In the early months of 2021, we all have witnessed the wobbling price of Bitcoin (BTC). But what's enticing to know is that it still have a steady interest of the masses worldwide. In this article, we will discuss a few mass adoption challenges that Bitcoin still needs to solve.
Recent Happenings in the Cryptocurrency Globally
The US-based payment giant NCR and the digital asset management company NYDIG signed an agreement and partnered with 650 US banks to let 24million people buy and sell cryptocurrencies. Also, El-Salvador notifies the world by declaring to make cryptocurrency the legal tender in September.
Such news coming from around the globe encourages us to sit on the bandwagon that routes you to the yellow brick road. But when we look at the other side of the coin, these announcements raises a big question in each one of our mind, i.e., "Bitcoin as a larger scale of payment is relatively unproven. It mounts a question on its adoption and uses as a network".
According to a variety of statements by Bitcoin experts, SegWit has expanded the platform's capacity in recent years. While the Lightning Network as the second layer solution enables Bitcoin to handle an indefinite number of transactions per second, theoretically. Many observers also believe that the current adoption issue with Bitcoin is not about its capacity and throughput, but it's actually about Bitcoin's usability.
Bitcoin is Maturing as an Asset
According to the most recent FOMC statement, it compared the price movement of Gold and Bitcoin. The fact that bemused everyone that a hawkish tone was seen in the price chart when compared. It also expresses a partially similar movement as Gold. It signs that Bitcoin is behaving like a real asset.
Developer Luke Dashjr said - “Following the activation of SegWit in 2017, Bitcoin does not have any maximum limit to transactions per second”.
Other commentators also believe that after the release of SegWit, the capabilities of Bitcoin has expanded.
According to Blockstream researcher Christian Decker, “Some time ago I came up with a direct comparison between pre-SegWit and post-SegWit. In this back-of-the-envelope calculation for optimal conditions (smallest possible transactions) SegWit nearly doubled the capacity of the network (from 5,200 [transactions]/block to 12,100 [transactions]/block) by optimizing how information is stored,” he said.
Christian also added, “However, with Taproot and Schnorr we can get closer to this optimistic scenario by further compressing common scripts and reducing the size of multisig transactions to be identical to single-sign transactions”.
Estimating the maximum number of transactions per second is not that informative and interesting. The number of transactions depends majorly on the nature of the transactions. Bitcoin is capable of serving multiple purposes, but in the future, it will establish as the comprehensive pool of multipurpose technology improving transactions and other core practices.
Usability is the Real Issue, Not Scalability
Bitcoin is facing many mass adoption challenges with every new dawn. But many organizations and practitioners are taking Bitcoin scalability as a massive issue for stopping people to set unprecedented ways of accessing its potential. With the help of Lightning Network's two-layer solution, many agree that it can be the national or international payment system used by thousands or millions of people globally.
According to Bendiksen - “There is no transaction capacity on the Lightning network — it’s unlimited, infinitely surpassing the capacity of centralized layer-2 alternatives like Visa and MasterCard".
El_salvador also considered Lightning Network, the two-layer solution for approving Bitcoin as a legal tender. Although, it still needed to get uncovered that how successfully it embraces cryptocurrency.
Many experts and commentators think that the issue is not Bitcoin or Lightning Network can handle large transactions. But the real issue is about its usability. And with a level of experience and expertise is arguably required to use Bitcoin with ease.
People and other governments are unaware of the usage and capabilities of cryptocurrencies. Experts are more in talks to increase the importance of the users running their own node. With this, the issue of the usability will potentially result in a degree of centralization.
