[easuter]

For me, I have "bitcoin fatigue" regarding all the usual topics pro-bitcoin evangelist start spewing whenever the topic comes up. The usual "bitcoin is the second-coming of christ" crap.

There is a complete lack of acknowledgement of bitcoin's ineptitude as a replacement for current payment methods, what with its 2TX/s limit (on a good day) and the ridiculous size of the block-chain which effectively negates all the advantages of it being a distributed system since you have to rely on third-parties to use it on you phone or embedded devices for example. Not to mention the monopoly that chinese miners have on the network...it's a joke.

IMHO bitcoin is an interesting experiment, but that's all it is. It will be replaced by something better some day, another fact that evangelists refuse to concede.

[Natanael_L]

Lightning Network is much much closer to going live now. That would be a federated (email/XMPP like) system to drastically boost the number of transactions per second that it can handle with retained security (a malicious LN server can at worst temporarily freeze funds and reverse only unsettled payments).

You don't need to trust third parties even with mobile devices, the Bitcoin Wallet app on Android uses the SPV protocol where a malicious miner has to outpace the rest of the miners to fool you. It uses the code library bitcoinj. Headers-first sync only made this easier to do with minimal resources.

[statoshi]

I find it less and less likely that Bitcoin will be replaced given the amount of investment (both time and money) put into the system. If Bitcoin was remaining stagnant, I'd be pessimistic as well, but there are a multitude of improvements that will be deployed over the course of the next year.

[easuter]

I'll take all these improvements with a pinch of salt until they are actually in the wild.

Take the lighting network for example. The idea has been floating around for quite some time but in practice its still vaporware.

Yet, ask any bitcoin enthusiast what's being done to solve the scalability problem and the LN is trotted out as if it were already widely adopted. It's ridiculous.

[EdHominem]

Sidechains are an answer, for you, if you don't feel the current blockchains scale for your needs. For micropayments, or whatever. But they don't solve anything per-se because nothing is broken.

Pay to publish is a feature. It's the rate-limiting mechanism we'd need anyways, but directly tied into PoW and reward.

Make your coin and ask people if they want to use it instead of bitcoin. It's so easy, and you can be proven right.