Jorge,
What metric would you use to consider bitcoin a success?
I mean a minimum success you would think about personal use.
Is there a daily equivalent a USD transacted that equals minimum success or a number of transactions (excluding change if that could be quantified)?
What about use for the supply chain? I.e. sell goods for btc and pay for wages or purchase supplies with that btc
I was asked this soon after I started posting here, and my answer is still basically the same:
Bitcoin will be a success (as a currency) when a significant number of people spontaneously choose it to pay for
legal purchases,
because it is better for them than the alternatives. "Better" may include cheaper, safer, simpler, faster, or any other operational advantage. But I would
not count people who use it just out of curiosity, because they are invested in bitcoins, for political/ideological reasons, or because they are interested in the technology.
I don't see that happening yet.
However, since then I have come to realize that bitcoin was never intended for large-scale use, but only to test whether the solution proposed by Satoshi to the "distributed ledger problem" (block reward + proof-of-work + longest-chain-wins) would indeed motivate the miners to maintain the ledger and protect it from malicious attacks.
The experiment has been running for 6 years, which is remarkable; but it exposed one flaw -- the centralization of mining -- which may require another genial idea to solve.Some possibilities have been suggested, however I will wait and see how the block size increase will effect the network first.
Yet if carbon credits and taxation ever take a foothold that would be an immediate deterrent for centralized mining.