"Scale" is not the point. Independence and resilience is.
Just because it still pops up and noone responds to it at all. How many transactions can bitcoin handle nowadays? And how much energy does it consume again for that?!
How much energy, money, human resources were spent already on research of, say, Fusion Energy? Has it produced anything close to being net-positive? Should we call it quits? Who gets to represent "society" to make such a call?
> How many transactions can bitcoin handle nowadays?
How many tons of cargo could the first airplanes carry?
Sorry for being flippant, but it gets tiring to get the same "argument" over and over and over again. Yeah, current implementation of the system is far from ideal. It needs work. It is being worked on. The fact that it is not it is the highest priority does not make undesirable. It just means that are other things that need to be worked on before we put more focus on these kind of optimizations.
High-value, low-mass packages were transported by airplanes by 1911; by 1918 the USPS had an official air-mail service. That's fifteen years from the Wright Brothers' flight, and only ten years after the first flight of a full mile's distance.
So airplanes were economically a net positive 15 years after their invention. Chaum's ecash, which I think is reasonably comparable to the Kitty Hawk flight, was 25 years ago.
The primary use of Bitcoin that I encounter in my daily life is in ransom requests. If I want to make a legal million dollar payment, it's easier and safer to have the bank do it than to use cryptocoins. If I want to make a $20 payment, it's much easier and safer to use a credit card than cryptocoins. While I quote these extremes, everything [legal] in between is also easier and safer than cryptocurrency.
If the "things that need to be worked on before" don't include any of these cases, what do they include?
And blockchain enables people to send value without intermediaries around the world in less than a few minutes.
Key point: without intermediaries. Any comparison with existing banking systems is moot.
> If the "things that need to be worked on before" don't include any of these cases, what do they include?
- How to get the systems safer to use, so that people can reduce their dependence on existing banking/financial structure.
- How to create other use-cases beyond transmitting value: to create credit systems (along with credit ratings, insurance instruments), to eliminate notaries and have blockchain be also used as a record of private property, deeds, etc.
- How to find a better point in the trade-off decentralization/permissionless/operational cost x centralization/permissioned/economies of scale. That is what Layer-2 solutions are about.
- How to develop and architect applications that make use of this technology without destroying value.
Do you need more?
