What has bitcoin achieved recently? Getting in more exchanges, getting in ETFs and wider access to traditional markets? Sure. Mining becoming an industry? Ok, let's count that too. Does that mean bitcoin is being appreciated for its values of decentralization and immutability? Probably not.
Most of the big fish that use Bitcoin for its decentralization, immutability and anti-censorship features will not say it on TV, because then the eyes may get focused on them "are they trying to do something wrong?"
One thing to think of, just from the very last big events: the North Korea hackers of ByBit have converted that wealth into.. guess what? Yes, Bitcoin.
While all this is happening bitcoin fees reached historic lows, which is a sign that there's very little demand to actually transact bitcoin.
Just offer the double of current price, you'll see that people will start sending money around, bots will start arbitraging and so on. Right now it's a waiting game, not necessarily a "rule".
Even more, with Bitcoin on-chain tx being relatively slow, many switched to LN or altcoins for small transactions and use Bitcoin as investment.
I'd compare this statement of yours with saying that gold is becoming useless (for centuries) because people stopped holding/using gold coins.
We spent so much time talking about lightning and layer two solutions while on-chain transactions can now even be send with a cost of close to nothing and decently fast confirmation.
Go to a supermarket in the busy hours and, when you have to pay, find a way to delay it for 10-20 minutes. If you can.
Bitcoin on-chain transactions have their use, but for proper use for day to day payments LN is a fine solution. Of course, if you don't have to pay for groceries or even a coffee with Bitcoin, you have no reasons to care to try LN.
People know that if we all started transacting in bitcoin tomorrow fees would go crazy though. The lightning network is far from usable and even for it acceptance is even lower than bitcoin.
I thought that if you wrote such a long text, you know what you are talking about. I guess I've expected too much.
No, LN is not "far from usable". LN works just fine.
But people still don't want to use bitcoin for everyday transactions. El Salvador wanted to pivot to bitcoin to save money on predatory remittance fees and boost its ailing economy that was based on two currencies, a national one and the USD. Still people don't bother to adopt the technology
As I said, people are lazy. Inertia is huge.
Even more, if one gets bitcoin and he understands that if he holds it for longer its price goes higher and higher, then he will think twice before spending those coins.
This is a problem for bitcoin-as-a-currency, clearly. But that doesn't make bitcoin as bad as you'd imply.
and El Salvador still nearly went bankrupt and had to scrap nearly all bitcoin related plans to receive a small IMF loan.
Bankers have their rules and double standards. While they try to enforce in all countries they gave loans to to stay away from Bitcoin, IMF itself started adding bitcoin to their reserves, according to some stories wandering on the internet lately.
Bitcoin remains hard to use, mining continues to be environmentally damaging to a very large extent while it also becomes more centralized and scalability remains an issue. This price boom changes nothing in terms of fundamentals. Bitcoin's price went up mostly due to external factors but that doesn't solve the issues related to adoption.
Maybe though in the end, adoption doesn't matter? What are your thoughts?
That newspaper you've got this misinformation from and how old was it?