I feel you but at the same time Bitcoin market cap is in the billions and comparable to some of the top S&P 500 company. This won't go away whether or not the 7 transactions or so per second is fixed. In fact it's only growing right now.
That being said I see a clear possibility for Steem to take over Bitcoin at some point but that clearly doesn't mean people should just stop looking for ways to improve Bitcoin. Now I don't think POW or any POS will ever be able to compete with DPOS.
The fact that the market cap is in the billions of dollars and the network can't even manage to confirm transactions after several hours is exactly the problem here. There is no advantage for the average person to use BTC over any other existing transfer service, especially without any protection/insurance of transactions.
Add increasing fees to the mix and what exactly is it that makes people value BTC? The fact that they want it to have value? Bitcoin is failing as a currency. In my opinion, Bitcoin is the most overhyped crypto token and it is extremely overvalued compared to how it actually performs
The speculation train will likely come to an end sooner rather than later. It offers nothing useful to anyone who has an actual need to make quick, cheap money transfers. Without BTC being able to do that, it has zero advantages over existing legacy transfer services or newer cryptocurrencies that can actually deliver on the speed, low costs (or free), and scalability.
If actual investors from outside of crypto ever look to get more heavily involved in cryptocurrencies and their blockchains, BTC will most likely not be where they go. (The Winklevoss ETF thing is actually quite laughable to me.)
It's not good good at transferring small amount of money but it still can serve to transfer large sum of money. Also the price of Bitcoin performed better way better than almost all company shares in the last 2 years and the difficulty to mine Bitcoin is going up so the price of Bitcoin in the next year is looking good.
We're not talking about a small decentralized company here. We're talking about a top S&P 500 company. Around top 240 something (link below). We can talk about all the down side of Bitcoin yet this mining industry and what come with it won't go down so easily I tend to think.
I recommend you take a look at my sub-chapter named Bitcoin here, (only the sub-chapter named Bitcoin) if you'd ever wish to learn more about my ideas on the subject.
https://cryptolization.com/
This is "The Titanic can't fail it's too big" logic which has been wrong countless times in the past.
Examples:
Enron
Lehman Brothers
Atari
Circuit City
The Soviet Union
Pets.com
Polaroid
Nokia
Kodak
The Titanic
The fees to transfer Bitcoin will grow as they are right now but that doesn't lead to system failure nor will it lead to people stopping speculating on the price.
I didn't said it can't fail but for the Bitcoin mining industry to go away, Bitcoin would have to systematically fail and the transaction limit isn't a systemic failure its only a known limit. That's what I tried to express with my comment.
Too big to fail logic is an oxymoron. I totally agree.
Do you not agree that Bitcoin can fail due to users leaving and moving to lower cost competitors ? In other words a competitive failure rather than a technical failure.
Yup but I tend to think this won't happen so easily. One of the rare coin that could make it happen is Steem. This is due to the distribution of coins. Bitcoin has one of the best distribution. There's still quite a lot of Bitcoins concentrated in the hands of a few large holders but compare to other coin Bitcoin's distribution is way better off than most if not all and this is quite important. (Steem distribution is another subject altogether)
Also one other reason why Bitcoin seems quite resilient is its mining industry which govern the ongoing distribution and is way larger than the other crypto mining industries. Here's one excerpt from a sub chapter I made on Bitcoin that explain some of the virtuous cycle Bitcoin mining feeds on.
The lower transaction fees aren't so true anymore for small amount but if the cost of "producing" Bitcoin is rising and thus the ability of Bitcoin to store value is ever growing well it seems to lead to what we're seeing right now and with "little" chance of seeing a drastic change in those trends in the near future.
Yet clearly black swan events can come in many forms and a lot of those event can easily be imagined so that's why I put the word little between quotation marks.
This website can give a good idea of distribution of the major coin. Damn Litecoin, Dogecoin and Peercoin. Also 25% of Dash could be own by the founder of Dash because of the ninja mine in the first day of mining. It doesn't look much brighter for Ethereum and when it will switch to POS this will advantage larger holder over smaller one which will further concentrate money leading to selling pressure.
https://bitinfocharts.com/
https://etherscan.io/accounts/1