People love to talk as if the current situation is frozen in time, particularly when it comes to open source software.
I've seen people complain about certain open source software based on their experience in 2016, as if nothing might have changed in the intervening years.
There is continuous work being done on scaling. Things take time.
We didn't have broadband internet immediately, there was a very long period of dialup, then slow DSL, ADSL and then eventually fast broadband.
There was no way you could stream video on the early Internet. I wonder whether people back then also complained that it will never be able to replace television, actually... I'm pretty sure those people existed.
That’s actually an argument against bitcoin - not against the internet. The internets adoption was bottlenecked on real physical infrastructure that had to be developed and deployed to every corner of the planet. Bitcoin being built on top of this infrastructure has only self imposed synthetic ideological limitations, lack of product market fit and lack of utility holding it back.
There’s no reason to think that the two should take anywhere close to the same length of time to reach adoption. Just look at the iPhone and Android that came out in the same year as bitcoin. If something’s good and useful you don’t need to proselytize and make excuses.
> That’s actually an argument against bitcoin - not against the internet
I'm not making an argument against the Internet. :)
The internet already had utility back when everyone used dialup, and Bitcoin already has utility now and is in many respects a massive success, especially given all the eulogies it's received over the years.
Incumbents have moved on from ignoring, and then laughing to now fighting.
So what has Bitcoin actually solved since it has been created if not only create rampant speculation, emboldening ransomware authors to get paid and contribute to burning the planet?
I can concede that Bitcoin has failed as a currency and that as an alternative for payments. But can we stop talking about crypto and thinking that Bitcoin is the only thing that matters?
> The supposed lightning network tends to centralisation
Well, let's put Bitcoin aside. The argument you are using here can also apply to Ethereum scaling solutions, and it is misguided at best and dishonest at worst.
Yes, scaling solutions sacrifice some decentralization in favor of performance. But to argue that it "defeats the purpose" is like saying "the Internet is not decentralized because most people access it through a handful of service providers" and that the only "right" way to access the Internet is by mesh networks.
Decentralization by itself is not a goal. The goal is to have a system that is censorship resistant and that can be an alternative to the status quo. If most people achieve these goals by using (regulated and well-managed) exchanges, or if smaller communities pool their resources to participate in the economy, you are still "centralizing" but you are not "defeating the purpose".
Another way to put it: say that you want to serve a community that is not served on underserved by the main banks. What would be the cost to fund and operate a credit cooperative? On the other hand, what would be the cost to setup and operate a Raiden or a Hub20 node to give people a custodial wallet?
I've seen people complain about certain open source software based on their experience in 2016, as if nothing might have changed in the intervening years.
There is continuous work being done on scaling. Things take time.
We didn't have broadband internet immediately, there was a very long period of dialup, then slow DSL, ADSL and then eventually fast broadband.
There was no way you could stream video on the early Internet. I wonder whether people back then also complained that it will never be able to replace television, actually... I'm pretty sure those people existed.