The Rise of Whatever

> Bitcoin failed as a currency because the people who got most invested in it do not care about currency

As far as I understand, bitcoin is fundamentally unusable as a currency. Transactions are expensive and limited to ?7k? every few seconds. It's also inherently deflationary, you want inflationary currency, you want people spending, not hoarding.

It's much worse, the maximum on-chain transaction rate is something like 7 per second. Also the time intervals between blocks have a huge spread, so it can take more than an hour for a transaction to be confirmed if you are unlucky. This is obviously impractical, so people came up with schemes such as Lightning to avoid touching the blockchain as much as possible. Of course this makes it much more difficult to judge whether the system can be cheated in some way...

Blockchains don't scale. But that's a feature, not a bug.

Great protocols are built in layers.

You have decentralized instant settlement for an average of 0.005% even for micropayments with the Lightning Network (another protocol built on top of Bitcoin). That's orders of magnitude away from the settlement time and resilience of the current payment networks.