The "scam" argument comes down to a religious belief about decentralization and immutability. These things are important characteristics of Bitcoin, but what many fail to realize is that decetralization and immutability aren't binary and there's degrees of them that make sense to be experimented with.
While not as decentralized as Bitcoin, that doesn't mean it's a scam. Just that it's more centralized than Bitcoin.
And as we have seen, the decentralization of Bitcoin has been quite problematic. It's incapable of doing important decisions on time. It's anarchy in the bad way – just chaos where people are having bitter fights and nothing gets done.
It's problematic for innovation, yes. I would argue that it's not problematic for it's intended application though: p2p digital cash. There's room for both innovation and p2p digital cash in the world though.
It's very big problem if Bitcoin wants to be cash that has large userbase. Currently it can't scale up and the development has been really, really slow. That's because it's too decentralized and can't do effectively any big decisions.
again, you're assuming the goal is scaling fast rather than being sound p2p cash.
when you scale fast, you sacrifice security. security is essential but comes at the cost of speed. so it's a constant tradeoff, and there's room for both approaches
@ntomaino since cash without a powerful network effect undermines itself, scaling up is a necessary part of becoming effective cash. Cash that I can't use to buy my groceries isn't cash.
If p2p cash can't scale, it's hard to consider it as sound cash. At least it should scale a lot more than Bitcoin does now. Bitshares and Steem are great examples how it can be done.
And the problem isn't exactly scalability, it's the incapability to make decisions on time. Governance model of Bitcoin sucks. If Bitcoin ever wants to be widely used cash, it should make big reforms on it's decision making process – which is, as I said, just chaos currently.
From a security standpoint, I think very much that sound decision making process is really important. If there is no clear way of deciding things, it's hard to react to different threats.
YEa, I know it has been horrible. Nobody uses it and it has no value.
No updates, and no new releases.