In casual use with your mobile phone, you are shown a QR code, scan it, tap "OK", and it's done. Not that technical. Billions of people with smartphones could handle that perfectly. You're right about transactions being slow and expensive, and that is certainly a much bigger problem. That and the fact that there are still very few places accepting it.
This is one thing I don’t get. In countries like China and India (to name the two countries I know about) mobile payment apps are ubiquitous. You go in to a shop, scan a QR code, and boom your payment is done. This is what crytocurrencies promised, but instead more closed apps came to fill the market. What happened?
1. You don't want to _ever_ wait 45 minutes for a transaction to potentially be confirmed on the blockchain. Even before the recent craziness and high fees this would sometimes happen.
2. The price fluctuates wildly. Pretty hard to reason properly about whether or not you'll be able to pay your employees this week if your "store of value" could drop 20% or more at a moment's notice.
3. The fees charged by exchanges to convert to fiat are exorbitant. Unless all of your suppliers and handymen take Bitcoin, you will get screwed by this on the regular.
The bulls usually scream "Lightning network, scaling, store of value" or some other nonsense, but the truth is, today Bitcoin is garbage as an actual currency.
Bitcoin Core betrayed the original vision of Bitcoin and hotwired it into a high-cost settlement system. The average transaction fee in Bitcoin is something like $38, which is more than the average weekly salary in many countries.
I believe that cryptocurrency will eventually attain mass adoption. The timeline has been pushed back a few years though because the main network has failed.
Bitcoin "as app" (once or if it works) will be more like cash payments, privacy wise. That is were I see the main advantage. I find it spooky what Visa and Mastercard now about all of us... at least about me.
One massive caveat is that all Bitcoin transactions are public, traceable, and permanently stored in the Bitcoin network. In most ways it's worse than cash, in some ways it's probably even worse than credit cards.
monereo, zcash, and eventually ethereum
the concept seems to make sense but I'd be curious how to audit such an obfuscated system
The system has been in place for years, and it works reasonably well. More competition would still help. And yes, a better network and better systems to cut out the intermediary would help even more.
Do you want to clarify this? If you meant what I think you meant, you're incorrect.
While a tiny aspect of dealing with Bitcoin is secure (key pairs) [1], actually using Bitcoin has proven to be a mess for almost the majority of users.
This is not a user friendly experience for most users.
Nobody would use banks if 4 out of 5 were completely cleaned out by crooks and went out of business.
The lightning network looks very promising in its ability to scale and reduce fees. It would make transactions nearly instantaneous, have reasonable fees, and help scale the network.
And you posted that comment while driving your flying car on your way to alpha centauri, right?
Foolosh cargo cult beliefs such as the ones you've illustrated do not serve as any basis to make investment decisions.
Everyone thought Amazon would never make a profit until it revealed the profit monster that is AWS.
No one can predict the future, all you can do is take the information you have available today and come to your own conclusion. If you don't understand the implications of cryptocurrency on society and money, then that's your loss. If you think you do understand it and believe otherwise, then go ahead and short everything and go make some profits against it.
I've followed bitcoin from the beginning and personally think the only problem it seems to solve is a way for techies to get rich quick.
I don't know if the hype/price is justified, I just know cryptocurrencies are going to change the world. It seems to me that something that important is probably worth betting on, and not against.
No, it would help scale "the lightning network" which would not be the same as "the bitcoin network".
So while it may not be technically true that the main network's capabilities have changed, users should see massive improvements.
Do some napkin math, this is impossible. The people who hold bitcoin now probably have a combined net worth of over a trillion dollars. They will pump and dump it forever rather than let it go to zero. It's way too much fun to trade alone.
> bitcoin has no mainstream use right now
Maybe not in india yet. Even there, it's only a matter of time. Someone will introduce gbtc to the NSE and BSE, and watch it get bought widely even in india. There is a reason it sells at a 20% premium in india.
I wouldn't be so sure.
> pump and dump it forever
That doesn't work.
What do you mean by this?
Crypto is also a stock market 2.0, where bitcoin is an index fund.
BTC is many things and it causes confusion amongst people trying to determine where the value comes from. It took me many years to figure this out, unfortunately.
Proved wrong by 300k transactions per day willing to pay a median fee of $30+.
«too volatile to be a store of value»
Proved wrong on the long term; has shown to be a fantastic store of value over 7 years: http://bitcoin.zorinaq.com/price/
«too technical»
Only gets easier over time.
«too fragile since it gets hacked »
Hardware wallets have pretty much solved hacking (plus can be backed up on paper in case they are lost, etc)
Bitcoin has no mainstream use right now. It's too expensive to transact in terms of money and time, it's too volatile to be a store of value, it's too technical to be used casually, it's too fragile since it gets hacked every which way, and it's too easily copied to be rare.