[lawn]

What do you mean struggles to be viable? Cryptocurrencies is already viable and used in a lot of places. If you mean other usages of blockchain I do agree.

And please don't bring up scaling (it's already viable today so the future is irrelevant to the point) or high fess (caused by Bitcoin's incompetent devs).

[thedancollins]

The technology cannot support millions of transactions per second - at least not in the case of a bitcoin blockchain which uses a PoW consensus mechanism. I am not sure how to respond to the second statement as there is some hand-waving and dogmatic proclamation that scalability is not an issue. Saying that cryptocurrencies are used in certain cases today and therefore - scalability is not an issue is like saying you once ate an apple and therefore all apples are edible.

[lawn]

I'm saying it's already viable and as such handles the scale we have today. Complains like "but it can't scale to all of the payments in the world" is severely missing the point.

Also we can already achieve PayPal like transaction amounts today, with Bitcoin Cash having in practice 20% of throughput. The limiting factor to scale further is software limited, not hardware. Furthermore it's possible to reach VISA levels of throughput with further work.

Scaling is one of the hardest issues for sure, but dismissing the viability of cryptocurrency because of it is naive.

[thedancollins]

Ah, point taken! One of the obvious courses is that there wiull be multiple blockchains each handling various arenas. In that case we run into the interesting blockchain-of-blockchains problems where we have to engineer not only under one blockchain but we have to figure out how to overcome the "slowest node" problem. Truly an engineering feat waiting for a hero (or heroine). Thoughts?

[lawn]

Yes among all clones and copies there are several "real" attempts at solving various problems.

As I mentioned Bitcoin Cash tries to see how far we can go with on-chain scaling.

Bitcoin on the other hand mostly avoids on-chain scaling and wants to add on side-chains which are supposed to scale. They're basically a second blockchain but it works a bit differently with different security trade-offs and comes with easy on and off settlements.

Monero wants to make all transactions private and thus make the coin itself fungible. The trade-off is that it's much harder to scale than the transparent blockchain of Bitcoin.

Ethereum wants to explore the idea of having advanced smart contracts on chain and again have several hard problems ahead.

Which approach is the best? Who knows...? Maybe in the end we'll have one coin that integrates all breakthroughs or they will each tend to their own niche. Overall I'm quite hopeful (obviously).

Now surrounding all this we need a lot of plumbing services. Payment processors which can accept the different coins and exchanges that makes it easy to swap between different coins.

I'm not sure if that answers your question though!