Well, seeing this 37-page thread, at least I guess it can safely be said that the community has an opinion!

The debate is still going on and has been going on for a long time. You'll hear both sides of the story.

The hard-forks on the BTC Blockchain are related to that debate. Different developers and actors of the comunity disagree on what Bitcoin should be geared towards and how changes should be implemented to reach their goals (for example block size v.s. transaction time)

With all the delays/unconfirmed transactions and high transaction fees right now, it is definitely an obstacle to the mainstream adoption of BTC as a payment system.

The volatility has also always been a problem for that to happen. I unfortunately can imagine your casual mom and pop feeling pretty uneasy when they realise they have lost 30% of their purchasing power in mere hours when trying to purchase some playdough for their grandson with BTC on amazon. Such corrections have always happened now and then.

Heck even the crypto community is all over the place everytime there is a dip, like right now.

I would say that despite being presented essentially like a payment system since the early days, it has been used more as a store of value and hybrid financial instrument as of yet with most of its use as a payment system being related to the Darknet (will I be flamed for saying that?).

We will see what happens with attemps at scaling-up with SegWit, SegWit2x (oh well...) and the Lightning Network, to allow for faster transactions.

Of course there's way more to come that we haven't imagined yet.


Only the future will tell if Bitcoin will be considered more as a store of value / digital gold or a payment system.