Bitcoin Forum

Is bitcoin really viable as a peer-to-peer electronic cash?

Due to high transaction costs and slow transaction speeds, how can we ever use bitcoin to purchase, for example, a Sprite and a bag of potato chips at a gas station? If I want to send a micropayment, for example, of 1000 sats on-chain I can pretty much forget about it because miners can’t afford to and as a result the transaction hangs out in the memepool indefinitely. I had a lot of hope for lightning network, but I am now starting to have doubts about its long-term success. What happens when someone using lightning wants to settling a microtransaction on the bitcoin blockchain?

How secure is bitcoin really?

Remember when cz binance wanted to people to thank him for not ordering a re-org to recover lost funds? Isn't bitcoin mining dangerously centralized? What if in the future there is a terrorist attack by government or other criminal orgs that involve bombing or burning large bitcoin mining facilities?

Satoshi writes in the bitcoin white paper that we propose a solution to the double spending problem, but has this really been achieved? Double spends are still possible with a 51% attack, so what solution to double spending has been achieved? Can't large mining pools conspire to attack bitcoin?

These are concerns I have for the long-term viability and intrinsic value of bitcoin.

This is a really valid question. At current transaction rate, it really worries me about the future of bitcoin as a successful currency. It is simply not feasible to use bitcoin for micro payments. If you want to buy a Sprite and a bag of potato chips at a gas station, you would definitely want to use fiat or card payment. Because that is cheap and convenient. Same with me!

There are two options available for us to use bitcoin for micropayments. Either we use pre paid cards like Polispay or we can use LN. If you want to know how LN works, you can read the below article,

https://cointelegraph.com/lightning-network-101/what-is-lightning-network-and-how-it-works

Lightening network is definitely a good solution but it needs to be more user friendly before it can become popular. But it is also gaining momentum slowly among the regular crypto users. So it's just a matter of time before it becomes an obvious choice.

Can you use coins and paper notes to pay for an online order? No. Does that mean that coins and paper notes are not viable forms of cash? No. The fact that Bitcoin is not the best option for certain kinds of transactions does not mean that it is not viable.

The proper question is, "are there any kinds of transactions in which Bitcoin is a viable option?" The answer to that is probably yes.


There are so many bitcoin mining facilities that I don't think that is a real danger. There are many more bitcoin mining facilities than there are Federal Reserve offices.


Keep in mind that every monetary system is vulnerable to some kind of attack. There is never any perfect solution.

All your concerns are on point and in as much as i hate to say, the current state of bitcoin and the entire cryptocurrencies is far from what was promised and proposed by satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin was to provide a decentralized financial system where transactions can be reversed but what cz planned on doing shows that people who are good with programing and codings will always have there way around bitcoin networks. For bitcoin to hit mainstream, the entire current operating model has to shift to a more palatable concepts that was promised

Not for small transactions. And it was clear since first price right after 2010. We can't send 10.000 bitcoins to order a Pizza like old days. :)
As suggested above, it's time to rise awarness about problems in bitcoin and how to deal with it. Using lightening network is a good option but it's not yet friendly use for everybody even for well experienced users. Personally, i faced a lot of troubles while trying to use Blue-Wallet which is considered one of the great wallets using LN .

I dont think so. For sure not main branch Bitcoin itself.
There must be developed second layer solutions like we have already btw Lighting Network because fees will be much lower, transactions will be much faster etc
Bitcoin is best as global store of value, digital gold that is better than gold in many ways.

about 51% attack Andreas Antonopolous made great video explaining this, in short this is not viable attack in many terms, mostly money and things you can actually achieve by this attack (not much)
so this is least of my worries in terms of Bitcoin security

Well, a 51% attack on the Bitcoin network would cost the attacker ~$290,000 per hour.
By comparison, a 51% attack on BCash for 1 hour costs only $8,502 and on Bitcoin Scam Vision it is just $5,626 /hour
You can checkout https://www.crypto51.app/ to look at the theoretical costs of a 51% attack on different chains.

I strongly believe that for someone who controls that much bitcoin hashing power it would be more profitable to mine properly than to make a double spend.

bitcoin is no longer considered a digital cash for the unbanked.
(tx fee's are more then a days labour for some 3rd world countries)
now its become deemed as the digital gold for custodian/bank vaults. while other networks let you use their pegged tokens(banknotes pretending to be gold value) so that other networks offer the 'digital cash'

..
as for the viability of the peer-to-peer. thats becoming more centralised to business-to business
if developers keep pushing people to use these alt networks in their ploy to make bitcoin the vaulted digital gold reserve business model. then independent users wont be even using bitcoins network daily so wont see any advantage to be full nodes for it.
instead they will just want to check the vault(the locked real btc) once a month or 2. and they will do this via their alt network custodian wallet provider.

..
transaction fee's have been coded to increase. there were many ways to code fee's better to remain low. but those methods were ignored because it went against the business model of shifting users to alt networks

luckily im an early adopter and have enough coins to not worry about fee's compared to the coinage i have so im sticking with bitcoin to hoard my value. but bitcoin has totally lost and continues to lose its electronic peer-to-peer electronic cash status for average joe that just wants to buy things with bitcoin

(pre-empt all the LN fangirls adverting their alt-network. pretending it is btc(its not))
note LN is not a unique feature for btc. other coins can do it. so if another coin like LTC has cheaper onchain fees and less block confirm time. LN wont make btc any better but instead make people want to use LN with LTC.. thus LN wont help btc

With the help of lighting Network we should be rest assure for micro payment on Bitcoin. This network is fast in terms of micro payment, also remember that, this doesn't need block confirmation but instantaneous in operation. Though, this technology is still be working upon for the betterment of the bitcoin transaction. Bitcoin is Still at the early stage of development and when time come everything needed for the micro payment will be activated.

the purpose of creating bitcoin has never been to replace fiat and let people use it for all their day-to-day purchases like a "bag of potato chips". the purpose is to create a decentralized currency and give people the financial sovereignty that they can never have while using centralized fiat while relying on corrupted banks.
that doesn't mean huge fees are acceptable though.

if anything the CZ clowning proved that bitcoin mining is decentralized and bitcoin is the most immutable currency that has ever existed. idiots like CZ will always try to make money from bitcoin and when their stupidity leads to losses (shitty platform getting hacked) they look to bitcoin to bail them out but it won't.

That right there is a huge misconception.

Even if CZ wanted to do a rollback, he would've failed anyway. It's not that CZ changed his mind to save Bitcoin's reputation, it's just that it wasn't going to be possible in his case.

Also, you're probably referring to huge enterprise miners not "people who are good with programing and codings".

Will the emergence of quantum computers affect Bitcoin's password security?

It definitely will. Hypothetically, quantum computers are powerful enough to break sha-256 encryption. The problem is there is no quantum computers yet. If they were exist today, that would be a problem for the bitcoin protocol, it would be already dead. The main advantage of bitcoin, however, is the fact that Bitcoin is open source software, which means everyone can contribute in it and develop some solutions for better quantum resistance of bitcoin. I assume it is going to be easier to do than inventing of powerful enough quantum computer. I don't know if it is possible to mine bitcoin using quantum computer, but it would also require some changes in the protocol to avoid possible centralization of mining or 51% attack.

Not sure what you specifically mean by Bitcoin's "password security", but potentially yes. Tell you what though, we're going to potentially have BIGGER problems if Bitcoin's encryption can be cracked.

I have (like the others here) also no clue what you mean by 'password security'.  :)
The Bitcoin protocol uses two different algorithms: ECDSA for signing and SHA256 to create the public address and calculate a block hash.

Theoretically it would be possible to break ECDSA and calculate the private key from the public key (Shor's algorithm).
So if you had a wallet without a single outgoing transaction, there would also be no public key for the quantum computer.

Should it ever be possible to break SHA256, we would have much worse problems, because SHA256 is also used for all SSL certificates.

I did not understand what problem could be with Bitcoin's security. But be sure that it is extremely secure. Moreover, you are completely free to join the network and mining on this security. This is one of the main reasons for the high reliability of the network.
But if we are talking about wallet security here, then the situation is different. Each wallet holder must secure his own wallet. We could not be expected to rely on a wallet already protected by another person. These issues have been discussed both in this forum and in all other channels for years. There are people who have a lot of technical knowledge working on it. So I don't think there's anything to worry about.

Quantum computers exist. Quantum computers just hasn't reached the level to pose a threat to encryption standards in the current day. Hypothetically, quantum computers can break ECDSA (and other asymmetrical algorithms) with Shor's algorithm. Quantum computer can theoretically weaken SHA256 (and symmetrical algorithms) but to a point whereby it's still very very hard to break it.

he did want a rollback and he did try so hard to make it happen and he did fail.
he even contacted a lot of mining pools and miners trying to convince/bribe them into rolling back the blocks and reversing his embarrassment but he never succeeded. it is impossible to perform such a thing but his lack of success was not just because of impossibility but also because all those miners are also protecting their investment and are well aware that a rollback is practically end of bitcoin's immutability, not to mention the death of that mining pool since all miners would stop using it right away.
then he tried to save face by saying he "changed his mind" instead of saying "i failed miserably". that is why i refer to him as a clown ;)

If a terrorist attack needs to happen and bomb all mining facilities then those attacks would need to happen all over the world and maybe sparkle a WWIII.
In this case, if Bitcoin is going to be shut, fiat currencies are going to be over inflated.
In conclusion, there is no way that Bitcoin is going to be harmed and not fiat currencies as well, the opposite cannot happen though.

Precisely. Hence why we had a good amount of FUD that month, with heavily misinformed people thinking and saying that a big name such as CZ could roll-back the chain if he wanted to. One thing's for sure, the PoS(piece of s proof of stake) aficionados were euphoric LMAO.

Thank you for correcting me. That is the field that I am yet to explore. Still, if quantum computers are strong enough to decode hashes, it will be urgent to implement some other hashing algorithm strong enough for succesfully resist against quantum attacks. I guess, this also applies to the possibility of deriving private keys from public keys. I am wondering what will happen to mining industry if there are quantum computers able to easily calculate the correct number i.e they will be doing proof of work much faster than other miners.

I think this is too protective of Bitcoin. Any fiat allows buying something cheap as well as something expensive. Bitcoin also allows buying something cheap, but it can cost A LOT. And it seems to me that the majority of daily transactions are small. When I go to the supermarket, I spend $10-$30 but very rarely more than that. And paying about 7% in transaction fees in this situation is just ridiculous. I hope there will be a solution allowing to avoid high fees because otherwise Bitcoin will have quite a narrow use case as money, not something to buy groceries.

Should it at some point be possible to use a quantum computer for mining and assuming it would solve hashing significantly faster, the difficulty would skyrocket after 2016 blocks (at the next diff adjustment).
After that, one would only be able to mine with this quantum computer - No ASIC would find a block anymore.
Similar as if you would want to mine with a GPU now.

No it's not. If you consider bitcoin as a spendable then you'll always be bother by its price and you'll always be at loss whenever the bitcoin goes high which is not right for me. The fact that bitcoin is volatile, don't think about you could spend it like a fiat currency coz you'll literally spending its future value, you might regret at the end. Best to do when buying online is to have a digital payment processor like paypal or bitpay coz it will costs you less than getting it done with bitcoin, just add the fact that there are massive transactions with bitcoin right now that drives higher fees.

All of your opinions are of the utmost importance.

But for me, the current state of bitcoins and entire cryptocurrency has been largely ignored and proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto's promises. Because bitcoin and whole cryptocurrency I would say is not stable at the moment. Because bitcoin is a decentralized type of financier and if it is used in a peer to peer electronic transaction like buying a bottle of soft drinks and a pack of potato chips at a gasoline station is not possible.

Because even I am beginning to doubt the long-term success of bitcoin and cryptocurrency because I can also say that it has not been stable until now. And in my opinion, it can't be used for peer to peer electronic cash and the only bitcoin can do.

Today one of the best transactions is with the use of the online payment and one of these is with the use of the bitcoin or cryptocurrency which is more efficient and reliable because of the transparency of the transactions of the payments or transferring of funds only. Many people today are choosing the bitcoin because of its security and avoid getting easily hacked by the person who aims to get immediate funds.
Most of the security features today are with the use of email verifications, mobile number verification requirements and the two-way authentication with KYC verifications to identify their new users' information and credentials to make it easier to locate the history of it.


The use of the bitcoin transaction today are widely accepting which is a good chance and many popular people now are using the crypto so it is looks like promoting the use of the crypto or bitcoin in some cases the bitcoin are rapidly increasing on it number of users which is a good time for adaptation.

Damn, you used a lot of "because" on your sentence.
Anyway, you can never expect bitcoin to have a stable price. Again, you are also wrong when you said crypto currency as a whole at the moment have no stable price. Did you forget about stable coins? They actually do have stable price!
If you are looking for stable price, go use those stable coins. And why isn't it possible to buy your "potato chips" with bitcoin?

If the transactions are really started through crypto, then I think now lightning network is the only solution, cause the main purpose of creating lightning network is to make the transaction easier and faster. You know that lightning network are created to make quick payment but small payment. This is the only easy way to buy these kind of small grocery items and till now LN is in under development phase, If the use of BTC increases in daily life then it is confirmed that the use of LN will also increase in near future.

It's not like all mining farms are located in one place, so it's impossible for a non-government group to deal a significant blow to mining. If a government, right now it would be China, would close down all mines in their country, it would be quite painful to the network, but it would stabilize after some time - new mines would open around the world due to the hashrate dropping, old mining equipment would become profitable again. Bitcoin mining is really resilient by design, the fact that after 10 years there was no successful attacks means a lot, during this time alts got attacked many times.

Very interesting question, basically bitcoin was created not because want to replace fiat in my opinion. So several small transactions
like buying a sprite and potato chips is better to use fiat actually. Therefore the ideal bitcoin as an alternative currency. Bitcoin security
related issues are quite safe in my opinion and what CZ are worried about bitcoin, until now it has not been proven about the transaction
rollback. And do not be confused between the security of bitcoin with the security of online wallets, because they are two different things.

Thanks for bringing this up as they are questions i do imagine within myself msot of the time.  Everything you pointed out is one point and i strongly believe that the current usage of bitcoin is entirely different from the concert behind it. Bitcoin was created to offer a decentralized currency to serve as a competitor with the Fiat currencies but Alas, bitcoin os currently use for speculative purposes majorly to make profit

Governments want us to live in a cashless society so that they could  have full control over transactions. After such a system is developed, we will no longer be able to make peer-to-peer deals without surveillance. Bitcoin is a way to opt-out from cashless future. Bitcoin is a better version if what we have had before. It's better than gold, cash and, more importantly, it gives us a freedom to trade on a free market. We can't do free markets nowadays since money has become a state property. Bitcoin gives people a choice.

Bitcoin is more store of value than electronic cash. At least, without layer 2. Conformation take to much time and fees are still high. But its important for the industry as indicator and main enter point into it

Undoubtedly, bitcoin as electronic cash has some drawbacks, for example, transactions are not instant like it is happening during physical cash transactions. We don't pay fees to miners upon transfering our cash. However, most of the "drawbacks"  bitcoin has were implemented on purpose. In order for bitcoin to be digitally scarce asset with the level of network security we have never seen before, it needs to have incentives for miners that support the network and make it almost impossible to double spend our non-physical asset. It is impossible for electronic cash to be digitally scarce, secure, dis-intermediated, decentralized without some concessions made by developers and community.

We Should answer this question by addressing how secure the blockchain is.

The security of blockchain runs on many levels:
• Interrelated Blocks
• Generation of a strong Hash
• Processing time of each block
• Proof of Work
• Consensus

At the same time :


• anyone with the block can verify it making it very secure , they can proof read it anytime , at the same time this tackles corruption.

Now , people are scared about the Hyper Over Quantum computers. Reason for that :

One can use this 10 minute processing time to find out the exact hash and then replace it skillfully.

But at the same time :
1. Not everyone can afford
2. Targeting People needs sources , so keep changing your address if you are holding a lot .
3. Use a strong secure network , follow the security procedures like making sure you don't have any softwares which is from unidentified sources , there is like a whole different topic about what you can do .
4. Privacy :')

More or so I would like to extend this to say that :

If you are using any bank account and keeping funds in it , it's more secure than that . Blockchain is something of the future , undoubtedly we need more improvements but *right now I do think it's the next best thing*

Thus :

It's super secure if used wisely.

_________________________________________________________

Fun fact about Blockchain:

It was actually invented way before Mr. Satoshi implemented it .
The idea dates back to the 1990's where people were thinking of using it for notary and stuff.

But the idea got recognition only by Mr. Satoshi , who made it known to the world.

I believe Andreas Antonopoulos explained it several times in various videos, but my personal fav is the following:

https://youtu.be/ncPyMUfNyVM

Within just 2 minutes he explains that 51% attack can not be done with Bitcoin any more(and the video was uploaded in 2015! Much less it is possible with the current Bitcoin's hashrate).

In short, what the attackers could achieve would be creation of an alternative blockchain, which no one except them would join. "And we'll carry on with our coin(BTC), and they can go mine whatever the hell they want on their alternative blockchain"(c)

 Question 1
That is a problem, but for me I use bitcoin to by products that are online - if the shopping site accepts it- but in places like store, stall,mall. I already will convert bitcoin before going I don't know but can more bitcoin ATM help in this problem?

   Question 2
Your safety is measured by what you do
+ What you do to protect yourself
+ How you go by with social media
+ Careful characteristics
+ Read -even down to terms and conditions of things-. Generally speaking you are your safety

So far, bitcoin is behind in its slow transaction speed and high transaction fees. than Ripple and Tron but these coins are behind regarding Bitcoin's popularity among the investors. there are lots of attempts of these coins to promote themselves to get popularity from the investors but no luck at all. these only indicated that Bitcoin is hard to overcome by those new coins that have both the speed and lower transaction fees. we also have the lightning network technology ongoing development and we are still in its early stage. Right now, all eyes are on BTC price and everyone is not bothered by its slow transaction speed.

I think everything is fine no and already back to normal not like last week when the Fees are really Grow high and it is harder to withdraw a small crypto because your money will just go with the Transaction fee.


No i disagree,yeah Bitcoin is not created to replace Fiat but buying Soda and Chips?lol in japan you can do that so why not avail if Crypto is offering us to use such transaction?

Increasingly, I see people switching to altcoins. If you had all your money in Fiat right now, what would you invest it in?

You are right, majority of people in cryptospace are just after the profit and certain increases they will add to their investments due to it's nature of going up and down as a result of volatility. To truly achieve the vision of satoshi Nakamoto, a lot of improvement needs to be done across cryptocurrency network and when the various underlying challenges get solved, we would definitely see more adoption and new people making use of cryptocurrency for their daily transactions

Investing in altcoins is an option only for very experienced day traders. If you are not one of them, don't even think of stepping on this risky path. They say, Bitcoin is volatile, but in fact it's pretty stable compared to some alts. Also the probability of it going down to zero, is far less than that for any of alts. Nevertheless, even with BTC, don't invest money that you may need in the near future, lest you end up selling at lower price than you paid for it.

Yes it is. Actually, the transaction speed is maybe not high enough because it depends of miners an the technology of the devices they use. Time after time we will see miners using a new technology and this will make transactions much faster than before. Halving will help about this, after each halving, the non-profitable and and old generation of the miners should leave the network or upgrade their devices. Otherwise, they will lose money instead of taking profit. I think the transaction speed will increase time after time and this factor won't be a problem real soon. However, you can pay more transaction fee and make the transaction look like instant-transaction.

Many people doubt bitcoin to be used as a currency, because transactions using bitcoin are considered slow and expensive. Especially with
volatile bitcoin prices make merchants or shops hesitant to accept payments. Though the perception is not correct, because if we transfer
funds using a bank is longer and more expensive than bitcoin. For the problem of volatile bitcoin prices, can convert to stablecoins every
time you receive a payment. And one more thing don't think of bitcoin as a substitute fiat, because it's wrong thinking. Because bitcoin is
only an alternative payment.