Topic: Disadvantages of bitcoins (Read 337 times)

The above mentioned points even put Bitcoin at an advantage than disadvantage from my point of view, the above mentioned points are not really common with or Fiat, scalability is one with some levels of concerns of which the domestic Fiat may have a slight advantage over Bitcoin but with volatility, it keeps Bitcoin at a high end where it turns out to go beyond just a payment means for transactions but even as a store of value in which it can be seen to posses investable attributes.

The concerns around mining have been of great concerns actually and this bothers most on the environmental effects that can be seen around the mining of Bitcoin, but then gradually we were getting pass the era where such becomes a problem to really bother on or probably see as a disadvantage a d this is because there are now environmental friendly means of mining such as the Green mining with leaser to almost no emissions that causes environmental issues, the disadvantages keeps winding down to the nearest minimum daily and will soon no longer be seen as a reason not to utilize the opportunities around Bitcoin, so I will advise you see beyond all this and take an opportunity in Bitcoin if you find one suitable with you.

In my opinion, in this world, everything has advantage and disadvantage, but it's how we handle it, that it won't affect us negatively.

We should know the principal guiding Bitcoin before we invest or trade, and know when to invest and trade too because if we made a wrong move in anyway, it will affect us badly, that is why we should be very careful and also be observant, especially when the market is fluctuating.

You should consider a few things when you are doing the examination. Since when did price volatility become an issue for Bitcoin? One of the biggest reasons why so many people are interested in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general is the price volatility which provides an opportunity for them to earn money by buying them lower and selling them higher, so I don't see this being an issue but it's a property that makes them so popular.

Scalability is an issue, no doubt, and we can often see the negative effects of this issue when the network gets congested whenever there are a lot of transactions being made because the block size isn't enough and the gap between blocks being mined is a lot compared to other blockchains.

Are you among those discouraging people from bitcoin or you are working with the government, or are you told all these, then they are all lies. The potential of bitcoin and the advantage of adopting bitcoin is far better whatever FUD you are spreading. Read and understand how bitcoin works, so that you will be enlighten and take those dumb ideas of your head. Bitcoin is freedom, bitcoin is the future, fiat holders will regret in future.

The system is risky and we should avoid crypto market if we're not ready to make substantial losses. I've learnt my lesson the hardway and will not give up easily other than fighting for improvement and massive gains. Bitcoin have done much harm than good in my region. It's hyped to be legit, which is true but most of these investors failed to make good finding about Bitcoin and they go ahead to invest, they have no clue about the current season they're enrolling themselves.

Indeed. In fact, price volatility is also one of the things that functions to get profits in trading. Bitcoin is not a stable coin, and Bitcoin has always been volatile. However, there are many parties who can optimize its volatility to gain profits, trading being one of them. So, if we just look at the negative side, we won't get good results from Bitcoin and whatever it is. Because nothing is 100% perfect, we have to be prepared for all the risks. And we also have to be smart to optimize all existing opportunities, including the volatility of the Bitcoin price, to exploit it for much bigger profit opportunities.

Maybe it's just to spread negative rumors and make people think about investing in Bitcoin. However, in fact the issues related to the things raised by the OP have actually happened frequently and we have even often encountered various negative news about Bitcoin. However, they still can't stop people from investing and doing various things related to Bitcoin. Yes, because with every risk, there are benefits that we can take advantage of, right? So as long as we can use it well, why not?

OP, with your mention disadvantages of bitcoin, what's your advice to it? Should we stop investing in bitcoin or stop having it as a store of value knowing its disadvantages?

That being said, the mentioned disadvantage don't matter, and it can never matter to us how we regard bitcoin as our future digital money created by Satoshi, to give masses total control of their finances rather  than depending on the government or the banks to take care of their money

I know its on medium I read it and that's why I shared my POV on it, I don't plan to buy his book, but first search if I could get it from someone for free. As many people love to read books and then share them hehe. Overall, to support the writer we should buy his/her books, and I will also consider this option as well, only if the book convinces me too. So before making my mind, I will follow him and read his other readings as well. Overall the topic is not about buying his books etc. the point was to make sure what's the real deal behind BTC.
Developers are making such coins and I think we should not call them scam, as they are not trying to develop a coin of the name BTC to scam people, they are developing there own coin (along with Blockchain) or there own token so nothing bad in it until they don't try to scam people by rug pulling or other types. The point is, scarcity is really a big factor, and the only factor that helps it to increase in value is its adoption, and why would people go after 11.5 M or 5.5 M alts while they know this is in the market for long period of time and have more usecases (ETFs approve now as well).

You are posting these based on what you have heared about Bitcoin; I will urge you to learn about Bitcoin from the links provided to you in the comments section to lear about all these before making conclusions.
Bitcoin if far above what you are expecting and you need to learn before you understand.
Price volatility and environmental concerns are all discussed by several people and we have come to conclude that Bitcoin investment is risky because of the price volatility, and the mining is the main reason why Bitcoin value will keep appreciating with time.

Before saying anything, I will recommend you to read through this thread and learn how bitcoin has become environmental friendly and the mining process is not placing any harm to the environment and people, read further from here.

debunking bitcoin energy in mining bitcoin by fillippone
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.56613804

Other challenges you have mentioned like scalability have been dealt with through the introduction of bitcoin layer 2 protocols.

Thank you, I think that's rather wise. And to minimize risks, woudl it be a good idea to use some tools, such as Aria crypto, to get an aggregation of news or something like that ? What do you use, you all ?

Price volatility is not a disadvantage of bitcoin instead it is advantage to investors who invest in bitcoin.  Without the volatility of bitcoin there will be nothing like profit in bitcoin,  no volatility there won't be any investment.  The volatility that bitcoin has is what makes bitcoin to be an investment.  Volatility is what makes bitcoin to be better than fiat. Having fiat in the bank for a very longtime, instead of the money to add value it will depreciates but in bitcoin the case is deferent, hodling Bitcoin for a very longtime volatility makes it to have good values.  Bitcoin has good volatility which is good and fair compare to other cryptocurrencies that volatility is not reliable, the price can go up and when it falls it will never increase again.

if we discuss about the disadvantages of bitcoin, maybe it will be quite long to discuss, especially on the 3 subjects you mentioned. however even though bitcoin is not perfect, it has disadvantages which make it not as perfect as people think, but it is much better than what fiat offers, it is much more secure and decentralized, which makes bitcoin an alternative payment that can be accessed by everyone and it's much more reliable.

I think that more than half of the mining farm facilities, the huge ones are using renewable energy because of how expensive it is to operate one. It is a never ending debate about the energy that's being used to mine Bitcoin. Whoever starts this context will always get to the point to make people convince that mining Bitcoin is using unclean energy instead of clean, renewable and environment friendly energy. I have watched footages of these big mining operations that uses, hydroenergy, solar energy and wind energy. So, I don't understand why this is always being brought up without doing some research.

There are no perfect ecosystem on blockchain. Some will have cons as well but it doesnt mean it is called a "disadvantage" maybe we can revise that to flaws which can be amend or improved under different circumastances. Price volatility isnt alone on bitcoin but everything on crypto even stablecoin have their down throat sometime. Scalability still in progress and being improved at the moment. Like the one said above, the introduction of lightning network helps it.

Take it easy bro.

All our life faces  scalability issues (as we need to take care of the next generations), volatility of the cost of living, environmental concerns relating to the life expectancy.

And with all above you can't contend that your live is disadvantage for your. Or you can?

I don't know if I'd say your statement feels incomplete or whatever I may assume but regarding the topic, the only system in bitcoin that I may define to be disadvantage is the volatility but I'd always take take to be a norms because there's no phase of investment that doesn't face pressures as a major challenge.
Bitcoin is just programmed in such a scalability of encountering increase and decrease but it's sure that its way forward is the direction of increments.
Just keep holding your bitcoin nomatter the phenomenon and you'd always account to the increase values.

I commend you for taking out time to list out all these links for the Op to satisfy his curiosity (if any)  but I also won't be surprised too if all this  is to create a thread they may not respond to. Say to generate traffic and go away.
I wonder sometimes why these newbies who ask for guidance on how to operate on the forum or what books to read to know more about cryptocurrencies don't come back here and at least try to educate us on what they were able to understand, at least show that the effort by other users wasn't wasted by participating, but no, you'd rarely see them. Rather it will be more "I'm a newbie" posts you'd see.

Ordinals in 2023 and Runes in 2024 shortly after April halving.
The emergence of Ordinals
Inscriptions, Mempools and Miners

Runes attacks in April but they are dying.
The Bitcoin Halving Is Here, and With It a Giant Surge in Transaction Fees
Bitcoin Transaction Fees Come Crashing Down Post Halving
Bitcoin Runes Protocol Sees Traction Waning After Much-Hyped Introduction

Ordinals and Runes hypes make Bitcoin miners richer but they also warn people of risk of investment, bets on BRC20 tokens, inscriptions even they are on Bitcoin blockchain.

Bitcoin is here to stay many more years but we can not say the same for future of Ordinals, Runes.

Since you used these two together let me remind you that bitcoin scalability and the recent fee spike are not related at all. The recent mess where we experienced a prolonged mempool congestion and a big rise in fee rate is due to an ongoing spam attack against bitcoin known as Ordinals. It is not because of scaling or block capacity. Even if block capacity were a lot bigger than this, we still would experience a similar situation due to such an attack.

Concerns in terms of scalability, volatility and environmental problems are only felt by a small number of people who are still not ready for all the processes contained in Bitcoin technology. Losses from Bitcoin are due to being impatient to go through all the processes that occur due to a very volatile market. Personally, I have felt many benefits from Bitcoin due to taking advantage of the volatility that occurs in the market.
The interpretation depends on where you stand, Bitcoin has played a big role in building the economy and making it easier for everyone to carry out international transactions without having to use bank services. All the advantages offered by Bitcoin have made this technology increasingly developed, increasing public interest in Bitcoin will make Bitcoin adoption even more widespread in the future.

That article from Vijay is very old and it is originally on Medium, you can read and enjoy it there, but if you want to support Vijay, you can buy his book on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Bullish-Case-Bitcoin-Vijay-Boyapati/dp/1737204118

Vijay notes it on Medium too.

Follow his X's account if you want https://x.com/real_vijay

There are many characteristics make Bitcoin is unique and scarcity is one of them. Scam developers can create their Proof of Work coins with total supplies like 11.5M or 5.525M or whatever smaller total supply number but I believe their altcoins will not have good utility and value like Bitcoin has.

Unless you want to tackle more specific(and newer) aspects of the issues you've mentioned, you're probably better off just reading discussions on older threads concerning these issues.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/could-the-scalability-of-the-bitcoin-blockchain-be-enhanced-without-sacrificing-5473700
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoin-volatility-5447045
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/use-of-clean-energy-in-bitcoin-mining-and-its-impact-5467209

Will put down the articles you mentioned since maybe you are interested on that topic.

This is helpful article to read

Scability issues  https://crypto.com/university/bitcoin-scalability

Price volatility https://www.bitcoin.com/get-started/what-is-volatility/

Environmental concerns related to mining https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/09/20/bitcoins-impacts-on-climate-and-the-environment/

This take long time to read so I do hope you take spend some of your free time reading this since for sure there would be a lot of learnings to get from this article. Although you can get an idea by ideas given by people but its more ideal if you can read the whole article so for you not to miss out some other information that you need to know.

I can’t see any disadvantages of Bitcoin here that you indicate in your subject in this thread. However, price volatility is not a disadvantage to the Bitcoin ecosystem; that is how it was created, and that is why you can invest in it. If the price remains in one place, how can you invest and expect any return from it? So don’t include volatility when mentioning the disadvantages of bitcoin for environmental concerns.

 This is applicable to any environment management where we have a small number of people who know about bitcoin, and people in such environments are not ready to learn about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. If not, I don’t think this is a big deal to the Bitcoin ecosystem in any way. 


Sure. You are right, most of these people don’t really know the main use of bitcoin and how it works. That is why they panic over many other things that are affecting the environment, but they are not ready to talk about them; they only focus on what will bring an easy life to the people. And Furthermore, even though miners are using the electricity people are using, I don’t think this will affect the power supply of such an environment. I’m very sure there are many other things going on that use the same electricity, but nothing has happened, so I don’t know how mining will affect the proper supply of power.

Didn't we experience the scalability issue several times?  When someone wants to play the network transaction fee, all these people have to do is congest the network.  It could not have been an issue if there was no problem with the scalability of Bitcoin.  I agree that developers are working on it but yet it has not been fully solved until now.  With these congestions also comes the transaction fee hike.

Regarding with price volatility, it is also one of the attractive factors of the Bitcoin market.  So I would not consider it as a disadvantage of Bitcoins.

Environmental problems regarding Bitcoin mining have been debunked many times I don't know why people still use these things to give a negative impression of Bitcoin.

Exactly.when people try to argue why they do not like bitcoin and they say because of its environmental impacts, they need to realize that bitcoin isn’t even the top producer of carbon emissions in the world. While we can indeed do better environmentally speaking, there are bigger problems to worry about.

Hmm, I won't comment on the Scalability issue with Bitcoin. Still, for the environmental concerns, buddy you need to realize that Bitcoin is not at all affecting the environment badly, because most of the miners use their power to run the mining setup like l=solar energy, on a large scale unit as well Now miners are putting their efforts to build self-powered units.

Even if Bitcoin miners uses the commercial electricity supply, still not an issue generated with Bitcoin, it's an issue that suppliers are not using ecosystem-friendly power generation sources, I believe maximum power is not based on renewable sources.

In my personal case I can't see any disadvantage or downside of Bitcoin especially in this digital age such a digital currency is playing a very important role in the economic development and improvement of the current civilization. However, although Bitcoin is currently used in various criminal activities, in that case, Bitcoin is not running in any bad direction by itself, but it only has bad effects automatically when the users run in the bad side. Bitcoin plays a very important role in controlling inflation and is used as an important medium of exchange in today's civilization.  Various countries are very active in legalizing Bitcoin and already some countries in the world especially El Salvador have already legalized Bitcoin.

Scalability issues:

Lightning Network (and possible other future L2 solutions)



Price volatility:

Not a disadvantage, simply part of the process of price discovery of an asset in its adoption phase.



Environmental concerns:

These concerns are from people who don't understand how mining works. The end result of mining is strengthening society's electrical production and specifically helping renewable energy by operating with excess energy at power plants or stranded renewables. Sure some energy use will continue to come from fossil fuels for as long as society uses fossil fuels, but that's no different than literally anything else in the world that uses electricity.

You have enlisted a good number of topics here, I already knew about the endthefud and read some of the threads there already but the last one from Vijay is quite new for me, and it's really a deep one. The author of the post really made a good effort to compile this up. Overall, the conclusion is enough to understand what the Vijay is talking about, which most of us already know that BTC is the new currency how it will dominate all other types of currencies.

That's why BTC will be adopted more and when more people will use it, due to scarcity factor it will increase in value thus proved to be a good source to store the value of money in it. Speaking of mining, there are some constraints like block size which can be managed to some extent via lighting network and the transaction fee which can also be managed to some extent via lighting network speaking of energy, I can say for sure that after reading the endthe fud website's article OP will know most of the concerns related to BTC mining energy are just excuses to start another side business of green energy. You will see a lot on this narrative.

Developers are looking for ways to solve its scalability issues though it might come still in a long time but I am sure it will come.

There’s really no solving this as this is part of bitcoin nay all cryptocurrencies’ nature. It is something we just have to live with in the present and the future.
There are plenty ways to address the environmental concerns such as using renewable energy instead. Again these are all challenging but I believe are doable. We just need to give it some time.

What exactly do you want to talk about OP, you did add the issues/disadvantages that bitcoin's got but you fail to deliver your own opinion about it. Shouldn't there be some substance with how you talk about this things, if you continue this kind of thing, it would probably not do you any better because you're going to be branded as low quality poster. Maybe add your own thing so people will have something to discuss and they don't have a hard time guessing.

Regarding those issues that you've mentioned, most of them aren't really a big deal, volatility isn't really an issue or a disadvantage for bitcoin, I mean if the price can drop that low or can go that high, I think that it would be a really good thing because if you look at it in a different way, it's going to be considered an opportunity for someone to buy at a lower prices.

I give you some resources to read by yourself rather than explaining everything here for you.

If you want to learn, I am sure you can read.

End the fud. Find many related documents on Energy consumption, environmental issues, price.
Bicoin clean up. Read to understand facts about Bitcoin mining.
Bitcoin mining council with quarterly reports and more detailed on Youtube.

After reading those resources to debunk Bitcoin fud, you will need to read
The bullish case for Bitcoin

Examining the challenges bitcoin faces including scalability issues, price volatility, and environmental concerns relating to mining