And also the hassle of carrying cash, accepting cash, keeping appropriate amounts of change and coins, the higher risk of theft, the inconvenience, cost, and risk of having to take that cash to a bank to deposit it, and not to mention that many merchants don't accept cash above a certain limit or even don't accept cash at all.
When you consider all the disadvantages of the various types of fiat payment methods, bitcoin is clearly the superior currency as far as I am concerned.
Topic: please delete - page 2. (Read 532 times)
The only form of money which is instantly confirmed and irreversible is cold hard cash, with bitcoin being a close second.
And with cash there is a higher risk of unknowingly accepting counterfit currency. It is also much more difficult (and slower) to make a "cash" payment to someone that is not in the same physical vainity as you.
I might compare someone "swiping" their credit card at a merchant, and the payment processor (using the Visa network) telling the merchant the transaction was "authorized" to an unconfirmed bitcoin transaction. In most cases, the transaction will be finalized and will not be reversed, but there is still the potential for a reversal (or in the case of bitcoin transactions, a double spend).
Exactly my point. Neither an unconfirmed bitcoin transaction nor a Visa authorization of payment are final. However, the bitcoin transaction is difficulty and costly to even attempt to double spend (certainly not worth it for the price of a meal in a restaurant) and the double spend attempt has a high chance of failing, while a Visa transaction can be reliably reversed easily and for free with a single phone call claiming that your card was stolen. Further, the window for a bitcoin double spend is ~10 minutes, while the window for a Visa reversal is 180 days.The only form of money which is instantly confirmed and irreversible is cold hard cash, with bitcoin being a close second. Everything else is a very distant third place.
Having said all that, this situation will change somewhat when full RBF is released with Core v24.0. At that point, zero confirmation transactions will be easily reversed, so you either have to trust your customer not to scam you (as you do with every credit card transaction), wait for a confirmation (still much quicker than 180 days!) or use Lightning.
(as others have noted) It appears the OP is conflating transaction throughput with transaction speed. Throughput is the number of transactions that can be handled per n period of time, while transaction speed is the time it takes for a transaction to settle/finalize.
The reason why bitcoin's transaction throughput capacity will be lower than Visa's is due to the fact that bitcoin transactions must be transmitted to everyone running a full node on the network (and each transaction is similarly stored by everyone running a full node), while Visa transactions only need to be transmitted to a Visa computer.
I might compare someone "swiping" their credit card at a merchant, and the payment processor (using the Visa network) telling the merchant the transaction was "authorized" to an unconfirmed bitcoin transaction. In most cases, the transaction will be finalized and will not be reversed, but there is still the potential for a reversal (or in the case of bitcoin transactions, a double spend).
The reason why bitcoin's transaction throughput capacity will be lower than Visa's is due to the fact that bitcoin transactions must be transmitted to everyone running a full node on the network (and each transaction is similarly stored by everyone running a full node), while Visa transactions only need to be transmitted to a Visa computer.
In short, Bitcoin can be faster than VISA if it needs to be.
Why do you think Visa is currently faster than bitcoin?If I have just eaten a meal in a restaurant, I could pay with either credit card or bitcoin. Whichever one I choose, I broadcast my payment to the network and the restaurant sees my payment show up in their account/wallet immediately. With bitcoin, the restaurant owner can spend the money immediately if they want, and the transaction becomes irreversible in 10-20 minutes, probably before I've even left the restaurant. With a credit card, the restaurant owner cannot spend the money until it actually arrives in their account 3-5 business days later, and the transaction remains reversible for up to 180 days.
The same fundamental premise holds true of any and all electronic fiat methods, be they credit cards, bank transfers, PayPal, Google/Apple Pay, etc. All of these can be reversed for a significantly longer period of time than bitcoin transactions can be reversed.
With the network hash rate so extraordinarily high, why is the transaction capacity so low? Wouldn't it be great if we could focus all that hash power on faster transaction processing instead of a high block hash difficulty? Well, we can!
Hashrate has nothing to do with the capacity of the network.
Just for fun, the Hahsrate now is 260Exahash, in early 2013 it was in 100 Th/s range, it doesn't mean that the capacity or speed of transactions has grown 2 million times, the only thing you can take out of that is that you need 2 million times more computing power to launch a 51% attack on the network.
The block time is the same, so although there is an increase in capacity due to segwit it's nothing that radical and it has nothing to do with the difficulty and the hashrate.
In short, Bitcoin can be faster than VISA if it needs to be.
No, it can't.
As mentioned above by BlackHatCoiner there are two different things capacity and speed.
Of course, constantly increased capacity will lead to every transaction in the mempool getting confirmed in the next block but it will still not make them instant, if the next block is mined in 20 minutes from when you broadcasted it will still take 20 minutes for a confirmation.
So no, on-chain transactions will never match Visa speeds, there are two different things and two different systems that serve different purposes, if you want competition with Visa speeds you have to look at LN.
All these suggestions are no more new. Faster transactions would only result to more possibilities of chain reorg and reduce the bitcoin blockchain security.
In short, Bitcoin can be faster than VISA if it needs to be.
If you want faster transaction, you can use lighting network. There are wallets like Bluewallet that makes it easy to use nowadays if you are not that good with bitcoin technical aspect. 
With the network hash rate so extraordinarily high, why is the transaction capacity so low?
Because they're apples and oranges. Transaction capacity doesn't have to do with network's security. The best blockchain is the longest chain with the greatest POW
This is pleonasm. Just the one with the most work.To increase transaction capacity, the block interval can be reduced by reducing the block hash difficulty.
There are various ways to increase the transaction capacity. One is to just increase the block size. Another way is to mess with block intervals, as you say, which involves trading off security. The fact remains: You don't scale. Scaling isn't a matter of transactions per second. It's a matter of transactions per second per block size. If you just adjusted the block size limit to 1 TB, and left transactions as is, you shouldn't call that "scaling". Scaling is when the size of transactions becomes less than it was before. Bitcoin can already process more than VISA can do, with second layer solutions.
Reducing block time is bad for security. Just look at exchanges: the faster the block times, the more the confirmations they want for deposits.
Bitcoin ~10 minute blocks were pretty well thought and I would not expect that to change in the near future.
If one wants fast transactions, he should look at LN, not try to change a perfectly working bitcoin.
Bitcoin ~10 minute blocks were pretty well thought and I would not expect that to change in the near future.
If one wants fast transactions, he should look at LN, not try to change a perfectly working bitcoin.
nothing to see here
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