People have been saying since it was valued at $1 that it was overvalued, or nobody should pay $1 for a virtual coin. Same people are still arguing the same thing 5 years later...
I find the idea of crypto currency, especially bitcoin, very interesting. I just have a very hard time seeing how it's actually useful. It can't handle very many transactions per minute. And the thing that supposed to make it so great is that no one controls it. But if bitcoin becomes really important then people will want to control a lot of the mining power. Pretty soon you end up with a group of miners (or even a single miner) having enough power to influence things leaving you pretty close to someone being in charge of the thing.
It's such a fascinating idea. But in less there was someway to limit mining so people couldn't throw additional power at it I'm not sure it's useful.
As an example, you could use a block chain to enforce a ledger between a couple of different companies but you'd have to have some sort of contract it said everyone was only allowed to use one of device X for mining. That way everyone would be equal and you could easily check it because the blocks should be minded roughly evenly.
But when miners can buy additional mining capacity, and they get rewarded for doing that with more money, how does this not end up with a winner takes all situation?
you can store and send any arbitrary amount of database entries
and wait for several minutes while your transaction is processedWill it hold up when 10 million people want to do that per day? 100 million? Half 1 billion? I know it can work at niche scales (relative to total global financial transactions) but can it actually be scaled up to be a real player?
Even if the block size was massively larger, say 100 MB, would enough transactions be able to be broadcasted around fast enough to be able to be collected in giant blocks to keep up with demand?
As to hardest/impossible for a government to steal from you: this is the mining pool problem. What if China decided to do something about all of the mining pools they have in their country and try and manipulate bitcoin? What if in addition to the pools that they could get/force to cooperate they added a bunch more miners with government computers?
What if the US government just decided to throw computer power at trying to make the dominant hashrate mining pool?
I'm guessing there are number of governments in the world it would be capable of doing that TODAY. They could certainly do it if they cooperated. Even if they can't take over they could throw enough uncertainty into the process to cause the price to crash.
If they all competed against each other we could end up in a situation where even know if theoretically no one controls bit coin realistically it's controlled by a bunch of giant governments and no one else is capable of competing. Oops, that sort of like the current banking system.
Like I said it's a fascinating idea, but I don't think it works at planet scale or if people can independently buy additional hashing capacity. It seems like it would have to have some sort of agreement to limit everyone to be roughly equal for it to work out almost anywhere.
I'd love to see history prove me wrong. I don't remember seening a solution to the problems that worry me yet. If they exist I'm not smart enough to think of them.
We'll see what happens.
This makes me think you haven't ever transferred bitcoins.
Why is it so hard to see?
Whenever you send money somewhere electronically, a middleman takes a cut. With Bitcoin there is no middleman.
It's that easy.
So much wrong with this statement.
First, not many banks in the U.S. do "the exact same thing for free", actually almost none do. Most ACH transfers take 1-5 days, instead of ~10 minutes with Bitcoin or ~15 seconds with Ethereum. Yes, I know about Zelle, but not all banks support that, and clearXchange isn't always same day, even.
Second, some services like Coinbase[1] insure your holdings, even while in crypto.
Third, almost all services that use ACH, like GDAX (Coinbase), Gemini, etc. don't do a 3% transfer fee through ACH, it's actually free. But it's next business day, like most ACH, where as crypto would've been an hour at most.
Lastly, some countries, like oh I don't know, Japan[2], have negative interest rates, so your money shrinks by the day instead of growing.
[1]:https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/166237...
[2]:https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/21/business/international/ja...
Seems like instant liquidity confirmation has been solved with credit cards or Paypal for trivial amounts (third party willing to act as an intermediary) or wire transfers for larger amounts (banks engaging their backchannel comfirmation protocols for a measly $25 fee).
There are also debit card payments, admittedly not as widespread, but impressively fast when used through Square Cash or Facebook Messenger.
None of the existing solutions are perfect, but all seem to be "good enough".
If I deposit to GDAX, sell to USD, and withdraw to my bank it will be there in 1 business day. It's been that way for years, for almost everyone I know. ACH pulls take longer, sure, but what I said is correct.
Also, multiple countries implemented negative interest rates[1]. Japan isn't an anomaly.
What you might lose from BTC fluctuation, you may also gain, as seen by the 400% YTD growth, this year alone[2].
You really should do more research and actually understand the topic instead of dismissing it because it doesn't fit your world-view.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_central_b...
[2]: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-price-nears-5000-ytd...
Is bitcoin capable of doing 50% of that? 10%? 1%?
I know people have just decided to expand the block size but what's a realistic limit on how many transactions can be done per hour? Is that enough for real widespread use?
I can certainly see uses but I worry that he can never get big enough to truly matter. Or if it does that a government or large private entity could easily try to take it over through force of computing power.
There's no holidays for the blockchain like banks have so you can send 24 hours a day, every day.
1 BTC is a historically common denomination that will likely receive less usage if the price continues to rise.