The market is constantly fluctuating. What is your opinion?
These are some my views for bitcoin:
- Bitcoin’s problems
Many people believe that Bitcoin is always going to be on top of digital currencies, because it was the first currency of its kind to take hold, and it now has an established market cap. It’s true, Bitcoin is the only case of a widespread, functioning blockchain. However, Bitcoin is not without its problems, the most important of which is user experience.
- How the hell do I use this thing?
If people can’t use Bitcoin easily, then it doesn’t stand a chance of taking off. If Bitcoin isn’t as easy to use as PayPal, if people have to use long weird-looking strings of 34 characters, if they have to use a wallet that looks like it was designed in Visual Basic in 1997 (or even 2007), why would they ever want to use it? Bitcoin is great, but it’s not so great that people who don’t know anything about it will look past its appearances to use it. Normal people don’t extend themselves to use new technology – only nerds and enthusiasts do that. Normal people wait for new technology to come to them, or at least meet them halfway. If someone has to understand the technology to use it, that technology is not ready for mass adoption.
- How big can it really get?
The other main problem is scalability. When I first heard of Bitcoin, I was seduced by the idea of rapid transactions and low fees, thinking about how micropayments would change the face of the web. When my time preference was low, I would even make transactions without paying a fee, and saw it come through within a few hours. Now, if I try to make a Bitcoin transaction without a fee, it’s may take days, or perhaps never be processed. Unprocessed transactions frequently exceed 10,000. Micropayments, and even small payments, are a dream of the past, with transaction fees now greater than 30 US cents. The block size debate has gone unresolved for more than a year, which points to a greater problem.
- Who is in charge here?
Bitcoin has no formal governance structure, and the only way to make a big change is to introduce a hard fork – creating a second Bitcoin, and hoping that everyone will come along with it. If the community cannot resolve a simple issue such as doubling the amount of data per block, what hope would it have to solve more complex problems? Bitcoin has apparently fallen prey to the one thing which we thought it would save us from – politics.