About six months ago the news was filled with companies that wanted to integrate Bitcoin as a payment system. However, in the fast-paced ecosystem of the cryptocurrency, things have changed radically.
Now, there are a multitude of companies that either move away from Bitcoin or are turning around. Microsoft recently announced, after almost three years, that it would stop accepting Bitcoin. However, that position was reserved after taking its own measures to: "ensure that low amounts of Bitcoin would be reimbursed by customers."
Steam, the gaming platform, also canceled its use of Bitcoin as a payment system in early December of last year. Their reasons were based on the general consensus, citing high rates and incredible volatility as the main problems.
However, it is not only those that are outside the crypto market; the North American Bitcoin Conference to be held in Miami next week, is no longer accepting Bitcoin for last minute tickets.
Slow and expensive:
Bitcoin has been the subject of controversy since its rates started with an average of $ 2, now, with transactions that cost more than $ 20, people have started to look at Bitcoin as something other than a digital currency.
The North American Bitcoin Conference announced on its website that network congestion and manual processing influenced the decision to stop accepting payments in cryptocurrencies.
"Now and always we will have to accept cryptocurrencies for our conferences, up to fourteen days before the event," the organizers wrote. "However, due to the manual entry of the data in our platforms for the entries when making the payment with cryptocurrencies, we decided to suspend payments with Bitcoin for the last minute sales".
Digital Gold:
It would seem possible to link the change of categorization of Bitcoin to the moment when SegWit2x suspended the launch and caused the Bitcoin to have a monstrous rebound that made it end the year 13 times stronger than when it started.
Bitcoin had had problems defining itself as a digital currency, or as digital gold, and due to the nature of the cryptocurrency, it was democratically cataloged, whereas SegWit2x did not achieve it, for a number of reasons.
It was thought that SegWit2x would help reduce costs and accelerate the network; however, the value of Bitcoin as a store of value would probably receive a blow.
And since the interest in Bitcoin was being driven by the tendency to accept the digital currency as an asset that was growing exponentially, it seemed that the community was willing to be called digital gold.
It is not permanent:
The great fluidity of the nature of Bitcoin's evolution implies that it could still become a very useful and viable currency if the community decides it. The last change that could be between the options is the Lightning Network that would help enormously with the problem of Bitcoin scalability.
The Lightning Network would implement an intelligent contract script in the Bitcoin network that would open the private payment channels between a partner (peer) and all the other partners with whom it transacts. In addition to all the private payment channels of which they are a part, each of the partners would have an open channel to the Bitcoin Blockchain.
