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What are you talking about? That concept doesn't make any sense. Decentralization is a concept, not an asset. It doesn't have a quantitative value. If that is really what you are asking then your question has no answer.
I agree (with the bold part). But yet you gave decentralisation
some value by saying: "The benefit of decentralization is not nearly large enough to outweigh the massive costs". Costs are measurable and you valued decentralisation below that. What if costs were 50% lower, or 75%, would decentralisation outweigh the costs then? Is there any deeper logic behind your statement, or is it just "I don't like it - not worth it"?
You don't need to have a numeric way to measure two things against each other to say one is greater than the other. You don't need quantitative data to back every statement you make in your life. I can say that Mozart was more talented at writing and performing music than Kirk Cousins is at playing quarterback in the NFL and there is no way to measure this, but everyone would agree that it is true. It's not an unreasonable statement to make at all.
I had never even heard of Aliexpress but the problem you are describing is most likely not an issue with the credit card. Either way, your evidence is completely anecdotal. The last bitcoin transaction I made took 8 days and cost $40.
Aliexpress is a sub-brand of Alibaba, only the biggest e-commerce platform in the world. Not quite an anecdotal evidence if there are plenty of others with similar problems and when they have dedicated FAQ section for that. What's anecdotal (purposely?) is your BTC transaction, if really happened at all (care to share tx id?).
You really don't believe me? Transactions were costing insane amounts of money in November/December last year and taking weeks to process. They were stuck sitting in mem pools forever. Here is the ID, although I don't think there is any way you can see when I submitted it: 7345a9bc63c1532082414d1849ff908a18f4dbdc0859959197fa022c66a2dd3e
Speed/cost may be performing better for crypto recently, but 10 minutes is still WAY too slow. If I go into a store to buy something, I'm not going to wait 10 minutes for the payment to process. Furthermore, the costs for bitcoin transactions are higher than credit card costs to vendors for reasonably small transactions. This problem will only become larger as mining becomes more difficult and fees rise. For bitcoin to be worth anything, it needs to be able to scale to thousands of times its current size, and it is running into major hurdles way before even coming remotely close to that point.
Are you of impression that fiat transaction are
settled instantly?
You can build any 3rd party payment services on top on Bitcoin, with instant transactions (ie transfers between Coinbase accounts, pre-RBF BitPay purchases), you could accept BTC zero-conf for smaller purchases before RBF was implemented (you can still do it with BCH), you have BTC powered debit cards, you have Lightning Network, you have coins that scales on-chain, you have non-blockchain coins that claim to have unlimited capacity (IOTA) etc.
I never claimed they were settled, that is irrelevant. It just has to be confirmed for a credit card transaction... you can't just accept that a bitcoin transaction will be all set when it enters the mem pool... in the case of bitcoin, you NEED to wait for it to settle.
If you build a payment system on top of bitcoin then you are taking something decentralized and improving it by centralizing it. Coinbase can do instant transfers because they control all of the bitcoin and know all of their private keys are valid. You can't transfer into or out of Coinbase instantly. If you want all bitcoin payments to be controlled by a sytem like Coinbase then why even use bitcoin at all? What is the benefit of that over credit cards?
There is always a tradeoff between decentralization/trustlessness and speed/scalability. Nobody is SOLVING the pitfalls of crypto without sacrificing decentralization and trustlessness.
Bitcoin was created primarily as a response to the flawed global financial system, not as competition to payment processors. Even if it can compete with the latter - comparing them is bit missed.
Saying BTC is only worth something if it has capacity to replace fiat entirely is simply retarded and no different than saying McDonalds is worthless until they have capacity to feed entire world.
There's nothing stopping BTC from existing forever as a niche-alternative to fiat. What gives it value is the free market - not the way how you feel about it.
Your understanding of the purpose of bitcoin's creation is vague so allow me to clarify for you - it was created to replace fiat. I would make an argument here in support of this but honestly it doesn't really matter at this point.
The difference between bitcoin and mcdonalds is that mcdonalds has a book value. They have stores, inventory, etc. They also have sales, and earnings... income... bitcoin has none of that. It has no intrinsic value, which is why it cannot exist in this limbo state you described forever.
Your argument is that private blockchains must be valuable otherwise people wouldn't be spending money and looking into it. That argument is horribly flawed. Go read the last few Snapchat earnings reports and tell me that Snapchat Spectacles are valuable. They spent a ton of money on it and then gave up when it fell flat on its face.
No. My argument was that:
"Furthermore, blockchain technology necessarily requires cryptocurrency" and
"A centralized and non-trustless blockchain ... is completely pointless" are false, as evidenced by Swift (among others). Private blockchains are just a form of distributed database and some find this tech very useful.
I have impression that you got stuck in some weird "something-is-overhyped-therefore-completely-useless" kind of logic.
No, you are saying that Swift and others investing in private non-trustless blockchains means they have value. What about the dozens of important figures who have claimed that bitcoin is worthless? Just because somebody or some organization invests in something or says something doesn't mean they are right. That was the point of my SNAP example. Look at all the smart people who invested in Bear Stearns in 2007.
Your argument relies on others' opinions and is therefore weak. If you want to argue about the merits of blockchain as a distributed database versus, say, an actual distributed database, then I'm happy to have that conversation. I work with software and databases so I would be happy to help you understand why it is so much less efficient than something like Cassandra or even regular SQL databases.
One reason I can give you for many companies to be looking into blockchain is that simply saying the word "blockchain" in public will cause a company's stock price to go flying to stupidly high levels. Look at Long Island Blockchain, formerly Long Island Iced Tea. They are an iced tea distributer based on long island and their business has NOTHING to do with blockchain. They announced that they would look into blockchain technology and changed their name, and all of a sudden their stock price surges to wildly irrational levels.
Agree. What are you arguing here? Yes, 'blockchain' is overhyped and mis-used to screw investors. How does this affect cryptocurrencies?
This was a response to your argument that companies would not be looking into blockchain tech if it didn't have some large value it could bring.
And just to add, the bottom line really is that more and more crypto can be created infinitely, and none of them ever have any intrinsic value (yes, the USD DOES have intrinsic value). The crypto space is infinitely inflationary for this reason, and IMO will eventually fail. It is only getting so much attention because it is new and people made a lot of money. This is not anything remotely like the internet.
No, USD DOESN'T have intrinsic value.
Cryptos are infinitely inflationary only if you assume that every newly created crypto is somehow automatically valuable and gets its share of crypto market cap (at expense of other coins). If that's what you believe, then put all your money in, go margin-short on BTC and create new coins at rate of thousands per day. Instant billionaire. What's stopping you?
Creating a new crypto and automatically assigning it value is exactly what is happening every day! Look at all the IPOs everywhere. This is literally what bitcoin is... creating value out of nothing. If it worked for bitcoin, eth, bch, ltc, iota, xrp, doge, etc... why would we think this will stop?
USD has intrinsic value because every person and organization in the US is required by law to accept it as payment for debt. It is legally guaranteed value by the US government. I would argue that this is intrinsic value. This differs from bitcoin, which nobody is required to accept anywhere.
BTW I don't believe in bitcoin but I would NEVER short it. It is too volatile. I'm not arguing that it will fall in the short term, I'm arguing that it will fall in the long term. I'm not going to pay margin interest until bitcoin dies, which could be several years or more. However, if it were available I would happily buy PUT options expiring in like, 5 years or so... that way risk is limited, as opposed to short selling where risk is unlimited.
