Blockstream Chief Strategy Officer Samson Mow says Bitcoin is bad for payments but the Lightning Network solves this. Mow conceded that he doesn't yet have an everyday use case for Bitcoin, quipping that in daily life, he still uses credit cards, not cryptocurrency. "It's more of a store of value and a medium of wealth transfer.

It's not something you would use every day in payments. I've said this before, and people have twisted around and said I hate Bitcoin, but Bitcoin is bad for payments." For payments, Mow said, we have the Lightning network: instantaneous and virtually free - designed exactly with everyday payments in mind. As a payment system, he recalled, Bitcoin takes ten minutes on average for transactions to be settled - this being an average, it can also take as much as three hours at times.

While Mow may still be using credit cards, he noted that Lightning - as a virtually zero-fee network - has the potential to change the whole equation once it reaches wide adoption. "Someone coined the phrase 'Bitcoin had a virgin birth.' None of the altcoins have that. They're all copies of Bitcoin's concept without that kind of virgin birth someone is able to assert authority over the network and control the roadmap or have influence over that..