ufhd
-I don’t see it as pessimism really. At the end of the day bitcoin is a product. Products succeed when they’re easy to adopt and thus achieve mass appeal. Bitcoin is not easy to adopt, in fact it is so difficult and risky to use that there’s a proliferation of services that’ll let you buy bitcoin or accept bitcoin payments more easily in exchange for a fee. That’s not good advertising for a product marketed as getting around organisations that facilitate your financial transactions in exchange for a fee.
Anyway if you accept that bitcoin is a product and products get accepted more easily if they’re easy to use, easy to understand, and trustworthy… then it’s not a big leap to accept that there’s rather a lot of entities far more capable of launching a product that does everything bitcoin does in a much more user friendly way.
And the final problem is trust. Money is important. For the average Joe money means security, it’s their income, their livelihood you’re talking about. Whoever is going to manage their financial transactions needs trust. They don’t have to be liked, few people love their bank. But they do need to be trusted to the point where the user feels he won’t be screwed any more than he contractually agreed to.
I don’t think any government, corporation or organisation in the world is going to endorse bitcoin over developing their own controlled digital currency.
In order to gain mass appeal Bitcoin is betting on the world getting ruined in such a specific way that there’s nobody left to offer a better alternative while simultaneously leaving all the infrastructure and permission in place for bitcoin to fill the void. That’s a very bizarre scenario.

-If you think bitcoin the goal of bitcoin is just to be 'as easy to use as a bank card' then you have missed the whole point. It's supposed to be a new form of money that will replace the current system. For that to actually happen there has to come a point where there will be a complete breakdown in people's trust in government. It won't happen in the USA first. But you can already see this happening in many countries around the world--eg. Venezuela, Egypt, Turkey, China. Europe will be next.
It won't happen quickly either--maybe it will take more than 25 years...but it will happen eventually. It has to. It's the natural result of governments printing a ton of worthless fiat. The average life of a fiat currency is about 50 years or so--but they all have to die eventually.

-Are you familiar with sidechains, or the Layer 2 functionality coming?
You seem to think that the bitcoin development community has completely stopped advancing the protocol.
You seem to think that the bitcoin industry is a disjointed mess that will never get ironed out.
I take it you're 20 years old, and weren't around when the Internet started?
I was. You should've seen the train wreck involved in just trying to get online back then. And how many decades it took for us just to get to Google existing. And Amazon.com.
You are that guy from 1991 who probably would've said the Internet sucks, and will go nowhere.
I used to have to drive to Walmart and buy a compact disc in an envelope, just to get online.
I got cut off anytime my call waiting beeped.... because my 2400 baud modem... was using my phone line... and scratchy sound tones... to keep me connected. I had to pay $9.95 an hour just to stay on the Internet.
I was the only one I knew with a computer. Nobody else gave a shit. There was no widespread adoption. And nobody had any use for computers.
Just loading a black and white pixelated image took 5 minutes back then.
I can just picture you saying:
"Nobody's ever going to use this shit. That image loads too slow. You're paying too much to get online. There will never be widespread adoption for this!"
Again, all of your posts are based on the same silly fallacy that bitcoin "today", is what bitcoin will always be.
Why do you defer to that ridiculous assumption?

-

-