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by PKop 1887 days ago
>BTC did not become “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,”

I understand that people are disappointed by this thus seeing the idea of BTC as a whole as a "failure", but given the fundamental properties of the system (finite supply, distributed network) it was never possible for BTC to become a currency used widely in everyday high volume transactions. Impossible.

Hal Finney even recognized this in early discussions predicting BTC wouldn't be used in high volume but more likely as a reserve asset, which BTC can absolutely be. Functioning as a digital gold, despite people's aversion or annoyance at this concept. Acting in concert w/ other payment methods or fiat currencies used for payments, taxes, commerce, transactions. A store of value to complement inevitable debasement or dilution of uncapped supplied fiat.

1 comments

Sure but Hal probably didn’t realize layer 2 solutions such as Lightning Network were possible, with low fees and fast transaction times using bitcoin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network

I see that as third party rent seeking behavior and a bit of a co-opting.

And that's fine, because the beauty of satoshi releasing it as open source spawned an entire ecosystem of ideas and implementations, so while his 'baby' may not be what he envisioned the basic idea and problems solved live on through evolution.