The world needs a scalable digital store of value and high-speed electronic cash system. Bitcoin fulfills the value of digital store of value, however it fails at being accessible for most of the world owing to it's low transaction throughput capacity and high fees. The Starmark $MARK is the digital gold that can handle planetary transactional demands and the provably scarce digital gold commodity.

The major problem with Bitcoin is that the block size has not kept pace with technological advancements in the area of bandwidth and data storage. Back in 2010, the average US household had a 3 mbsp internet connection, and now the average household has a 285 mbps internet connection. Since Bitcoin's growth has been stunted and solidified at 1 MB it is only capable of handling at most 7 transactions per second and any surge in demand leads to high transaction fees which have reached well over $100 US in the past. It's not a very user friendly digital cash nor digital gold when billions of people around the world are unable to transact on the congested network.

Furthermore Bitcoin faces an existential risk where the block subsidy continues to dwindle and there are not enough fees generated by users of the network to offset the block subsidy and therefore leading to weakening security over time due to decreased hash rate. The only way for the Bitcoin network to continue to be secure is for the price of Bitcoin to go up relatively in terms of real energy costs. However that further aggravates the problem of high fees because the transaction fees are priced in satoshis and therefore it will cost more and more to transact on the network leading to less and less usage by regular users. This will accelerate the accumulation of Bitcoins by banks, institutions, and governments and they will issue tokenized Bitcoin and effectively turn Bitcoin into a reserve currency held by only the largest industry participants. Welcome to the new banking system, same as the old banking system.

There is a path out of the madness Bitcoin downward spiral: increase the Bitcoin block size by a factor of 10x or 100x as soon as possible. By increasing the block size, it will be the ultimate move to secure Bitcoin as the electronic cash system *and* digital gold store of value of the world. It will ensure that there is an open monetary network that everyone can participate in, and not just the largest participants who will be able to afford expensive settlement fees. Disappointingly, our hopes of Bitcoin increasing the block size has dropped below 5%, and we cannot sit by watching Satoshi Nakamoto's beautiful invention get captured and strangled.

A digital gold and cash system needs to generate tremendous volumes to be competitive to create enough transaction fees to offset the dwindling block subsidy. The only way forward is to be able to handle thousands of transactions per second, which will provide the economic incentive to miners to keep the hash rate high and transaction throughput pushing the limits of what is possible.

The Starmark $MARK is humanity's hope for a better future which has a stable, extremely scalable digital store of value and electronic cash system that not only powers a global monetary network, but also operates as the world's decentralized open message network. We would only need approximately 50,000 messages (or transactions) per second, with each valued at $0.01 USD to equal the current value Bitcoin block subsidy of 3.125 for every 10 minutes. That is approximately an 8 GB block sizes. If we accept $1.00 US transaction fees, then only an 80 MB block is needed and only 500 transactions per second.

Does that sound like an impossibility? Well, it is forecasted that by the year 2030, the household internet connection in the United States will be over 2,000 mbps. That means an 8 GB block would be possible to download in 32 seconds. Furthermore, nodes would not need to store every block since the beginning of all time, but rather be able to rapidly synchronize with UTXO committments and keep perhaps the last 10 blocks only. Even so, if the block size was only 80 MB then a $1.00 USD transaction fee would be adequate to cover the security budget required to offset the dwindling block subsidy.

Even Satoshi Nakamoto himself believed that was the correct path for a global monetary network. Quotes:
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"The incentive can also be funded with transaction fees. If the output value of a transaction is less than its input value, the difference is a transaction fee that is added to the incentive value of the block containing the transaction. Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free."

"I'm sure that in 20 years there will either be very large transaction volume or no volume. "

"In a few decades when the reward gets too small, the transaction fee will become the main compensation for nodes. "