Bitcoin is about to die
(www.barrons.com)
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Excellent comment. Well stated.
There may be advantages / disadvantages I'm overlooking though. What are some of the top criticisms of bitcoin that may hold some merit?
The lone fact that it is digital, and not something physical, is alone a barrier to many people accepting it. To them, money was always something they held in their hands. However, these same people would likely accept a government digital currency if it were shoved down their throats. And most of the USD in circulation today only exists digitally.
Some legit criticism would be the 1mb block size limit, with a note on "some", there's a lot of invalid criticism on that topic too. The block size limit was added to prevent spam, by restricting how fast the blockchain can grow.
Since every transaction ever made is logged, and since the blockchain is supposed to run on as many privately owned devices as possible and not on centralized servers, it's vital that it doesn't take up too much disk storage space. Currently around 200GB for a full node.
I think Satoshis mistake here was to expect a continuation of moores law, that is based on 2008's technology, we would all still use desktop PC's today, with spinning magnetic hard drives. Tho those drives would have 128 or 256 TB of storage capacity and doesn't cost more than $50 - $100.
Instead, the smartphone became more popular, then came the SSD drives which are more expensive, hence smaller in storage size but faster which made them more popular. The original idea might have been to allow bigger blocks or some kind of dynamic scaling, but without big storage the blockchain needs to be kept small in size to ensure it remains decentralized.
Today we do have bigger storage mediums at reasonable cost, and a increased block size could be justified. That said, there's been plenty of upgrades which aims to fix the scaling issue, first segwit which reduce transaction size, hence doubling amount of transactions that fits inside a block. Then the beech32 update and now the lightning network which uses parallel chains.
And beside Bitcoin, there are also a few valid alt coins, all with their own brilliant solutions to the scaling problem. From parallel chains, to dynamic block size and more. In the end, if we all reduce consumption anyway, there won't be a need for huge transaction throughput.