What's your biggest problem with Bitcoin

[PeterGuinness]

What you're saying still isn't true because you are forgetting that loans can be used to cancel each other.  Here is a simple example:  image that Satoshi who is cold and has a broken arm has 50BTC, a forest of trees and food while hungry Ben has nothing but an axe.  Ben borrows 50Btc from Satoshi to be repaid at the end of the month with 10% interest.  Ben then buys the trees and some food from Satoshi for 50BTC.  Ben chops the trees into firewood which is now worth 55BTC.  Satoshi buys the wood with 50BTC cash and agreement to pay the extra 5BTC at the end of the month (effectively he is borrowing 5 virtual BTC from Ben).  At the end of the month Ben pays Satoshi 50BTC and they agree that the two debts of 5BTC cancel each other and that everything has been made good, ie: there is no debt remaining to anyone at all.  

The important thing to note is that without the use of loans Satoshi's trees would have never been chopped, Satoshi would remain cold and Ben would have starved!  There is nothing inherently wrong with interest bearing debt as long as it is used wisely.  Everyday around the world interest bearing debt facilitates trade that would not occur otherwise.

Why should ben buy the trees? He could offer his service and his axe to chop the trees for Satoshi and then get a decent meal from Satoshi.  So Ben is not hungry anymore. Satoshi still has his 50 BTC and no one owes anyone anything?

And your story would be a bit different in real life, the bitcoin loansharkt who will loan you the money do not want to buy back the trees, they will not make a deal with you where you get the same debt to cancel eachother out. You will build up and build up debt upon debt and then we are back again where we started from, a banking system and virtual BTC that has no backing at all by anything but an agreement between you and the loanshark, thus creating bitcoin out of thin air made possible.

....

The reason why I had Ben buy the tree was to keep the example simple-- ie, it used only two protagonists.  Obviously in real life there are maybe many other people involved, eg: Ben would loan the money from a bank as you pointed out.  However, it is conceivable that such a situation as I outlined could occur-- eg: Ben bought the trees because Satoshi didn't need them all (all the wood was really worth 70BTC whereas Satoshi only wanted 55BTC worth), so Ben kept some himself for his own cooking, warmth, to build a hut and so that he could sell some to other people.  In fact I know of a situation where something like this happened in real life.  A while ago in my country some of the banks started selling off their physical buildings to investors with the condition that they be rented back to them, the bank even supplied a loan for you to buy them if you didn't have the cash.

Regardless of this though, the point I was trying to make is that the claim that it is impossible to pay off interest in a world that is based on a finite money supply is wrong.  This example clearly disproves this claim.  By-the-way, it is not the only way to disprove it, just one of the simplest examples.  Another example that is easy to describe is one where the person who owes the interest pays it back with labour or goods instead of money.  I didn't use this because I wanted to show that you could destroy the interest with "money" alone (where money includes debt in its definition).

[neoneros]

The reason why I had Ben buy the tree was to keep the example simple-- ie, it used only two protagonists.  Obviously in real life there are maybe many other people involved, eg: Ben would loan the money from a bank as you pointed out.  However, it is conceivable that such a situation as I outlined could occur-- eg: Ben bought the trees because Satoshi didn't need it all (all the wood was really worth 70BTC whereas Satoshi only wanted 55BTC worth), so Ben kept some himself for his own cooking, warmth, to build a hut and so that he could sell some to other people.  In fact I know of a situation where something like this happened in real life.  A while ago in my country some of the banks started selling of their physical buildings to investors with the condition that they be rented back to them, the bank even supplied a loan for you to buy them if you didn't have the cash.

Regardless of this though, the point I was trying to make is that the claim that it is impossible to pay off interest in a world that is based on a finite money supply is wrong.  This example clearly disproves this claim.  By-the-way, it is not the only way to disprove it, just one of the simplest examples.  Another example that is easy to describe is one where the person who owes the interest pays it back with labour or goods instead of money.  I didn't use this because I wanted to show that you could destroy the interest with "money" alone (where money includes debt in it definition).

You can borrow and bring back the BTC lended, even with interest, or in a pay-it-forward way, leaving out the BTC interest. It might work in a perfect world and a transparent one where everyone knows who lended who money and what to cross out in the end, but the world is too complex for this not to go wrong somewhere making it impossible to pay of interest, people hodling their coins till it reaches the moon, scammers, loansharks. We do not live in an ideal world.

I could go to my bank and say: "Hey, I have some debt, but I have made a nice drawing you can hang in your office, or I could wash your windows and we call it even right?" on which the bank will reply "yeah, 'right'. Someone call security!".

Getting paid for services is not the same as interest. Paying it forward might be, leaving the money where it goes and in a weird butterfly effect like manner it will somehow return to you  indirectly. You cannot rely on that. Somewhere along the line it will get stuck because of a simple thing called greed.

[PeterGuinness]

...

 could go to my bank and say: "Hey, I have some debt, but I have made a nice drawing you can hang in your office, or I could wash your windows and we call it even right?" on which the bank will reply "yeah, 'right'. Someone call security!".
...

What you say is most likely true, ie.the bank wouldn't accept your offer to clean their windows.  However, what you can certainly do is go to another bank and tell/prove to them that you have a started a new window cleaning business that is profitable and because of this predictable income get them to pay of the existing loan by taking out a new loan.  This, by-the-way, is called refinancing a loan and is done all the time.

In case you didn't know: supplying, buying and selling debt is the biggest business on the planet!  Without debt almost none of our economy would exist.  Over history the use of debt, (ie: the ability to get something now and pay for it later with interest) is the way by which we have financed the development clean drinking water, abundant food, education, modern medicine, modern transportation, computers and telecommunication, etc, in fact just about everything that you use.   Note that the countries with the least developed banking services are the most backward, undeveloped third world countries that exist.  There is nothing wrong with debt that is used wisely.

Regardless of all this, the whole point of my original post still stands: I supplied an example which demonstrates cleanly and simply that the claim that it is impossible to ultimately pay off interest in a world with a finite money supply is NOT true.

[neoneros]

But I would still have a debt, for infinity. I do not want to be cleaning windows/rely on a loan my entire life. Paying a loan with another one only makes the other loan a bigger one, original plus interest. And so the debt grows and grows, because I do not have to pay the interest immediatly, there could be more interest paid than there is BTC available.

If all BTC is given as a loan, with a 5% interest, you have to pay back 105% of the available bitcoin, how would you go about that? And interest on loans work on a per month basis, so 5% per month.. that adds up each month, let's say that 50% of all BTC is in a loan, for 5% after a whole year it will be 62% on interest alone to be paid. No matter how simple you example may be, you cannot expect this to work if the numbers do not work out.

supplying, buying and selling debt is the biggest business on the planet!

I know that debt is the biggest business, it is the basis of the world economy to collapse,
It was the the splitting up and repackiging debts and selling them again, splitting them up, selling, splitting, selling, split sell, that boosted the bubble and made it explode with a bang.

Access to resources and hogging them for big money is what made the economy. It does take investing to get infrastructure, but it does not mean the loan system is not flawed. Privatising things like telecommunication, water and infrastructure has made it into a business, with the main goal optimising the profits, not the product quality.  Nestle is even trying to get water off of the list of primary neccesaties to boost their sales of bottled water. But that is a whole different discussion.

[PeterGuinness]

But I would still have a debt, for infinity. I do not want to be cleaning windows/rely on a loan my entire life. Paying a loan with another one only makes the other loan a bigger one, original plus interest. ....

Acutally, No.  A very common reason (if not the most common) for refinancing a loan is so that you pay LESS overall.  Here's an example: Imagine that you have clocked up a $10,000 unsecured debt on a credit card at 15%pa.  Instead of paying this high rate, you go to a bank and take out a $10,000 loan (secured against an asset of yours) at 7% and pay off the credit card.  You have now made the interest payments smaller and thus will pay less.   Another example is when a central bank lowers its interest rate which causes the other banks to offer lower rate loans-- people often refinance their existing loans to take advantage of the new lower rates.

If all BTC is given as a loan, with a 5% interest, you have to pay back 105% of the available bitcoin, how would you go about that?

I've already demonstrated in my first post how it is possible to payback interest even though the total amount due is greater than 100% of the hard currency supply.  It's possible because we can arrange loans such that interest due by different parties will cancel each other.  I gave the simplest example with just two protagonists, but in the real world it involves more actors, eg: the banks.  In the real world it is the banks which handle the cancelling of interest.  This results from the fact that the banks continuously borrow off each other to balance their books and a bank only pays back what is due after the cancellation of interest owed to each other.

And interest on loans work on a per month basis, so 5% per month.. that adds up each month, let's say that 50% of all BTC is in a loan, for 5% after a whole year it will be 62% on interest alone to be paid. No matter how simple you example may be, you cannot expect this to work if the numbers do not work out.

What does this particular example prove about anything in general?  If you're stupid enough to take out a long at 5% per month and have no hope of paying it back then you deserve to go bankrupt!   I've not said that ALL loans can be paid back,  I've only said that loans taken out wisely can be paid back.

For your general enlightenment:  If you can earn more profit than what you will pay in interest from money supplied by a loan then the loan is a wise move (of course you have to also balance it against the risk involved in deriving your profit-- equations that compute this are very well known).  If you will not earn more profit than what you will pay in interest than the loan is a very bad idea!  It's that simple!  Owing debt baring interest can make you money in the right circumstances.

[smith coins]

For me, probably the transaction confirmation times.

[HeroCat]

Currently BTC transfer times  I hope with time will be better 

[gripflierGO]

The time to receive some confirmations is the most frustrating fact in bitcoins.

We just have to wait until Bitcoin payments become more popular and one confirmation becomes instant. It would be great if we could shorten the delay before the first confirmation because that's what matters for people who want to pay in a store or a restaurant. Maybe there would be a way to recognize small transactions, like smaller than 0.01 BTC and allow them to get the first confirmation quicker.

Exactly. Confirmations need to be more faster as it takes lot of time for transaction to get confirmed. And if this is the case it would be difficult to pay at shops as you can't get the goods until the payment is confirmed and it would become time consuming and won't help at the time of emergencies.

[Jhacker]

No peer to peer banking app. If my programming time isn't already 100 percent occupied with other projects already, I'd code one. It seems to me that it is a waste of bitcoins to have it just sit in your wallet all the time. You should have a banking app that will allow you to loan your bitcoins out with interest based on a borrower's credit score. Your money should be working for you, making interest and dividends, not just sitting in your wallet.

Have a blockchain like app with multiple decentralized servers take deposits. Then, this app will make loans with interest based on credit scores. The app will then pay the depositors interest minus a reasonable fee for the people running the servers. This would act as a bank without the crazy banking fees and our taxes being given away to "bail out" shitty banksters that will only use the money to throw fancy parites with hookers and champagne! Computer servers don't need hookers and champagne.

There should be automated apps that take the place of all financial services which are currently run by corrupt banksters and lawyers.

That's a good idea.

I'm inclined to say it's not.  Lending at interest with a finite monetary supply will only encourage fractional reserve practices.  Bitcoin's economy at its core is not debt-based like the fiat world.  Imagine if Satoshi, after mining the first BTC50, had immediately lent out those coins with a 5% interest rate.  This means there would be BTC52.5 to pay back.  Where does the person he lent them to get the extra BTC2.5 from?  It didn't exist until the next block was mined.  I've never been a great fan of religion, but the one thing they used to get right (but sadly don't care about it anymore) is that they made it clear that usury was morally questionable.

Ok. Not bad. So in a bitcoin world there will be no such thing as interest?

Oh I'm sure there will be, it's pretty much inevitable.  There's nothing that prevents people from charging interest, so it's only natural that people will give in to greed and do exactly that.  They're probably already doing it right now.  It just kinda goes against the ethos of the whole thing (in my opinion at least).  As soon as you introduce debt in a system with a finite monetary supply, you are essentially guaranteeing that someone, somewhere, will be unable to repay because there isn't enough money actually existing in the system to cover the interest.  People will do just about anything to turn a profit, even if it means screwing someone else over.

What you're saying isn't true. It would be true if the guy who borrowed from Satoshi has to pay it back in a 1-time lump sum. However, he can provide a service that slowly earns bitcoins, and pay those back to Satoshi. In turn, Satoshi spends the bitcoins he got back somewhere, and that third party spends the bitcoin buying the service from the guy who borrowed from Satoshi. Now he has enough bitcoins to pay back Satoshi in full, without any magically appearing bitcoins.

If there was no interest involved, then yes, that would work just fine.  However, with interest, the person who borrowed the money might find a way to pay it back over time, but somewhere along the line, someone (or a group of someones) will always be in debt by BTC2.5 and that number will grow every time someone lends at interest.  If there is a fixed total number of coins and the interest requires more than that total to be paid, someone will end up owing money that doesn't exist.  That's why debt collectors usually resort to taking your possessions, most people (literally) can't pay.

What you're saying still isn't true because you are forgetting that loans can be used to cancel each other.  Here is a simple example:  image that Satoshi who is cold and has a broken arm has 50BTC, a forest of trees and food while hungry Ben has nothing but an axe.  Ben borrows 50Btc from Satoshi to be repaid at the end of the month with 10% interest.  Ben then buys the trees and some food from Satoshi for 50BTC.  Ben chops the trees into firewood which is now worth 55BTC.  Satoshi buys the wood with 50BTC cash and agreement to pay the extra 5BTC at the end of the month (effectively he is borrowing 5 virtual BTC from Ben).  At the end of the month Ben pays Satoshi 50BTC and they agree that the two debts of 5BTC cancel each other and that everything has been made good, ie: there is no debt remaining to anyone at all.  

The important thing to note is that without the use of loans Satoshi's trees would have never been chopped, Satoshi would remain cold and Ben would have starved!  There is nothing inherently wrong with interest bearing debt as long as it is used wisely.  Everyday around the world interest bearing debt facilitates trade that would not occur otherwise.

Why wouldn't Satoshi just hire Ben to chop the wood directly?

[Jhacker]

But I would still have a debt, for infinity. I do not want to be cleaning windows/rely on a loan my entire life. Paying a loan with another one only makes the other loan a bigger one, original plus interest. ....

Acutally, No.  A very common reason (if not the most common) for refinancing a loan is so that you pay LESS overall.  Here's an example: Imagine that you have clocked up a $10,000 unsecured debt on a credit card at 15%pa.  Instead of paying this high rate, you go to a bank and take out a $10,000 loan (secured against an asset of yours) at 7% and pay off the credit card.  You have now made the interest payments smaller and thus will pay less.   Another example is when a central bank lowers its interest rate which causes the other banks to offer lower rate loans-- people often refinance their existing loans to take advantage of the new lower rates.

If all BTC is given as a loan, with a 5% interest, you have to pay back 105% of the available bitcoin, how would you go about that?

I've already demonstrated in my first post how it is possible to payback interest even though the total amount due is greater than 100% of the hard currency supply.  It's possible because we can arrange loans such that interest due by different parties will cancel each other.  I gave the simplest example with just two protagonists, but in the real world it involves more actors, eg: the banks.  In the real world it is the banks which handle the cancelling of interest.  This results from the fact that the banks continuously borrow off each other to balance their books and a bank only pays back what is due after the cancellation of interest owed to each other.

And interest on loans work on a per month basis, so 5% per month.. that adds up each month, let's say that 50% of all BTC is in a loan, for 5% after a whole year it will be 62% on interest alone to be paid. No matter how simple you example may be, you cannot expect this to work if the numbers do not work out.

What does this particular example prove about anything in general?  If you're stupid enough to take out a long at 5% per month and have no hope of paying it back then you deserve to go bankrupt!   I've not said that ALL loans can be paid back,  I've only said that loans taken out wisely can be paid back.

For your general enlightenment:  If you can earn more profit than what you will pay in interest from money supplied by a loan then the loan is a wise move (of course you have to also balance it against the risk involved in deriving your profit-- equations that compute this are very well known).  If you will not earn more profit than what you will pay in interest than the loan is a very bad idea!  It's that simple!  Owing debt baring interest can make you money in the right circumstances.

So short answer is that yes, if someone loaned out 100% of bitcoin, they would not be able to pay back more bitcoin than the 100%. But if they used that bitcoin to generate profits, they could pay back the interest in another currency, or with goods and services. In the case that everything was valued in bitcoin, the value of bitcoin would simply increase to reflect the increased amount of goods and services, and when they paid the 100% of bitcoin back it would be worth more than when the bitcoin was originally loaned out.

[tyrexs]

my biggest problem with bitcoin is price dont want move high because i know bitcoin is future of currency. why bitcoin price still cheap right now

[aakashsangwan]

my biggest problem with bitcoin is price dont want move high because i know bitcoin is future of currency. why bitcoin price still cheap right now

There are many factors deciding the price of Bitcoin.
As 2016 is the year of halving the block reward so you can expect major pumps at that time.

[Amph]

my biggest problem with bitcoin is price dont want move high because i know bitcoin is future of currency. why bitcoin price still cheap right now

There are many factors deciding the price of Bitcoin.
As 2016 is the year of halving the block reward so you can expect major pumps at that time.

we don't want a major pump that end with a major dump afterward, we need to maintain a stable price permanently, like we are doing with the current value would be ideal

but i guess the biggest problem is that every new day a bad thing pop up(now we have miners taking profit by abusing fee) therefore i'm not so sure anymore if bitcoin can reach the moon

[lorylore]

Transaction time is a biggest concern. Some time its instant. Other time it takes much time and some users even wait for like 5 confirmation which normally take 30 mins for me now. So waiting seems to be drawback.

Transaction in Bitcoin actually Instant, Confirmation of the transaction which is takes much time.  

But what about the transaction that has no fee, they never get confirmed so sad

[AtheistAKASaneBrain]

Transaction time is a biggest concern. Some time its instant. Other time it takes much time and some users even wait for like 5 confirmation which normally take 30 mins for me now. So waiting seems to be drawback.

Transaction in Bitcoin actually Instant, Confirmation of the transaction which is takes much time.  

But what about the transaction that has no fee, they never get confirmed so sad

It's impossible that a transactions gets frozen forever as far as I know. All transactions eventually get processed, it will just take a lot more to get it done. The best way to avoid this is always paying the standard fee.

[lorylore]

Transaction time is a biggest concern. Some time its instant. Other time it takes much time and some users even wait for like 5 confirmation which normally take 30 mins for me now. So waiting seems to be drawback.

Transaction in Bitcoin actually Instant, Confirmation of the transaction which is takes much time. 

But what about the transaction that has no fee, they never get confirmed so sad

It's impossible that a transactions gets frozen forever as far as I know. All transactions eventually get processed, it will just take a lot more to get it done. The best way to avoid this is always paying the standard fee.

Well that is the best way but i have seen transactions even with some low fee, it didnt get confirmed what will happen if they dont get confirmed ? how long will stay or will lost forever that unconfirmed amount?

[BTCevo]

Transaction time is a biggest concern. Some time its instant. Other time it takes much time and some users even wait for like 5 confirmation which normally take 30 mins for me now. So waiting seems to be drawback.

Transaction in Bitcoin actually Instant, Confirmation of the transaction which is takes much time. 

But what about the transaction that has no fee, they never get confirmed so sad

It's impossible that a transactions gets frozen forever as far as I know. All transactions eventually get processed, it will just take a lot more to get it done. The best way to avoid this is always paying the standard fee.

Well that is the best way but i have seen transactions even with some low fee, it didnt get confirmed what will happen if they dont get confirmed ? how long will stay or will lost forever that unconfirmed amount?

It is just random, I make 2 transaction with usual fee, the first one is confirmed like about below one hour and the second one it get 3 days to confirmed. IMO whoever pay more fee he will get the first chance to get confirmed but with a low miners fee I dont think it will go fast. Like I just said it takes 3 days to confirm my transaction but at least it will confirm at last, just be patience

[lorylore]

Transaction time is a biggest concern. Some time its instant. Other time it takes much time and some users even wait for like 5 confirmation which normally take 30 mins for me now. So waiting seems to be drawback.

Transaction in Bitcoin actually Instant, Confirmation of the transaction which is takes much time. 

But what about the transaction that has no fee, they never get confirmed so sad

It's impossible that a transactions gets frozen forever as far as I know. All transactions eventually get processed, it will just take a lot more to get it done. The best way to avoid this is always paying the standard fee.

Well that is the best way but i have seen transactions even with some low fee, it didnt get confirmed what will happen if they dont get confirmed ? how long will stay or will lost forever that unconfirmed amount?

It is just random, I make 2 transaction with usual fee, the first one is confirmed like about below one hour and the second one it get 3 days to confirmed. IMO whoever pay more fee he will get the first chance to get confirmed but with a low miners fee I dont think it will go fast. Like I just said it takes 3 days to confirm my transaction but at least it will confirm at last, just be patience

I can paste here 2 different transaction ids with the same amount of fee and one got confirmed very quickly another one has 2 days and hasnt confirmed yet

[zeraTunerse]

Transaction time is a biggest concern. Some time its instant. Other time it takes much time and some users even wait for like 5 confirmation which normally take 30 mins for me now. So waiting seems to be drawback.

Transaction in Bitcoin actually Instant, Confirmation of the transaction which is takes much time. 

But what about the transaction that has no fee, they never get confirmed so sad

It's impossible that a transactions gets frozen forever as far as I know. All transactions eventually get processed, it will just take a lot more to get it done. The best way to avoid this is always paying the standard fee.

Well that is the best way but i have seen transactions even with some low fee, it didnt get confirmed what will happen if they dont get confirmed ? how long will stay or will lost forever that unconfirmed amount?

It is just random, I make 2 transaction with usual fee, the first one is confirmed like about below one hour and the second one it get 3 days to confirmed. IMO whoever pay more fee he will get the first chance to get confirmed but with a low miners fee I dont think it will go fast. Like I just said it takes 3 days to confirm my transaction but at least it will confirm at last, just be patience

I can paste here 2 different transaction ids with the same amount of fee and one got confirmed very quickly another one has 2 days and hasnt confirmed yet

Yes that is the biggest problem with bitcoins. Sometimes it hardly takes 2 minutes to get confirmed and sometimes it might take more than 48 hours and that is really ridiculous.

[notabeliever]

My biggest problem safely converting to us dollar