You are making a wrong conclusion based on false data. In 2017 bitcoin was experiencing the biggest spam attack of its entire history (biggest until today too). The number of transactions then can not your baseline.
Oh ok then it's even worse, taking 2017 out of the equation means the number of transactions per day/month had no real growth from 2015 to 2023.
In reality if you check the stats rarely released by payment processors, check out number of merchants that are accepting bitcoin each year, countries adopting bitcoin as legal currency, legal tender, reserve currency, for international trade and a lot more you can clearly see that usage of bitcoin as a currency has been increasing by a lot.
So ditch the on-chain data and find reliable info on the news websites? doesn't seem like something I'd do, furthermore, your claim was that number of people using bitcoin as payment has been ever increasing, that's different from how many countries taking BTC as a legal currency, and the only valid source for such a claim is on-chain.
Here is a chart of Bitcoin transactions, each input is the average 30 day transaction (30 days worth of transaction / 30)
This is 4 years' worth of solid on-chain data which clearly shows no sign of transaction growth, in fact, it's showing the exact opposite of what you claim, during the 4 years we had all kinds of bull and bear markets, nothing affected the overall direction of the trend.
Lets fact check your assumption.
I intentionally chose 2015 to 2017 because the end date is approximately when the spam attack gets worse and also the huge bull run and the bubble has not yet started. The window from 2017 to 2019 isn't that better though (~1400 ie. ~55% reduction) which proves my point about increasing adoption as a payment network.
Here is another chart showing the average 90 days block size
More blocks that are almost half empty than blocks that are almost full, in 2022 the average blocksize was 630kb, which is closer to 50% than to 100% as per my previous "assumption", in fact, we can still smooth out 5-6 years worth of data regarding blocksize and it's more likely than not for this assumption to hold, unless we would cherry pick periods of when blocks were almost full.
And by the way, you seem to confuse adoption with usage, just because more people adopt bitcoin and buy it, doesn't mean there are more transactions, the adoption per see has without a doubt increased it can be seen through the increasing value of Bitcoin, but that doesn't mean everyone who buys bitcoin will transact it, most of it will just sit there.
Miners are already "extracting fees" they don't need Ordinals for that unless you mean spam attacks like 2017 which artificially inflate the fee is a "good thing"!
We need every bit of value we can extract, you will have very hard time finding a miner who would mind getting paid more be it the result of spam or NFTs.
which is to use a side-chain.
The NFT folks can tell you the same thing, you can use a side-chain for payments as well, LN works great.
You are forgetting that SHA256-ASIC and Scrypt-ASIC are different and you can't use one for the other. In simple terms bitcoin's hashrate can not "slide" to shitcoins like LTC and Doge.
If we go with your logic the hashrate should slide into another SHA256 coin!
I am pretty sure he is talking about money flowing to those altcoins, not the miners themselves, someone who wants to invest 1m in mining gears would rather buy those Scyrpt miners and extract more money, a valid point on Phil's behalf, look at all the money we let go to those shitcoins just because we don't want to allow anything to be built on BTC blockchain.
That is still much less than any VAT, taxes, card loading fees, 3rd party commission fees, etc. that you can get charged with with fiat money.
Indeed, I am not arguing that it's using your credit card is cheaper than sending a transaction on bitcoin (although most of the time it is), the point is, that a tiny transaction is going to sit on the blockchain forever, despite the fact that many people would label it as "useless".
i knew miners didn't give a damn about what bitcoin is used for as long as they can collect their fee. they would be happy to see transaction fees skyrocketing if the blocks can still stay full.
Not sure why you quoted tromp on that, it was actually me who wrote that and yes, as a miner I can confirm that I will be very happy to see transaction fees skyrocket, but miners do care about the well-being of bitcoin probably more than anyone else, miners have so much lose, they put billions of dollars at stake, build infrastructure, hire people, go through the legal process, having to fight against those who think Bitcoin is useless and is wasting energy resources, Bitcoin is worth nothing without miners securing it, not sure why many people want to label miners as "devils".
In fact, Bitcoin users should make sure that miners are always "happy" even if they dislike them or hate them, they are keeping your money safe and the fees you pay are not charity work it's for the work they provide, if you are not happy about it, start mining your own bitcoin and code your software to reject what you think of as "spam" and save Bitcoin from the devils.
But no, most people don't contribute anything to bitcoin, they don't mine bitcoin, they don't code shit, don't even run a full node, they just want to buy cheap bitcoin, send it for free to their hardware wallet, wait for the price to increase, send it back to the exchange for 1sat/vbyte and sell it to fiat and still want to boss around people telling them how to use the blockchain.
I see a bit of extortion happening here Mikey, should I power back (of wait, first buy back) a few of my miners to try to offset this?
Ya bro, sharpen your miners, looks like the NFT market is going to bring you back to business, you are getting back your devil title soon.