Topic: Weaknessess of bitcoin - page 4. (Read 3306 times)

Indeed, that's a good idea. Thanks.

Thanks a lot. I thought that 1e-8 was a hard algorithmic limitation (just like the 21million). Indeed, if it's only a client limitation, there's no need to worry.  The granularity is infinite and it solves completely my point 1 and 2.

I like your post because it's easy to read since with your strict numerotation of themes.

1) Low monetary mass.

Non issue.  The bitcoin is just a unit of measure.  Each bitcoin is divisable in 10^8 parts.   More than enough.

2) Fixed monetary mass.

That's not a weakness.  That's the whole point of the thing.

3) geekish interface

Don't care.

4) Early/late user unfairness

Don't see any unfairness in that.

5) Exchanges

Give it time.

6) fraud

Yeah, bitcoin doesn't provide any third party or compensation service.  That's not its goal.  But such service can be provided by someone you trust.  It's the same for all money.

21 Million is just an arbitrary number. It has no physical meaning except for serving as a reference point. It really doesn't matter whether that number is 21 Million, 400 Billion, or 888.888 Trillion - as long as everyone on the p2p network agrees to adhere to that precise number for the history of the currency.

If 21 M "feels" too small for you, then think of them not as 21 M Bitcoins but 21 Trillion Microbitcoins (which they will eventually be called anyhow if Bitcoin ever goes mainstream).

Also, in the unlikely event that the smallest unit of divisiblity (1e-8 Bitcoin) becomes too large for everyday transactions, the client could easily be modified to support even smaller divisibility.


Yes, some money will disappear, but the more money disappears the more valuable the remaining money will become, incentivising people to be more careful not to lose it.

We will never run out of Bitcoins, since however few of them remain, they can be divided indefinitely if need be.

Addressing points 1 and 2, bitcoins are scarce and infinitely divisible.  These are strengths of bitcoins as stores of value.  Exactly what problems did bitcoins help you solve if you identify these features as weaknesses?  and don't worry about lost bitcoins.  they make every remaining bitcoin worth that much more.  like if you lost a dime, i would be slightly richer and guard my dime just a bit harder.

3, just wait
4, i am a late adopter to gold (i never mined any, but lots of others have).  i'm fine with that
5, sell some stuff for bitcoins, people might buy it from you
6, don't get frauded

As you said, this has been discussed before, but I will try to answer some:


Apart from the discussion if it really is enough or not, there can be parallel bitcoin networks. Its not an idea that is very popular around here (for obvious reasons) but I think that as the system starts to gain importance there will appear competing networks, most probably local networks belonging to a geographical area. There is no problem in several bitcoin networks at the same time. There are already exchanges between dollars, euros and bitcoins, and they could exchange between the different networks.


You are probably right in this one.

Also, firefox or chrome plugin that allowed to pay by just clicking a link would be a step forward. There has been some discussion around this but nothing has happened.


First, from a moral point of view, the people that is here earlier are taking risk and spending time in something that could develop into nothing. There has to be a reward for early adoption, right? I mean, jumping in the wagon when everything works is the easy task. Being here from the beginning when almost nobody was using it has merit. Also, remember that nobody is stopping anyone from starting a new bitcoin network. Satoshi has open sourced the software he has created.

Second, from a practical point of view, people will keep adopting Bitcoin because of different reasons. One is to show the finger to the banking system. Two, because as more business accept Bitcoin people will find them useful to buy stuff. And Bitcoins will behave better than any government fiat currency (it wont lose value), therefore they will find an incentive to use it. Also there is the pesky part that since it is an anonymous currency some people will trade in it and will decide to not pay taxes. This is not encouraged here, but can be nevertheless an incentive.


This is an important issue.


Having a decentralized system has it advantages and its disadvantages. But there could be in the future a similar system using bitcoins.

Hello,

I'm fairly new to bitcoin but really interested as it solves a problem I was trying to solve for years. Nevertheless, there's some weaknessess I'm foreseeing. It has probably been answered before but I could not find any answers on this forum.


1) Low monetary mass.

21.000.000 seems really low. The lowest fraction is 10e-8. Why such a low limitation ?  I understand perfectly the fact that generation should be harder and harder but I don't understand why limit it to 21.000.000.

2) Fixed monetary mass.

In the long run, it means that the money will disappear. Crash disk, human error. Even real money is destroyed every day. What will happen if we start running out of bitcoin ?

3) geekish interface

I'm a user experience/human machine interaction guy. And bitcoin is currently just plain geek masturbation. There's no way any "normal" user would use that.

This is not a unsolvable problem. But it should be taken into account more deeply. Users don't care about underlying concept, P2P, cryptography. They just want a secured account somewhere in a "bank" and a pocket account that they could afford to loose. Everything else should disappear.

The key/anonymity concept is also very hard currently (and it could be non-convenient). What if you want to send some money to your family to wish an happy birthday ? What if you want to see which customer has payed what ?

(well, it means that I could work myself on that particular problem)


4) Early/late user unfairness

I've read that some users generated 150bitcoins in a few days. According to the calculator, I will have to wait 60 days before having my first bitcoin !
Would you join a monetary system if you know that a few people already have approximately half of the whole monetary mass ?  Hmm, it seems rather odd, isn't it ?

5) Exchanges

I've browsed the list of websites supposed to offer stuffs against bitcoins. Only one was really displaying "bitcoins accepted". All the others were standard ecommerce websites with no mention of bitcoin. What could I do if I wanted to use my bitcoins ? No idea yet on how I could use them.

6) fraud

What if I pay for a service and it appears that it was a fraud ? With VISA, you can get your money back quite easily. With bitcoin, it is just impossible. A transaction is a transaction an it is impossible to find the receiver afterward.


Well, this is a lot of questions, don't hesitate to redirect me to related topic in this forum.