Okay, so you want Bitcoin to be fast (low transactions latency), and have low transaction fees. Great.
I completely agree that these are barriers to Bitcoin (and decentralized cryptos generally) to be accepted as a means mainstream means of daily transactions.
In fact, I suspect
people here in Bitcointalk are probably getting sick of hearing me say this.
Now let's talk about how this will
never happen using the blockchain architecture.
The blockchain architecture--implemented as it was designed to be used, e.g. as a massively decentralized architecture--is directly at odds with both cost and latency. Indeed, you could say that Satoshi
intentionally designed Bitcoin to be
slow and expensive in order to make the decentralized paradigm work.
Insofar as cryptocurrencies have decreased their cost and latency, they have sacrificed decentralization. This is a trade-off that is based on the universal constant of the
speed of light.
It will not be solved by optimizing some code.
It will not be solved by making a few changes to the usage paradigm (unless you sacrifice decentralization).
And while I am an experience software architect and I could have told you this shortly after reading the Bitcoin white paper for the first time, even if you aren't a technical person, you'd have to conclude that after
14 years of trying with no solution, the problem is never, ever, EVER going to be solved.
And no, increasing the block size isn't going to help. A mainstream currency would need to the
tens of thousand of times faster, it would need to be
hundreds of times cheaper, and it would need to handle tens of billions of transactions
per day which is absolutely unthinkable with a public ledger.
Repeat after me:
Bitcoin was not designed to be a mainstream currency.
Bitcoin was not designed to be a mainstream currency.
Bitcoin was not designed to be a mainstream currency.
It just. plain. wasn't.
This was never Satoshi's goal. If it was his goal, he would have designed Bitcoin differently (e.g. not blockchain, not decentralized [e.g. he would have created something like
Haypenny]).
Be content that Bitcoin does what it was designed to do (well, sorta does): it allows transactions that evade government subpoenas. Thousands of people all over the world need this.
And Bitcoin
also does something it was never intended to do, but has become very popular: it works fine as a speculation instrument. Millions of people like this.
Having Bitcoin do any more than that will require that Bitcoin isn't Bitcoin anymore.
My opinion is that the hope of Bitcoin is financial sovereignty and financial freedom for anyone who has access to the internet. I see it as THE killer app of the edge network known as the Internet. I think edge is really critical because Bitcoin was also designed as an edge network. This means that every user was to have a node.
You make a lot of good points but I have to disagree with one of them. Bitcoin was designed to be a "digital form of electronic cash". If you say this in the title and the first sentence of the white paper it is the intention.
I also understand why you would be concerned that we couldn't come up with a solution since one has not been identified to this point. I think we can solve these problems. See my post above for some basic ideas.
