What it does is not just arbitration things, but establish global consensus and an unalterable log of that consensus.

If you've tried linking distributed Oracle databases between just a few different sites, you'd understand this has tons of failure cases and is, in fact, not a solved problem, even in the centralized world.

(Bigtable probably gets the closest these days, if you want proprietary and not globally auditable.)

> What it does is not just arbitration things, but establish global consensus and an unalterable log of that consensus.

That is nice. But can I, and everybody else in the USA successfully use Bitcoin on Black Friday? According to the National Retail Foundation, in 2016 over 101 million people went out on black friday to buy something. If Bitcoin could somehow 10x its transaction rate to even 40 transactions per second (which it can't and probably never will) it would take almost 30 days to process every order. At its current rate of 4tps, you are looking at about 292 days--during which, according to Wolfram Alpha, Venus will have made 1.3 trips around the sun.

So again, yeah, great job. Bitcoin solved some technical problem. Go team! But who gives a crap if some technical problem doesn't solve any real problem? Isn't that what we engineers exist to do? Solve real-world problems?

Lightning Network protocol has reached v1.0 and they have demonstrated transacting real bitcoins instantaneously on youtube.

That's a problem that hasn't been solved (yet).

That shouldn't diminish all the other things that BTC does successfully.

When the correct answer is “bitcoin“, what is the question? I genuinely, genuinely, don’t see any task for which it is the best solution — not even for anonymous online payments or secret ways to store wealth.

"what is the most well tested and carefully developed payment system today that allows me to have complete control of my funds without having to trust any third party?"

I see your suggestion and raise you “precious metals”

a) Precious metals are not portable enough. With Bitcoin someone can transfer any amount of value within a few minutes to the other side of the globe (and no-one can stop you from doing so).

b) Precious metals are too reliant on physical security. Someone can break into your house much easier than into i.e. your hardware wallet.

c) Besides these, precious metals are not a payment system, much less a programmable one. You can't code for example a logic that requires multiple untrusted parties to sign a transaction for it to complete.

Do wire transfers solve no real problems? I do essentially all of my large transactions usinng bitcoin.

I don’t think I ever claimed 20 t/s was sufficient. Just pointing out the throughput has increased by an order of magnitude and there is a tremendous amount of ongoing innovation in this space.

Marvellous, one whole order of magnitude! If you manage another factor of 5000 and Bitcoin will reach what Visa and Mastercard (and, separately, another cryptocurrency) managed several years ago.

Does every conversation about bitcoin have to devolve into snark and disrespect? It's not fun. It doesn't do any good for anyone.

Good question. I’m frustrated by the unwillingness of bitcoin (specifically bitcoin, not blickchain or cryptocurrencies in general) fans to recognise the flaws. It’s like… huh, like politics. Or religion, which is kinda also politics.

This is low level trolling. Visa and Mastercard are not decentralized. Centralization is an easy way to scale. They are not apples and oranges.

Also, Bitcoin settles transactions in 30 days, merchants get their funds in 30 days if they are lucky to not have the charge back.

Apples and oranges.

> Centralization is an easy way to scale

That is one reason why I prefer centralised to decentralised. I have yet to see a justification for the cost of decentralisation. This cost is an important thing, not a trivial thing.

Other reasons include but are not limited to the governance mechanism of things like bitcoin not being demonstrably better than the governance systems of any other currency, but that’s a much longer topic of discussion.

Which cryptocurrency supports 60k t/s?

BitShares, apparently. Press release June 10, 2015, claimed 100,000 t/s.

Never heard of it. I suspect their claim is either bogus or their coin is a database.

There are far too many cryptocurrencies to keep track of, bit even if the claim is false, Bitcoin is still absurdly slow compared to existing normal systems.

What existing “normal” systems?

Visa and Mastercard, like I wrote a few layers above.

My bad, I thought we were comparing global decentralized and trustless systems.