Yes, BTC has weaknesses. No, it cannot scale up to "7 billion people using it for every tiny financial transaction" likely even with Lightning. It doesn't nee

Yes, BTC has weaknesses. No, it cannot scale up to "7 billion people using it for every tiny financial transaction" likely even with Lightning. It doesn't need to and you should please ignore the people who say it will. I love BTC, I think it's great. I think other cryptocoins innovate where BTC can't. But the BTC zealots who act like BTC will displace general purpose banking (or zanier still, the entire financial industry) make this conversation so frustrating. BTC can be a success without this all-or-nothing campaign. In fact, it is a success because it will continue to exist/store value, and operate as a medium of exchange. It will have hiccups and scaling challenges and we will entertain proposals like segwit and LN which don't radically alter the coin's design. Unfortunately they alter enough of the design to disturb the economics/incentives for the different roles. Those different roles have had well-aligned incentives for a long time and hopefully they don't continue to drift apart. This is the greatest risk facing Bitcoin IMO. For a long time I was worried about a weakness in the signature hash. But the bounty for that has been so enormous for so long that I'm doubtful one will ever be discovered. So Bitcoin is truly a robust coin, and it can continue to serve us well. If the 15000USD value is based on "7 billion people using it for every tiny financial transaction" then people should probably start shorting BTC (maybe tomorrow evening w/CBOE/Gemini).