcoin transactions would be "cheap." He encouraged the use of mandatory fees early on, even when there was room for free transactions:

Another option is to reduce the number of free transactions allowed per block before transaction fees are required.  Nodes only take so many KB of free transactions per block before they start requiring at least 0.01 transaction fee.

The threshold should probably be lower than it currently is.

I don't think the threshold should ever be 0.  We should always allow at least some free transactions.

Also, take a moment to recognize what minimum fees used to mean in Satoshi's day: 0.01 BTC vs. the 1 satoshi/byte minimum we generally pay today.

Satoshi also encouraged a fee market, just like we have now:

It ramps up the fee requirement as the block fills up:

<50KB  free
50KB   0.01
250KB  0.02
333KB  0.03
375KB  0.04
etc.

It's a typical pricing mechanism.  After the first 50KB sells out, the price is raised to 0.01.  After 250KB is sold, it goes up to 0.02.  At some price, you can pretty much always get in if you're willing to outbid the other customers.

Just including the minimum 0.01 goes a long way.

The narrative of perpetually infinite cheap/free transactions that Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik promoted was never "Satoshi's vision" and I think the above quotes convey that.

[Ozero]

In any case, bitcoin still has something to work on. While he is far from perfect and this must be agreed. Its main purpose, to be an alternative means of payment, still works very poorly.
Now bitcoin is in most cases used as a speculative means of storing value. As long as people have hope that in the future it will grow significantly in price, this will work. However, in general, a financial asset with high price volatility cannot be a good means of storing value. Well, cryptocurrency is developing and developing very quickly. This is a good guarantee of her success. Only the strongest will remain in this market.