Bitcoin Forum

I wanted to know how bitcoin is useful to community and what are the advantages of this currency above other P2P or electronic currencies. If you like you can share disadvantage too.

Please share your thoughts.

Thanks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joITmEr4SjY

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/dam/assets/140408165335-bitcoin-washington-620xa.jpg

The advantage over other cryptocurrencies is that it is the first, and as a result its codebase is the most tested and established, it is the most well known and by far the most valuable in terms of fiat exchange price. The importance of the latter is frequently dismissed by people who must somehow not require food, clothing, housing, utilities and so on.

All those advantages could change over time if an altcoin shows clear technical superiority and as a result gains a following and then media attention. But three points make that difficult:
1) Greed. Most altcoin creators and promoters seem to just want to make a quick buck by pumping-and-dumping
2) Innovation. Bitcoin solved some very deep problems compared to national fiat money. An altcoin successor must recognise *genuine* problems with Bitcoin and provide *genuine* solutions. Changing a line in the code to cutt block generation time to 1 minute won't cut it.
3) Adaptability. If the bitcoin community sees a clear improvement has been made with an altcoin, those features can be incorporated into bitcoin. Not easily to be sure - it almost certainly requires a hard-fork and a prior year or two gathering consensus. But it can be done.

advantages
1. no need to waste money making business plans just to convince a bank to give you a business account, and then pay fee's to add electronic payment systems... bitcoin can work with just a QR code on a piece of paper.. no need for banks or payment service providers

2. send funds across into any country without delay or fee's

3. sell products from your house, street market, website without card processing equipment.

4. no worries of chargebacks or non-payment. bitcoin is an electronic cheque, once signed and handed over the funds are yours guaranteed.

5. you can send someone $1billion or half a penny, without any difference to the method, time, hassle or hindrance

6. no need to store customer payment details for 6 years, no risk of identity theft or hacking to gain customer payment details.

7. you can be as public as you like by announcing which address represents your employee's wage receiving address, making it completely public. or keep it completely a secret where no one will know who or what the transactions are for

8. funds can be used as a public vote. set up 2 addresses, the one with most tx's received wins

many more advantages, but i got bored of typing

I don't think there will be an altcoin powerful enough to gain the insanely strong network effect of BTC. The only other cryptocoin that can dethrone Bitcoin, is when TPTB replace cash with an e-currency which is based on financial credits, of course closed source. Basically, closed source e-fiat, a total nightmare.

haha...thanks for your time by typing this post, i agree these are some of the best advantages bitcoin has but don't you think most of these can be covered by other e-currencies also you lose identity when convert botcoins to fiat.

There are ways to mix bitcoins to clear links to activity. It's also possible to convert bitcoins to fiat with no identity using P2P exchanges like LocalBitcoins.com.

Yeah both points you highlighted are really good and i completely forgot about localbitcoins.com this way you can hide the identity but again this is an alternative not a solution, what you say?

i dont understand bitcoin really are because many defintion , our opinion but in my opinion bitcoin really help for people who lost their job or no job for people who's had financial problem or some people poor it can be way of gaining knowledge about what topic they want to know or help some people who had problem to help ,

this is what bitcoin really is not, a instrument to help the poor... it was not born for giving a quick buck, it was born for an alternative to fiat money and they centralized system,nothing else, yet people are still using for acquiring more fiat

people should do the opposite, convert all fiat to bitcoin

im new in this community sorry for what i said i just say my own opinion that is my know about bitcoin is and i dont know fiat means because like i said im new in this community many question about this community and i just study and read it to know what world is this  ;)

the bitcoin is one of kind digital currency that has no likeness,of course there is nothing perfect bitcoins does have it"s flaws
Bitcoin Advantages

(Freedom in Payment) :-With Bitcoin it is very possible to be able to send and get money anywhere in the world at any given time.
-You don’t have to worry about crossing borders, rescheduling for bank holidays, or any other limitations one might think will occur when transferring money
-You are in control of your money with Bitcoin. There is no central authority figure in the Bitcoin network.
(Control and Security);Allowing users to be in control of their transactions help keep Bitcoin safe for the network
(Very Low Fees);Currently there are either no fees, or very low fees within Bitcoin payments

Bitcoins can be called disadvantages.
Constantly increasing the size blockchain.
Very long transfers between wallets.
It is necessary to wait 6 evidence, and it is long!
Many believe that the end will come soon Bitcoins.

This is necessary as the need for data space will arise as soon as the network sees increasing transactions over time.


Nope. As far as I can remember, most wallet services only require 6 confirmations from the network before the balance appeared in the wallet. That will only take 30 minutes usually (in opposition to several days before you can flag a transaction complete in bank transfers). In case of importing wallets, it only takes several minutes before the process is done. I don't see how you consider that as long.


Necessary? Yes, so as to prevent double-spending. However, there are some clients who don't flag a transaction valid before it reach 120 blocks deep. See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Confirmation for more information.


This are only some of the factors that helped bitcoin see its way to where it is right now. Without the necessary safety precautions and measures that is being implemented in the coin, I don't see bitcoin going this far.

30 minutes - too long for me. Sometimes you need to quickly convert from one Bitcoin exchange for another. For this, I and many others are using other coins. This is for me the main drawback.
Very often it is necessary to wait more than 30 minutes (~60min). Although I pay a good commission.

Thanks guys slowly i am learning some new facts and will the transaction wait time will increase slowly?

Good Video and fine explanation, We need to learn a lot about bitcoins deeply, really useful comparing to other currencies, recently I came to understand that slowly people get to understand the bitcoin, hopefully if the bitcoin get introduced in Hyper markets around the world, it would be awesome to have the secure transactions with them,  I need aviation related should also deal with bitcoin.

converting fiat to bitcoins to buy things. or converting bitcoins to fiat to buy things is not what bitcoins are all about.. what you are taking about is the gateway services, not bitcoin itself..

bitcoin can be compared to bank notes. when paid in bank notes and buying things with bank notes, businesses do not need or care about identity. yet if you went to an exchange service to swap bank notes of $ for euro's then things get complicated where if you request more then $1000 the exchange starts to get interested in who you are.

 i have an income that is fully bitcoin (no conversion) i pay my bills in bitcoin so i never need to hand over my details. and thats what bitcoin is about. not the exchanges

So the only advantage of using bitcoins is the anonymity factor? Was that the only reason to have this crypto currency?

For me it's the fact that the currency can be converted into fiat and trading in it earns me a profit if the price increases. I don't bother much about the anonymity.

Yeah anonymity is one of the factor making it popular but this is not popular in all the countries as of now so if you have bitcoins then you need to convert them to fiat.

Daily number of transactions is increased since 2011, you can check this out: http://www.coindesk.com/data/bitcoin-daily-transactions/


~iki

i think there is three disadvantages of btc:
first:payment takes too much time
second:there is a %51 attack posibility
third:proof of work system because it is make you waste a lot of energy
fourth(not a disadvantage just choice):anonimity

other cryptocurrencies born to solve this issues if you paying attention to anonimity then go for monero,dash,cloak,crave,shadowcash
also dash is have instantx feature thats making the transactions so so fast at this time i have no word for others.

Those who have 51% of the capacity will never do bad for Bitcoin. It is not beneficial to him. Then I almost agree with you.

Actually you really need money to convert it to bitcoin if you want to make payment using bitcoin



You need to wait for the confirmation so I guess that is the delay and there is a fee per transaction but it is too low so it is not without payment



If there are still more advantages there must be a lot of disadvantages too, there are not all smooth things for bitcoin

There are only advantages and no disadvantages. It's the perfect money and cute single young virgin college girls will throw themselves at you if you use it to pay for everything in your life. Now get out there and buy some bitcoins so mine are worth more.

Bitcoin is useful for me because it allows me to easily accept payments from all over the world with essentially no fee. I tried selling my stuff on ebay, but there i got ebay taking fees (listing fees, item sold fee, ChargeBacks!)  and paypal taking fees, and often got robbed on the USD <> CAD conversion rate. with bitcoin it just feels much more Direct. also i like that it's actually possible to accept small payments, I sell a 30 pack of these General purpose bitcoin business cards to hand out (http://s7.postimg.org/myzxsuh6z/Untitled.png) for basically the cost of postage (~1.5$) accepting a buck fifty from someone in Australia is not possible without bitcoin.

Privacy. I use Bitcoin because I want privacy. Although Bitcoin transaction can be tracked but it require lots of work. And if I use a mixer... it will be almost impossible to track who I receive my Bitcoin from.

In the past, I've had many international wire transfers out of the US routinely blocked by my bank (it may have something to do with the countries I was sending money to). They would eventually clear after I called some compliance officer and explained who and what the money was for, but it was becoming a nuisance. Using bitcoins was one way to get around this inconvenience.

And both parts need to have a bank account in the first place. And probably will have to pay lots of fees to keep it.


Bank accounts aren't only a nuisance, but are expensive and hard to have.

its not about anonymity.. its about not needing to convert.

after all if you are american. do you even give a crap if there was a UK bank that needed your life history just to convert dollars to pounds.. no.. all you care about is that you can go to your local shop and hand over dollar bank notes and get goods for them without needing to show ID.

the argument is not about bitcoin conversion. it is about bitcoins usefulness AS BITCOIN.
for instance imagine a world where we all used gold. and someone invented a technology that gold was weightless so that we did not have to store it in banks in exchange for receipts that we swapped with people.

getting paid gold and knowing you can hand gold to people without converting it into bank paper is what is good about bitcoin. if all you care about is the value of bank paper and increasing bank paper. your missing the point of bitcoin.

its like you are american and you want to buy euros, not to buy things from places that accept euro's. not to convince businesses to accept euro's but purely to find ways to increase your dollars.
to me you might aswell go trade on stock and currency markets as you are not interested in bitcoin for bitcoins true purpose

One of the advantage of using bitcoin is because it is Untraceable. This is both a benefit and a risk for bitcoin. The benefit is that you don't have to be afraid of any organization of being able to trace the source of your funds. This is a clear benefit in many areas of the world because governments that are supposed to guard against fraud are actually defrauding people by taking their savings partially or fully.

So you mean with the increase in daily number of transactions there will be increase in wait time as well?

Yeah agree international transfer are easy with bitcoins but this can be used as money laundering and funding money to terrorist as well

Privacy is maintained until you are dealing in bitcoins only once this is converted to fiat, its gone.

This is giving birth to scam/fraud/money laundering which can be used against a country as well.

it depend how you do it, there are numerous way to still preserve your privacy after you have exchanged bitcoin to fiat

it depend also on the amount, small amount may go unnoticed

Yeah i know there are few methods to remain anonymous when changing to fiat but again those are alternatives you can't really rely on them.

For me the biggest advantage is this :

No centralized 3rd party needed for a transaction. {No banks / No PayPal / No Western Union}

These are the guys, stealing your money daily. {They charge us huge fees to spend our own money} They are also manipulated by governments and by people.

Take away the 3rd party, and you have less hassles. {This is also why I am against some 3rd party "service providers" entering the Bitcoin scene}

They are also manipulated by the same people and governments. {KYC / AML etc. etc.}

Bitcoin also has the advantage that the creator is unknown. {Nobody to sue, when these governments and people are looking for someone to blame, when they loose control}

Even banks require more time than 30 minutes to process a transaction. If you see that transactions being settled for more than 30 minutes but not more than an hour a drawback already, then you must find a new competitive service that completely outpaces bitcoin in many things. Without the necessary confirmations in the network, then even though you have some coins ready within a minute or 10 minutes, you'll have useless coins given to you because coins that are used in a transaction should be confirmed first by the network to ensure that these coins are valid enough to be spent.

Try to imagine the scenario that one day when you travel from a country to another, you don't even need to bring along different currencies and waste on the fees just to convert from one to another. You just need to have your bitcoins with you and practically buy just about almost anything. No worry about banks or credit cards anymore or giving away your private information. It's the freedom here we are talking about.

I know about the benefits of using bitcoin is a rule to transfer Bitcoin is not as complicated as FIAT, disadvantage susceptible to theft which is conducted the Hacker as it had happened before

How exactly you want to add more data to blockchain without increasing its size? Transfer times are not that long, bigger threat is double spending. You dont need to wait for 6 confirmations you are fine after just 1.
Many people before said that bitcoin won't survive. They all were wrong.

Well if you are moving from one country to another you can not buy all things from bitcoins, bitcoins are not popular in all countries and also if you need to convert that to fiat in different countries again its a long process.

It won't be soon. Think of it like this, we are paving the way for our grandkids to have a better world to live in. I don't think Martin Luther King or Malcolm X expected to see an end to racism in their lifetimes. I'm sure they were thinking of their children and grandchildren growing up in a better world.

I agree, not all countries have accepted bitcoin. and not even all of them know about it let alone trading bitcoin to fiat.
also it is worth mentioning that bitcoin is not legal in some countries.

To wait for 6 confirmations have to wait at least 1.5 hours. On the credit card does not appear after a Confirmed. This is for me a long time. Sometimes you need urgently money.
Size blockchain really for me does not matter. Memory for flash drives and hard drives grows all the time.

Yeah i agree it won't be soon like you said but it could be better for future generations.