[osense]

I suggest you look into blockchains like Solana and Fantom, there have been some technological advancements lately that allow crazy fast and cheap transactions (with some other downsides of course).

I think of the current state of crypto as a kind of a wild west situation, there's still so much to be discovered and there's a lot of competition between different tokens to see who can do something better than the others. Saying that it's too slow right now doesn't mean it still will be a couple years down the line.

[pphysch]

Fantom: "Each network built in Fantom is independent from one another."

Solana: "Many [Solana] clusters may coexist. When two clusters share a common genesis block, they attempt to converge. Otherwise, they simply ignore the existence of the other."

Continuing my analogy, now they've gone and reinvented NAT/"IP federation", and destroyed the global P2P nature of Bitcoin. They've readded middlemen to online payments. Remind me what problem they are solving?

[osense]

Middlemen? Since when is a cluster of decentralized nodes a middleman?

Yes, it turns out that making a decentralized system both secure and scalable is a difficult problem, so people have been looking for ways to deal with it and improve on the original solution of Bitcoin (which, by the way, as I'm sure you know, has incredible energy consumption just to validate less than 5 transactions per second. How is that global?). I don't think that organizing decentralized nodes into some sort of bottom-up structure takes away from the P2P nature of blockchains. Just because a solution to a problem is not trivial and easy to understand (which Bitcoin is from the point of view of many more contemporary protocols), does not make it invalid.

At least Solana is a level 1 protocol, as opposed to some other solutions like sharding or zkRollups which add even more complexity.