Re:My professional opinion as a blockchain researcher: I don...
by Retra on Monday February 12, 2018 @12:21PM
(#16360125)
It is not obvious that those problems are solvable, nor is it obvious that they're solvable in a way that doesn't simply recreate existing systems. And even if they are solvable, there's no lower bound on when that will occur.
And cars from the early 1900s may very well have been unsuitable to to the purposes for which they were employed in the early 1900s. You can't ask people to build their businesses and trust on a foundation that will "maybe" be poured "sometime" in the future.
You cherry-pick cars in the 1900s while failing to ignore all of the early 1900s technology that didn't succeed because there was no way to improve it. None of that was obvious then, either.
Bitcoin critics like you always focus on temporary issues. All the points you list are either being solved or fundamentally solvable. It's like criticizing cars from the early 1900s and missing the point that, obviously, they, like Bitcoin, will improve over time. For example:
• Volatility: on the long term it's declining because markets are getting deeper https://mobile.twitter.com/lsukernik/status/8649208737189519...
• Transaction verification speed: new technologies like Lightning Network make them instant; even a 0-conf non-RBF transaction is relatively safe to accept instantly for most use cases (eg. certainly safer than a CC transaction which can be fraudulently charged back.)
• Transaction fees: solvable by off-chain technologies like Lightning, or by increasing the block size (Graphene or UTXO set commitments make this scalable).