Fixing that is being discussed but will require a fork (and has already lead to a lot of religious warfare). Even after the fork, the requirements of supporting humongous blocks just to support more than 3 transactions per second will lead to even more centralization of Bitcoin than what's already happened, as full nodes are forced to move onto server-grade hardware instead of an actual decentralized swarm.
You don't trust the USG? Great! But now you have to trust China and GHash.io instead, it's been years since Bitcoin has actually been "decentralized" in any meaningful sense.
But even with the low current block size, money supply inflation, and plummeting Bitcoin price, the network has still failed to scale as judged by the only thing that matters: Cost per transaction is still $10, and it would be even more expensive if Bitcoin price ever went back up! https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction
Someone does. I tried bugging Luke-jr to start commenting here (as in HN in general), but received no reply. I rarely see bitcoin core developers commenting on HN.
It's just a matter of doing a little research to find all the naysayers.
Even a bubble sort will eventually get you a sorted list, but there's a reason we don't actually use it in practice.
Seriously, add up the billions upon billions we've spent as an industry (in terms of $/KwH delivered to all the datacenters across the world) over the past, say, twenty years, and bitcoin looks downright anemic in comparison. [1]
You might not like that people are choosing to spend money on electric for BTC, but if they weren't, I imagine that juice would just be spent on serving up pics of cute cats with a side of advertising and tracking. Be thankful we found something slightly smarter to do with it.
[1] http://www.nrdc.org/energy/data-center-efficiency-assessment... - 13 billion a year for power to U.S datacenters, according to the NRDC. Slap a moving average on that, account for non-US usage, and scale it back twenty years to the launch of Netscape Navigator and the subsequent rise of colocation, and we're talking more money spent on electricity for the Interweb than most nation states annual GDP.
Right now I could pay someone in Thailand and they could take money out of an ATM from one of the largest banks in 20 minutes. You could be on the island of Koh Tao, have money sent to you from anywhere in the world, and get cash as part of the same trip to go get a cold drink from a 7-11.
There is also the problem that as its usage increases the difficulty in offloading the bitcoins for the remittance company increases which means their costs increase.
Bitcoin sucks for micropayments. Even the core devs agree with that and recommend you do them off chain.
Credit card fraud is almost entirely a merchant problem and honestly when it comes down to it they don't matter in deciding what payments to accept. Their customers will.
>There is also the problem that as its usage increases the difficulty in offloading the bitcoins for the remittance company increases which means their costs increase.
I don't understand what you are trying to say or how increased usage would make dealing with bitcoins more difficult.
It doesn't suck for micropayments, I know this because I actually use it frequently. It's great. Have you actually used bitcoin? Visa defines micropayments and anything below $23 The core devs don't recommend doing that off chain, that is 100% not true.
Credit card fraud is a massive problem no matter who you blaim. Credit cards are inherently insecure since you have to give someone all the information necessary to charge your card to use it at all! It makes no sense. Many businesses lose enormous amounts of money to credit card fraud. I buy many things with bitcoin, it's amazing how much easier it is than dealing with credit card transactions, the bank's false positive fraud protections, the banks not catching actual fraud, the vendor's false positive fraud protections (for using a vpn or ghostery), waiting for the transaction to go through, etc. Never mind putting all sorts of unnecessary information in. Bitcoin is literally two clicks.
You can say 'it won't work'. The truth is, it IS working right now.
>I don't understand what you are trying to say or how increased usage would make dealing with bitcoins more difficult.
In any given country you're only going to have so many buyers for bitcoin. So the service on the receiving end has a limited number of people to sell the bitcoins they receive to in order to get the cash to give to the recipients. As supply of bitcoin increases the buyers will start wanting to pay less and you end up with a wider and wider spread. The only way around this is for that company to then go sell them in a foreign market and deal with a large float and forex/transfer costs. All of which(spread,float risk,transfer costs) feed back into the fees they need to charge or the spread they need to have to keep them profitable.
I don't consider $20 to be a micropayment but even then once you include the overhead in acquiring the coins existing systems will match the cost in most cases until you get to a small enough number that Bitcoin is unsuitable too.
And yes I've used Bitcoin. I've been involved in the community for a few years now I just don't see it finding widespread success.
It's not about blame its about who it is a problem for. Consumers get protection from credit cards that they don't get from Bitcoin. Its the vendors that have the problems and as I said they can promote Bitcoin as much as they want but it won't reduce fraud until they drop credit cards and that won't happen because users don't want to use bitcoin.
It is working. I'm saying it won't be mainstream and that the people who have bought in expecting to be rich should be expecting to be disappointed.
Literally the only use case for Bitcoin is so that libertarians can buy illicit goods without having to go to the bad part of town and talk to minorities.
Wow at how that quote is full of xenophobia and FUD.
And yes, it was overhyped by a bunch of morons. Fortunately for all of us, ad hominem arguments are bullshit.