At the time of writing this comment, if you want your BTC transaction confirmed in the next hour it would cost you ~ 10USD ( https://bitcoiner.live/ ) .
What planet do you live on where you think a non-negligible percentage of people in ANY country, let alone a developing one, can afford 10 dollars for each transaction they make? That's not even considering the price effect that global demand would have on fees. Bitcoin can't even meet the demand of the relatively small cult of people worldwide that buy it, few of which even move their "assets" off the exchange.
Parasitic investors have strangled cryptocurrency. If you think Bitcoin can currently serve any purpose other than making rich people more rich, you're a fool. Wake me when Tether is dead and people start using crypto as it was intended, peer to peer digital cash.
EDIT: I apologize for coming off so harsh. My anger is (mostly) not at you. I'm angry at seeing the enormous potential bitcoin had to do good in the world go completely to waste.
10 dollars is a steep confirmation price but if you have a life savings of, say, the equivalent of a few hundred or thousand USD that you hold in cash and your local currency is rapidly inflating making it worthless, btc is an amazing life raft that you could put your money into. If you are able to migrate and get a high paying job and still have family somewhere far away in the world that you want to help, $10 fee is not that crazy to send them monthly payments that they could then trade for cash or food.
Then there are obviously the side chain solutions, lightning network, or even just using exchanges to transfer btc to altcoins with faster settling times and lower fees if you really do want digital cash.
It doesn't have to be a bad replacement for cash. It can actually be a fantastic replacement for cash if we continue building it as one. The fact is, the current BTC devs decided bitcoin can't scale before ever even trying. They were short-sighted, took VC money to pivot to "digital gold", and started spreading the false narrative that it never could have worked.
> Why are you so set on digital cash?
Because until bitcoin is useful to regular everyday people, there won't be enough buy-in to offset the huge exchange rate fluctuations caused by speculators. If that doesn't happen then it will only ever be useful to speculators.
Your above example scenario makes perfect sense if you're a skilled worker from a wealthy country but it's nonsense if you're among the remaining 80% of the people on this planet. Bitcoin can help EVERYONE if we let it. Luckily other coins have picked up the slack.
Please keep the Bitcoin-the-protocol and Bitcoin-the-currency separate. The protocol obviously can't "scale" to even remotely close to everyday payment systems such as Visa or Mastercard.
That much should be evident, and was the subject of pretty much every discussion around the protocol about ten years ago or so. The basic idea has limits. 10x of a tiny number is still a tiny number.
Payments can still be viable in Bitcoin-the-currency however. This can be done in a number of ways, from Visa-like third parties to decentralized payment networks such as Lightning and a number of similar ideas. Settlements will always be necessary so there will always be need of something like blockchain in distributed systems.
No system where every actor needs to keep a permanent record of every transaction of every other actor forever can scale to the entire planet. Transactions must be an issue only for the parties involved in the transaction, and maybe for a third party.
Has the proportion of transactions gone up compared to the miners?
1. Massive media hype surrounding the price in 2014 caused everyone and their mom to try and buy bitcoin. The original developer (Satoshi) had added short term limit on the number of transactions that could be processed in a given time (transactions per block) as a short term fix for a few bad actors spamming the network. So the network was left unable to process the massive increase in demand caused by the price hype. This "fix" was stated to be temporary but was left in for the reason below.
2. A handful of new BTC devs ran off the old guard who believed the network should scale up with demand. This resulted in them intentionally refusing to change the software to accommodate yet another round of increased demand due to media attention (2016).
3. Increased regulatory scrutiny made it difficult to buy/sell crypto outside of large, regulated exchanges, effectively reducing liquidity for those that aren't institutional traders and those unwilling to give Coinbase a DNA sample just so they can buy crypto. The new regulatory and institutional friction killed many of the original use cases for bitcoin leaving mostly institutional traders left. These traders are unphased by high transaction fees, especially since most of their trading takes place off-chain on an exchange website.
For example, I donated to a torrenting site with a very low fee and it took ~3 days to confirm.
If the use case is only large gold like transactions, the BTC use case makes more sense. Tbd.. shake it out.
It blows my mind the amount of talent being wasted building "solutions" for an intentionally crippled chain. One can only polish a turd so much.
This is an inevitable result of deflationary currency.
We already have tons of options for 'store of value' why on earth would we invent another, worse one?
BTC is not a store of value or a currency - it's a weird social movement.
