Hi tradertimm,

I appreciate your viewpoint. To respond to your points:

This piece was aimed at providing a balanced view of both sides of the Bitcoin debate, as there are very smart people on each side and it would be foolish to not consider all opinions before making a final judgment. My conclusion is in support of Bitcoin. Like I said at the end, I hope Kyle Samani is right about his $100T thesis.

However you think of Mike Hearn, he was one of the first to work on Bitcoin and is very knowledgeable about the project. I think most people respect his contributions and knowledge. Again, he is just one person and I am not suggesting any one person’s opinion is the truth.

Venezuelans rely more on the USD as a store of value than Bitcoin today.

Bitcoin OTC volume and derivatives mainly supports its use in financial speculation, rather than as a store of value or transactional use currency. Of course, any increasing activity for BTC is a positive.

Bitcoin’s Lightning Network is indeed impressive. It launched in March 2018 and I give Multicoin Capital credit in their 2018 annual report for making a very good prediction that its use would 10x in 2019. At the time, it hosted $2M across ~2700 nodes. Halfway into 2019, it hosts $11M.

However, even Multicoin is unconvinced about its long term success due to issues with capital efficiency. I will defer that judgment to them as I am not as much an expert on layer two initiatives on Bitcoin.