It is in fact cheaper for online transactions
It's cheap now that miners are allowed to
print money faster than the FED mine bitcoins with a high block reward.
Bitcoin core developers like Peter Todd already said "in regards to fee economics we're probably already in deep shit in the long run".
Yeah, cheap, forevah.
safer for protecting your identity
Sure, if you're dealing with child pr0nz you want to protect your identity. I am sure the average Joe prefers to remain anonymous over the fact that he can get his money back if somebody steals it or gets lost with credit cards data breaches and whatnot (VERY EASY to get your coins stolen with bitcoin if you have to move your money around and use it, but yeah as long as it's in cold storage and you don't use it's secure... lol)
simpler for international transactions
It's so much simpler for the average Joe to get into bitcoin that he needs to do wire transfers to some obscure exchange and wait few days to be able to buy bitcoin, but be careful, he should also look into trading and pay the fees to convert his BTC to USD (and keep it in an exchange online, because secure) else he can get easily screwed by the volatility which defies the whole purpose to use it as a currency.
As an alternative to wire transfers to buy bitcoin (and use bitcoin to pay for goods and services online instead of those ugly credit cards), he can buy it on circle with a... ehm... credit card.
Woops.
All of this is very user-friendly, straightforward and very convenient for the average joe. Very appealing.
faster for online payments
Left time I checked credit card transactions were instant.
and more secure
Credit cards can give you your money back in case of data breaches and what not, if you lose your bitcoins or you get hacked (happens all the time even to people who tried their best to secure their funds, again, if they have to move their money around), you get nothing, it's over, you're done.
Yes he addressed scaling in the whitepaper.
Yeah, it's so addressed in the whitepaper that the bitcoin community is having debates on a solution proposal that created more controversy (and arguably other problems too) anyone has ever seen within the community.
However, since then I have come to realize that bitcoin was never intended for large-scale use, but only to test whether the solution proposed by Satoshi to the "distributed ledger problem" (block reward + proof-of-work + longest-chain-wins) would indeed motivate the miners to maintain the ledger and protect it from malicious attacks. The experiment has been running for 6 years, which is remarkable; but it exposed one flaw -- the centralization of mining -- which may require another genial idea to solve.
Well, the ripple network (but yeah as you said, the ripple NETWORK, not ripple the coin) and their consensus protocol solves most of these problems.
No mining or mining centralisation, more scalable, it effectively cuts fees that are gonna stay low forever (not like in bitcoin), no proof-of-work, no wasting of resources etc but most importantly it doesn't force you to adopt a volatile ponzi currency that nobody needs or wants.
You can put any asset or currency in the network and it's more suitable for smart contracts and all the other possible "blockchain technology" applications.
And that's an example of distributed ledger that works, others might follow the coming years.
distributed ledgers = the internet
cryptocurrencies = pets.com
Poll
