Bitcoin is facing more problems than most of people even can imagine, the most important ones that are effecting the protocol now are the Block size limit and the difficulty retarget algorithm.
We all know that Bitcoin is facing a big problem with full blocks and a very long queue of transactions even with included fee (a free transaction is a long dead concept in Bitcoin) waiting to be included in the next blocks, The cluster fuck that they call a debate that was caused by this, made a small technical problem a big issue, two camps fighting over what should be done while Bitcoin network is struggling and losing users and potential adopters and most importantly its legitimacy!
but here is how this situation can get even worst! soon (sometime in July) we will have another Halving which will bring the reward from 25 to 12.5 BTC, with a competitive mining, miners are mining at small profit margins, a declining price of bitcoin and a halving reward means that miners will be mining at loss which will result in shunting down many Data centers and cause another cluster fuck, difficulty will stay the same while the hashrate will experience a significant fall, blocks will take a long time to be mined which will result in a bigger transactions queue (maybe one that we didn't experience yet)and constant full blocks for weeks maybe even if users will panic months.
This is all came at a the worst time possible, there are many other and better alternatives, adopters are asking: Why wait for a dying horse when you can ride a rocket ? the scripting features in Bitcoin are primitive and allow for very simple things, Like Nick Szabo said "Bitcoin is a pocket calculator, Ethereum is a general purpose computer", this is why Ethereum is booming now.
While The Bitcoin cult is still lost in delusion, smart people are looking and switching to better alternatives that beats the Bitcoin tech, Bitcoin has only a couple of months to get its shit together, but even then, it lost the battle in my opinion.
I'm with you on that one.
I used Bitcoin recently to transfer funds from USD to EUR, to gain the benefits of the Euro rebound. So USD on Finex, over to EUR on Kraken. Whole process took about 4 hours from start to finish, with first blockchain confirmation registering after 100 minutes. From an end user point of view, this shit just ain tenable and before someone points out the speed of Bitcoin compared to conventional banking, may I remind them that conventional currencies don't run a regular risk of a 10% correction within that timeframe. Bitcoin does, and people using a crypto to transact large amounts of capital just don't need that stress. Whilst I was waiting on my BTC, I decided to race LTC against it. LTC transaction between Finex and Kraken was completed within 10 minutes. Unfortunately, the LTC market on Kraken is too thin, otherwise LTC would be the obvious choice for me when switching between exposure to EUR and USD.
Bottom line is that BTC is fucking shit at what it does, and there are more technically superior alternatives out there. BTC is number 1, cos it was the first, and that this is where the greatest liquidity is, but the more these problems persist, the more likely it is that both technological and financial focus turns away from it, and over to better alternatives.
Also, nobody around here seems to make much of the fact that due to aorund 70% of the mining capacity being based in China, this gives the Chinese government a virtual kill switch on BTC. Perhaps they don't give a crap about BTC at the moment, but if/when their economy starts to tank, and the PBOCs response is to drastically devalue the CNY, only for a flood of capital to start evading PBOC controls via Bitcoin, the Chinese government are likely to ban Bitcoin outright overnight, and order the miners to shut down. They have already issued warning to the general public to keep away from Bitcoin, so those Chinese still playing with Bitcoin, are doing so at their own significant risk........and before any Bitcoin zealot jumps in with diatribe about miners in other parts of the world simply taking over, hashrates adjusting accordingly etc etc, blah blah blah....lets face it, Bitcoin is just not going to survive an outright ban from the Chinese. The market would fucking tank into the dirt, the p2p network would go all too shit, some previous small time miner would emerge with like 70% of the capacity, their would be absolutely no trust left in the asset.
So, the Chinese government have the power to kill Bitcoin overnight, all they need is a good reason to do it, and ya know what, stranger things will have happened.
