21–30 of 42 posts
2 - Worse, there is literally a finite amount with a surprisingly large floor on the smallest denomination (which exacerbates problem 1)
3 - slow, repudiatable settlement.
How could you use it to buy a pack of gum at the store? The cost of the transaction would be high and the shop owner would be pissed if 45 minutes later the transaction backed out.
For me, transaction times and cost. Paying $2 to send $100 over 15 - 30 minutes, feels expensive and slow to me as a buyer. Sellers are used to longer clearance times and higher fees it would be more like our modern system if the seller paid the fee.
I've been following crypto since 2012 (I work in the industry on an alternative cryptocurrency). I completely agree that this is the primary issue that Bitcoin and Ethereum have. Lightning and other second layer scaling solutions show promise but just haven't matured at the rate that I was hoping. Most applications just aren't feasible with such high transaction costs. I have a strong feeling that when second-layer s…
Instead, they should go for whatever security they can get while still getting fees sub-1-cent, transaction times sub-1-second, and still vaguely decentralized.
The really secure transactions can be reserved for cases where paying a $2 fee and waiting 15 minutes is acceptable.
What happens when rewards for mining a block halt or the price of Bitcoin drops to a point where it’s no longer economically viable to pay for electricity and mining rigs?
Fewer people buy rigs. Fewer people mine. The remaining people get paid more. It's a self balancing system.
Assuming you are saying as an investment, I think a plausible worst case scenario is that a major government, let's say the US, makes it illegal to move their currency on to crypto exchanges and kills all legitimate on ramps.
Bitcoin would survive this but I would guess it's price would go down somewhere between 10 and 100x . Potentially more.
The hard cap on the number of Bitcoins also makes Bitcoin a deflationary asset/currency. Deflationary currencies have been known to be actively harmful since at least the great depression.
Overall, Bitcoin is a technological curiosity that is only attractive to people who don't know much of anything about monetary economics and have no desire to learn.
Bitcoin is essentially a Ponzi scheme. The only way to make a profit is to sell an asset whose added value only exists if more people buy into it. Nowadays many bitcoin supporters refer to it as "digital gold", but that's just not the case. Gold is a natural element with some unique phisical a chemical properties that make it both attractive (e.g. jewelry) and useful (e.g. industrial applications). So those buying go…
Bitcoin is essentially a Ponzi scheme. The only way to make a profit is to sell an asset whose added value only exists if more people buy into it. Nowadays many bitcoin supporters refer to it as "digital gold", but that's just not the case. Gold is a natural element with some unique phisical a chemical properties that make it both attractive (e.g. jewelry) and useful (e.g. industrial applications). So those buying go…
That's often the first question people asked in the early days. But where does its value come from? And I couldn't help but ramble on about the fact that its value isn't tied to anything but that simply there is a need for it... for some reason.
1 - It's deflationary 2 - Worse, there is literally a finite amount with a surprisingly large floor on the smallest denomination (which exacerbates problem 1) 3 - slow, repudiatable settlement. How could you use it to buy a pack of gum at the store? The cost of the transaction would be high and the shop owner would be pissed if 45 minutes later the transaction backed out.
Bitcoin would have to literally be worth $1,000,000.00 for the smallest denomination (10e-8) to equal a cent. Realistically you'd be looking at ten times that before there's problems. Why pennies still exist I have no idea.
And after that 2nd layer solutions can subdivide Satoshis easily.
What an absurd argument to make.