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No. People actually use other currencies as a medium of exchange first, and store of value second (usually they purchase assets to store value long term). Bitcoin is the other way round (at present at least).
I save more than I spend, so wouldn't I be mainly using it as a store of value rather than a medium of exchange?
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Cryptocurrencies have a niche use, mainly to buy things on the black market but also for small peer-to-peer international payments when other options are not practical. For this reason I don't expect that cryptocurrencies will completely disappear any time soon. However the value of bitcoin is mainly driven by speculation at this point, a currency that's so volatile is very difficult to use if you're a business. At b…
Your first sentence mostly fits Bitcoin, but misses the point on most of the other cryptocurrencies.
I also think my first sentence applies to bitcoin and ethereum which together have a bigger market cap than all the other cryptocurrencies added together.
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I probably should've taken the time to mine some back when my friends were doing it and tried convincing me too. Ah well. The thing I keep telling myself is if I'd mined even 1000 bitcoins (which was viable at the time I first learnt about it) I'd have totally sold out at $10.. there is zero chance I would have made it to $1000 :-D
I sold my 200 at 40. Something for nothing, right? /facepalm
Notice how almost all news of Bitcoin now are about its price. Bitcoin used to be exciting in both technical and economical aspects, but has now become just a store of value entirely driven by speculation. Other technically superior cryptocurrencies (e.g. Monero, Ethereum) have replaced most of its usecases, boasting much faster and cheaper transactions and real anonymity in the case of Monero. Bitcoin takes more tha…
Cost me over $4 to send Monero transactions last month. Cost me about $3 to send a Bitcoin transaction this morning. The average and median transaction fees between the two networks have been pretty close for a while
I like Monero but it has some way to go - it needs a light client, multisig completed, and hasn't really had to confront any scaling issues yet (already at 30GB+ blockchain with 4-5k transactions per day).
At the same time the other cryptos are progressing rapidly on the one huge advantage Monero has - Ethereum has added zk-SNARKs and there are all sorts of proposals and developments on Bitcoin now that malleability has been addressed and the new opcodes added
edit: also re: Bitcoin News - most of what I read is about the ongoing Segwit2x saga, but it's a bit difficult to avoid the price when it is on such a tear
Again, nobody in the comments mentioning Tether or Bitfinex shows how little hackernews knows why the price is rising.
Well, please enlighten us then!
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I think you might be confusing cryptocurrency with blockchain. Cryptocurrency uses blockchain but blockchain isn't cryptocurrency. Blockchain technology is already incredibly useful for banks doing interbank currency trading iirc. I guess you could be talking about banks doing crypto trading, then I would guess that they are but a number are still stuck in the stone ages.
I think they're using both, as a mean to scale for billion or more number of accounts.
I wish people in this entire thread weren't allergic to providing citations and references though.
I keep seeing my non-it friends boasting on FB how much they profited with Bitcoin this week. I am afraid this bubble will get way much bigger before it bursts.
I'm afraid that like the housing bubble, it'll get "too big to burst" and require intervention to keep those who have previously invested afloat while keeping down those outside the bubble.
Maybe if people are looking for long term security and insurance against risk they shouldn't buy into anarcho-capitalist fun bucks... or at least not more than they can afford to lose.
I consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but I'm still completely lost as to whether Bitcoin is basically a pyramid scheme set to crash massively, or something huge that will continue climbing. I probably should've taken the time to mine some back when my friends were doing it and tried convincing me too. Ah well. (Queue heated comments from both sides. Discussing bitcoin is like bringing up religion AND politics at the…
Cryptocurrencies have a niche use, mainly to buy things on the black market but also for small peer-to-peer international payments when other options are not practical. For this reason I don't expect that cryptocurrencies will completely disappear any time soon. However the value of bitcoin is mainly driven by speculation at this point, a currency that's so volatile is very difficult to use if you're a business. At b…
This is not an issue. There is a bunch of automated software in the developed world to mitigate the risk. In the third world, there are buildings full of cheap/slave labour that perform the same function manually.