You say that now but it wasn't always the narrative from the bitcoin community. It feels more like after-the-fact rationalization than a true objective. It just so happens that bitcoin's original architecture didn't scale and now people are trying to figure it out.

And that's perfectly fine but I feel like we're seeing the same thing now with segwit and the lightning network. It's all unicorns and rainbows until you realize that in practice it doesn't work as perfectly as you'd have hopped.

What annoys me is that all these issues could always be anticipated even using some rough "back of the envelope" calculations. But there's no place for constructive criticism of bitcoin in the community so the problems are only faced when you really can't ignore them anymore, and then everybody says "well duh, it's obvious that wouldn't work" like you just did.

I fully expect that we will see the same thing for segwit and the lightning network when it'll turn out that the pipe dream of "everybody opens channels left and right" will fail to materialize and some alternative, probably more centralized architecture will take its place. It's not necessarily a bad thing but I wish there was a place where this could be discussed without being immediately called a shill and a traitor to the cause.

Can it be faster to people used to instant payments? I thought Bitcoin was supposed to be futuristic and fancy

So Bitcoin's only useful to the rich?

So Bitcoin is now a replacement for fiat currencies that shouldn't be used for a very common use case for fiat currencies?

What exactly is the reasonable cutoff for when I should use Bitcoin or not? How would I know? How frequently does that change?

It's not even worth thinking of it as a currency until the volatility stabilizes, which may never happen. It's a store of value.

The cool part about this is that we are kind of going back a fantasy system with different coins like copper, silver, gold, and platinum.