Bitcoin was a great project that got a lot of things right, but it has not worked well in at least two major areas: > "The transaction fee market is a free mar

Bitcoin was a great project that got a lot of things right, but it has not worked well in at least two major areas: > "The transaction fee market is a free market of users bidding for a limited amount of transaction capacity. It is subject to the natural laws of supply and demand for that limited economic resource." This is ridiculous. When bitcoin was developed, there was plenty of distributed transaction processing capacity and we have many more and much more powerful computers and better networks now. Our growth in supply of the ability to process transactions in a distributed fashion has dramatically outpaced the demand. But bitcoin's built-in scaling mechanism led to a CPU->GPU->FPGA->ASIC->Dedicated hardware arms race. So most of the world's capacity can't really take part. The supply is wasted. And as a result, everything ended up monopolized and centralized in the hands of a few people in one place. Of course they're going to want to keep the supply limited to protect their monopoly, and of course they're going to want to charge fees to capitalize on it. But it's all artificial. We have tons of spare compute capacity. It's unlikely that will become a scarce resource at any time in the forseeable future. Not scarce enough to induce delays or justify fees. The other failure was simply the fact that it was so difficult (and lengthy, scary, potentially expensive) to get money into or out of the system. It's hard to build adoption rate when you require people to link their bank accounts to shady exchanges and go through complex transactions that take multiple days (and/or download a massive blockchain that may also take days). Hopefully a future cryptocurrency can address the issues discovered with Bitcoin and succeed. It should seek to remain decentralized; everyone should be able to participate, and to do so relatively quickly, easily, and safely.