Hector Martin

Ok, let me know when you've solved that one

I'm not just trying to be snarky. Your original rant was against bitcoin being engineered stupidly. It wasn't. It was engineered in a way you disagree with. Your fantasy of increasing both aspects with power is just that. It's not obvious how to do that.

It sounds like your saying "this thing that has properties no one knew how to get before is stupid because it doesn't have this property that no one knows how to get"

If your main point is that you want bitcoin to be faster, then well done, here's an array of people who disagree with you: [ ]

Bitcoin was engineered stupidly because it was, as it literally says in the first line of the original paper, designed to be an electronic version of cash - which it has failed at, due to built-in hard limits on scalability.

That doesn't mean the design didn't introduce valuable new concepts and techniques, but it failed to reach the goal it set out to. You can either consider it a prototype (the designers knew, didn't expect it to get this big) or a failure (they were idiots and didn't foresee this)

My main point is Bitcoin is not, and fundamentally cannot, achieve what people are trying to use it for, and it has vastly outgrown its potential as a design, and the only thing propping it up is moronic investors and speculation.

There are already plenty of other altcoins with differing properties; it remains to be seen if one will fundamentally fix this problem while keeping the benefits or adding its own.