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Here's Why People Don't Buy Things With Bitcoin (vice.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: One reason for this, if you live in Toronto like me (or anywhere else for that matter), is that there's basically nowhere to spend digital coins in the real world. Coinmap, a service that maps bitcoin-accepting locations all over the world, shows a few places that accept bitcoin in Toronto, but it's clearly out of date -- I called several businesses listed on the site and they had no idea what bitcoin even is. A bigger problem is perfectly illustrated in a Reddit post from Wednesday morning complaining that a bitcoin transaction worth just $9 still hasn't gone through the network after two days of waiting. Two. Days. The likely reason is that the fee attached to the transaction in order to incentivize faster confirmation -- 50 cents, which is about as much of a premium as I'd pay for a $9 transaction -- simply wasn't enough. "Should I have paid $3 on a $9 transfer to get it processed?" the person wrote.
says the real world
The idea of any blockchain-verified cryptocurrency being widely used as money never made sense, and never will. What, if I buy lunch for $10, I have to wait several hours or days for a bunch of server farms in China to verify my transaction while burning enough energy to light every house in my neighborhood? Either that, or pay $2 or $3 to get it "expedited" in 15 minutes?
It's insane. The world economy is far too large and complex to be funneled through 1 MB or 2 MB or 4 MB chunks of data verified one at a time, and even the people pushing BTC realize that now. When was the last time you heard BitPay brag about how many new merchants were using their service? The idea of BTC as money has all kind of faded away. It simply won't scale, regardless of the supposed "solution" of SegWit.
Now it's all about the speculative frenzy, and the different factions within the Bitcoin ecosystem fighting for control of the blockchain with hard forks. BTC is useful for moving large sums of currency across borders without government control (many wealthy Chinese like that), but as far as being used as "money", that ship has long sailed.
Even gold only has value because people believe it does. Its only real value is as a conductor, but beyond that, it's pretty worthless. Gold is too malleable and cannot be used in building.
Bitcoin suffers from it's own design. It's decentralized, and unregulated. Criminals have flocked to the 'currency' for these very reasons.
It just goes to show, regulation does have a place. I personally can't get behind something that facilitates criminality to the degree bitcoin does.
It's very design is the problem. It can't be regulated. Oversight is impossible. In the age of scams, fraud and identity theft, we simply cannot have a deregulated decentralized, pseudo-anonymous 'currency.' It just causes way too many problems and ultimately doesn't solve any problems legitimate government issued currency has.
There's a lot of bitcoin hate on Slashdot from people who are mad they don't own any bitcoin, and didn't get in when it was affordable.
I don't think transaction speeds are a technological problem. Bitcoin can do nothing to make transactions happen quickly at scale with any technological model with the way cryptocurrency is currently set up. It's a political problem that currently has no solution and worst yet as far as I know nobody has even come up with a pie in the sky solution that might work either.
Visa has to process millions of transactions every second. Visa spends a TON of money on data centers and ways to process all of that load. There is currently no good incentive for miners to create the massive infrastructure needed to make a real time transaction system work in the real world. It's either wait more than 5 minutes (unacceptable) or charge multi dollar fees on top of the price of what's being bought (also unacceptable). The only way Bitcoin will be viable is to work fast and cheap. It's neither.
The strength of Bitcoin comes from the health of the computers maintaining the Bitcoin network, and those computers are only on the network is because they're getting paid in bitcoin to maintain it.
Once it becomes hard to impossible to mine bitcoin, to the point where it is not financially feasible to do so, Bitcoin's network will weaken and fold as miners move onto the next crypto-currency with a better ROI.
This will have the net effect of weakening the number of systems maintaining bitcoin - and potentially weakening the strength of the bitcoin network. This *might* possibly cause bitcoin's price to suddenly drop as people pull out.
It's either that or bitcoin has to continue to inflate for eternity I guess.
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