However, if we look ahead to the next few years, do you think Bitcoin can realistically handle a massive chunk of everyday online commerce? Or will it always remain primarily a settlement layer and store of value, leaving day-to-day transactions to stable coins or other networks?
Im curious to hear how people here view the trade-offs, especially regarding user experience, volatility, and global scalability. Lets discuss!
Bitcoin can already do this. The point is not to use everything on chain because that is not good, many payments are small and not important. They don't need to be permanently stored and replicated on many thousands of computers. Instead Bitcoin's Lightning Network already provides more capacity than is needed to handle all the transactions of the world. There isn't a practical limit that we have hit yet, we can see what happens when it has more users. If it is going to be used this way is another topic, for that I am not so confident because many do not value the decentralization that much as we do.
Lightning cannot reach mass adoption. The architecture is just not allowing convenient use, because of liquidity and connection issues.
Bitcoin can power all online transactions theoretically using Ark, but probably requires covenants to be included in a future softfork. Ark is already working without covenants though, although it's debatable if that alone can power all online transactions.
I have read things like this many times but I have never had a single issue for small payments, which is what lightning is made for. I never had connection issues or liquidity issues. Did you personally have some issues? When was that? What wallet did you use?
I'm confident that Bitcoin won't power all online transactions in the near or even distant future. 🙋
You are probably right but that is not the question here, the question is about technological capability of doing all of that.
