Bitcoin may not be the go-to digital currency for most of the world’s 8.1 billion population today due to scaling limitations, but there’s a hoard of developers out there hoping that one day it will.
When Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin, it was meant to be a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. For a few years, that worked pretty well. But as the network grew larger and more valuable, most hodlers, which now include firms like MicroStrategy and BlackRock, just seem to want to hoard it all away.
Bitcoin payment naysayers point to the network’s slow transaction speeds and sky-high fees during periods of demand and note that its overall uptrend and volatility mean holders are more likely to salivate over future gains than spend their BTC.
“The one issue I still have with Bitcoin, it was meant to always be a currency,” Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas told X Hall of Flame recently. “This is a real currency, and it went away. The price is volatile, and it is more like a commodity; it’s like gold.”
But the big question is: How can Bitcoin payments make a comeback?
Bitcoin’s golden years for payments
In the early years, at least, there was an unmistakable movement toward Bitcoin payments. BitPay reported in 2012 that over 1,000 merchants accepted Bitcoin through their service. Just one year later, it had already ballooned to 10,000 BTC-accepting merchants.
For a time, it seemed as if everyone was jumping on the Bitcoin payments bandwagon. I remember attending an online gambling conference in 2013 where one of the sponsors, a Bitcoin solutions company, moved $1 million worth of BTC to an attendee’s newly created Bitcoin wallet and back again in seconds. The crowd that had gathered around the phone gasped when they saw the enormous sum arrive — and for a negligible fee.
Gold has a $14 trillion market cap with zero merchant adoption.
So why do people think Bitcoin can only have value if it’s used for coffee payments?
— Dan Held (@danheld) September 12, 2023
However, the wheels started to fall off around 2017 amid that year’s massive bull…
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