Bitcoin has clearly failed in an 'exchange' role as evidenced by still not needing to fiddle with the 7 tps transaction rate (1MB block size) and not being on a trajectory to need to do so any time soon. The reason for this is abundantly clear and I've been saying so for years: Bitcoin is simply not competitive in this role.
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I don't fully get where you're coming from on this one. Does it all boil down to your assertion that blocksize increase would have to outrun Nielsen's law in order to sustain significant transaction throughput?
Lemme just follow up on that briefly for the benefit of those here who are not so mentally adroit (e.g., cypherdoc, justusranvier, etc.)
I wrote that after reading about the BitPay layoffs. This is an indicator that it's starting to dawn on the VC types that they've been shucked by us geeks (and the last half year of charts indicates something similar.) It's probably not monetary loss which stings as much as being ridiculed by their peers.
Anyway, I read this as a strong alignment of the tea leaves showing that we may be in for more hard times for a while.
It's really not uncommon for startups for lay people off. Up to half of staff is well within normalcy....not that it's good, of course, but I wouldn't read too much into letting 9 ppl out of 60 go (aside from maybe they need to hire slower/smarter).
That said, I do think a shakeout in the VC-funded side of the ecosystem is inevitable. Something like 500+ companies were founded, most probably seed/angel stage, and most are not going to get an A round. While it's going to be annoying from a headlines perspective, it's a fairly natural stage in the evolution of a hot industry, and in this case, is most certainly necessary to rebalance expectations, especially in terms of the timeframe across which mass adoption can happen.
At least Marc A. is on-point with the latter; specifically his quote that things like ApplePay will make the most fin-tech impact over the next 2-3 years, but Bitcoin will make the most impact over the next 20 years.
The low hanging fruit has been plucked. It was fun, but now it's time to knuckle down and let Bitcoin build on it's true strength as a solid reserve currency. I just hope it's still possible. If it is it will be a monster pay-day for us hodlers. If it's not, oh well...it was a fun ride.
Whether reserve currency only forever or reserve with the subsequent addition of exchange, it's necessary to re-focus on the investment side for a while. Investors and speculators need to drive market-cap and hodling so that entrepreneurs have something to work with. The folks thinking that this was going to be like Facebook; ie, pegged exponential for 5 or 6 years until >1B users were doomed to be disappointed. It takes a lot more depth to reform humanity's ideas of finance and money than it does to build a gossip-sharing platform with a high virality coefficient.