It confuses a lot of tech people that it has something of value to it that we don't totally understand and we keep thinking that it'll crash or the bubble we're all certain we're seeing will pop.
What it is now is a disgrace.
Not a new use case. Not a new retailer accepting it. It's worth more because the same people who bought it last year will spend more to buy it this year.
$170B worth of value today? No. But price is current value + potential future value * likelihood of getting there. People are starting to understand the potential, and working towards that future.
Therefore the fees are often too high, and the confirmations can be delayed a lot unless you pay a lot, for it to be very useful. For example it often doesn't make much sense to pay for games on steam using Bitcoin as the fees take a large portion of the payment.
How do you propose we increase throughput on a competitive space without compromising the byzantine fault tolerance of the bitcoin network?
Go on, I'll wait.
It isn't just 'make the blocks bigger'. That's like telling a developer to just ship more code. We didn't scale the early internet by making packets bigger. Open your mind and stop repeating things you read just because you read it. Think for yourself and if you are uninformed about a technology then do not open your mouth to speak. You don't reach scale and adjust a hundred billion dollar network by hacking fixes, you do it by carefully making calculated changes with science and testing behind your decisions. The developers working on bitcoin today have done more to contribute to the growth of bitcoin than detract and the sheer volume and scale are unprecedented. Nobody is equipped to say one solution is obviously better.
also china.
Bitcoin has become to slow and expensive (transactions) for that...
You can also use services which convert your coin of choice to Bitcoin, for example using shapeshift or for Monero xmr.to which is excellent. You can't avoid the fees on Bitcoin if you do that though...
There are many coins which have cheap and fast confirmations, for example Ethereum or Bitcoin Cash.
Ethereum devs are also working on the raiden network which I believe is atm on the testnet and might release sometime the next months.
Bitcoin is limited to a fixed blocksize and ASIC mining while Ethereum has a dynamically adjusting blocksize to fit the network usage and capabilities.
And IIRC Ethereum is atm handling more Transactions than Bitcoin and ETH TX are arguably more complex, yet the network hasn't broken apart.
No, I think it was just as smart to avoid it then as it is now.
And people won’t be able to get out in time. When the price begins dropping in earnest, liquidity will dry up completely.
All of this has happened before, and will happen again. This is the most predictable thing in history, including the fact that Cassandras will be ignored.
And that makes me bitter.
But I also don't regret it. Because I also clearly remember that when it hit $9 I thought at the time that if I owned any Bitcoin I would certainly sell now. With the amount I would have invested I could have maybe earned $1k.
But it's foolish to think that you would be rich by now if you just had invested a bit because you can't know when you would have sold them again.