> It's now used primarily as a vehicle for speculation
Gambling. It’s gambling. A significant fraction of the American economy continues to gear towards gambling. Whether it be short-term dopamine hits from ad-fuelled social media or trading crypto, it’s a similar pattern of decay across a common although growing demographic stripe.
You probably should look at different numbers than just the dollar price.
Number of nodes is rising,
number of wallets is rising, number of hash-power is rising.
Also, please look into the "Lightning Network". It's the second layer on top of Bitcoin and that's where the whole ecosystem scales (in terms of numbers of transactions per second). Cheap, scalable and fast transactions.
Nodes rise because businesses that want to build on the chains require them unless they want to a pay far too much for a wrapper API. The number of wallets is literally unbounded, and it’s impossible to know precisely how many entities are attached to those wallets. I am one person. My tens of wallets are only for one person. I make a new wallet every time I try new wallet apps. I make new wallets to try new things. “Number of wallets” and “number of nodes” is a bad metric.
I would be highly interested in finding a serious shop/commerce/ecommerc operation where Lighting Network is actually used.
I check LN every 6 months or so and situation is not looking so great.
As it was with Bitcoin itself in early 2010s the shops advertising crypto acceptance are doing it mostly for publicity/ideological reasons or actually have stopped existing.
* http://www.room77.de/ - SMTP-packets to port 25 (info[at]room77.de) may very likely get a response just as much as electrons sent to our telephoney landline-device (+49.30.31102260). Single static page.
Lightning network pulls transactions off-chain, thus relying on trusting someone (either the person you transact with or some third party acting as escrow for the funds). By adding in trust, you can mitigate the primary bottleneck caused by proof-of-work consensus methods. But if you have people you can trust to transact with, there's no point in interfacing with Bitcoin at all, just make a micro-payment network without the bitcoin connectivity, like Venmo. This is why we don't see adoption of Lightning Network, it just moves us off of Bitcoin, which lets us get most of the "benefits" for none of the costs.
That's not how lightning works. While it's true that the transactions are off-chain there is no trust element involved.
A channel between 2 entities is backed by real bitcoin and a scheme to manage the ledger based on bitcoin primitives (multisignature).
Lightning is just a series of channels + routing, so in effect it's a path of channels between you and the party you are transacting with + ledgers of those channels updating with the value that is being moved. At any point in time you can close any channel and materialize however bitcoin you have on your side.
Gambling. It’s gambling. A significant fraction of the American economy continues to gear towards gambling. Whether it be short-term dopamine hits from ad-fuelled social media or trading crypto, it’s a similar pattern of decay across a common although growing demographic stripe.