It's really telling when the only news about it is how much people are buying it for.

Not a new use case. Not a new retailer accepting it. It's worth more because the same people who bought it last year will spend more to buy it this year.

Square Cash, Amazon rumors, Wall Street interest, progress on scaling, emerging custody solutions, retail banking integration (Fidelity and USAA), improving regulatory clarity.

$170B worth of value today? No. But price is current value + potential future value * likelihood of getting there. People are starting to understand the potential, and working towards that future.

Retailers accepting it just isn't "news" anymore. This isn't 2012.

If Amazon started accepting Bitcoin directly (as opposed to accepting gift cards that you can buy for Bitcoin elsewhere), that would be enormous news. One of the reason the "retailer X accepts Bitcoin" stories have died off is that almost all of those retailers were ones nobody cared about.

What exactly is a disgrace about it?

The developers are actively trying move away from the original vision "p2p digital cash" to simply a "store of value".

Therefore the fees are often too high, and the confirmations can be delayed a lot unless you pay a lot, for it to be very useful. For example it often doesn't make much sense to pay for games on steam using Bitcoin as the fees take a large portion of the payment.

I'm so tired of this uninformed critique.

How do you propose we increase throughput on a competitive space without compromising the byzantine fault tolerance of the bitcoin network?

Go on, I'll wait.

It isn't just 'make the blocks bigger'. That's like telling a developer to just ship more code. We didn't scale the early internet by making packets bigger. Open your mind and stop repeating things you read just because you read it. Think for yourself and if you are uninformed about a technology then do not open your mouth to speak. You don't reach scale and adjust a hundred billion dollar network by hacking fixes, you do it by carefully making calculated changes with science and testing behind your decisions. The developers working on bitcoin today have done more to contribute to the growth of bitcoin than detract and the sheer volume and scale are unprecedented. Nobody is equipped to say one solution is obviously better.

that it's trying to be a currency when it clearly doesn't cut it as one - just like gold used to be but is impractical now.

also china.

Interesting how even with good foundations, a tech is not good until tested at large.

Which coin can be used as a currency today? Ethereum, Stellar Lumen, Monero?

Bitcoin has become to slow and expensive (transactions) for that...

In practice you need merchants to accept the coins for them to be very useful. So far no coin has come ahead although there has been some uptake for Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash.

You can also use services which convert your coin of choice to Bitcoin, for example using shapeshift or for Monero xmr.to which is excellent. You can't avoid the fees on Bitcoin if you do that though...

There are many coins which have cheap and fast confirmations, for example Ethereum or Bitcoin Cash.

Monero is pretty good if you need privacy, Ethereum is okay if you need it a bit faster, you can get a confirmed transaction in about a minute with average price (about 20 cents or less in worth)

Ethereum devs are also working on the raiden network which I believe is atm on the testnet and might release sometime the next months.

It has become the gold of the cryptocurrencies world. Nobody uses it to buy stuff but only as a store of value. I'm also disappointed in what it has become, and I say that while currently owning bitcoin.

Ethereum isn't inherently better as a currency. It still has the same scaling limits as bitcoin, just lower utilization at this point.

It has much higher limits though.

Bitcoin is limited to a fixed blocksize and ASIC mining while Ethereum has a dynamically adjusting blocksize to fit the network usage and capabilities.

And IIRC Ethereum is atm handling more Transactions than Bitcoin and ETH TX are arguably more complex, yet the network hasn't broken apart.