91–100 of 225 posts
Bitcoin has been around for 8 years, and general awareness has really only kicked in over the last 4. These Bitcoin companies are the first generation. I think it's reasonable that in the next 10 years the tasks you performed will be more seamlessly orchestrated, and greater competition will drive the price down. It would take an order-of-magnitude improvement to undercut the wire fee ($35) which may well happen.
With a title like "The Disaster that is Bitcoin" we really shouldn't feed the trolls. It's true bitcoin doesn't compete with traditional fiat for many purposes. Calling bitcoin a disaster for it is trolling people who see potential in the technology. The disaster that is clickbait.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of the article is really that using bitcoin means using a lot of wildly dysfunctional intermediaries. USD to bitcoin and back again is, almost certainly, the most liquid market there is. It's a scalding indictment of bitcoin when part of the promise of bitcoin was that it would be quick, easy and cheap to perform these kind of transactions
to be fair to bitcoin, the primary point of bitcoin is that it's a decentralized ledger not under the control of a government or bank. Ease-of-use was an afterthought. (but then again, it ended up not being very decentralized, either)
Which, as we can see, costs a lot of money and doesn't add much value for legal uses.
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Where "it" is Bitcoin and not USD.
But bitcoin needs to be transformed back into a currency at some point to use it . There is no point in a wire transfer if the person at the other end isn't going to use it. Yes, some retailers accept bitcoin, most don't.
You can't separate the currency from the ecosystem for anything but academic purposes. The ecosystem is a mess. A commonly cited benefit of crypto-currencies is that they'll eliminate friction and fees in the system, and I think this is only because the systems don't exist. People want security, verifiability, and reversibility when dealing with money. There has to exist companies to do this whether they are Citibank…
Bitcoin has the advantage over fiat of having been designed with incentives of participants aligned so as to make the likelyhood of inflation extremely small over the long term. So the scenario that Bitcoin makes better is the one in which money printing would have occurred, but now can't because of recourse to Bitcoin.
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> It seems the actual fiat currency part worked fine. I don't think Bitcoin is made at will out of thin air like flat currency routinely is. You can still argue that this is not a problem with flat currency itself, but the problem is, unlike Bitcoin, the laws regarding printing and production of flat currency are not governed by hard-to-break math.
> I don't think Bitcoin is made at will out of thin air like flat currency routinely is. This is a gross oversimplification of how the vast majority of central banks(ie: the ones that matter) handle their fiat currency. In theory, yes, they could just print money, in practice, they don't "just print money".
Even so, I still think bitcoin is a brilliant tech and valuable experiment.
It is wrong to think of bitcoin as a direct competitor to fiat.
Just like mp3 / bittorent did not destroy the music / movie industry, bitcoin isn't going to replace fiat currency. Not now and not in it's current form.
But it's going to be around as an alternative to the centralised banking system and as a very interesting social experiment and self-governance technology.
In time, both techs are going to merge - meaning that banks will implement all kinds of 'blockchain technologies', while virtual currencies will implement all kinds of services which the banks currently provide.
* Blocks are now so full that transactions have stopped flowing and there's no solutions that will address any of this without forcing any of the thousands of systems already built on top of Bitcoin to migrate = slow confirmations = massively higher fees
* Slow confirmations for every day payments = credit card use-case somewhat ruled out
* Double-spending is now a feature of Bitcoin = 0 confirms are now less secure (I understand the logic but its black and white. Instant payments should be possible but obviously zero confirms aren’t the way to do it.)
* Horrible black and white thinking for seemingly everything in Bitcoin -- especially security -- whereby nobody can imagine a fail-safe system and the community blames anyone who loses their coins even though the Bitcoin protocol is inherently unsuitable for building fail-safe wallets.
* Terrible user-experience on the protocol, infrastructure, and application levels. So much so that Bitcoin will likely never experience mainstream adoption for this reason.
* Community has become a toxic circle jerk of investors who ignore any of Bitcoin's problems in favor of its myopic benefits in the hope that they can still ride the blockchain to the bank (somewhat literally.)
* A hostile dev community that is so utterly clueless when it comes to real world business that their choices have managed to cripple the entire system.
* Community is an echo chamber of ignorance that blindly believes that all advances outside of Bitcoin are traitorous, incorrect, and not worth knowing about; Outright hostile towards new users with an air of technology snobbery that makes the Linux community seem like a welcoming party at an Apple store.
* The technology is inherently unscalable -- in fact, the only currently good plans for scaling Bitcoin involve not using it (No, I'm really not joking, that's literally what “off-chain” means) But the real problem here is really the fact that the development team have refused to increase the block size even though this was always intended in the design of Bitcoin by Satoashi and even though there are plenty of resources to do it.
* Bitcoin is now more centralized than any dictatorship -- the development team have become controlled largely by a single corporation (meaning a single CEO -- we all know who) and mining pools have become so large that at any time the miners can collude to reverse recent transactions.
Bitcoin has failed at every goal that it set for itself and the biggest issue out of all of this is the fact that the system can be so easily controlled by standard social engineering. If a decentralized system can be circumvented through moronic human and political means then it loses any advantage that it might have had by being decentralized. So philosophically and practically – Bitcoin has failed as both a consensus system and as an idea.
In fact -- probably the biggest advance that Bitcoin made was in the use of smart contracts to enforce agreements which actually already existed prior to Bitcoin. So I think going forward banks will end up using Bitcoin-inspired technology but they will ignore its consensus system completely (which frankly sucks) and instead use what is now being referred to as "smart signatures" (or programmable signatures) as a way of enforcing complex agreements between institutions.
Tl; dr; Bitcoin was an experiment that proved that certain things could be done better but it failed at a lot of things. It turns out that Bitcoin probably won't be the next Internet but it did make for quite an interesting ARPANET ...
I don't think USD -> Bitcoin -> USD is really the way to go on this. If you are trading in USD, why would you move it into bitcoin and back again? You already had it in USD. If you need to buy some groceries in the US, you wouldn't trade your USD for CAD (Canada money), then bring CAD to a grocery store that also accepts USD. You would only bring CAD if you already had CAD.
The point of the article is really that using bitcoin means using a lot of wildly dysfunctional intermediaries. USD to bitcoin and back again is, almost certainly, the most liquid market there is. It's a scalding indictment of bitcoin when part of the promise of bitcoin was that it would be quick, easy and cheap to perform these kind of transactions
OP is either an idiot who thinks he can day trade but can't plan ahead and calculate fees or (more likely) he has an agenda against Bitcoin.