What are the obstacles to mainstream bitcoin adoption?

I’ve been watching the cryptocurrency space since early this year and have been studying the underlying technology which is about half a dozen different technologies that underpin bitcoin and make it a success. In the near future we have a fork coming up that will generate another 21 million altcoins.

This makes me question, is the future cryptocurrency space more inflationary? Also are we achieving faster transaction speeds by having fewer users of each coin? This would represent a horizontal spread of the market cap across several alt coins. As such, this marketplace is beginning to resemble the search engine wars of the mid-90’s.

(Google images - Wikimedia Commons)

For bitcoin to be able to be as fast as Visa / MasterCard, it would have to process approximately 25,000 transactions per second. Right now bitcoin can handle about 15 / second. The math comes out to Visa / MC being 1666.67 times faster than bitcoin. If block size was about 1 GB instead of 1 MB, with segwit, this becomes possible. Lightning network is another possibility, but it appears we still have a long way to go.

If there’s no “Google of finance” that emerges as the clear favorite, then the most likely outcome is that alt coins will begin to rival bitcoin in market dominance and maybe even surpass it. This is not unlike what happened in the beginning of the web, when Yahoo emerged first on the scene, then Einet Galaxy, Webcrawler, Altavista, and many others started to emerge. Is bitcoin the Yahoo! of the decentralized web?

(Google images - Wikimedia Commons, modified by me)

Then in 1998, Google emerged and the beginning of evil web centralization began. Censorship has been growing in recent years and original ideas are increasingly disappearing from the web. As Andreas Antonopoulos has said “the web has become the largest repository of cat videos…”.

(Google images - Wikimedia Commons)

Any technology of real consequence is increasingly being marginalized or co-opted. This is another danger for bitcoin and we see this now with banking authority looking to adopt the underlying blockchain, just "without the censorship resistant, borderless, decentralized, open access, open protocol, and controlled by us blockchain” as Andreas Antonopoulos puts it.

Will people fall for the arguments of re-centralization post Equifax? The evidence for the failure of central authority to keep your information safe is everywhere. But it's mostly the technically sophisticated who see it clearly enough to understand that there's a replacement that is a vastly superior model to the current panopticon. Your typical FB user is only marginally aware.

That leaves us with this scenario... Authority promotes and distributes FedCoin (or similar) that will claim to have the same benefits of Bitcoin, Litecoin, etc, but without the downsides of "terrorism, money laundering and lack of accountability" that they claim cryptocurrencies create. The people, not having read the technical specifications will not know any better and we continue down the path of panopticon for a time, going from hack to hack not understanding that centralized data systems are fatally flawed and cannot be fixed.

This will continue to create a steady stream of ID theft victims... until one day, the one open source protocol that cannot be stopped without authority committing suicide, emerges.

---

Donations (public bitcoin address):

3FwxQsa7gmQ7c1GXJyvDTqmT6CM3mMEgcv

---

---