Bitcoin — Just port it to a Polkadot parachain already.
As as ideology Bitcoin is amazing. It has everything you could ever want in sound money and a store of value. I am grateful that Satoshi invented it.
However, being the first at anything does not guarantee being the best, especially when it comes to technology. Since BTC was the first of its kind it will always have a special places in many people’s hearts.
Due to architectural limitations it is time to upgrade the Bitcoin. Proof of work is currently wasting an entire countries worth of energy, we are paying the Bitcoin miners protection money ( they are the only obvious attack vector ), mining for proof of work causes a suppression of the value of Bitcoin due to miners having to sell BTC to pay their bills. This downward pressure on price is in direct opposition to the increase in value most hodlers want to see.
The BTC network is painfully slow, outdated, and lacks any real features. Let’s face it, along with Ethereum, the network is barely functional with only a few users. In both ecosystems the miners have all the control through extortion practices as well as massive centralization. I cannot imagine how embarrassing it will be when crypto community invites the world to play in their blockchain, only to find out “crypto kitties” fucked it all up. In all seriousness, the BTC and ETH ecosystems are ready to be mothballed. There is no way either will be able to handle the technological requirements, nor the transaction capacity to be Enterprise ready. No Fortune 500 company is going to deploy onto a block chain where miners control everything as well as having fees jump 600% randomly.
It is time to get a polkadot parachain and just port all the Bitcoin wallets over. Polkadot has superior…, well superior everything. Cosmos or stellar, EOS could also be a candidates, but I prefer dot. I cannot image it would take the development teams more than a few months to spec this out and deliver. All BTC wallet addresses with balances and transaction history are publicly visible. It should not be difficult to take the BTC public address, create the corresponding Polkadot wallet and have the BTC owner input private keys and take ownership of the new Polkadot wallet.
I hope someone else out there has a better vision for BTC than some painful band-aid solutions for an out of date network. You can attempt to build whatever you like on top of BTC, but if BTC is the settlement layer, then it will always be an anchor dragging the system down.
Think creatively, BTC can live on and have a better life in a new ecosystem.
