Everyone has their own take on the block size war. I was there. Watching as a noob. My take has always been that this was at its core a philosophical fight.
Yes there was skullduggery and subterfuge...
Store of value in a multi-meaning word, in exchange terms against fiat currencies BTC it's not and never was a store of value since it's value against fiat keep changing (climbing up, in general, which multiply the fiat countervalue but still do not "store value"). In terms of security, availability it was most of the time and still is today a store of value: so far no one have successfully cracked Bitcoin, the hash power is still do high that a 51% attack it's unrealistic, the network availability is remarkable etc. In that sense my BTC as a currency are damn safe, so their value is well kept.
The point is the absence of daily use in nearly all the planet for daily expenses. These are the source of stability because a baker, a butcher sell at a reasonably stable price a day after another, people buy at reasonably stable rates and even if the exchanged amounts are little they are damn many. That's the substantial value of a currency: it's underlying economy. Lightning does not help much because it's conceptually hard to understand for common people "why I need to pay to open, then I can't receive payments if I not spend more than what I want to receive?". That's why it's technically ok (as long as the counterpart is online) but practically a failure. Without an easy day-to-day payment solution that really works BTC as a store of value do work only for giants.
They push people towards stablecoins while they use BTC between themselves to avoid scam or need of trust. Something very dangerous for those who are not banks or sovereign states.
This could change with hardware: cheap homeservers like a single box, with a GNU/Linux distro as a fw, with a built-in Blog Habla-style, a social WebUI like Lemmy/Reddit, a generic chat, ... Also running a Bitcoin node allowing to open a channel with itself. Than you can say Lightning is the wallet you carry with you, if full you need to empty it a bit because the amount of cash it contains it's constrained, while the homeserver is your own bank and also the rest of your digital home. A hw wallet to pay around for those who prefer money and surveillance devices also known as smartphones well separated complete the game. Without such action that could be financed by tech savvy whales knowing such move it's needed to keep BTC up, well I'm not much optimistic for the future. I can trade BTC, but if I can't really buy daily things because sellers do not accept them and so I have to relay on third parties Crypto cards... It's not much freedom...
The point is the absence of daily use in nearly all the planet for daily expenses. These are the source of stability because a baker, a butcher sell at a reasonably stable price a day after another, people buy at reasonably stable rates and even if the exchanged amounts are little they are damn many. That's the substantial value of a currency: it's underlying economy. Lightning does not help much because it's conceptually hard to understand for common people "why I need to pay to open, then I can't receive payments if I not spend more than what I want to receive?". That's why it's technically ok (as long as the counterpart is online) but practically a failure. Without an easy day-to-day payment solution that really works BTC as a store of value do work only for giants.
They push people towards stablecoins while they use BTC between themselves to avoid scam or need of trust. Something very dangerous for those who are not banks or sovereign states.
This could change with hardware: cheap homeservers like a single box, with a GNU/Linux distro as a fw, with a built-in Blog Habla-style, a social WebUI like Lemmy/Reddit, a generic chat, ... Also running a Bitcoin node allowing to open a channel with itself. Than you can say Lightning is the wallet you carry with you, if full you need to empty it a bit because the amount of cash it contains it's constrained, while the homeserver is your own bank and also the rest of your digital home. A hw wallet to pay around for those who prefer money and surveillance devices also known as smartphones well separated complete the game. Without such action that could be financed by tech savvy whales knowing such move it's needed to keep BTC up, well I'm not much optimistic for the future. I can trade BTC, but if I can't really buy daily things because sellers do not accept them and so I have to relay on third parties Crypto cards... It's not much freedom...
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