As somebody who has held cryptocurrency for years and codes Solidity, never before have I seen a dumber market than this. Every time valid criticisms come forward, they're met with articles like this. The articles are usually convincing to people with limited understanding of economics or technology, so they keep quiet. "Open source money" and "blockchain is the future" sound like very convincing arguments to justify these ludicrous sums of money. What they neglect to address is that...
A) Bitcoin is congested with transactions and takes hours to process some of them
B) Bitcoin fees are through the roof, it sometimes costs as much as 25% of the value of a transaction to send it
C) The upgrades to fix these problems are extremely slow - scaling hasn't been solved for years, because different parties keep fighting for control over the currency codebase and shooting down each others' attempts to upgrade it
D) Bitcoin is still, objectively, centralized. Almost all of the miners are based in industrial regions like China, and belong to a small monopoly of mining pools. All of the exchanges are centralized, and are well-known for losing clients' money. The big banks are replaced by big whales, who will do anything in their power to manipulate markets for their gain.
E) Bitcoin addresses the technology perspective of sending money, but doesn't address any of the macroeconomic problems that arise from a deflationary, uncontrolled currency.
F) Bitcoin is not actually anonymous. Data science techniques can parse the blockchain and see sending patterns between different accounts. They map these patterns to various identities. If those identities can be mapped to a real person, say, when they cash out of an exchange, then it's known exactly how much Bitcoin they have.
If someone could write an article addressing these facts, rather than throwing out slogans like 'open source money', that would be nice.
A) Bitcoin is congested with transactions and takes hours to process some of them
B) Bitcoin fees are through the roof, it sometimes costs as much as 25% of the value of a transaction to send it
C) The upgrades to fix these problems are extremely slow - scaling hasn't been solved for years, because different parties keep fighting for control over the currency codebase and shooting down each others' attempts to upgrade it
D) Bitcoin is still, objectively, centralized. Almost all of the miners are based in industrial regions like China, and belong to a small monopoly of mining pools. All of the exchanges are centralized, and are well-known for losing clients' money. The big banks are replaced by big whales, who will do anything in their power to manipulate markets for their gain.
E) Bitcoin addresses the technology perspective of sending money, but doesn't address any of the macroeconomic problems that arise from a deflationary, uncontrolled currency.
F) Bitcoin is not actually anonymous. Data science techniques can parse the blockchain and see sending patterns between different accounts. They map these patterns to various identities. If those identities can be mapped to a real person, say, when they cash out of an exchange, then it's known exactly how much Bitcoin they have.
If someone could write an article addressing these facts, rather than throwing out slogans like 'open source money', that would be nice.