Dear Readers,
The digitization of our world is astounding. Over the past thirty years, communication, finance, education, governance, and more have increasingly shifted from physical to digital spaces. The internet has exploded as a result and the companies at the forefront of advancing humanity towards its digital future have been rewarded handsomely. Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook alone command nearly $10 trillion dollars’ worth of value and together capture the bulk of human interactions happening online.
Digital living has necessitated an ever-increasing number of online payments, and the online payments space is similarly dominated by a group of mammoth payment processors. Companies like Visa, PayPal, and Mastercard, while not exclusively tied to the digital world, nonetheless process the majority of payments on the internet, numbering in the hundreds of millions per day.
A digitally native world though calls for a digitally native payment method and Bitcoin has stepped in to fill the void. The Bitcoin blockchain, like the internet itself, runs on a decentralized worldwide network of computers. Its digital-first nature makes it the perfect payments companion for the digital world that lives on the internet.
That said, a large number of critics, both from within and outside the crypto space, attack Bitcoin for its perceived scalability shortcomings. After all, the Bitcoin blockchain is currently capable of performing only a few hundred thousand transactions daily on its base layer, far short of the hundreds of millions of transactions taking place globally on a daily basis.
