Speaking of gold: Gold has been demonetized (ie, there are no gold coins in circulation as national currencies), so it's not like millions of gold transactions are happening every day. In terms of transactions per second, it's not very unlike Bitcoin. Yet, the ~5.8bn ounces / ~180 kilotons of gold have a marketcap of 6.5 trillion USD.
BTC is digital gold. It doesn't need to scale its transactions to billions per day for fear of death. You are only looking at the transaction aspect / epayment system aspect, and you are overlooking the store-of-value aspect.
The store-of-value aspect of Bitcoin benefits massively from the ability of any individual to run a full wallet, with the entire blockchain, and the individual being able to be their own banker and have their own bitcoins under their control, while these BTCs appreciate even from their ...non-use and scarcity, relative to the fiat money supply which is inflating and devaluing itself.
So which is it? You want smaller block size so we only use bitcoin for settlements or you want people to be their own banks? You can't have both.
Bitcoin, aside from being a coin and payment system, is also code that can be cloned/duplicated in altcoins... so it can scale if you make multiple bitcoin-like coins, use them for fast and cheap transactions and then discard them in the long run when their blockchain is bloated (if they can't be pruned). It's like using silver, copper and nickel for other coins that are traded daily, while you leave your gold coin under the mattress.
Right now we are using our gold for dust transactions of a few thousand satoshis and pretend that we need larger block sizes. This is ridiculous waste of blockchain space - which represents a barrier to entry as it increases in size (not to mention what happens when it increases dramatically, in terms of mining, centralization etc). Let the fees take care of this kind of waste and not multiply this wasteful behavior.
This is like the people who worried that browsers would clog up internet traffic back in the early nineties. or worries about picture files. or sound files. or video. 1TB hard drives are cheaper than a carton of cigarettes. Next year 10 TB drives will be. It's a bullshit argument.
Dogecoin, IIRC has 1mb blocks per minute, so, in that sense, it scales 10x compared to BTC - which is even larger than XT. But it's not like people are saying "hey the dog can scale like crazy, let's all buy the dog and go to the moon"...
I mean why hasn't anyone brought it up as a major selling point for altcoins like LTC (4x), DASH / DRK (4x), DOGE (10x) that they can scale much more than BTC due to their more frequent blocks (of similar size) if that's all it takes to overtake bitcoin, that will supposedly die from not scaling, while these coins have already "solved" that and thus they will scale much better?
If it was such an issue, the money would have already decided in favor of altcoins that are "better" than the "flawed" Bitcoin - which is also "flawed" with its very slow confirmations compared to most alts that are lightening fast when, say, you deposit into an exchange. But the reality is that the parameters of Bitcoin are known for years. People know that btc is more expensive in its tx's, that it's slower, etc etc, yet it is still dominating the crypto-market due to the store-of-value aspect which seems to be (to the market) more important than the transaction aspect.
The urgency isn't even in block size or scalability. The urgency is in fixing the goddamn decision-making process among the core devs. You think Hearn was wrong about that?
but I'm doing fine, putting a little into bitcoin at a time.
