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What are the negatives of bitcoin if you think there are?

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#2
clemens said:
The massive resource it require is one point and the volatility is another, what else?
Click to expand...

I know this is not what you're asking about but it's worth mentioning that fiat money systems use much much more resources. Also the volatility isn't the feature of the design - it's simply a symptom of the "early adoption" stage (yes, we are still early adopters).

One thing that could be seen as "negative" is that the user must be responsible and can lose his money much easier than fiat.
 
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#3
There is not really a negative side of the bitcoin in my opinion. People can use it or don't, I can only see opportunities over bad things.
 
#4
clemens said:
The massive resource it require is one point
Click to expand...
It is all very relative, you can compare the resources used to:

- fiat/forex - how many people are employed in currency exchanges, sitting there all day to exchange dollars to euros for a spread? How many people are employed by Western Union etc.? How many people work in banks on completely bulls**t positions. The ecosystem of money transfers employs millions of people directly or indirectly. And they f**k it up anyways as you could've seen in 2008.

- gold - yes sure, get soil from a mine, possibly illegally with the help of some poor people in Papua New Guinea or Congo or Chile... Then extract the metal in a way that is harmful to the environment and to the people doing it. Then transport the metal to another country where it is melted into nice bars of various sizes. Then sell it and put it underground again - into a safe or a vault.

Bitcoin uses electricity? More than the entire consumption of some countries? Maybe... is that a negative?
Not really if the electricity consumption doesn't hurt anyone. Some researches say 75%+ of Bitcoin mining is from renewable resources.

The economical incentives behind Bitcoin lead to the miners being in locations where power is cheap and abundant and otherwise would be wasted.
Think of places like:
- remote regions in China and Mongolia with energy from hydro power plants and no network to transfer it anywhere else. Set up a mining operation, use the energy and help local economy.
- places like Iceland with geothermal power and no possibility to transfer energy 2000 km across ocean. Instead use the energy to mine Bitcoin and for heating.
- places like Permian basin where there already exists oil mining that produces natural gas as a by-product. 150 billion cubic metres of natural gas wasted every year with zero use. This gas was/is usually burned and wasted on the spot because it was too cheap to transport it and sell as LNG. When you see an oil tower with fire on top, it is burning natural gas uselessly, instead you can use the energy to mine Bitcoin in a decentralized way.
- places with subsidized electricity like Venezuela, the government is evil but at least you get free electricity, so if possible use it to live outside of the local fiat system (whether you prefer dollar or bitcoin, both are better than local currency).

When you think of it this way, Bitcoin is actually very eco-friendly and wastes much less resources, fossil fuels and people's time than banking system and than gold.

________________________
Back to the original question - what are the negatives?
- it is probably still too small to be taken seriously
- it is a market easy to manipulate with whales and margin trading
- the original idea can be destroyed by ill-intentioned exchanges that don't really have all bitcoin they claim and that block user accounts. Think of fractional banking moved into the cryptocurrency world.
- it is not fully fungible so bad actors (evil governments and evil corporations helping them) can trace some transactions
 
#6
Bitcoin is still associated with uncertainty, many do not know what to think about it and you divide it into two groups - good and bad.
For some people - if you mention the word bitcoin, you will be compared to a criminal.
The biggest problem is probably that many people have not become familiar with the topic of Bitcoin and therefore can be fooled by stupid rumors
 
#7
It's a social construct, more so than a technical one. And thus it has no inherent value besides a belief in its value shared by a group that has reached and crossed a certain critical mass to obtain and support its current market cap. And should that belief fall back below a critical mass, there is little to justify any valuation at all.
 
#8
As for the downsides, look at it as an early-stage startup investment - risks of superior competition arising, regulatory choking, development errors, etc. I see energy waste as an asset because it protects the ledger's integrity. You can't change Bitcoin's transaction history without burning through a fortune of an empire. The tech is over a decade old by now but there are challenges to overcome which can't be solved with sober logic. Bitcoin is ready when all world settles day-to-day transactions on it.

It's a necessary counter-force against the communist-style central planning economy, and I hope it succeeds.
 
#11
maureen lewis said:
The main negatives of bitcoin is that it is very volatile, Its value fluctuates. It is still not widely accepted and there may be risk involved as It is not much protected.
Click to expand...
actually not anymore
if you look how volatility in bitcoin collapsed over the course of last 3 years you would be amazed

5 years ago it was unthinkable to have mid double digit annualized....


all because of stablecoins. look how tether became the number 1 application on ethereum network for several months already
 
#16
@reesek : how to reliably get verified accounts while you can?? Funding almost always must come from accounts linked to verified id....(or crypto - my post yesterday...kyc is being used to slow/channel/direct the flow into cryptos = a negative for BTC)

@khinkali : good point - so you "get as many verified" as you can now....then they slowly freeze all assets one account at a time as kyc gets stricter.
 
#17
You guys turning this thread into a different directon, thread closed, please open a new one relevant to the answers and questions you see below the thread.
 
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