way to use gold for payments directly, so no "mint" or "bank" was needed!
The genius of Bitcoin was in figuring out a way to take all the properties of gold (valuable, scarce, and
immutable) and make them digital. In exactly the same way that digital news made it possible to teleport one article from a virtual newspaper right into your hands, and streaming music
made it possible to teleport one song from an album right into your home, digital gold makes it possible to teleport one payment's worth of gold directly to the recipient. Making the
gold digital makes it teleportable (weightless, massless) and trivially divisible. In other words, digital gold solves the problem of using gold directly as a medium of exchange.
Bitcoin wasn't ever supposed to be a decision about being "gold or cash." Bitcoin was always supposed to be gold and cash. That's what makes it disruptive! Making onchain transactions
slow and expensive has the effect of turning Bitcoin back into gold 1.0. Slow and expensive is the BTC strategy. A digital version of gold that isnt cheap and fast to move is no better
than real gold as a medium of exchange. And let's not miss the fact that being able to use the gold directly as a medium of exchange without needing a bank to route it for you