[jrm4]

What I think others overlook is that in practice (and despite what the retconners are trying to say about bitcoin is gold or some nonsense) -- is that Bitcoin was NOT designed to be a blockchain platform. It was designed to be fungible currency. And it's an excellent proof-of-concept...but with severe flaws that will kill it, especially in light of the fact that we're talking about *open source software, which begs to be forked, and effectively has been.

Your argument strikes me as very odd -- you seem to suggest that nothing can beat Bitcoin in theory, but Ethereum is already beating it in practice.

[tomputer]

> Your argument strikes me as very odd -- you seem to suggest that nothing can beat Bitcoin in theory, but Ethereum is already beating it in practice.

In theory everything is possible. I do not follow the beating really. They can both exist with different use cases.

Bitcoin wants to be digital gold (and money) and Ethereum wants to be a smart contract world computer running dapps. They solve different problems.

[jrm4]

But Ethereum is a technically superior option for both cases. It does what Bitcoin can't do, but it also does what Bitcoin does better, and has a roadmap to improvement beyond that. Bitcoin is still wildly slow and destroys the environment, and Ethereum is on track to mostly not do that, to say nothing of "post-Eth" projects like Pulsechain.

Now, I'm sure Bitcoin will enjoy name recognition for some time, but in my experience, always bet on the tech.

[djschnei]

Bitcoin slow? I make virtually free, instant, micro-payments on Bitcoin hundreds of times every day (Podcasting 2.0). I also accept Bitcoin payments on my e-commerce site that settle instantly for fractions of a percent in fees. I also route hundreds of Bitcoin payments per day using a raspberry pi which draws an extremely low amount of energy. Not sure which "reality" you're referring to...

[jrm4]

Man, your use case is one I hope I'm wrong about. I love the idea of microtransactions and tipping and such. But, I never much paid attention to Lightning given that the BTC price didn't really move when it came out, which strongly suggested to me that not enough people really cared.

[djschnei]

It's impossible to consider Bitcoin without considering lightning. Two sides of the same coin. It's still early in its adoption curve for sure, but it has been gaining traction.

- Twitter uses lightning for its tipping mechanism

- The Podcasting 2.0 standard is all lightning based

- NCR is integrating lightning

- Blackhawk is integrating lightning

- Kraken has enabled lightning

- Robinhood is integrating lightning

- Square/block is investing heavily into lightning development and enablement

I'm probably missing some big ones...