Well, I mean, these are not and never have been the main benefits of Bitcoin.
EDIT: Thanks for the downvotes (please check out their purpose, it's not to disagree with people). You guys should go and read the Bitcoin Whitepaper.
EDIT: Thanks for the downvotes (please check out their purpose, it's not to disagree with people). You guys should go and read the Bitcoin Whitepaper.
1) Peer-to-Peer transactions
Thats's nice, but so do Square Cash, Venmo, Paypal, etc... and they currently do it cheaper.
2) Borderless payments
How do we define borders? They're just arbitrary demarcation lines regulated by governments, so wouldn't the developing regulations in South Korea and China be creating borders for bitcoin?
3) Fraud Protection
Maybe someone can explain this to me. If any weird activity happens on my bank account, my bank contacts me and shuts down my card until I verify transactions. If I make a purchase with my CC and the seller is fraudulent, I can charge-back and have the CC deal with the seller. How does Bitcoin even come close to that level of fraud protection? I assume multi-sig is their way of defining "fraud protection"?
Is it the decentralization? Because isn't the bulk of the mining being done by large pools that can then be regulated and controlled by the governments of the countries in which they operate? I just checked the mining breakdown[0] and the two top mining pools (BTC.COM and AntPool) are owned by Bitmain[1], which is a Chinese company, and the next two (BTC.TOP and ViaBTC) also look they're controlled by Chinese companies. I'm not anti-chinese, but lets not pretend that companies operating in China aren't in some way beholden to their highly centralized and non-democratic government.
So what are, and have always been, the main benefits of bitcoin again?
[0] https://blockchain.info/pools [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitmain
With the difference that your wallet and means of transferring funds is centralized; you can't transfer money from your Paypal wallet without using Paypal's services. With crypto all you need is a connection to the network and your private key.
> How do we define borders? They're just arbitrary demarcation lines regulated by governments, so wouldn't the developing regulations in South Korea and China be creating borders for bitcoin?
They are, plenty of countries where crypto tech is not officially allowed. Or well, they can block the exchanges; in theory, using a VPN service people could still get on the network. But that too can be blocked. So you have a point there, while transferring coins is a global thing, there will be countries without an open internet where it won't be possible.
Re: fraud protection, that's a tough one indeed. I think that implies that you can't get hit by a malicious bank? I'd argue it's more insecure than regular currencies, and like you said, official banks and currencies have a guarantee system, that is, if e.g. a bank gets hacked, or even when, due to your own fault, you get scammed, banks and credit card companies will reimburse you, often backed by national / global banks and systems.
No they don't. Any one of those services can freeze your money or worse, go into your banking account and reverse transactions. That's not peer-to-peer. There's a centralized governor.
Then why the $#@! did they include "fast" and "low fee" as 2 of the 3 main points on their website.
"The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions"
Clearly lowering transaction cost is one of the basic ideas behind Bitcoin that has now failed.
If the minimum transaction fee is X then the minimum reasonable transaction is ~10-20x. Based on current fees you can't do 0.0001 BtC transactions, thus it fails one of the primary goals and the entire value from irreversible transactions.
Really this get's to the hart of irreversible transactions. Without artificial limits like the current 1MB block size transactions take meaningless amounts of computation and bandwidth and so they should basically be free. It's really oversight which is why Visa can get away with 30cents or more for what take a computers well under 1/1,000th's of a cent to maintain.