Re: Bitcoins and other cryptos will never become mainstream before...
Until the basic laws of physics are repealed, there will be no way a decentralized infrastructure will scale to the level needed to truly take on the world-wide credit card infrastructure (which is just a start in taking over currency generally).
And even centralized cryptocurrencies using blockchain are too slow and expensive to scale to this level. XRP touts aspirational numbers of "a thousand transactions a second" when a real competitor would need to be several million transactions a second. There's simply no way you can do this with blockchain, and you'd instead need to use a non-blockchain paradigm like Haypenny.
Blockchain is a great platform for meme investments like Bitcoin or NFTs, but it's not suitable as a real, mainstream currency and never will be.
And even centralized cryptocurrencies using blockchain are too slow and expensive to scale to this level. XRP touts aspirational numbers of "a thousand transactions a second" when a real competitor would need to be several million transactions a second. There's simply no way you can do this with blockchain, and you'd instead need to use a non-blockchain paradigm like Haypenny.
Blockchain is a great platform for meme investments like Bitcoin or NFTs, but it's not suitable as a real, mainstream currency and never will be.
I think decentralized cryptocurrencies can scale to the level of VISA/Mastercard via the use of an off-chain scaling solution (aka Layer-Two). The only problem is that you still need to pay an on-chain fee (usually high) to open/close channels. If there was a way to circumvent that, Bitcoin and other decentralized cryptocurrencies would be on a road towards massive adoption worldwide. I've been doing some "digging" and found a Bitcoin L2 network called "Ark". It's privacy-focused and doesn't require you to pay on-chain fees to interact with it. Maybe someday the Lightning Network will use this technique? I hope so, especially when there's huge interest into BTC and altcoins.
I'd bet 10 years from now, BTC would've already solved its scaling issues without sacrificing decentralization. The future is not set, so anything's possible.
