Eh? The volatility is a HUGE problem for bitcoin as a currency.

If I run a small business, accepting payment in bitcoin just creates risk. The state of my business not only depends on the quality and success of my product/service but also on the volatility of bitcoin because by accepting bitcoin I am forced to effectively take a long position on BTC. The price could crash by 25% before I sell the bitcoin and now I've a cash-flow problem - struggling to pay wages and rent - even though my business is successful in that I made a profit on selling my products or services.

The purchaser of my services is effectively on the other side of this trade and is exposed to the opposite risk wrt to BTC/USD. The only way for the two parties to minimize this risk would be for the customer to convert fiat currency into bitcoin just before paying, and then for the vendor to convert the bitcoin back immediately on receipt. With high spreads and transaction costs, using bitcoin in this manner is incredibly expensive and makes no business sense.

Do many Bitcoin boosters even care about BTC becoming a currency any more? Seems it has achieved much more success as a frenzied medium of global speculation than it ever dreamed of as a stable digital currency.

If BTC isn't valuable as a currency, then it is in fact a speculative bubble that will suffer a dramatic collapse, just like the tulip mania in the Netherlands in the 17th century.

What about the new "digital gold" store of wealth narrative?

Yes, but gold has been used as a currency for thousands of years and it does not share many of the problems of Bitcoin — for example it isn't so volatile.

Of course, it's a finite resource and mining it involves dynamiting mountains and cyanide poisoning the environment, but then again Bitcoin mining currently consumes enormous amounts of energy and it can only grow from here. Also countries with no gold reserves have been at a disadvantage, but then Bitcoin mining will require enormous resources as well and countries without those resources will remain at a disadvantage. So personally I don't see any benefits whatsoever.

If I had wealth to store, I'd invest in property simply because properties have intrinsic value. And yes, I'd still buy gold before Bitcoin or any other currency for storing wealth long term.

Bitcoin is currently only useful for speculative gains and I don't see that changing.

Digital gold term is utter nonsense and nothing more than wishful thinking of those involved. Gold has huge value, be it national reserves, jewelry, industries etc. and has never, ever lost much of its value.

Bitcoin is a classical ponzi, you don't have more than few bytes of otherwise meaningless data, and only emotions are keeping the value so high. And as we know, emotions change.

Don't insult gold. It will be around long after Bitcoin will become just another part of history.

I think you could fairly easily rationalise to yourself that Bitcoin _will_ one day be money, and we haven't reached its true value yet, so nobody wants to miss their piece of the pie when that happens.

A few years ago the Winklevoss' said their target is $600,000 per coin. When I heard that, I thought they were insane. Now, I'm not so sure.

That would be the price it bitcoin was used in about 10% of all transactions worldwide.

It could get there even with far fewer transactions, right? If people keep buying bitcoin just to hold it, then the lack of sellers could drive the price to insane levels without much transaction activity.

I remember the 2013-14 hype cycle. That's when BTC hit $1k and a lot of merchants started accepting it, mostly as a PR gimmick. That's when I bought my BTC and even bought a few domains with them.

Since then, I almost never see BTC as a payment option.

You underestimate the dreams of BTC Boosters.

Exactly. Until we pay rent, wages & stock with Bitcoin, it's essentially just digital gold bullion.

You'd be an idiot to pay for any service with Bitcoin. A million dollar pizza makes for a great news story, but it would suck knowing that you effectively let go of millions of dollars just to buy a pizza.

Bitcoin holders are disincentivized from spending it.

It's almost like being inherently deflationary is a negative property for a currency to have...but that can't be true, because lots of cryptobugs have explained to me at great length why this is actually Good For Bitcoin.

If transactions were confirmed quickly with low fees, you could just turn around the Bitcoin in a few minutes in the exchange for dollars, all automatically. The price won't change that much on the timescale of minutes, so add in a small buffer percentage to make up the leftover difference and you're done.

That's where IOTA and/or Stellar Lumen come into play.

How does one take a short position in Bitcoin?

If the futures markets at the CBOT or CME attract volume, you could use those. Otherwise, you'd have to do it over-the-counter. Borrow a bitcoin from someone and turn it into real money. When you have to repay, if BTC is down, you'll buy back a BTC at a profit. If it's up, you'll have to buy back at a loss.

Note that this gives you a maximum gain of whatever BTC/USD is today (assuming you denominate in greenbacks), while upside risk is theoretically unlimited.

Of course the lender has to trust or be ensured (or insured) that you will repay.

There must be people using Ethereum contracts to make options on BTC, and maybe trying to minimize counterparty risk through the judicious use of open-sourced smart contracts and digital collateral? Anyone know of interesting cases?

http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/bitcoin-futures.html http://cfe.cboe.com/cfe-products/xbt-cboe-bitcoin-futures

Apparently they will list on 18 Dec on CME, and 10 Dec on CBOE.

I get the feeling that there will be a fair bit of selling pressure as a result. That's usually the case on lockup expiries and it would make sense for the initiation of a volatile instrument that wasn't previously shortable on a listed basis.

I wonder how hedging transactions will affect the mechanics of the bitcoin market.

> I wonder how hedging transactions will affect the mechanics of the bitcoin market.

The bitcoin market is astonishingly shallow compared to most commodities and nearly unregulated, I assume hedge funds and other smart money can and will manipulate the price up and down to their own advantage.

Why would it be particularly easier to manipulate bitcoin pricing over other stocks/securities? Simply because the authorities don't understand it yet, or something to do with the nature of crypto-currency itself?

Because there are relatively few buyers and sellers in the market and the amounts of transactions are small, so one big mover can shift the price a lot.

According to some blockchain site[0] the average transaction volume for BTC is something like $2.25m USD equivalent

For comparison, on an average day, SPY[1], which is just one security (albeit a popular one) trades something around $17,160m (e.g. $17.16b).

[0] https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-...

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPY

Because there's fundamental value behind most traditional securities, even if it's well below the current market price. If you hold a bond, it will (usually) pay interest and principal. Equities carry the value of the cash holding of the company, plus the potential for future dividends. These cash flows act as an anchor on the value of those securities (in both directions, up and down.)

Couldn't you say the same about penny stocks? And won't this problem go away as BTC gets more popular?

> Couldn't you say the same about penny stocks?

Sure, but there are also laws and regulations that limit what you can do with stocks on a real exchange: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcap_stock_fraud

> won't this problem go away as BTC gets more popular?

Maybe. It would have to get a lot more popular, and a lot more legitimate and regulated. At that point, it's lost all the cyberpunk appeal, and it's just another speculative asset.

Regarding penny stocks, this does happen all the time, although its expressly illegal (look up boiler room scams).

What you mean? You can short any crypto currency on many exchanges. Bitfinex and GDAX being the biggest right now.

And when bitcoin crashes, and the exchange "gets hacked", goes bankrupt, and the owners run away to some international destination, who do you claim your USD back from?

If you're shorting, you get the $ up front and have to supply the security when you "cover". Not having to "cover" the short would actually be better.

It would take some gut to do it.

I have the same thought myself sometimes, but then I remember this quote: "Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent."

I think that's derriz's point. It's very difficult, and would be prohibitive for a small business to immediately convert bitcoin to cash.

Very soon (next week) bitcoin futures will start trading which will be an easy legitimate way to take a short position. You just need a futures account which you can get from regular financial institutions.

Most major exchanges offer margin trading.

IG will do it sometimes. (https://www.ig.com/au/forex/markets-forex/bitcoin-1)

You can lie to an exchange that supports it. Sign the paperwork making promises about things that aren't true.

Whaleclub

Bitfinex offers this.

> The price could crash by 25% before I sell the bitcoin and now I've a cash-flow problem

Well, the parent comment said "if the transactions were quick", meaning that you would exchange the bitcoin for something else as soon as you received them (within a second or minute, say).

Wouldn't that cost a huge amount in transaction fees, making the whole thing moot?

For a large enough sales volume, the transaction fee might be negligible, but I don't know the numbers.

The volatility of Bitcoin has been decreasing over time.

Recent price jumps tell a different story.

Do you have any data to back it up?

It's still far too volatile to be a reasonable currency.

It's actually impossible to reliably get a transaction confirmed in the 15 minutes that BitPay (who they used) is willing to lock in an exchange rate for, regardless of load on the network. The earliest a transaction can confirm is on the next block, and there's about a 25% chance no block will be mined by then.

>However, getting the transaction confirmed can take many hours at the times of high demand and then it still fails because thanks to the volatility, the transaction fees have gone up in the meantime. That is creating unsustainable problems for the customer support and makes BTC unusable for actual payments.

This is precisely what Lightning aims to solve, and at least anecdotally so far, has done so in the case of LTC.

(Though its hard to compare LTC to a chain with a market cap of over $200b even if the former has a skyrocketing trade volume)

Having used bitcoins as money, I really want the confirmation times and transaction fees to go back to what they were a year or two ago. I keep hearing that this mythical lightning will fix things, and I sure hope it does.

I want internet money. I want to be able to send money to anyone, anywhere in the world, at the drop of a hat, as easy as email. I don't care about speculation or getting rich or avoiding taxes or sticking it to the man or anything like that. I just want to have a convenient way to get tipped on IRC by anyone at any time and to be able to repay in kind, to anyone at any time.

10 minutes isn't really the drop of a hat. But why do you need your first confirmation in approximately the next 10 minutes so badly anyway, especially when it shows up in the mempool pretty much immediately? I paid around 20 cents on an approximately $200 transaction a couple weekends ago, it got verified after about 4 hours but I was expecting longer, it would have been fine. In the last 24 hours, 36,332 transactions were verified with at most 30 cents in fees. (https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/) The estimated time bounds for a transaction in that pool are 25 minutes to 14 hours.

Just knowing it's in your mempool isn't a very strong guarantee that the payment will go through. Probably fine for reversible digital goods, but not much else. Some systems pay miners to look at their block templates to get a better assurance it will confirm (and that it won't be replaced), but it's still not very good, and given that Lightning is now running on mainnet there's little value in continuing in that direction.

We've mostly had this for years, in the form of PayPal. Your ID even is your email.

The issues with PayPal have mostly been interfacing with fiat currency, which any system will have to deal with, and transaction fees, which any system will have.

The real problem IMO is the lack of a de-facto service that everyone all around the world has, and we're kind of in this position: https://xkcd.com/927/

Paypal doesn't work well across international boundaries. It's not convenient for IRC tipping. It's not internet money. And it's not my money, it's their money which they usually will give to me at their pleasure.

Having family and friends in different countries who use different currencies, let me tell you, Paypal is not the solution I want.

I avoid using PayPal internationally because they make it hard for me to pay in foreign currency denominations (they "helpfully" insist on being my exchange) but I have used it, it was no "worse" really than paying domestically. What makes them bad for you for international?

I argue it's not convenient for IRC tipping simply because 1) software is not well-integrated for minimal clicks 2) the other person might not have PayPal.

Don't get me wrong, I don't love PayPal, but I don't think Bitcoin brings anything really fundamentally important & new to the table, except maybe the decentralized part. Though, I suppose you could argue the decentralized nature of email was key for its universal adoption today.

That "helpful" exchange also charges a 3% fee on all currency exchange, on top of their regular fees.

You can insist that they charge you in the same currency as you wish to pay with and your bank will do the exchange at an order of magnitude lower fee. Not everyone knows this. The user interface also doesn't make it very clear (which perhaps surprised no one).

It would be the "not my money" part that is fundamentally different with Paypal. Paypal can choose to withhold this money at any time for any reason, and they have done so in the past. A lot of the money isn't even FDIC insured in the event of bankruptcy etc.

It straight up didn't work with my Vietnamese friend

Have a look at Transferwise.

I transfer money to my mum in the UK once a month from my Australia debit card and its in her account within minutes, and the fees are far lower than a bank transfer.

PayPal is a US-based centralized corporation. They're an application with a single point of failure.

PayPal? Is it this strange service based in USA (of all countries) which requires me to send them a utility bill? Seriously?

Are there any Bitcoin exchanges that don't require photo ID?

Yes. Some only require that if you wish to withdraw or deposit fiat over some daily limit.

You can create a scarce token with all the qualities you desire in like 5 minutes. Creating 'internet money' with a stable value and network of potential transactees probably looks exactly like Bitcoin's development though.

Bitcoin is not set up to ever be "stable" by any definition.

Real currency has a federal reserve to balance supply against demand and keep the value steady.

BTC has entirely demand-driven value-- which is precisely as steady and predictable as the human mind.

I wonder how real currencies existed before central banks...

They weren't stable.

You mean stable like the US dollar which went from $35 per ounce of gold when Nixon closed the gold window to $668 ten years later? By contrast the aureus, the solidus, the fiorino and many other metal based currencies preserved their value over several centuries. What eventually destroyed those currencies was not the lack of a central bank but on the contrary eventual debasement by the central authority.

Actually, I'm glad you pointed to the failure of the gold standard. It's a great example of why commodity money is dangerous.

The gold standard was abolished because the economy was on the brink of collapse. A dollar grossly mismeasured the value of an ounce of gold, because there were far FAR mare dollars than gold to back them, and the mapping of gold to dollars was not adjusted at all (from $35/oz) despite the discrepancy growing and growing for decades. In a sense, each ounce of gold was being double-counted 100 times over by so many dollars floating around in the economy. That situation was horribly unstable, because it was at huge risk of a run on gold (You'd have a lot more wealth if you exchange your dollar for gold; because of the aforementioned double counting, an ounce of gold actually corresponds to a great many dollars. If everyone had realized that and done it, the economy would have been toast).

Disconnecting the dollar from gold allowed the value of an ounce of gold to be correctly measured. So while other prices in the economy remained stable, gold shot up, because now the market was free to price it accurately (reflecting that the economy had grown far faster than the supply of gold). That doesn't indicate inflation, it precisely illustrates how dangerously out of whack things were before the gold standard was lifted.

Looking at the Coinbase graphs reminds me of reading CPU charts, comparing resource use between 3 web servers. Sometimes one coin will spike or dip independently, indicating higher utilization of one coin over the other 2 - an arbitrage opportunity; other times all 3 coins see a matching dip or raise, likely indicating a systematic cause.

I'm mostly happy with bitcoins except for what I mentioned: transaction fees and waiting times. If those things can really be brought down by the lightning network, that's all I care about.

Financial stability seems like a secondary concern that cannot be solved via computer code but might instead require other kinds of human codification, perhaps legal.

>This is precisely what Lightning aims to solve, and at least anecdotally so far, has done so in the case of LTC.

Which LTC wallet support LN in production?

Serious question: even if a currency is only good for exchanging for other currencies, doesn't that still make it a currency?

In other words, even if you can't go buy clothing or games or hosting with BTC, doesn't the fact that you can exchange it for $LOCAL_CURRENCY (which can be used to buy those things) give it value?

Basically, a meta-currency or currency of currencies, if you will.

Edit: I realize we are saying the problem is a delay and pinning down the real value at a given time, but it sounds like that doesn't matter so much as the volatility itself, which should eventually settle. If delay were really a problem, then I would think stocks wouldn't be a thing.

That makes it a security. By definition, currency is something you can exchange for goods or services, while securities are financial instruments that hold value (i.e. can be exchanged for currency).

See also: the European Currency Unit. Not a currency, but sort of acted like one.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Currency_Unit

Stocks are a thing because no one thinks of them as liquid assets. Steam is making the same argument about bitcoin essentially.

It was eye-opening to realize people buy stocks for 2 reasons:

1. Dividend payments

2. The expectation that someone else will want the stock more in the future. (Often for reason #1.)

Financially, there is no other logical reason to possess stocks. It was part of the larger lesson that companies often perform irrational actions because they are made primarily out of people.

3. Voting rights.

Stocks are an order of magnitude more liquid than Bitcoin, though

That would depend entirely on the stock. I'm sure there are many, many companies whose stock trades at less daily volume than BTC. Actually, I'd think few companies' stock trades at BTC's volume.

Oh sure, Berkshire Hathaway is less liquid. There are lots of stocks designed via various tricks (usually just share price) to be held and not traded.

Nonetheless, for any of the "commonly traded and indexed investment securities we all talk about colloquially as 'stocks'", the daily trade to capitalization ratio is routinely an order of magnitude higher than bitcoin.

No, it becomes an asset, like gold.

The thing with gold is that it's been valued for thousands of years all around the world and you can show it off, and we're pretty sure that we won't find a pure gold asteroid hurling towards us.

BC has none of those advantages.

Wait, has a pure Bitcoin asteroid been detected already?

Where then, would you draw the line between a currency and a non-currency asset?

When it hits all of:

    Acceptability
    Durability
    Divisibility
    Stability
    Portability
    (Elasticity)

If you can't spend it easily, it's not a (functioning) currency.

If it spoils or decays within your lifetime it's not a currency.

If it's not something you can divide in order to make payments of a more-or-less arbitrary amount, it's not a currency.

If you can't predict how much of the asset you will need to pay your bills next month, it's not a currency

If you can't bring it with you to the place where the exchange takes place, it's not a currency.

If you can't obtain capital investment in a currency because the currency itself is more valuable than anything you could produce, then it's not a (good long term) currency. This last one is in parens because it one only matters in a growing economy. A deflationary currency can still otherwise function as a viable medium of exchange, but eventually, lack of availability for new entrants will mean that entrepreneurs will begin looking to do business in alternate currencies.

> If you can't predict how much of the asset you will need to pay your bills next month, it's not a currency

Back in the hyperinflation days, we couldn't predict how many Cr$ we would need to pay our bills in the next month. That didn't keep it from being a currency.

That period did not last. Yes, if you try hard enough and look narrowly enough you can find exceptions to any of these rules, but it holds as a general guideline. If hyperinflation had continued indefinitely, it's probable some other commodity would have supplanted it as a de facto currency.

Are you missing fungibility or is that covered?

Missed it. In my mind I think I lumped it in with divisibility, which is related but not quite the same thing.

Nice. In that case, I wonder if you've ever heard of Monero? :)

Liquidity, probably - how fast can you exchange how much of it.

Though I do personally think there's a lot more to a currency than that.

Everything is a currency, if you barter hard enough.

Barter is, by definition, an exchange of goods without using money. In other words if you have to barter to get rid of it, it's not currency.

Does Valve really needs more than 0 confirmations? double-spending doesn't seems like a big issue for them since Steam is DRM and they have some level of control over the software people have in their libraries (and total control in the case of online games). If the concern is whether some people would just download games, double-spend before getting one confirmation and then keep Steam offline forever (or copy the game files from the steam folder), I think people can already do something similar as they let users "return" games during the firsts 24 hours after the purchase.

The problem with zero conf now is that the transaction may never get through. Blocks are full so often that if the fee isn't high enough the tx might stay stuck in the mempool for weeks until the machine is rebooted and the tx is lost forever.

Extremely low tx fees may never get into a block, but I just checked the the current price for a target of 24hs max (the same window time that fiat users currently have for returns) and it shouldn't be more than $0.35 USD for a simple 1 to 1 transaction (14 sat/byte). I know that this still isn't good, specially when you may be sending just $5 for some cheap game, but it's not that terrible either in my opinion...

Problem is that the minimum fee for 24hr target could change a lot in an hour or less because some news story happened or simply when enough people noticed a lull in fees and decided to move their fees when it's still cheap. In that event 24hrs coild easily turn to days.

Wallet developers and payment portals gets a lot of flak for overcharging fees, but ultimately it is still preferrable to using a conservative estimate and deal with the likely support call when the payment fails to confirm, and there is nothing they can do but watch it get bounced between nodes.

If the transactions were quick and Bitcoin were usable, I'd argue that the price wouldn't be fluctuating

Right, that is really the other side of what I didn't say. I don't expect Steam to be holding onto bitcoin for very long but if even for the short amount of time they're holding it the price is fluctuating and doesn't offer an equivalent price in USD from the time the user presses pay to the time the transaction is processed, on top of what can amount to a 20% fee it's simply not currency. They'd be better off allowing people to pay them in stocks sold on the NYSE and NASDAQ.

Steam does not hold onto BTC, BitPay collect the user's payment, tells Steam to release the order and writes a USD.cheque to Valve once in a while after taking their cut. The system worked until network congestion and market volatility made it impractical.

The only major online retailer that actually keep their own BTC is Overstock.

I wish someone invented a currency that was a percentage of the stock market index. Maybe blockchain could help with this...

That's more or less what ETFs do.

I know what an ETF and an Index Fund is (and that is where most of my money is held). My point was that would be great if had such a currency (i.e. is fungible, commonly accepted as a medium of exchange, and is easy to carry & transact) as opposed to something stuck in your brokerage account.

ETFs are not currency...

> The volatility wouldn't be a huge problem

I am having trouble fathoming why you think that.

The possibility of goods or services being returned or disputed at a later date creates risk even when the initial transactions are instant.

> and makes BTC unusable for actual payments

How ironic..

If you treat it like gold(store of value) then having a service that makes it liquid is just a bonus. Is like expecting to be able to purchase something using stock.

The point of a store of value is to have a stable, well, value. Either because the value is entirely intrinsic or because the demand is very stable.

Bitcoin is no more a store of value than tulips were. Bitcoin is a speculative product, not a store of value.

A store of value is something which you can be sort-of sure that people will want it in X years (with the longer the X, the better).

Gold has been valued since, I don't know, before the Greeks. What are the chances that tomorrow gold will go completely out of style (say gold will be worth no more than copper)? What about BitCoin? Can you put money in BC and hide it away?

It's just a sign that there are technical challenges. This can be solved with adaptations in the protocol (forks) I guess.

My biggest issue with BTC and the reason why I've never been bullish on them, despite owning a couple early on

People seem to forget Bitcoin is still in early "alpha" stages. Transaction times, fees, and even stable price will come IF it proves to be a long lasting means of exchange. This time next year tx times and fees will be solved with the lightning network - today the first text was done on chain. This is still early times

> I think this is what will ultimately bring Bitcoin down

People have been saying that for years. It serves purposes other than buying and selling goods, and in fact almost no one uses it to buy things.

That’s an entirely different narrative about Bitcoin, though, then what was presented to us when it was seeking adoption. The messaging was literally: use this to buy things. Maybe we all got it wrong, but a lot of people did, then; we must never forget the infamous Bitcoin pizzas.

https://twitter.com/bitcoin_pizza

I’ve noticed this trend lately of rewriting what Bitcoin is for because I assure you, it was presented as the new cash for a long, long time. We were supposed to see Bitcoin ATMs and paying for daily sundries with Bitcoin. Then that became difficult, we are starting to see the brave adopters drop out of using it that way, and suddenly it’s an investment vehicle and store of value and nobody really buys anything with it and that’s been the intent all along.

People were saying those things for years because Bitcoin proponents were telling us. It’s not like people arrived at that conclusion erroneously.

Huge numbers of people still believe in the idea of "electronic cash" (as set out in the original Bitcoin white paper.)

Right now the core Bitcoin dev team have gone one way, so the "currency" side of the debate have largely moved to alternatives like Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin etc.

The current backlog of transactions on the main Bitcoin chain is down to the artificial block size limit. How far on-chain scaling will stretch is unclear, but the core Bitcoin network could easily process more transactions if the block limit was increased.

The truth is user adoption surpassed the development of the tech. I honestly believe a year from now these issues (tx times and high fees) will be solved vis the lightning network.

People who have been involved with Bitcoin from the beginning are not trying to change it's definition. It will 100% be digital cash in due time. The reason it's taking so "long" is because the dev team cares about keeping it decentralized and doesn't throw sloppy code out and end up forking it later like many other alt coins

I don't think most reputable proponents have been saying that for years though.

In any case, the internet was designed as a communication medium that could survive nuclear war. That's how it was sold by its proponents. So what.

> I don't think most reputable proponents have been saying that for years though.

Define reputable.

> Announcing the first release of Bitcoin, a new electronic cash system

http://web.archive.org/web/20090131115053/http://bitcoin.org...

> Instant transactions for points-of-sale

http://web.archive.org/web/20130805223235/http://bitcoin.org...

(That verbiage lasted most of 2013, but was removed a couple days after this capture, presumably because payments were starting to become less "instant.")

> Bitcoin is a new payment system, independent from the traditional financial sector, and this could provide resilience to the economy in case of a crisis, as it creates a parallel payment system.

Understanding Bitcoin: Cryptography, Engineering, and Economics by Pedro Franco, 2010, pp. 26.

> You can purchase video games, gifts, books, servers, and alpaca socks. [...] Bitcoins are a great way for small businesses and freelancers to get noticed. It doesn't cost anything to start accepting them [...] and you'll get additional business from the Bitcoin economy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um63OQz3bjo

Bitcoin has literally been presented as a replacement for cash payments since day 1. I could go on, and on. That history is now being rewritten, and I think it’s important to understand why. Bitcoin set out to do one thing, is failing at that one thing, and I’m discouraged to see people rewrite the narrative rather than own it and say it didn’t work for that.

And you've mixed up your history: the research grants into the Internet were funded for that purpose, but it quickly morphed into an alternative usage once the new abilities were seen. Nobody went out and pulled out full page newspaper ads with that intent for its design, or otherwise heralded the Internet as such.

Are you of the opinion bitcoins development is done? User adoption has skyrocketed and far surpassed expectation. The first ever Lightning Network transaction happened today. Bitcoin is still early technology and it will take time to developers a p2p secure digital form if cash.

Ethereum, the supposed answer to bitcoins problem has just recently began to see the exact same problem. Why? Because of a dumb kitten game - what happens once even a single ICO finds an moderate amount of user base?

These are early times friend

"The first ever Lightning Network transaction happened today". Do you have a source for this where I can read more?

Did my own research. They're further along than I thought.

“Lightning Protocol 1.0: Compatibility Achieved ” https://medium.com/@lightning_network/lightning-protocol-1-0...

But the Internet accomplishes that. The fact that it also accomplishes everything else is a bonus.

BTC doesn't do its original job, and the current value on it, aside from idiots looking for a get-rich-quick scheme, seems to be that it will eventually do its original job.

What other purposes is it used for?

Right now it's only use apart from being an investment medium is to convert currency to alt coins, alt coins is where the innovation is and where the real use of distributed ledgers come into play.

Gambling.

gambling is a good, a bad good, mostly, but nevertheless.

International money transfer and store of value that can't be meddled with by another entity.

Various governments have done a pretty good job of meddling with it thus far.

How exactly have they meddled with it?

By threatening to send people who trade Bitcoin to jail: https://www.coindesk.com/bangladesh-outlaw-bitcoin-jail/

That's meddling with the person, not the transaction. The protocol is unassailable. Anyway, if you really want there are mechanisms for anonymous transactions over BTC.

Buying drugs and ransomware.