Still today, we get lured by the same businesses (because all these lenders were just banks/financial operators) but without any of the safety nets we have in place when we work with "old school" banks.
To not be the one stuck holding the bag.
I think that's what was meant when calling it digital currency.
But now it's heading down a different path.
99.9% of all "advances" and developments in the space hasn't moved us towards the endgame, if anything it's taking us further away.
BCH allows more transactions. BTC would take 18 years for 4B people to perform a single transaction each. And it costs ridiculous amounts of resources for a ridiculous amount of constant security.
BTC's 1 MB (or a bit more with segwit accounting) is just hopelessly obsolote, we could easily handle multiples without any issue whatsoever, and it would require a massive increase there after to reach the state of "one or two nodes".
Further, BCH isn't "turning down alternatives". It's a permissionless system after all, and it does have malleability fixes if you want to have layer two for it.
It's BTC who is blocking any on-chain scaling and bet everything on the experimental Lightning Network (that's still experimental mind you).
Ironically this is what is described in the original bitcoin satoshi whitepaper (not 'one or two' obviously), but the math doesn't work out.
Right now bitcoin has a throughput of about 1 KB/s, which is slower than a 14.4 dialup modem. The entire 13 year chain fits on a $40 thumb drive with room to spare. Even 32MB blocks (53 KB/s) maxed out for another 7 years would fit on single $220 12TB hard drive.
Running a node is only really necessary for miners, exchanges or any other major service but it will be trivial for anyone who can watch a youtube video or stream netflix for at least another decade.
But even if there were a reduction in the amount of nodes, and in security vs. 51% attacks (looking at miners' profitability), BCH has shown its willingness to consider tradeoffs and changes.
There will be opportunity to backpedal if the community considers centralization is a bigger risk than adoption difficulty.
I fear BTC's downfall will be caused by its brittleness resulting from the fixed rules.
This seems to be contradicted by the deflationary design of Bitcoin. The fact that Bitcoin is deflationary probably also exacerbates the speculative interest from investors that makes Bitcoin more volatile and less useful as a currency. It's possible that Bitcoin was technological sound, but economically destined to fail at its stated goals.
That exchanges don't need help with that
The emergence of crypto coincided with the final snuffing of bearer bonds and certificates and most anonymous bank accounts. The death of crypto will coincide with something else. The regulators of the world continue to pick and choose where to place their fingers in the cracks of the dam. Money that cannot efficiently or legally pass through KYC/AML will find a way.
Saying "centralised exchanges bad, DeFi good" misses the point that the main use case of centralised exchanges is not covered by DeFi.
Of course you can, both ways.
> On a private chat, Bob tells Alice how to send him fiat.
https://learn.robosats.com/docs/payment-methods/
> You can pay with any method that both you and your peer agree on. This includes the higher risk method such as PayPal, Venmo, and Cash apps.
C'mon, that's not trading fiat for crypto. That's "PayPal me some money".
Then it turns out that the promised future involves trusting someone to honour a paypal and pray you're not being scammed.
Whenever a big exchange fails, we see a lot of people say "of course, this is why decentralization is better." But I'm not convinced people are less likely to lose money in decentralized exchanges. It seems like it would actually be easier, it's just that a bunch of small scale scams aren't going to get the same attention as a huge exchange collapsing.
[1] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/robosats-private-bitcoi...
They're currently a little short on manpower. If you're a Java dev, you might consider giving a hand.
The last time I looked into this it needed a security deposit in BTC.
Tether's audit has been promised since 2016. Still hasn't happened yet.