Not really. Was the goal of Bitcoin ever to be the successor to paper money? We're here today and Bitcoin is a functional payment network. Not only that, it's a fairly large one, and it has become a household name. I don't really use Bitcoin but I think it's hyperbole to consider it a unilateral failure just because it didn't supercede traditional currency.
It’s a household name because of speculation, however, and statistically almost nobody uses it for the kind of decentralized transactions for which it was originally pitched. The number of vendors accepting it has gone down over time (e.g. Steam, Microsoft) due to the endemic problems and many of the people who claim to use it (even here) are actually using the credit card network with government currencies for the actual transactions so there’d be very little disruption if it disappeared tomorrow.
>nobody uses it for the kind of decentralized transactions for which it was originally pitched
You're misinterpreting absence of evidence as evidence of absence which is a logical fallacy. clearly there's enough of a market for trustless wealth storage enough to support a $100 Billion dollar market cap. Maybe you think that the world will need less and less trustless wealth storage in the future and you're short bitcoin; it looks like the market is betting against you though.
1. Before accusing other people of logical errors, check to make sure you’re not making one of your own, such as assuming that the current market cap of something is completely backed by real value. Pets.com and Webvan had plenty of market cap right until they didn’t - and a pure fiat currency like Bitcoin has a floor of zero because the only value is the network of people who continue paying to operate it.
2. If a significant number of people were using Bitcoin to replace currency usage, as per the original manifesto, they’d leave evidence behind. You’d see retail transactions, it’d show up in financial reports, the network having problems would make the news because of the inconvenience to businesses, PayPal and western union would be reporting lower usage, etc.
Pasted from another thread:
If you think that Bitcoin's value is $0 long term, why not go short and make reams of money? After 10 years the market has shown that owning 100 btc has preserved more purchasing power than owning 100 USD, What's your call for the next 10 years?
I can use Bitcoin today, right now, right here. I actually do occasionally, it's how I pay for VPN service. So is it a failure? No. It's a successful payment network. It didn't cause a libertarian Utopia or whatever, but that's a pretty lofty goal for a conceptual currency based on cryptographic hashing. I have nothing else to say here.
That nicely demonstrates my point: you’re a supporter and you use it infrequently with apparently one company. That does not sound like the revolution in personal finance we were breathlessly promised.
I'm a supporter? By what definition of supporter? This may very well be the first time I've ever discussed Bitcoin in a forum. I don't support Bitcoin the same way I don't support Hanes clothing. It's just a thing I causally use. It works. Why are you trying to pigeon hole me personally? Who promised you this revolution, did Satoshi personally?
Oksy, supporter may be too strong. The aspect I had in mind was that even someone who’d gone to the trouble of learning about it and getting setup to use it didn’t really have a need to, whereas for years here and almost everywhere else fanboys were telling us it was going to replace Visa.
