It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin

In theory users could pay a transaction fee denominated in a commodity. Once mined the miner can convert to another asset type. But say you're saving in terms of kegs of beer and can't pay a fraction of a keg - you could keep an energy fund so you can pay a highly granular transaction fee. Now, if the miner doesn't think the certificate is valid or reputable it won't be included.

US-based financial institutions are often willing to deal with US citizens.

That's what you get for relying too much on autocorrect...

> The technology is inherently unscalable -- in fact, the only currently good plans for scaling Bitcoin involve not using it (No, I'm really not joking, that's literally what “off-chain” means)

You understand that there's more data in the world than is practical for all of us to store... The solution is to pick and choose which pieces need to be globally visible (ie, on-chain) and which do not. When I play poker I don't wire-transfer the result of each hand, that's what the chips are for.

> Blocks are now so full that transactions have stopped flowing

You mean, near-zero fee transactions... Because blocks are being published, and they're full of transactions.

Nobody ever said it was going to be free, it's just been small enough to tolerate the odd free-rider. That phase is coming to an end.

> But the real problem here is really the fact that the development team have refused to increase the block size even though this was always intended in the design of Bitcoin by Satoashi and even though there are plenty of resources to do it.

If transactions were free why wouldn't I backup my photos into the blockchain?

If we expand the blocks now we'll just end up with the same amount of waste and the same whining. If we let the fee rise first, then expand the blocks to balance both fee and network cost, we'll end up with something stable.

Also, Satoshi was wrong about some things. Why are you trying to treat "him" like a god?

> A hostile dev community that is so utterly clueless when it comes to real world business that their choices have managed to cripple the entire system.

No, that's exactly backwards. Bitcoin is an open system, not a startup incubator. It's not bitcoin's responsibility to support your business, it's your business' responsibility to function on the infrastructure available. Going to large blocks would benefit some companies who don't like paying for infrastructure. It'd keep their free-ride going longer, but at the cost of all the other players.

> Community is an echo chamber of ignorance that blindly believes that all advances outside of Bitcoin are traitorous, incorrect, and not worth knowing about; Outright hostile towards new users with an air of technology snobbery that makes the Linux community seem like a welcoming party at an Apple store.

Well, if you're judging by the response you've gotten, there may be confounding factors your analysis has missed... What reaction should an anti-vaxxer receive at a medical-policy conference when they stand up and declare that science has failed, etc?

On one hand there is a global focus is on reducing energy waste. On the other we have hundreds of thousands of people merrily wasting electricity mining bitcoin and other assorted crypto currencies. This is a bit of a dissonance.

To make matters worse crypto currencies like bitcoin appear to incentivize early adopters to act in bad faith like a pyramid scheme. That they are open to monopolization by those who have disproportionate access to cheap electricty and resources can't help build trust.

So the early adopters have every incentive to spin it and on cue they talk it up deceptively on decentralization, anonymity and control as if the protocol develops itself and is not under the control of an inner cotorie.

Aren't governments and financial systems supposed to work for us and if they aren't is the solution to make sure they do, or a flawed technology workaround that benefits early adopters and concentrates power and influence in the hands of a few? The cure seems worse than the disease.