Vitalik Buterin – co-founder of Ethereum blockchain network – spotted talking about Bitcoin. Interestingly, it was not just any random thought on any occasion, given Buterin was speaking at Korea Blockchain Week 2022. He was talking about the massive increase in transaction fees and crypto transactions becoming expensive.
Buterin outlined, in 2008, when white paper of bitcoin was presented, it mentioned the important use cases of the first cryptocurrency. He said that the idea was to create an electronic cash system that could make peer-to-peer transactions. This transaction system was relatively way cheaper than the traditional payment systems.
Ethereum co-founder further stated that bitcoin was treated as a payment method until 2013. He said that slowly, the cryptocurrency gained popularity and people started considering it as a store of value. By 2018, the notion of treating bitcoin as an investment will take over the concept of using bitcoin as a payment method. Increased adoption made blockchain transactions expensive and eventually BTC payments dropped significantly, he added.
The Russian-Canadian programmer thinks that using bitcoin as payments was a vision and people are slightly forgetting this. He said in his opinion this is the reason why the prices of making payments have got way higher.
However, Vitalik Buterin not only pointed out the issues, instead, he also provided solutions. He said that crypto assets including bitcoin will be supporting payments after using the lightning network like scaling solutions. This would bring down the cost of transactions upto fractions of a cent, he added.
Buterin stated the layer-2 scaling solutions would make transaction fees go down and crypto payments would make sense again. He outlined blockchain data compression as one last barrier to bring down the transaction fees. Citing Ethereum’s Optimism layer 2 scaling solution, Ethereum creator indicated the solid work happening around scaling roll-ups. He said the solution introduces zero byte compression and worked to bring down the blockchain transactions data’s size and cost.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2022/08/08/why-ethereum-co-founder-reiteraterated-the-reason-behind-the-creation-of-bitcoin/