The best monetary system is no monetary system, but I guess we are not ready for such a huge step. We need to take small steps improving our situation as we go along.
Bitcoin was the first step to break away from inflationary money which is controlled by people who do not have our interest at heart.
It was a revolutionary step and taught us what the strong and weak points are of crypto currencies.
In the many years that it has been around it has proven to be secure but the more people jumped on the bitcoin train the slower and more expensive it became.
Mining bitcoin is hardly profitable anymore and that is one of the reasons why transaction fees had to go up. The other reason is that the network is simply too slow. And for those who don’t agree I suggest you compare it to the major creditcard transaction processing power, or that of PayPal. From there it will become obvious that bitcoin can not possibly compete even if it suddenly became 100x faster.
No matter how desirable bitcoin is, you will have to face the reality that it simply can not compete and therefore it will never replace existing fiat currencies.
Just the beginning
But this is not the end of it! Not by a long shot! Crypto’s will prevail, but not before they have improved on their weak points. The main issues are:
- it is nerd money
- it is slow
- transaction fees are too high
- there is no governing structure to solve issues and expand
Bitcoin Bubble
The bitcoin price has risen above 1200 EUR and fell back to about 830. Since then it has been rising again but what many people seem to overlook is that this rise is not supported by a large volume.
This makes the situation very fragile and the price could suddenly collapse back to the 800 levels and even below.
And what’s more, this is likely to happen as other crypto currencies are solving bitcoins problems and bitcoin is no longer the gateway to get into (and out of) crypto’s. For example litecoin is much faster than bitcoin and there are several places where you can exchange legacy money for litecoin. Then of course, there also is dash which seems to be successfully addressing all of bitcoins issues. The moment people understand this situation will be the beginning of the end for bitcoin.
And segwit?
Segwit will get implemented into litecoin well before bitcoin is ready. And it will have little or no perceivable effect in litecoin. This will lower the hopes that people have for bitcoin and it is questionable if this hope will return. Especially now that dash is positioning itself with dash debit cards and rumours of it being added to a major exchange.
“No one can stop bitcoin”
said Bill Gates. That is true, and no one will stop bitcoin. Bitcoin will stop itself.
All cryptocurrencies are very fragile as they are very new, and many people got to know them massively in the last 2 or 3 years; I agree with your negative points related to bitcoin, however, the main strenght of bitcoin is that a lot of "normal" stores accept it. As this stop passing, bitcoin's price will start decreasing. The main advantage is that there is a finite number of bitcoins.
True. And crypto's that do not have a finite number, are IMHO very unlikely to succeed.