People have been saying that for years. It serves purposes other than buying and selling goods, and in fact almost no one uses it to buy things.
https://twitter.com/bitcoin_pizza
I’ve noticed this trend lately of rewriting what Bitcoin is for because I assure you, it was presented as the new cash for a long, long time. We were supposed to see Bitcoin ATMs and paying for daily sundries with Bitcoin. Then that became difficult, we are starting to see the brave adopters drop out of using it that way, and suddenly it’s an investment vehicle and store of value and nobody really buys anything with it and that’s been the intent all along.
People were saying those things for years because Bitcoin proponents were telling us. It’s not like people arrived at that conclusion erroneously.
Right now the core Bitcoin dev team have gone one way, so the "currency" side of the debate have largely moved to alternatives like Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin etc.
The current backlog of transactions on the main Bitcoin chain is down to the artificial block size limit. How far on-chain scaling will stretch is unclear, but the core Bitcoin network could easily process more transactions if the block limit was increased.
People who have been involved with Bitcoin from the beginning are not trying to change it's definition. It will 100% be digital cash in due time. The reason it's taking so "long" is because the dev team cares about keeping it decentralized and doesn't throw sloppy code out and end up forking it later like many other alt coins
In any case, the internet was designed as a communication medium that could survive nuclear war. That's how it was sold by its proponents. So what.
Define reputable.
> Announcing the first release of Bitcoin, a new electronic cash system
http://web.archive.org/web/20090131115053/http://bitcoin.org...
> Instant transactions for points-of-sale
http://web.archive.org/web/20130805223235/http://bitcoin.org...
(That verbiage lasted most of 2013, but was removed a couple days after this capture, presumably because payments were starting to become less "instant.")
> Bitcoin is a new payment system, independent from the traditional financial sector, and this could provide resilience to the economy in case of a crisis, as it creates a parallel payment system.
Understanding Bitcoin: Cryptography, Engineering, and Economics by Pedro Franco, 2010, pp. 26.
> You can purchase video games, gifts, books, servers, and alpaca socks. [...] Bitcoins are a great way for small businesses and freelancers to get noticed. It doesn't cost anything to start accepting them [...] and you'll get additional business from the Bitcoin economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um63OQz3bjo
Bitcoin has literally been presented as a replacement for cash payments since day 1. I could go on, and on. That history is now being rewritten, and I think it’s important to understand why. Bitcoin set out to do one thing, is failing at that one thing, and I’m discouraged to see people rewrite the narrative rather than own it and say it didn’t work for that.
And you've mixed up your history: the research grants into the Internet were funded for that purpose, but it quickly morphed into an alternative usage once the new abilities were seen. Nobody went out and pulled out full page newspaper ads with that intent for its design, or otherwise heralded the Internet as such.
BTC doesn't do its original job, and the current value on it, aside from idiots looking for a get-rich-quick scheme, seems to be that it will eventually do its original job.
