RE: What's the underlying value of Bitcoin?
true we have a new choice to exchange value without a middleman. But WAIT A MINUTE with Bitcoin we got also a middleman, the miners who put pressure on us the users and force us to pay high fees to keep the blockchain running and today we suffer also from long confirmations.
But there is light on the end of the tunnel in November 2017. Bitcoin is the pioneer in the scene and tries to catch up with the lightning network and Segwit but it seems sometimes ridiciulous to me what happens in the mining camps around the world
animation from giphy.com
Nevertheless we got great opportunities and more and more new contenders arousing our attention for value exchange with low or no transaction fees and many times faster transactions than Bitcoin. But Bitcoin currently has the deep market penetration i think and is already working in the real world others have to prove first.
Love the gif.
Well yes, Bitcoin has some critical flaws by design. And one of it is it's Proof of Work implementation, which does incentivize centralization.
There is a great article about some possible solutions which could still be implemented in time if the developer community would be more cooperating: https://news.21.co/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c28e