Bitcoin was designed to be digital gold.  Because the supply of bitcoins is capped at 21 million most of which have already been distributed the currency’s value is likely to go up over time. Which means that Bitcoin doesn’t necessarily need to be widely used as a currency or a payment network in order to be an appealing way to store value.Increasing the network’s capacity isn’t difficult from a technical perspective, but proposals to address the problem encountered a lot of resistance from Bitcoin purists.