No, it is not about your silly scaling issues or other internal politics. The battle I talk about is still far way, but it is inevitable. It is when bitcoin comes out of its darknet markets, its amusing mathematics, its online life and faces the real world of salary payments, utility bills, loan payments, school and college payments, buying home, car, groceries and gadgets. That's how a common man interacts with money and payments.
Bitcoin will never become a normal payment system, until it is so radically changed that Satoshi wouldn't recognize it as bitcoin.
Its economic model is that of a highly speculative gambling token, not as an ideal money. It is perfect to speculate with, but it cannot stabilize, because of its huge initial seigniorage which has created immensely rich whales that can do anything with the market, and because of its hard issue limit. That's a disaster as a monetary system ; Satoshi was simply a naive dude who didn't even understand the motivations of sound money doctrine, and applied it in a case where it couldn't work (namely with a NEWLY ISSUED money).
Its proof of wasted economic value also makes it entirely centralized, expensive and wasteful, and highly vulnerable to state control.
Then the kid finally learns some manners the hard way, and agrees to pay taxes on his bitcoin income. And agrees to show all his transactions. And wallet details. People are now forced to use a single bitcoin address per person and that address is linked to their passport and their other national identities. Every bitcoin transaction must go through a government verification for identifying the parties involved. All good.
All lived happily ever after.
Wait, the kid then wonders - why am I using bitcoin? with all the extra difficulty. Oh, that's because it is mathematically beautiful. isn't it? Those 64 hex letters with random beauty. Ah, I can keep looking at them admiring their beauty forever.
The human society has come a long way through the jungle life, cave life, tribal settlements, civilisations, cities, nations and governments. Bitcoin, while appearing to be ultra high-tech, full with mathematics and cryptography, it is essentially a throw back to jungle life as far as the social life and governance is concerned. Bitcoin abhors governance. It ignores the need to know each other. It rejects monitoring and traceability. It want to break the government and thereby it encourages the law of jungle.
Yes. You are right. This is because bitcoin was invented based upon a ridiculous conspiration theory, that "bankers are evil". Not understanding that monetary things have evolved over time and adapted to human society, and that a naive system like bitcoin misses a lot of what those systems have built into them. Bitcoin is an brilliant technical implementation of a very naive idea concerning the complexities of payment systems. And as such, it will live, but not as what it was meant to be, but rather as a gambling token. Which is what it has been for the last 8 years or so, and will remain. Which will not mean that it will not be adopted a lot: people will gamble a lot with it. Some will win, and an equal amount (somewhat more in fact) will lose, and it will waste a lot of value on proof of wasted value.
That said, I liked bitcoin exactly because of its anarchist idea, but it has lost this charm. My idea was indeed, a subversive payment system that could entirely pervert and subvert all state operation, by bribing politicians, having a fluid murder market on which it would be possible to raise armies in a totally invisible and anonymous way, by financing invisibly the development of new weapons (like biological weapons) all over the earth without anyone noticing in a distributed way and so on. THIS is why I loved bitcoin in the beginning, because I saw it as a way to ultimately overthrow all forms of publicly organized society. But bitcoin will not do that. And within an organized society, it doesn't mean anything else but a gambling token.
Lack of tracking in money movement clashes with the very existence of government. Enforcing tracking in bitcoin shakes the very foundations of bitcoin. That's the battle I was talking about. The new kid on the block has no way of fighting it. Forget winning. I won't be surprised if all the bitcoin owners could be seen as criminals, and forced to do only darknet transactions forever.
That was my inception from the start: that a dark market would grow so big, that it would overtake and outperform the normal economy, like happened during WWII in Europe. When most economic activity is actually undercover. This is the thing I saw for bitcoin. But it is not anonymous enough. This is why my interest got later ported to things like monero and other anonymous coins, because only those could have a chance of doing so.
Outside of anarchy, bitcoin has only a future in gambling.
