[em3rgent0rdr]

> "Bitcoin was advertised as digital cash. Tons of nerds envisioned a future of the whole world buying coffee with Bitcoin. As it became clear that the current network could never fulfill that vision..."

There is an interesting historical tidbit: Initially Satoshi didn't have a fixed block size limit. That limit was only added after a DDoS attack where absurdly large blocks flooded the network. But that was a temporary fix, and satoshi had said that limit could easily be changed, maybe using some algorithm that increased size based on demand or that gradually increases with time. He had said large blocks is not a concern because network bandwidth increases exponentially. Unfortunately, the early developers did not proactively address the scaling problem, such as by allowing for increasing block sizes, so we are stuck where we are at today. [1]

Point being, bitcoin could have been a micro-transaction-capable digital cash, and it (or another crypto-currency) still could fix this scaling problem. Not everyone in the community has "evolved their beliefs" about bitcoin (or cryptocurrency in general). I personally feel that bitcoin was and still is experimental, but has simply been a victim of its own success, but that the scaling problems are not insurmountable.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1391350.0

[malloryerik]

I'm excited about digital money. What could the effect be of a boom and crash? If bitcoin had some kind of algorithmic central bank mechanism, low transaction costs, and didn't spew CO2, I'd be in love with it. I'm half in love with Ethereum, although something there doesn't quite feel right yet, either.