or do we want protection from current monetary systems and government involvement?
The reason for this is that if Bitcoin is secure and trustworthy, trustless decenteralized micropayment facilities can be built on top of it and extend Bitcoin's transaction security with arbritary speed or scale. But if the system is fragle and underminable by attackers (government or otherwise) then it won't be robust enough to underpin these things.
(and things like micropayment channels were't my invention, they were recommended by the system's creator-- thats part of why Bitcoin has smart contracts to begin with.)
whats interesting is Peercoin Achieves the second, now by design.
It heads of the whole Block size issue by going for the backbone, which is now becoming the problem for BTC as it tries to be 1 and 2, without being 2 first.
It seems that something like peercoin will take the lions share of large value transactions and BTC is falling into the middle of not being doge Ie doge can handle a high TPS at sacrifice of security [but who cares when your buying an ice cream and dont get hit up huge credit card fees], and not being good as a backbone.
Dont get me wrong I am a hardened BTC supporter, its just the boundary conditions do not support backbone currecy as well as Peercoin and so a debated like this rages.
I have being saying this for some time now, and it has come to fruition.