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Efficient in what way? Process more transactions? Take your pick of any other Crypto Currency, and all can handle more than BTC at the moment. All depends on block size and time. Increase block size and/or reduce time and you can handle much more.
Just sayin'> @randvegeta said:
I reckon more people in the world have heard or read about crypto currencies than IPv6.
and IPv6 has been a "thing" since, what, 1999? while crypto currencies were not long ago born.
I do genuinely agree that crypto currencies are the future, however I think they will be most dominant in the form of tokes for services (talking Golem type stuff)
Blockchain has many applications and it may even be widely used one day. But how or why could people be left behind? That seems rather unfair and punitive to late commers.
Name one application where it beats something that existed long before it
Having an immutable public ledger that is stored and distributed across the planet and verifiable to all is a powerful thing. In theory, the block chain cannot be controlled by any one entity so you could put data on the block chain and it would be an unchangeable reference. And it would be indisputable for as long as that block chain exists.
It cannot be forged, or amended. You don't think this is powerful?
Other currencies are gaining traction fast and could overtake BTC, its not like if BTC is doomed all others are doomed, just check coinmarketcap if you dont believe me. BTC can also change its not like it can never be altered to accept higher amounts of traffic, there is still hope for BTC. What I mean is like this.
Old people said, computers and internet are stupid/ They are now left behind. BTC at least now is something you need to learn to use. I believe the earlier you get into these currencies the better off you will be.
young people and people being born will grow up with the new currencies, like how young people grew up with the internet. They wont be left behind.
You can get a sense of Bitcoin relevancy by its market cap. It is 39 Billion right now. It might seem like a big number, but it's not. Bitcoin is still very obscure.
Also, Bitcoin is very volatile, which makes it hard to use as a payment method.
Cryptos, in general, are definitely the future, but for most people, it is just a pain to use.
You conveniently dodged the question
In what way will they be left behind?
In theory, BTC CAN change, but what makes you think it will? Plenty of other Crypto Currencies are technically better than BTC and yet they pale in comparison with regards to usage and market cap. BTC is the defacto standard, and all other Crypto currencies rise and fall in line with BTC.
I'm not saying the failure of BTC will be the failure of block chain or crypto. But in many ways, LTC, Etherium and other crypto are already better, and yet they are smaller. BTC has the first mover advantage and it will be hard for other Cryptos to really get the same level of traction. The fundamental problems of BTC are still somewhat present in other Cryptos any way. Just to a lesser extent.
How do you figure?
You want something specific?
Digital ID
Contracts (and Smart Contracts)
Proof of ownership
Proof of existence/ authenticity
Proof of an action
Historical Record Keeping
Distributed Storage
There is literally not s single working example of a blockchain-based alternative to any of these
You may as well have added "end war" and "solve hunger" to that list
What happened to the customer being #1? I'd rather pay a company the TX fee for PayPal and use it instead.
then...
then...
He answered the question spot-on. You can dispute the value of an immutable public ledger, but there has been no public ledger in history before it that has had this property.
Companies are experimenting with Blockchain tech for complex supply chain management, as one example. Of course this isn't home page news - not like the sexier BTC price explosions. But it can potentially solve quite a number of obscure yet important issues in supply chains.
Also @texteditor , if you don't like the answer, you can't just accuse someone of dodging the question if he answered it. You might be 14 for all I know - but you should learn how to discuss things properly on this forum.
I think cryptos will be modern gold, essentially. Gold has less practical uses as a material but is still the traditional go-to for wealth storage. Crypto could possibly supplement that or even usurp that role.
But just imagine if a country scrapped its central bank and put its monetary policy in the Blockchain. How would this country fare with this much volatility? And predilection towards completely uncontrollable manipulation? The Fed gets a lot of crap from Libertarians, but compared to what a leveraged free market could do to a country.......
Umm.. of course there are no working examples of this.. It's a new technology. But the point is Block chain can implement all of these things. It cannot solve world hunger or end war. That's just stupid.
There is actually some data stored in BitCoin's block chain now that are unrelated to 'financial transaction data'. But BTC cannot realistically be used for that since 1MB blocks are small and extremely expensive to process. But that would simultaneously make putting data in the Block Chain all the more valuable. Do you actually understand how block chain works or are you just trying to be argumentative for the sake of being argumentative? That's a serious question BTW.
Me too. I would not pay BTC if I had a choice to use credit card or Paypal. From a buyer's perspective.. it's easier, faster, cheaper and safer.
Sorry, I tell a lie. Smart contracts are a purely Block Chain based concept. A programmable contract. Not possible in BTC mind you, but it is the basis of Etherium.
Yes this seems more likely. In which case, the current limitations of BTC may not be an issue at all. In fact, if BTC becomes more like Gold, it would act as a global clearing system. Services could, and would be built on top of the BTC block chain which could in theory solve most, if not all the current limitations in BTC.
So if you imagine that BTC is like gold, gold would be an entirely impractical means of paying for goods and services as there simply isn't enough gold in the world to act as currency. So you can end up with a currency backed by BTC in the same way most currencies were backed by gold. You obviously cannot exchange $1 for any amount of gold, but collect enough dollars and hey you can get your bar of gold. The difference being, with a public ledger, you can make sure that the issuer of your BTC backed 'currency' actually has the BTC available to back up their claims. It would be public, transparent and 100% verifiable.
Essentially, this would be moving small BTC transactions off the block chain, reserving the block chain for only higher value transactions. Much like a clearing house!
You are incorrect.
One example is digital ID: https://bitnation.co
This is not widely-adopted but the technology is being used and has not been defeated from a technical perspective. It works.
Nor is it completely unreasonable to think that records like vehicle history reports or property titles could be better stored in a blockchain. Just because governments move at a snail's pace doesn't mean it's a frivolous idea.
I'd give you a cookie, but that would be impractical. How about a free VPS? XD
For chinese they can write german pretty well.
So with the prohibitively high BTC TX fees is there an altcoin contender users prefer for payment?
this ^
I see young people left behind with computers as well. They're all using android silo services made to use without understanding. How many young people have any grip on crypto, let alone BTC? I don't think that's going to change.
It's not long ago that gold was used directly in my area because it's a gold mining culture here. But even then it was not everybody, and basically only the few on the inside of the "industry". That's the same as Bitcoin. Only a few will grasp the technology and participate at that basic level. The only future of crypto currencies involving everybody will be in some easy to use up front secondary version - much like credit cards today. - 2¢
https://z.cash/
No.
BTC is a fixed fee, Paypal is a percentage. Major difference on 1k$ payment.
Not only that - there is a blockchain system running already with some EU based banks to cross-verify TARGET2 and SEPA transfers, this is only demo obviously and not public (never will be either) but it is one field where it has major advantages as you simply do not need to trust the Iranian central bank has actually sent that wire (aside that eg. SWIFT is insanely insecure by design, as we have seen before).
That are primarily Russians, you see that on the wrong encoded ö/ä/ü in mail replies always.
No Germany/Austria based spammer would ever use German as language with a German host, and no foreign spammer would use vicsocks in DE to sign up and actually speak German then.
But fees are set in satoshis, and with the price, even in satoshis, is rising, meaning the fees are increasing in cost in USD terms faster than the rise in BTC price.
Basically, for BTC to be cheaper than Paypal, the transaction would need to be valued at more than $100, assuming an average size (kb) transaction.
Bare in mind if you have a lot of fragmented coins, it can cost a whole lot more. I was moving around a dozen coins and it ended up costing over $50 in fees, and this was before the price jumped over $1,600. So it would be more expensive now (around $70).
And as the number of transactions grows, the higher fees people will pay to ensure their transaction gets processed quickly. For an inherently deflationary system, the inflation on transaction fees is staggering!
Ethereum has more than half the market cap of Btc, when a few months ago it had next to nothing. I believe Btc will always be up there but there could easily be a whole new top currency in like a year. Ethereum also basically always is on its steady path of growth regardless of what the other currencies are doing.
The price of ether has jumped $150 in 1 month alone. That's a price rise of 3x. There can be no justification for such a price rise without a corresponding increase in 'economic' activity.
Most crypto price increases seem to be about speculation, and I would imagine that is particularly true of ether.