Topic: Bitcoin's Weak Points (Read 474 times)

It isn't private / not fungible. This is one of the key properties of moneyness. As I understand it, Bitcoin can't achieve base layer privacy so certainly a question on whether it can really be internet money in the long run.

One of the biggest issues of Bitcoin is the crime rate of ransomwares. It costs millions for the victims just to retrieve their data. It is also a non foolproof technology because if you put the wrong address, it's gone. You can't reverse the transactions once you start to send it. The scalability issue, everytime the price of Bitcoin is moving up. The transaction costs is going higher also as they're so many users are sending and receiving. Sometimes it's not worth to send small amounts anymore because of unreasonable cost of transaction. It's not decentralized anymore because you can't liquidate it if you don't comply KYC/AML procedure.

Unfortunately there still are many weak points.
For example:
- High fees. The fees needed to confirm a transaction may very even dramatically over a short period of time. But in general it is not so cheap, especially for micro payments.
- Long confirmation time. This is somewhat correlated with fees, but in general remember Bitcoin transactions are not instant.
- High volatility. This peculiarity of Bitcoin make it more used for speculation and long term investments, as a digital asset, but not as currency. To become a real method of payment Bitcoin's volatility should be less dramatic, otherwise merchants will never be prone to accept it.

I had been watching some videos on bitcoin being banned in few countries. Thus, was undergoing a though process of the pros and cons of the feature anonymity that is provided by this technology.

Pros:

• No-one has the actual stats of how rich or how poor you are
• No need for you to account your earnings or even pay taxes until you convert it to fiat
• You can have the complete owner ship of your funds Example: some banks and other functional bodies have withdrawal limit if funds are in your wallet exchange as per your wish
• Transferring the ownership is simply by sharing private key

Cons:

• Money-laundering is carried out by spammers
• Criminals can demand for funds and it would be hard to track the criminal

It can never lose the volatility while it's priced against steadier elements. Volatility can ease off the bigger it becomes but it'll never be fully steady. Gold still has plenty of movement after thousands of years.

Even if volatility was somehow magically dealt with, the inflation or devaluation of what its value is measured against would ensure the price moved quite violently at times.

It is both a weak point and a strong point. I doubt people would have adopten bitcoin without its volatility attribute. Besides, imo, that's just for now. BTC supply is still being released constantly and the market is still in its infant stage. This makes the price constantly change and therefore why it is volatile. I expect it to actually reach a stable price when the last coin is mined. Plus, the government refuses to accept BTC because they can't control it. No one could.

We can never have the best of both worlds, the world requires balance that's why things needs to have their advantage and disadvantages, the bad and good side, the pros and cons and this also applies to bitcoin but that doesn't mean that will define bitcoin and will change the minds of crypto enthusiasts that uses it.
           Well bitcoin's decentralization is obviously a good thing and counts as a disadvantage, a pro, and a good side of bitcoin but this exact feature has the disavantage, the con, and bad side, for the the decentralization is what makes the cryptocurrency free from the control of the government, the government won't be able to do anything once you lose your coins through scams and fakes for they don't have the control over it.

For anything in our real life, there are always two sides exits concurrently, pros and cons, strength and weaknesses, so I don't think that weaknesses of bitcoin will destroy it or will result any kind of death for bitcoin.

Over time, bitcoin will be upgraded by developer team. If someone need an example, the most intesting one is the hardfork in 2017. This is good for bitcon, but if someone actually stood in crypto market those days months ago, they knew that good things were fudded and become bad ones. Fortunately, eventually good things will be always recognized as good ones - "Render to Caesar what is Caesar's".

If someone does not have faith in bitcoin at beginning, that sort of person will always suspect about the value of bitcoin as well as survival ability of bitcoin. They are weak-handed guys and often shake their hands out when market and bitcoin movement turns to bad directions.
Bitcoin, in realitly, has impressively survived over last ten years, while over short period of longevity so far (months/ years), bitcoin-forked coins lost their values terribly.

Personally, I have strong faith in bitcoin, if not, I have not stood here, in such a very highly volatile crypto market. There are only 3 millions of bitcoin left to miners over next few hundred years, and millions of bitcoin likely lost forever. So, why do we need to seriously take weaknesses of bitcoin into consideration?

Without bitcoin, there would be no crypto market at all.  

Transactions cannot be canceled, by confirming the delivery, you also agree. I don't think it's a weakness but it's an important point to always remember. Nothing is perfect, this also applies to bitcoin and other altcoins. In the market, maybe for some people who have a large amount of BTC can easily reduce their rising prices, volatility and high fluctuations will be a weakness if bitcoin is used as a currency to replace fiat.

When it comes to the evaluation of weaknesses, they are many that cannot be exhausted and it depends on what appeals to you the most that you regard as weakness while others might even see it as an advantage. For someone who have been scammed before, we will all agree that one weakness is the fact that transactions cannot be reversed. The moment one confirmation is done, your fund is gone. No one to report to, no way to freeze the fund pending fulfillment of obligations which then makes it possible for third parties to come into the picture before transactions can be done which for me, defeat the purpose of peer-to-peer transactions.

In order to compete with our fiat systems, Scalability is one area bitcoin falls short and then there is the lack of support from some governments which is the legal lining to make this Cryptocurrency great.

Didn't lightning solves this issue already which its fee is less than a USD?
When the devs decides to change its transaction fee it can be reduced. It wouldn't be reasonable to send 1 BTC and pay that big. It isn't yet as urgent I guess but consensus intervene one day.


You wouldn't like it either if the price of BTC will somewhat be stable, you find it that way and shall be like that no matter how much it will be. It would be solved if the government see BTC that it could function as GOLD, we never know.

Part of the weak point of bitcoin is no turning back. Once you've made the transaction, you cannot undo it. Once someone steals your bitcoin, you cannot find and get it back. No one is responsible for our btc, only us. Another bad side of bitcoin, mining affects the environment. A lot of illegal and criminal activities are transacted here in crypto. But even with its negative sides, I'd still chose to remain with bitcoin. Everything has its imperfection.

It has been created and been using like that since then.
This may consider as a weak point but a solution for faster transactions is still unreachable. But I think it is not the weak point, its the vulnerability to be stolen. In any side of this world, hackers are always there, even bitcoin can't avoid them.

I think Bitcoin's weak point could be its volatility. Bitcoin price is very tend to change every time. Because of this, governments do not approach to Bitcoin to make it as local their currency instead of fiat money.

I sorta agree with your statement that the transaction speed is slow, We also need to pay more fee if we want a faster transaction. The feeling of the instant transaction is the one bitcoin is lacking. We can't change this fact because it is built like this. We can't blame satoshi because this is how blockchain works.

Nope. What power are you talking about? And why you comparing to fiat? Really? In fiat even if you holds 50% of the total supply(just for example even tho fiat is unlimited) , You can't control its price since its value is fixed compared to BTC. How can it be bitcoin advantage if someone holding the majority of the coin can fck up the whole crypto world? Bitcoin is a decentrelized currency. Which means no one can control your assets, it includes also the value of your asset. If someone can manipulate the price then its not fckn decentralized.  

I like it when my money becomes more valuable over time, even when it does it in a wobbly way



you're making a common mistake

Choose:

• fast, expensive transaction
• slow, cheap transaction

there is no "slow expensive" option, you're right, that would be dumb



default fee has changed before, as has the minimum amount. Big increases in Bitcoin price are exactly what provoked the change. But you can do something yourself before that....

You can't set a lower minimum amount in the Bitcoin software, but you can reduce the minimum fee. If more people did this, pressure would increase for the fee floor to lower

One of the strongest as well as weakest point of Bitcoin is the concept of mining.
At one place it ensures fair verification of every bitcoin transaction and creation of new bitcoins without involving any third-party. But on the other side, the competition among miners leading to huge wastage of resources. As this competition gets more stiff, we may further see more spending on electricity and equipment for the creation of computing power which also have negative impact on environment. Also fees will increase further due to lack of bitcoin scalability.

From what I have experienced with bitcoin. It's weakness was always the slow transactions. Whenever I send some btc into my wallet, i experienced a whole day before receiving it. Fees are also high just like what others are complaining about.

Aside from that, I can never say any weakness of it. And oh wait, when it comes to the exposure. Scammers mostly used bitcoin in their fraudulent acts and that also makes his reputation so low.