Is it really severely undervalued? Look at my post above with the transaction bandwidth edit. How is Bitcoin severely undervalued without diving into speculative growth? Bitcoin's primary draw is as an investment tool for speculation. How many of you here regularly use Bitcoin as a currency to buy and sell goods for?
Bitcoin isn't just a currency, and that's the whole point of it. If you think that this is all there is to it, then you don't truly understand where the underlying value stems from. How many people regularly use Gold in a similar fashion?
Bitcoin's intent was to be a digital form of cash. It is both a currency and a means of payment processing. This was pointed out right in the whitepaper. Even if Bitcoin now fills a different space, its outward intention was to function as both a currency and payment processor.
Now don't get me wrong, Bitcoin can scale [not to the level of Visa I don't think], but it is highly likely it will not in any substantial way. If a dynamic block size is implemented along with blockchain pruning then we could see many times more transactions processed per second, but just a basic increase [not even looking at pruning] has not made any meaningful progress towards consensus. And even if the network could handle it, how many of you actually use Bitcoin to buy and purchase goods and why not just use any other payment processing network?
GBattaglia. You seem to be purposefully attempting to create a strawman argument with your emphasis on payment systems (which is only one part of bitcoin).
I will admit I am playing devils advocate to some extent, but that is due to some of my disillusionment with how Bitcoin has evolved over the past 4+ years I've followed it. I believe most people would have very little interest in Bitcoin if its price remained stable or if it just increased in value slowly [will say 10% year, which is still pretty fast but about the value gold has risen over the past 15 years]. Most people's interest in Bitcoin itself is as a speculative tool it seems. And that part of Bitcoin I'm focusing on does seem like what Satoshi intended to be the primary draw of Bitcoin in his whitepaper; digital cash.
In other words, at the risk of repeating what others in this line of conversation already suggested, you are admitting that you are not really engaging in a genuine conversation in order to suss out the value of bitcoin. You are parcing out some choice aspect and then focusing on that choice aspect and attempting to suggest that is the whole of value of bitcoin.
Let me play along for a short-period, though. Yeah, there are a variety of lame arguers who want to suggest that bitcoin is ineffective because it cannot compete against various centralized credit card services or other centralized payment processors.
So fucking what? Since bitcoin is decentralized, it has to go through various hoops to prove is secure before it can start to attempt to achieve mass adoption or mass processing. It makes no fucking sense that bitcoin should go from zero to 1,000 without making sure that it is secure first. Yeah, no road map was outlined by Satoshi regarding how to get to a "peer to peer cashless payment system", but you know what, when you look at the situation, it makes sense to make sure that the peer to peer and the security is powerful and robust.. before the payment system becomes either mass adopted or on a similar level to some centralized system.
On the other hand, bitcoin remains amazing because it is accomplishing a lot in terms of bolstering the various aspects of the peer to peer and the secure in order to make the payment system to become more robust when it actually does evolve to a higher mass adoption level. On the other hand (am I running out of hands, yet?), bitcoin already serves as secure payment system that just is not at the mass adoption level, yet so there is considerable value in the system "as is" even if it evolves no further.
Regarding processing payments through fiat and credit and other traditional system, yes we can do both, and we need not use bitcoin on that level - especially if we have the option to use the other system, as well... but still does not mean that bitcoin is not bringing something to the table, even though there exist several systems that are options to a lot of people. Conversely, if some people do not have access to some of those other payment and credit systems, then there is likely a place for bitcoin for those under banked folks... right now that is available to those people, even if they have not learned about it yet.
just observation
