Switching topics back to the emails, I've been reading them quite carefully (and therefore slowly) for a better understanding. What do the esteemed ladies and gentlemen think about
https://mmalmi.github.io/satoshi/#email-19, where Satoshi's email confirms that Bitcoin was meant to be a digital cash, not an investment tool, as outlined in the Bitcoin white paper title?
The transition of bitcoin from a digital cash concept to an investment tool is a natural evolution driven by several factors that have unfolded since its inception. While SN initially designed Bitcoin with the vision of it being a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, its use and perception have shifted over time.
Fiat-currency uncertainties, mainstream news SoV narratives, and speculative interests have all shaped bitcoin's current image.
While the original intention of Bitcoin may have been as a digital cash system, its journey through a decade of development, market dynamics, and changing perceptions has led to its predominant role as an investment tool.
Any really good "hard" money like Bitcoin is going to be useful for both of money's main two uses: transactions and storing value. Considering the fact that being useful for transactions is the final phase of adoption (because you literally can't transact on a mass scale until there is a large enough mass of people willing to be paid with the currency), it makes perfect sense that in these still early days of Bitcoin its main use is as an investment/store of value. This is very straightforward.
Payments on any sort of a large scale don't come until much later in the adoption of Bitcoin (or any currency growing organically from the ground up). There has been no transition from Bitcoin's original idea to a different idea. Bitcoin is simply following a natural growth cycle where one part of money's use case comes before the second major use case.
The natural growth cycle is:
1. investment / store of value
2. payments AND investment / store of value
We are simply still fairly early in the first phase. Of course the second phase is happening at the same time but it takes much more mature growth to achieve so it's use case growth naturally lags far beyond the first phase. So if Bitcoin is say 10% into phase 1 it's only maybe 0.1% into phase 2. And it's not until Phase 1 gets to a very mature point that Phase 2 can really start to take off as Bitcoin ownership and acceptance reaches a critical mass allowing people to start readily paying for things with it.
Satoshi's idea of Bitcoin being p2p cash is still very much alive, it just naturally happens to be the use case, or the part of the ecosystem, that takes the longest to develop.
We have dynamic blocks for processing payments at relatively good speeds for a utxo model called Blockchain. And there we also have the GhostDAG. Combination of the two??