As for the longer term, this brings up an important question: why use blockchain at all?
Blockchain is transparent, it's decentralized and trustworthy.
1. "Transparent" is a
bad thing when it comes to preserving privacy.
2. "Decentralized" is just an implementation detail that is supposed to accomplish a benefit. But it's a waste of time if that benefit does not materialize.
3. "Trustworthy" does not describe thousands of blockchain projects, and in fact they are the opposite. Bitcoin is trustworthy because it is carefully governed, supported by many, and has been around for a while. But that all has nothing to do with the blockchain architecture per se.
It might be slow and costly for now but it won't stay this way forever.
Yes it will, and in fact it will most likely get
slower and
more expensive over time. Blockchain was designed to be
intentionally slow and expensive. This is a feature and not a bug. As such, it will not be "fixed".
We're still new so the challenges are what we should be expecting because after we have a triumph over this setbacks, only God knows how explosive Bitcoin adoption will get.
Bitcoin has been around for
14 years now. It's not going to be fixed.
I believe Bitcoin is not actually created to make transactions with complete anonymity nor either traceable by the government, it's just to eliminate the middle man and still Bitcoin is capable of doing that.
Almost
any digital currency architecture will "eliminate the middle man". Services like PayPal have been around for 15 years before Bitcoin--and PayPal is today far cheaper and faster than Bitcoin for a transaction.
Blockchain was a complicated solution to a very complicated problem--but it's a problem not many people actually have.
Privacy and anonymity weren't the "first thing Bitcoin was originally designed to accomplish". Bitcoin was supposed to be peer-to-peer electronic cash, which can be used without the need of banks and third parties.
Using banks/third parties is faster, cheaper and easier. Why would you go to all of this trouble to make a digital currency that is slow, expensive, and complicated, as Bitcoin is? It was because Bitcoin was designed to solve a problem the existing services could not solve, which is resistance to government subpoenas.
In other words, this problem did not exist,
Bitcoin would have never been invented.