Hello everyone.
Before starting with the topic I would like to clarify something: my account was hacked a while ago and recovering it was practically impossible since I had no BTC address on the signature. So, that's why I had to open a new one, I haven't done it before simply because I didn't need it, I have been away for a long time but I was here by the time Bitcoin was worth about $500 or even before that. I've become interested on it back then and started to collect them from faucets. Not long after that I started to collect other cryptos from faucets. I've seem Bitcoin and the others to evolve over these last years and frankly speaking it's a kind of sad to see the current status of the Bitcoin.
Now, moving to the point I should explain first why I think that Bitcoin is dead as a currency. Well, the reason it's quite simple: moving Bitcoin around had become
very very expensive. There are two main reasons for that. The first one is
inflation, currently at the time of writing Bitcoin's price is around $8000, that's quite high. If I remember correctly the network fee for standard transaction used to be between
BTC0.0001-
BTC0.0004 that would be worth now between $0.84 and $3.37 that's a bit far away from "low fees" that the original presentation video mentioned (
https://youtu.be/Um63OQz3bjo?t=16s). On top of that there is
the other reason which is
network congestion. Take a look at
https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ it shows the number of transactions in the mempool. Well, I must admit that it looks much better than the last time I checked it, which is a relief, but my point is still valid, the recommended fee for a standard size transaction at the time of writing is 130 satoshi per byte which roughly translates to
BTC0.0003. That's $2.53 for a single transaction, which means that if what you want to purchase has a price of $1 you will end up paying $3.53 due to the transaction cost. That renders Bitcoin almost unusable (but it was much much worse the last time I checked), of course there are transactions off the blockchain via wallets like Coinbase and Xapo, but using those it's not the as using BTC, because they are centralized, so you lose the main point of using a cryptocoin.
As a closing I would like to share with you a picture which illustrates how I felt when I was about to exchange my altcoin dust and discovered that BTC price was over $10000
https://imgur.com/a/JaKkVThe points you made as the reasons why you conclude that bitcoin is dead from where I see it can be summarised into two which are the price of bitcoin at $8000 and the transaction fee which is not sustainable for transferring small amount.
On the first, as the high price of bitcoin, a lot of people would disagree including me because that amount you quoting is a crash from the all time high of above $19000 and at that point a lot of people still got in which would made me conclude that the high price is based on your status and not the general feel of the market which in turn cannot be relied on as a basis to declare bitcoin dead.
On the other concerning high transaction fee, it's practically the same thing with the bank because you can transfer 1$ equivalent from one account to another in the same bank without any fee, you can't do that to other banks as the fee would be more than that which is what the Xapo and Paxful etc that allows you transfer across their platform with little or not fee. Again, tell me how possible using the bank to transfer $2500 dollar equivalent across the world and pay less than $20 as at this day. Even though its not perfect, but its still way better.