I think Bitcoin has many advantages over fiat or normal currencies such as the USD and Payment companies such as Paypal.
Advantages:
= Very low fee to send and receive cash - much cheaper than Paypal or Western Union or SWIFT or TT Payments internationally.
= Decentralized and not really controlled by major governments or finance companies
= Quite Anonymous - You do not have to give all your information to a company to send money.
Disadvantages:
= Takes around 10 minutes for the first confirmation - so the payment is not instant.
= Price Volatility - The price of Bitcoins is much more unstable than say USD. Hopefully this will be more stable
= Unknown - Still not accepted by major companies and there needs to be much more marketing to promote Bitcoin.
These are the things that i can think of for the reasons why Bitcoin may or may not be used.
Is there anything else that you think can be added to advantages or disadvantages?
So I'm pretty skeptical about what I underlined above, and totally disagree with what I put in bold.
Bitcoin isn't very decentralized, but it provides more decentralization than the central banks (obviously). I think this problem is just going to get worse as time goes on and the future halvings cause more "at home" miners to stop mining because the cost of them doing it is just way too much than what they are getting out of it. Doesn't mean that all miners will get out of mining, because a lot of people just enjoy it for a hobby, which there is nothing wrong with that... it's just a very expensive hobby IMO. I just think the development of big time mining farms that will become the "Apple" or "Microsoft" of mining will be inevitable, because as the difficulty increases and payouts decrease, you have to be able to know how to run miners in the most profitable way in order to gain ROI.
Now with true anonymity, I don't believe that one bit... and it's becoming more clear that's the case every single day. Like I stated above, people don't just mine to produce their own bitcoins to spend. Bitcoin is very much pseudonymous, but the privacy and security that bitcoin gives users is declining every day. If people want to get into bitcoin, they will probably have to go through a 3rd party exchange site, which requires them to link their bank accounts and/or credit cards, which links to them as an individual. This is not at all anonymous, and people should start realizing this... that's honestly the biggest flaw I see in bitcoin right now