Topic: Please stop blaming "the government" for lack of Bitcoin mass payment adoption - page 4. (Read 588 times)

However, the fact is that there are still many countries that prohibit bitcoin. In my country, bitcoin can be owned as an asset but not as currency. So anyway, without legality from the government, Bitcoin will remain in a gray area

It seems that currently Bitcoin is still in a "gray" area, even though countries ban it, in fact they are not serious about banning it because the government does not carry out raids or confiscate Bitcoin. It seems like the government is doing this on purpose, because if all countries agree to ban and eliminate the circulation of bitcoin then at least the country can mass close all crypto exchanges.

In my opinion, if bitcoin is legalized as a currency in all countries it will not shift the position of USD because bitcoin has a limited amount and there will be problems with transaction volume as you said, but at least it can be used as an alternative currency in cross-border trade

The Wikipedia article op is referring to can be helpful, but it's important to note that it can be outdated or misinterpret certain things, as well as assume it's legal somewhere when it's just not illegal.
In any case, I agree that the lack of adoption is not on the governments. If we're talking about democracies, laws change actively when there's a strong public demand for something. The demand for Bitcoin as a form of payment is simply not high enough to prompt major changes and adoption. It can change over time, but let's also not forget that Bitcoin blockchain doesn't scale well (I'm talking about the limit of processed transactions per minute and transaction fees when the network gets congested). The op is correct to point at the importance of scalability.
Of course, people here can say that there are alternative, off-chain solutions to address that problem, but then we lose some of that decentralization and financial freedom that came with Bitcoin.

There's a lot of disinformation and incorrect notions going around about the legality of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and digital currencies.

Here is a good place to start if you want the facts about Bitcoin's legality:

Legality of cryptocurrency by country or territory

What you can learn from is that for almost all purposes, Bitcoin (and by extension cryptocurrencies and digital currencies) are not meaningfully curtailed by government regulation on individuals. Even China's ban on Bitcoin hasn't stopped Binance from trading $90 billion per month there. Based on this, you would be hard-pressed to find a civilized country where you could be put in jail for owning or trading Bitcoin. They exist, but they amount to a tiny fraction of the world's economy.

And yet in the face of these facts, a near constant refrain from many crypto enthusiasts is that the reason Bitcoin hasn't replaced the world's sovereign currencies like the USD and the Euro is because there's a conspiracy of government regulations to stop it. They can't point to how exactly this works, but more importantly, they seem to ignore the fact that Bitcoin transactions can take 30 minutes to complete and cost 30 US dollars, making the transaction unthinkable for all but a microscopic fraction of worldwide daily transactions. And while more centralized blockchain-based approaches improve this situation somewhat, they are still orders of magnitude away from the scalability necessary, and the key pair requirement for end-users is clunky and makes it hard to adopt.

When I first designed the Haypenny transaction platform, my first task was to calculate the number of monetary transactions going on in the whole world on any given day, and then calculate that number for peak times of the year (e.g. Christmas), and then multiple that by a factor for the peak hours of the day, and then multiplying that by a factor of five to account for "peak-second" loads (yes, my professional background is whole-internet scale systems in case you couldn't tell ).

The number you arrive at when you do these calculations is that you'd need a system that could handle a transaction load in the signal-digit millions of transactions per second if you wanted to replace daily credit card and physical cash transactions worldwide. And you'd need to handle several hundred billion transactions a month.

That is what is required for a currency to replace the current status-quo, and Bitcoin and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies can't do it, and they can't even get close.

And it should go without saying that transactions would need to cost far less than today's transactions in order to replace the status-quo: people don't make a major change to their long-held behavior unless there is a significant incentive to do so.

And then there's the usage model. Not only does any new technology that replaces the exact functionality of an existing one need to be far cheaper in order to have a chance, it needs to be easier for end-users, too. Requiring every consumer to have a private key is something we've been dreaming about since about 1994 (I was there ), but its a pain in the ass that most consumers don't want to deal with.

These are the reasons there is not mainstream adoption of Bitcoin for everyday payments, not some conspiracy by "the government".