Ethereum will have transaction chops of Visa in 'a couple of years', founder claims Blockchains might be a bit slow today, but one of Ethereum's founders predicts that in "a couple of years" the popular network will have the same transaction capacity scale as Visa. Speaking at TechCrunch's Disrupt San Francisco on Monday, Vitalik Buterin said Bitcoin can process less than three transactions per second, …
doesn't depend on anything technical. It depends on whether any of these currencies can become stable enough to gain popular acceptance rather than mostly being the latest in a long line of speculator's playthings.
Not many people want to use a currency that was worth 50 cents yesterday, $8000 today and $2 tomorrow.
And that stability will in turn depend on how readily the currency is accepted (and able to be regulated) by world governments - which will fly in the face of one of the currency's potential attractions anonymity.
Just look at the most recent Bitcoin blip when the Chinese Government took an adverse position...
That "blip" was just over an adverse position. If they follow through on their statements and really crack down on enforcement, bitcoin is going to tank since it has become so heavily utilized in China to avoid currency controls.
But that's fine for the speculators who have left gold and moved to bitcoin since that's where the action is. It is funny how spam has lately touted bitcoin as the new gold and claiming it will go up in value 1000x over the next few years. Any goldbugs who have adopted bitcoin have to admit they were never in gold because of its "real money" status if they move to bitcoin!
It doesn't have to be accepted by them either - it just has to be accepted by somebody who'll give you the currency your government requires.
You have a £1000 tax bill? Click on your phone to give me 1/3 of a bitcoin, and I'll put a grand into your bank account. We can do this in the pub.
That's why the "Chinese crackdown" you mentioned hasn't actually really impacted the price that much - far less than previous government intents have.
Actually works out pretty well for the currency. Somebody buying thousands of bitcoins for dollars on an exchange previously could knock the market up/down. However once the money's in bitcoin, it's pretty easy to spread from phone-to-phone and as more people creep into the market, the price will rise, and without the government intervention - stabilize.
And how are Chinese people going to exchange bitcoins in the pub if the government cracks down on anything that converts them to yuan by shutting down all bitcoin related sites in country and blocking the ones outside at the Great Firewall?
My take is that "crypto-currency" is here to stay, in some form.
My reasoning is that large chunks of the world have "shit-conventional-currencies".
I personally, whilst a fan, have no intention of shifting my pension into one - but if you live somewhere else, it seems as sensible as storing a block of US hundred dollar bills under your floorboards.
Bitcoin itself is a bit unwieldy to use to buy a round of drinks - but I don't see it being replaced as the equivalent of gold. The thing the rest are measured against.
As such, a bitcoin bet is a bet on the concept of cryptocurrency, rather than any individual young upstart.
There's now a whole load of them cropping up - and dying just as fast.
That's understandable as the cost of entry is pretty minimal.
Still, some are getting traction and more importantly the ease of entry is increasing.
Coinbase makes it pretty easy to fill a wallet with your debit card.
shapeshift.io lets you convert between a pile of different currencies easily.
Currently it's the wild-west of speculation, prices to dollar will fly all over the place - but I simply don't see this all "going away".
Price increase has come from more and more people wanting to buy. Each day more people own bitcoin, and that will surely smooth out the market.
Maybe I'm wrong, and people will lose faith and dump - but I have to think that whilst technology enables more and more people to buy, the market will expand and the price will rise.
If I have no over-riding reason to use a crypto currency (I'm not a drug lord for instance) then I have a choice. I know that the odds are stacked against me in a casino or other gambling, I do not know enough about the stock market, so why not replace my bingo with buying a few bitcoin?
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What's the point of having a blockchain, if you have to go off it in order for it to be any use?
We've just created a slow but supposedly extra secure means of transaction which isn't any actual real-world use. It's supposed to give us permanence and transparency, but then we have to use other systems that we have to trust (and presumably also pay) in order to actually do anything.
So what's the point of using the blockchain at all? Why not just use VISA? They already work, don't wildly fluctuate in value, and have lower transaction costs than Bitcoin (when you take into account the exchanges).
I don't know about Etherium, but Bitcoin transactions are only temporarily free. At some point, they'll have mined all the Bitcoins allowed. At which point either the miners will need paying per transaction, or they'll vote to keep paying themselves by minting more free new Bitcoins (so the goldbugs start crying about inflation), or the miners stop mining and the whole thing collapses.
Not everyone has access to credit cards. In some countries, mobile phones are more common than bank accounts.
And there is no intrinsic need to convert it to fiat in order to use it. People would would accept Bitcoin in exchange for dollars, would also accept Bitcoin in exchange for goods and services. Supposing Bitcoin continues to grow in popularity, it's only a matter of time until the goods and services you want can be got with Bitcoin directly.
Bitcoin miners already receive fees for transactions. It hasn't been free to use for years.
O'rly.
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/hackers-seize-32-million-in-parity-wallet-breach/
http://fortune.com/2017/07/18/ethereum-coindash-ico-hack/
And the current is incredibly volatile and subject to manipulation, same as any crypto currency.
And their primary use seems to be to enable cybercriminals to monetise their exploits.
When government finally wakes up they'll ban crypto currency trading.
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
I haven't actually used these currencies so I'm not sure how the "proof-of-stake" alternatives to "proof-of-work" are coming along, but it strikes me that the existing mining model is essentially insane; a frantic digital race to waste more power than the other guys to ensure your version of the truth prevails.
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