I've been for cryptocurrencies from when I first heard about it and got involved back in 2013. There are some pros to having Bitcoin as the future method of payment however there are some cons too.
It would be interesting to see why you think Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrencies) will surpass traditional methods of payment (Cards, Bank transfers, payment gateways etc.). Or if you think they have no future please share why.
Some of my concerns: - Ever since a few people have made a fortune from the massive spike in prices, it's attracted a lot of traders and day traders. Not a bad thins but it's clear to me that easily 90% of cryptocurrency users are just traders with no intensions of using the currencies. Hence the rise in a lot of exchanges (a lot of which look the same).
- All it takes is 51%. Although for a coin such as BTC would be very expensive to attack the network it's still possible.
Here's my insane scenario:
100 top banks from across the world don't like the threat BTC has on their business so they all join together to buy compute power, take over the network and cause havoc. I estimate it would cost around $2,000,000,000 (2 Billion USD). This is very expensive but what's $20,000,000 (20 million USD) to a top bank? That's an investment to help protect their business. - Speed: BTC is known to be slow to confirm a single transaction (approx 10 mins). ETH is faster (approx 15 seconds). I believe (correct me if i'm wrong) that if you cut down block times it slowly starts to make a decentralised system more centralised.
Food for thought..
And where will you get all that asic gear? Magic? You could also argue the same thing by saying they could band together to buy "all bitcoin", and the exact same thing occurs: Price will go up faster than all the money they could pool, EVEN if govs joined and started printing to foolishly attempt this.
Every 10 minutes a new block is found. You can broadcast when there is only 1 minute left or 9. Fast transactions should not be the aim for someone using Bitcoin, you should stick to transactions that can wait, such as something you would buy online and can wait one day or so for confirmation. The "instant" thing is a specific situation than most people can simply avoid, or perhaps use LN but this is something extraordinary, very uncommon. ETH is a very poor example, its blockchain is also clogged with all the non ETH traffic (gazillion tokens and random contracts) and worst thing is they can undo transactions on a whim, as they already did. No one has the power to do that to Bitcoin, not even Satoshi. ETH re-created the worst characteristic of fiat money.
Anything that is not instant payment, such as wire transfer, can be done with Bitcoin perfectly fine and cheaply. There is only one tx fee you should ever use: 1 sat/B. Its true you can pay more to have more priority, but this should only be done in rare circumstances. It is wrong when wallets try to guess the network and change tx fees on their own, it projects the wrong image of Bitcoin. It is NOT Bitcoin's fault that most wallets do the wrong thing, just don't let the wallet decide for you when you want to speed things up which should only be done rarely, and perhaps never once LN becomes a thing.
Bitcoin is in the hands of too many people for it to be attacked successfully. Some of the smaller altcoins do have this problem. Neither the banks nor the govs even banding together can destroy Bitcoin. People know this and that is why it has its current value after 11 years of its creation. It is safe money you can use or keep without any artificial restrictions imposed by law or politics.