Another interesting thing to ponder is that when fiat currency first came in, it was greeted with much the same scepticism as bitcoin is now. Can you imagine it?
"We just use paper??? Thats madness! Its just paper! How can we trust it???"
It took 400 years for paper money to properly catch on and be trusted. It was a technological innovation off the back of the printing press, it was new, it was different, and it was scary.
The best way to understand bitcoin in my opinion is to study monetary history. We are completed clouded in the normalcy of what we have come to expect in our current financial environment. It is ripe for disruption by new technology, and that technology is here.
"We just use paper??? Thats madness! Its just paper! How can we trust it???"
It took 400 years for paper money to properly catch on and be trusted. It was a technological innovation off the back of the printing press, it was new, it was different, and it was scary.
The best way to understand bitcoin in my opinion is to study monetary history. We are completed clouded in the normalcy of what we have come to expect in our current financial environment. It is ripe for disruption by new technology, and that technology is here.
You are right - the financial and banking sectors are ripe for disruption. The technology is here to improve the efficiency of the payments infrastructure. But, the solution is not bitcoin.
Bitcoin can only process ~10 transactions per second. Visa, in comparison, can process up to 60,000 transactions per second. Bitcoin requires an antiquated, and outdated, system for processing transactions (mining), using expensive hardware, massive amounts of infrastructure investment, and unbelievable energy expenditure/waste. The last figure I saw was that Bitcoin uses as much energy as the Czech Republic - and this is an asset that is hardly used as a medium of exchange on a global scale.
Why would we build the future of money around a system that: a) cannot support the world's demand for transactions; b) cannot be integrated into the existing financial system (i.e. lack of transparency and failure to adhere to KYC/AML requirements that all banks must comply with); c) is grossly inefficient and wastes an incredible amount of energy resources; d) is one of the most volatile assets that is widely traded and with a large market cap; e) is 'maintained' by a very small number of developers who could, if they decided to, alter the source code; f) there are better and more efficient technologies out there (not Ethereum), g) etc, etc, etc, etc (these are just a few thoughts off the top of my head).
You say Bitcoin will win. How will it win? And by what metric?
It's not going to be adopted by the key institutions that would legitimise it as a global currency - i.e. central banks, IMF, governments, etc. It's going to come under heavy fire by government due to its influence on the climate.
So if Bitcoin is a terrible medium of exchange, what is its role? As a store of value..? How can it be a store of value when it's decreased over 50% within the last few months? How can it be a store of value when its price can fluctuate by over 10% on certain days? How can it be a store of value if it's highly correlated to other asset markets, and is only backed by the demand of speculators (and a very very small amount of institutions, who I would argue are mostly within the speculator basket, such as Microstrategy). Once confidence is lost in the asset, it will no longer be a "store of value", it will be worthless.
Bitcoin is kind of like the first computers, that took up an entire room, were unbelievably expensive to operate, and could only perform very basic operations. Nobody is using the first computers invented to this day. Similarly, it could be compared to the Ford Model T - a great innovation, but not used today.
Bitcoin is only valuable as long as someone is willing to pay more for it than you purchased it for. The tables will turn on bitcoin at some point and it will not be adopted on a global scale. That, I am almost certain of.