While bitcoin was a revolutionary experiment, it appears that Bitcoin Core development has been captured by either the banks, or other vested interests. When bitcoin was conceived in 2009, it was expected to scale to hundreds of millions of transactions per day. However, somewhere along the way, it was decided that the 1MB block limit, introduced as a temorary anti-spam measure when generating blocks was cheap: was a feature, and not a bug. This has the effect of limiting the network to processing global demand at 7 transactions/second or so.
I may add more links about the history, but 2015 was apparently a pivotal year for bitcoin:
A fork of bitcoin, known as Bitcoin Cash (BCH), is an attempt at restoring the original experiement. From bitcoin (BTC) dominance charts, you can see many people migrated to Etherium as well.
Back to James Phillips' personal website.
Edited: June 13, 2020.