The latest attempt at trying to trick the masses into buying BTC by switching the units to mBTC reminded me of something: Bitcoin PR is pretty full of shit with the assertions it makes and as a result, the popular opinion around it. Bitcoin should have warning labels similar to cigarette packs - clearly visible on any exchange for first time 'investors':
1) WARNING: Purchasing bitcoins may allow government agencies to track your every spending
2) WARNING: Your money/BTC in exchanges can easily be stolen or frozen or hacked or not be withdrawable
3) WARNING: BTC is certainly not government-proof and can be severely hampered if wanted
4) WARNING: Bitcoin has no patents around its technology and clones can be created instantly and at no cost – the network effect primarily is what gives it a higher valuation
5) WARNING:An altcoin might gain prominence and severely impact Bitcoin value
6) WARNING: A better cryptocurrency is probably in the process of being created
7) WARNING: Your entire BTC wealth might be eradicated in case of computer problems or user error
WARNING: You are highly likely to be scammed at some point using bitcoins in cyberspace and nothing can be done about it
9) WARNING: Too large of Blockchain size/large mining pools can wreck Bitcoin integrity, quantum computers could jeopardize Bitcoin security
10) WARNING: No one knows what a bitcoin is worth and its price is purely being driven by Ponzi-natured speculation
1) Bitcoin is harder to track than credit cards and bank transactions. (and possibly even paper money)
2) Bank accounts can be frozen more easily than bitcoins can be stolen (ask cyprus). As long as you are secure with your private key, noone can steal a satoshi.
3) government can't do anything against bitcoin
4) really?
5) unlikely and it's basically the same as 4
6) if that's the case, you'll see it coming long before bitcoin will crash. also, it's the same as point 4.
7) user error maybe, if you're batshit crazy. computer error, no, not if you have cold storage.
noone will help you when you get scammed for dollars either.
9) by the time quantum computers would jeopardize bitcoin security, they would have already hacked credit cards and banks, as they are less secure, and also bitcoin would have already switched to a new, more secure protocol by then. (ASICs will become worthless than untill the new generation of Quantum ASICs gets developed, at which point the difficulty will become several yottahashes or even more.)
10) if you're using bitcoin purely as a currency, the price doesn't matter much, just like you don't care about the dollar to euro exchange rate.
1) Most people buy Bitcoins on exchanges with their real life identity linked. Therefore most people are susceptible to having their entire transaction history followed. Bitcoin claims to be anonymous but it really is not. Paper money definitely has the upper hand here.
2) Check the number of banks that have lost assets throughout decades and then check how many exchanges have been compromised in some form throughout Bitcoins brief history. I think Banks have been pretty trustworthy as far as keeping your assets safe for the most part.
3) Governments can ban merchants from accepting Bitcoin, they can make it illegal for exchanges to sell them, they can tax exchanges to the moon, they can tax Bitcoin to USD cashouts to the moon, they can ban use of bitcoins period or simply 'prove' it helps terrorism and essentially smear it to death. None of these would kill Bitcoin perhaps, but value would drop immensely.
4) Many tout Bitcoin's amazing technology and if it were impossible to copy in some fashion then it could derive value just from that, but that's not the case as many newcomers probably think.
5) Look at Litecoin's marketcap. Worth 1 billion without anything really all that different.
6) New users are being sold on the future of digital currency - in fact its probably just one of the early iterations before a better tech comes along and fixes some of the issues that BTC has.
7) Most people are pretty retarded when it comes to using their PC so this is a valid concern Id say
When you spend dollars, theres usually a physical address associated with it and over credit card there's a trail and possibility of chargeback.
9) At a future date when blockchain is so big or when mining profits dwindle or some supercomputers are put to the task, 51% attack is not out of the realm of possibility and there's not much that can be done if that happens. I've even heard that as little as 33% control is necessary to mess with the integrity of the blockchain.
10) Practically no one is using Bitcoin as a currency right now- Bitpay does less than $10 million of transactions per month.
Anyways my point is not that Bitcoin is bad or worse than fiat or anything like that - it's just that new users are not exactly being projected the truth which is kinda messed up and not a tactic that Bitcoin needs to employ.
