Topic: Is there a remote possibility that BTC won't get mainstream? - page 2. (Read 570 times)

From technical perspective, Bitcoin would have LN and this has to drastically increase the transaction capacity. Instant transactions, low fees, user adoption.

Bitcoins volatility might be stopping some merchants from accepting it, but as bitcoin price increases and user demand for bitcoin as a payment option rises, more merchants would start accepting it, merchant adoption.

I think the biggest barrier that is stopping bitcoin from going mainstream is a good number of people don't understand the technology behind bitcoin or how it works and then there are some misconceptions. It would take some time for people to grasp what is bitcoin/blockchain technology.

Another good number of people even don't know bitcoin exists because they don't have internet access, maybe in the future, Blockstream Satellite will overcome this barrier, global adoption.

I believe in the coming years more countries would legalise bitcoin and it is possible for bitcoin to attain global adoption in the next 10 to 15 years.

According to Andreas Antonopoulos bcoin mainstream adoption will take 15 to 20 years, https://youtu.be/y3cKBDBabtA

As it is, the complex PoW process in Bitcoin makes transactions horribly inefficient in terms of electricity use.  Microtransactions may appear "free" or "cheap" to the user when the blockchain is supposedly scalable, but it's certainly not cheap for the planet.

Another example of a problem problem is that forks hurt the Nash equilibrium - they can be more profitable while using the same mining algorithm, and they could be mined using BTC ASICs.

I don't know where you're getting this information from, but the vast majority of merchants in Japan do not accept BTC.  It's still only a small niche.
In BTC's current state, it wouldn't make much sense for a physical store to accept BTC unless people are buying expensive products (say in IKEA for example).  Transactions are too expensive and they require waiting for confirmation.  In a physical store, you can't just stand there for twenty minutes or whatever waiting for your transaction to confirm before you walk out with the product.

Online stores sometimes accept it.  If you're in the US, there's enough online stores for you to buy most products (not food).  In the UK it's a bit harder but there are still a fair few.

Basically I'm just saying that BTC is not ready for mainstream adoption.  It's far from bad, but it will take time for the technology to develop into a fully working cryptocurrency.

We've already seen Russia and China putting heavy restrictions on trading bitcoin. There's no chance of an entire country adopting bitcoin into it's
central economy because of the main message of it being a decentralized currency. I can see various independent businesses allowing people to pay with
cryptos. And BTC has already started going mainstream ever since major news networks have started talking about it which caused more people to become
involved.

It's possible but not very probable. If things like the current situations in Venezuela keep occuring I confident bitcoin will be adopted at a higher rate than it is now. Right not bitcoin has still a couple of flaws that need fixing but they're so insignificant compared to the bigger roadmap of bitcoin.

First requirement of going mainstream as currency - solving the scaling problem. Otherwise Bitcoin will be a "digital gold" - expensive to move, suitable mostly as storage of value or used only for very expensive purchases.
We may be getting close to it as offchain and sidechain solutions are being developed, so this problem might be solved in a few years.
The second problem is regulation and competition - some governments might start actively opposing Bitcoin, banks will start offering their clients better deals to prevent them switching to crypto. Average people probably don't really care much about decentralization and financial freedom, they want fast and cheap transactions, which was the original promise of Bitcoin, described in Satoshi's whitepaper.

It wil go mainstream, in the sense that more people will use it than now.

Not sure if it would ever get 10% of world population for example, because we don't have a road map for that beyond LN, which is confusing to noobies anyway.... we will see.

I feel that blockchain is here to stay but can't help thinking there might be a SLIGHT possibility that BTC wont get mainstream. In the UK, I don't know of one place that accepts BTC on the high street and I'm not a hermit.

I was filling the car up a few days ago and thought what it would be like to pay with BTC.
Maybe it will never be illegal in the UK or my government would have said so already but it may never become mainstream and ONLY niche.

The price we dream of for a BTC to be 5 figures is the day my mum has her own BTC account which she takes travelling and she 55 years old. Blockchain is staying but can it force its way into mainstream if given time. Will it happen or NOT. Is the fact that japan have adopted it and they are a developed country means that its ONLY a matter of time the west adopts it.

10-15 years is hard to imagine and so far down the road...