i think at this point in time bitcoin is a solution looking for a problem.
almost 24 months ago people though that bitcoin would revolutionize the business of international money transfers, people started working on designing ATMs, and fiat to bitcoin exchanges popped up in many jurisdictions. a solution to an old problem.
today we have some ATMs and a healthy number of exchanges, however both of these have very high regulatory costs. as it turns out much of that "problem" is mostly the creation of various regulatory regimes, since we no longer generally ship around tons of gold on ships, that let us say are in place to allow incumbents to make money along with providing protocols that allow for reporting to governments primarily for reasons related to tax collection, but also the enforcement of embargoes, sanctions and the never ending hunt for organized crime (terror, drugs, etc).
frankly this is not what bitcoin, as one can plainly see, excels at.
one has to go back to the Satoshi Nakamoto white paper and re-read it occasionally to pull out new nuggets of insight based on what has transpired.
While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model.
Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible
services.
A few things to note here:
1. "the system works well enough for most transactions" means that Satoshi thought that "most transactions" concerning online commerce are handled well by the current system. therefor it is not likely that bitcoin applies to say the purchase of books on amazon.com. Bitpay, circle and coinbase are sadly barking up the wrong tree.
2. so what is bitcoin perhaps good for? there answer is right there in the first paragraph: "small casual transactions" and " non-reversible payments for nonreversible services".
What are interactions that may constitute say "small casual transactions"?
1. tipping - this has been relatively successful for reddit and doge it seems
2. online gambling - we can see that the dice sites appear to do decent business
3. ?
4. ??
5.
What are "nonreversible services"?
1. the time stamping of a digital document
2. the use of processing power
3. the use of data storage
4. the escrowing of something of value
5. the execution of a contract between some parties
6. the delivery of data
7.
8.
9.
Now ask yourselves, how many bitcoin services and business do you know which fall into some of these categories?
And then you, I think, shall understand why we are not yet at $10000/btc.
When folks on here can start naming popular services in a majority of these categories, and perhaps others, then we will see not only the foundation for more wide spread adoption but also price.
Most of the investments in the current space by VC are really throwing money into a fire. But I have full confidence that in time (say 2-3 years) other groups that are more nimble and not necessarily driven by rigid business plans will begin to execute on these. Of course that is the reason why I really like projects like Ethereum, Counterparty and Storj.
+ Many more projects which will use NXT as their "fuel".
if you want to invest directly with BTC.
Once you bought the equipment to support the network of NXT you have a fixed cost of electricity of running a node ($20/month for a decent node) and no other fees.
In PoW you need to upgrade your equipment every 6 months to be able compete in the mining race, spend time to maintain the hardware, electricity fees increase as you compete to gain a larger share of hashrate to mine the same amount of coins as before (some of the electricity fees may be offset by more energy-efficient ASICs, but I would guess there is still an increase). In short, it's a nightmare. Only few large datacenters could survive in the end and then they could all be easily coerced to make a PoW crypto centralized and regulated.
With NXT; The power will always belong to the users.
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