Topic: Bitcoin For Purchasing Goods and Services Mainstream>? (Read 201 times)

There is another website to check Bitcoin market cap and a table for comparison of it with other assets and companies.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/assets-by-market-cap/

Bitcoin soon will surpass Silver and will never look back. Recent months, it only has fluctuated above and under Silver.

What do you mean by "value"? Is it market capitalization of bitcoin? That is $1.3 trillion which puts Bitcoin on the 9th biggest market according to this list: https://8marketcap.com/ which is above a lot of big companies like Meta and big banksters like JPMorgan Chase.

In other words "value-wise" Bitcoin can handle a lot, not to mention that it is still appreciating and has a lot of potential for more rises which would increases its "value"!
The real question is "does it need to do any of what you said?" and the answer to that is no.

This seems difficult for many reasons, the most obvious one is the technical aspect, bitcoin will need to process transactions way faster than what it does right now, and as we could see just a few days ago, some greedy people were enough to push the fees to the highest levels we have ever seen, the second problem is political, since even if bitcoin was able to achieve this feat, would governments support such system? I do not think so, so while bitcoin can be used as a way to transfer value all over the world and can do this job relatively well, to become the mainstream way in which people all over the world do this is not likely at the moment.

This is a very near solution right now but for me, we are still early, even Bitcoin itself is still not accessible to most people as day to day use like purchasing goods. So even if layer 2 (lightning network) will be the solution it will gonna take time to achieve it, it still needs to be accessible by most people and user-friendly.

The answer is absolutely not.

No blockchain system can come even close to handling mainstream loads, which would require transaction loads in the millions of transactions per second. Bitcoin is necessarily slow and expensive by design. You cannot have a decentralized system that is fast/cheap because it would be too easy to subvert (long long story short).

Only a fully centralized system--and even then, a very purpose-built, streamlined system--could manage this problem.

Here are the calculations as I wrote them up here a while back:

***

Let's start with the estimates of the number of credit card transactions there are on any given day, and extrapolate the peak volume per month, then per day, then per hour, then per second.

To keep the numbers easy, I'll just give you the very rounded numbers:

1. There are about two billion credit card transactions, world-wide, per day--if you average over the course of a whole year.

2. But some months, e.g. the holiday season, have much higher volume, so figure ten billion per day during those periods.

3. This comes to about 500m transactions per hour, but all of the hours in the day are not the same from the standpoint of purchase volume: there are peak shopping hours. Those hours can be 10x higher sometimes. So figure two billion transactions per hour during peak-peak periods.

4. Any internet-level system needs to account for a multiplied "peak second" volume, as the network can create holdups, which are then released like when you put your hand in front of a stream of water than then pull it away--and getting "behind" will cause a "traffic jam". Hence, figure a rate of about 10 billion transactions per hours to account for that, which comes to about 300k transactions per second.

5. So that's just credit cards, and that's just the volume we have today. But the vision here is extremely fast, extremely small, extremely cheap transactions that can be used even more broadly than credit cards: in other words, the vision is that someday humans will not use paper or metal currency at all, since we will have a system that cheap enough and fast enough to truly replace cash. Current estimates put the number of cash transactions at about 3x that of credit cards in developed countries. Hence you get to (again, heavily rounding here) to a level at about one million transactions per second.

So the "replace all current transactions" level of performance is about one million transactions per second, and for growth, to actually handle this problem, you need to imagine you could eventually end up at a multiple of that, e.g. millions of transactions per second.

The basic reason for the creation of Bitcoin is for it to be used as a currency. But from the way things are going in the Bitcoin space, it has shifted to an investment. Looking at the future, Bitcoin might not recover its currency status because it is becoming difficult for commoners to even have access to it. Bitcoin is now a major target of rich businesses and individuals who see it as a major means of preserving wealth and making a profit.

The reasons why I think Bitcoin might not become a popular means of payment are high transaction fees, unfavorable government polices, volatility, and lack of Bitcoin education in some parts of the world.

A few years ago, everyone would have said that it was only a matter of days before Bitcoin would be fully integrated at all levels. Now everything looks completely different and the answer to your doubt is negative, Bitcoin will not have a significant place as a means of payment, at least not for ordinary users.
It will become just another trading asset on the stock market, a toy for big players.
With this lack of resistance to spam and high fees as a result, it cannot be considered a reliable solution as a global currency.

Lot of controversy might come up with this before it will happen but yeah bitcoin could be use on mainstream and can be accepted the same as fiat. But unfortunately there's few merchants accepting it and few countries adopt bitcoin as their legal tender. El Salvador might be the perfect model on this since we can see their government aggressively adopt bitcoin and declare it as legal money on their country. We can see that bitcoin has been used and well circulated to that country.

If there are more same like situation will happen and some countries will see the benefit of accepting bitcoin on their country for sure they will make El Salvador as a basis that they should accept bitcoin on their country and make it as alternative money for their people.

But bitcoin need to earn a lot of success plus positive result when it always show up on the mainstream so this dream which  will came into reality.

It has never changed from being a store of value, from being a currency itself that can be used for P2P transactions. Whatever has been written on the whitepaper, there's no any change at all. But it's just that the wide use of Bitcoin have been common as a store of value and with the current status of the transaction fees, it's not an ideal thing to be used for P2P transactions unless the transaction will happen off chain.

It's possible because it's been there already. But the fees stops that optimism from the majority of us. However, there's the BTC Lightning Network but this is ideal for smaller transactions. And the exchange-wallet apps that has off chain transactions that you can use them for transfers without having any delay and fees because you're on their platform and using Bitcoin as a payment to anything that you want to purchase. It's possible with those wallets as long as you and the person you're transacting with also uses the same wallet but if you or the other party is using different wallet then you have to take the current fees even if they're expensive. But the ideal thing to do when the fees are that much is to do nothing.

It is already used as a means of payment in some online stores and you can check it for yourself, I think those stores are also accumulating bitcoins in this way without overdoing it like others are doing. With this, they can help the market grow and make it a popular investment as well. Some of the local stores and services all around the world nowadays have also started to accept bitcoins as their means of payment and what you are saying here is part of the process, if we have these things right now, it's not impossible anymore to have all those local stores accepting bitcoins in the future because as of today, it has been known that bitcoin in a good way to invest your money other than the tradition we have.

I think that the rich have no problem with any fees, and if someone has a transaction value of $100 000, then it is certainly not a problem for him to pay $10 or even more for such a transaction. For everyone else who, especially nowadays, is trying to save on everything, every saving is valuable - and to me it's honestly a bit tragic that instead of Bitcoin, which should primarily be a cryptocurrency, we have to look for alternatives in some altcoins if we want to pay something that way. All this, of course, because someone is literally abusing Bitcoin for their monkey business.

I hope that we will not get into a situation where one day Bitcoin will really become a toy only for the rich...

I am fine with Bitcoin blockchain for payments because it is a most secured blockchain, Proof of Work, highest network hashrate and difficulty.

Unfortunately, since 2023 and the deployment of Ordinals and BRC20 tokens, Bitcoin blockchain becomes more congested with massive high transaction fee rate spams from Ordinals. Since the halving, another attack factor appears, Runes and together Ordinals and Runes make Bitcoin on-chain transactions become very expensive.

It is no long a good mean of payment even for the rich.

I'm trying to understand what you actually meant by what you wrote, and maybe you think that there is not enough BTC to be used as a global currency or that its price is "too low" to be accepted globally. In any case, none of them make sense - because even though there are currently around 19.6 million BTC in circulation and the max supply is only slightly less than 21 million, you forget that Bitcoin has the smallest unit, which we call a satoshi, and it looks like this -> 0.00000001


It is obvious that as a means of payment, Bitcoin has a big problem when we talk about on-chain transactions that are not instant, and as we can see, they can be very expensive. I honestly don't see that this can be "fixed" in any way in the near future, but even if it could, the fact remains that most people who own Bitcoin do not want to use it as money. Besides, the decentralization that Bitcoin is completely based on is not something that any significant government would accept, because we all know that most of them think that what they can't control is not good.

Bitcoin has always been an alternative, and it will most likely remain so.

Bitcoin market cap is bigger than many companies, a little bit bigger or smaller than Silver. It's not small even Bitcoin is only 15 years old and was born in 2009.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/assets-by-market-cap/

If you have a time traveling machine to go back to years like 2009 or 2010, I am sure you will choose Bitcoin, not gold for your investment because since 2009, Bitcoin has best ROI compares to gold, US 10-year bond.
https://casebitcoin.com/charts

No, it doesn't work enough to handle the global market at its current level. When the transactions go high the fee also increases and the current network can't handle so many transactions. On Bitcoin's own network global level transactions would make fees very high and no one would even think about considering it as a way of payment with unimageable high fees.

I believe if Bitcoin has to go at global level for transactions then a layer 2 solution is mandatory to make that workable. The lightning network is going to be very beneficial if Bitcoin has to go for global transactions. The lightening network allows way more transactions then Bitcoin's own network and it doesn't get congested like Bitcoin network.

I will accept the fact that bitcoin is more of store of value despite it has other functionality. And the reason I said so is that bitcoin transaction fee is high to be used for frequent transactions expecially using it to buy some minimal things like a $5 or $10 worth of commodity will charge you alot that is why I accept the fact that it is a store of value.

Then talking about the value not high enough to be used as a mainstream, I think you are confused here. Or probably I am the one who is not understanding you. If I may ask, at what value in $$ would you prefer for it to be used as a meanstream in the world market? Because people are already complaining that btc is too expensive to be used as meanstream for global market and you are saying its not enough. The popular USD used globally is just $1 and it is used online as a means of payment why must btc be more than the actual price to be what you desire? Anyways btc will gradually meet your expectations sooner.

Bitcoin is more than enough to Handle the global markets. Just that mempool will be contested and the transaction fee would be high just as @Dr. Bitcoin strange has predicted.

First, Bitcoin has to be accepted by everyone in the global market or in every part of the world before it can be used as a global money system in every market. Apart from El Salvador, where Bitcoin is legal tender, and any other country that treats Bitcoin like a legal tender, every other part of the world doesn't treat Bitcoin as a legal tender, and therefore those people that accept Bitcoin in those places do so under a per-to-per agreement before the payment can be carried out. For example, Bitcoin may not be banned in my country, but you cannot go to any random shop and ask to pay them with Bitcoin; they won't even attend to you. 

Unless the government has deep control over everyone who is using Bitcoin, it cannot be generally used in the global market as a money system. Before that can happen, countries that have banned Bitcoin have to lift their ban; people who don't accept Bitcoin have to do so at will or out of will, etc. Bitcoin was not created to force anyone to use it, (it was supposed to be, every individual to their personal decisions and dealings with their Bitcoin).

In our imagination, let us assume that Bitcoin has become  the global money used in the market all around the world. You asked if the technology was enough to handle the global market (?).

Definitely yes! But people will have to deal with a high transaction fee because the mempool is going to be very congested with different businesses and customers sending in trillions of transactions in seconds. Of course, there have to be more miners to handle the world's (population) Bitcoin transactions.

What do you mean by the “Value is not high enough”?
How high should the Bitcoin price go for the value to be high enough?

Is the rally from just cents to $65K within about 14 years a joke to you?

When you look at the white paper, the purpose of Bitcoin is to offer an alternative peer to peer electronic cash system from the existing main stream and centralized cash systems. I don't think most Governments can let a cash system they can not control or can not use to print billions of cash be the “Global money”. We need to be a little realistic on this.

If you love freedom and total control of your funds. Bitcoin will always be there for you.

It’s honestly complicated and can not be answered by a simple yes or no.

Yes it is possible and I can see it happening with how much interest and acceptance a lot of the people from different parts of the countries give to bitcoin. But does the government support this movement? A lot of them no. So it is really up to the government how much mainstream bitcoin can get.

Another thing is that bitcoin still has some improvements to make regarding the congestion of the network which proves to be one of the biggest problems bitcoin has faced so far. With advancing technology I have no doubt that we will see some breakthrough and finally solve this issue. Then we can think of having bitcoin adapted by a larger audience.

As right now BTC is more of a store of value. The value of it is not high enough to be able to use mainstream for the global market as the money system. For all markets to be based on.
Do you think that if ever there becomes more adoption, BTC would be and able to be used for mainstream like a global money? Does the tech work enough that it could handle the global market?

why or why not?