What do you think is the biggest disadvantage of bitcoin?

[BlackHatCoiner]

We keep saying bitcoin is a nice currency, because of lots of reasons like deflation, freedom etc. There are times though that we find some kind of inconvenience on its use.

IMO, bitcoin has a huge disadvantage. The fee part. I've made a transaction 5 days ago with a charge of 500 satoshis (in total). That's pretty cheap and I set that fee because I'm transferring money to myself, but thinking that it may never be confirmed is kinda annoying. Based on bitinfocharts, the median fee right now is $7! I'm playing on an online trading card game that accepts only paypal, and I'm trying to convince them accept bitcoin. How exactly?? All those HODL enthusiasts look forward to see bitcoin touching the $100k. In order for this to happen, it means more demand. This leads to more transactions per second which also leads to higher fees. Who knows how many satoshis we'll have to pay for having a high priority among miners' choices.

Am I the only one that starts unseeing bitcoin as a medium of exchange?

[1714942264]

1714942264

[avikz]

Bitcoin has a number of disadvantages. Let me list out a few even though everyone knows about it,

1. High fees - yes, it's not a regular problem but it keeps on popping up
2. Confirmation time - on an average, a bitcoin transaction takes around 30 minutes to get 3 confirmations. Usually  1 confirmation is fine but majority of the websites look for 3 confirmation before they can accept it as a valid payment
3. Psuedo anonymous - many see it as a benefit of using bitcoin but that's the only reason why bitcoin is increasingly being used by illegal miscreants or terrorists. That's worrying - look at Europe now!

Bitcoin was never an ideal medium of exchange, rather it was always an investment or an avenue to hide income for majority of us!

[mk4]

The security aspect. To be able to secure your funds correctly on non-custodial wallets, you'd have to do a good amount of research especially if you're not tech-savvy. And one thing's for sure, the masses don't like doing research. Everyone's simply too used to the email:password with email/SMS 2FA combination.

Am I the only one that starts unseeing bitcoin as a medium of exchange?

Bitcoin being really bad as a means of exchange isn't really new when prices are extra volatile, and it really sucks. But that doesn't mean it will stay this way forever. Lightning wallets are getting BETTER by the daily. It's just that we have the chicken and the egg problem. Not much people use Lightning because not much exchanges and services accepts lightning, and vice versa.

[Lucius]

Am I the only one that starts unseeing bitcoin as a medium of exchange?

There is no doubt that there is a challenge when it comes to fees, but it is something that is an integral part of what makes Bitcoin unique compared to other payment methods. At the end of 2017, those fees were even over $50, but since then we have achieved a significant adaptation of SegWit, LN is slowly evolving and more and more people are using it, and crypto exchanges are sending transactions in batch.

Micro transactions for less than $5 are really a problem, and I really don't see the logic of sending such a small amount and paying more than twice the fee - but my personal attitude is to always adjust to the moment and pay in a way that is currently more convenient for me. Yet Bitcoin remains the perfect choice when it comes to larger amounts, as people move millions for just a few $ fee.

[Tipstar]

Internet. It's dependence on internet might be the biggest disadvantage for bitcoin. We are moving to a much divided world that may lead to more localized and closed economy as well as internet. If the differences keeps on rising, different region would detach themselves from the global internet and create their own WAN. Bitcoin on different WAN won't be compatible.

[Eternad]

Internet. It's dependence on internet might be the biggest disadvantage for bitcoin. We are moving to a much divided world that may lead to more localized and closed economy as well as internet. If the differences keeps on rising, different region would detach themselves from the global internet and create their own WAN. Bitcoin on different WAN won't be compatible.

Internet will depend on our location, in terms of BTC being dependent on Internet to be use is normal as it's the only way to determined its price due to supply and demand as it is not based on our economy but based on the global usage of users. Those who have high speed Internet have the advantage for a much faster transactions. The only disadvantage I see in BTC is the fees since unlike banking transactions that have certain fees fixed in doing transactions bitcoin prices differs every now and then as the price itself is too volatile.

[royalfestus]

The decentralization should be an advantage but the space is actually controlled by some people. It is difficult to deny the manipulation of price and the process of hoarding. Bitcoin cant be the king in the space for ever and the whales will become threat in the space in the future. A million bitcoin holder can easily manipulate the market that holds trillions of dollar that is in the world economy, it could be threatening to government and world leaders.

[FlightyPouch]

It is true that there are problems with the fee and with the confirmation time but the disadvantage that other people have is that they can't actually use their bitcoins other than trading and holding which I hope we could use for a lot of things especially as a mode of payment online. The rate of adoption of bitcoin is so slow is also a big disadvantage of it.

[Upgrade00]

This tweet by Michael Saylor is relevant here;


I can't think of a perceived disadvantage in Bitcoin's protocol without a sufficient reason for that which makes the network unique.
One of the comment new members make often is that: 'Bitcoin is too complex to understand as opposed to the centralized financial sector', this however is necessary to create a decentralized system which is fully controlled by the holder, if one is going to have autonomy of their finances then they have to make the effort to understand how it works.

High fees also presents an issue from time to time, but this depends on your perspective; One who makes a transaction in Bitcoin which is equivalent to $1billion can pay fees of about ~$3 which is relatively cheaper than virtually all other payment platforms, but such high transactions are not common and do not account for daily payments.
Greater adoption for 2nd layer platforms like LN and relevant BIPs can help solve scalability issues.

[newgil]

VOLATILITY

For me, in purpose of being a coin, the big disadvantage of Bitcoin is volatility, but this disadvantage can be mitigated in the future when Bitcoin become widespread.

In economics to something be considered a coin, is necessary to fill some requirements as:  Store of value, unit of account and medium of exchange.

At this moment, the volatility of bitcoin impact too much on its usability as a coin, its hard to use a unit of account, when it is so volatile, and it impact on that other requirements.

[kryptqnick]

Bitcoin has a number of disadvantages. Let me list out a few even though everyone knows about it,

1. High fees - yes, it's not a regular problem but it keeps on popping up
2. Confirmation time - on an average, a bitcoin transaction takes around 30 minutes to get 3 confirmations. Usually  1 confirmation is fine but majority of the websites look for 3 confirmation before they can accept it as a valid payment
3. Psuedo anonymous - many see it as a benefit of using bitcoin but that's the only reason why bitcoin is increasingly being used by illegal miscreants or terrorists. That's worrying - look at Europe now!

Bitcoin was never an ideal medium of exchange, rather it was always an investment or an avenue to hide income for majority of us!

I agree with the first two points, but I think they can be covered by one major issue as its consequences: scalability. Bitcoin cannot process enough transactions per second, which leads to higher fees if people want their transactions to be confirmed faster and longer waits because there are many transactions awaiting confirmation. And it's indeed a big problem if we're talking about the prospects of global adoption because even nowadays the fees are sometimes very significant, and we're very far from Bitcoin usage being widely spread. As for #3, I think it offers a good balance between complete anonymity and ID verification. And I don't take this argument seriously because fiat is used for terrorism a lot, and yet we use it nevertheless.

[Harlot]

Bitcoin got off from a bad start that's why I am thinking this is the biggest disadvantage of Bitcoin. What I mean by a "bad start" is peoples' general idea of Bitcoin is it is a dark web money that it is simply a money from criminals this thing led to a great contribution why isn't it accepted by majority of the businesses out there. If the government has accepted Bitcoin from the beginning and didn't treat it as some kind of accessory to any crime I believe Bitcoin's acceptance must be better right now.

[Axelseseclevz]

I think the biggest disadvantage of bitcoin is internet connection and second is the high transaction fees. You can't use bitcoin without internet and if you make transaction you need to pay a higher fees in order to make sure that you will have a successful transaction.

[S_crypto]

Hi all!
I am new here, but I have been following bitcoin and cryptos for about 5 years now.  

I agree that the Bitcoin transaction fees are quite expensive, but this is also is because of the amount of electricity used to validate a transaction.
Every transaction is consuming about 740kWh! Then you also have to compensate the miners for the cost of the mining hardware, rent of datacentre space, salaries and their gain on the investment. So it's no wonder that the transaction fees are high.

This is also one of the main problems regarding the adoption of bitcoin for everyday transactions: if you do the math, it is simply not feasible (at least as it is right now):

- Credit cards are making about 4000 times the transactions of Bitcoin
- Replacing the credit cards would consume about 300'000 TWh/year, while the current worldwide electricity production is only about 23'000 TWh/year!

If I have to write a list of the 3 main disadvantages of bitcoin, I would say:

1) Power consumption: has an impact on adoption and cost of the transaction.  

2) Very slow: this is one of the reasons why I prefer other cryptos!  

3) No privacy: this is a fundamental feature that is currently missing for bitcoin. That's why I like Monero.  

Except for this, bitcoin still has the first-mover advantage, that makes it very popular even if in my opinion, there are better alternatives nowadays.  

[newgil]

Internet. It's dependence on internet might be the biggest disadvantage for bitcoin. We are moving to a much divided world that may lead to more localized and closed economy as well as internet. If the differences keeps on rising, different region would detach themselves from the global internet and create their own WAN. Bitcoin on different WAN won't be compatible.

I had never thought of that before, but it really makes sense.

Recently we see some less free countries, taking some strange moves in a direction of deprive its entire people of using internet. Iran passed by a internet blackout this year and some specialists are saying that some countries like Iran, Russia and China in future, claiming espionage risk, can block worldwide internet access and install a kind of governmental intranet.

[BrewMaster]

Am I the only one that starts unseeing bitcoin as a medium of exchange?

unfortunately you are not wrong. the increasing fees and the volatile market are the two main reasons why bitcoin can't seamlessly act as was meant to.
for some reason the scaling discussions seem to have stopped after 2017 whereas it should always take place. as Antonopoulos once said scaling issue is not something you solve. instead it is something you fix for now then in the future fix it more and more.

3. Psuedo anonymous - many see it as a benefit of using bitcoin but that's the only reason why bitcoin is increasingly being used by illegal miscreants or terrorists. That's worrying - look at Europe now!

if you consider this an issue then you should never use fiat anymore because for every single satoshi that may be used for something illegal there are trillions of fiat dollars being used by terrorists.

[seoincorporation]

For me, the biggest disadvantage of bitcoin is the number of transactions it can process, we have blocked every 10 minutes and each block has approx 2500 transactions. And this is one of the main limits of bitcoin, This is why not all can move to bitcoin. If we try to make the same amount of transactions that we have on Visa in 24 hours, we will realize how the bitcoin network gets doomed with a damn crazy queue that could take more than 1 month to confirm.

That's for me the main and biggest disadvantage of bitcoin.

[newgil]

Hi all!
I am new here, but I have been following bitcoin and cryptos for about 5 years now.  

I agree that the Bitcoin transaction fees are quite expensive, but this is also is because of the amount of electricity used to validate a transaction.
Every transaction is consuming about 740kWh! Then you also have to compensate the miners for the cost of the mining hardware, rent of datacentre space, salaries and their gain on the investment. So it's no wonder that the transaction fees are high.

This is also one of the main problems regarding the adoption of bitcoin for everyday transactions: if you do the math, it is simply not feasible (at least as it is right now):

- Credit cards are making about 4000 times the transactions of Bitcoin
- Replacing the credit cards would consume about 300'000 TWh/year, while the current worldwide electricity production is only about 23'000 TWh/year!

If I have to write a list of the 3 main disadvantages of bitcoin, I would say:

1) Power consumption: has an impact on adoption and cost of the transaction.  

2) Very slow: this is one of the reasons why I prefer other cryptos!  

3) No privacy: this is a fundamental feature that is currently missing for bitcoin. That's why I like Monero.  

Except for this, bitcoin still has the first-mover advantage, that makes it very popular even if in my opinion, there are better alternatives nowadays.  

The transaction cost has nothing to do with the power consumption.

Its a free market!

The power consumption is high because there are a big competition against miners, and those miners just are keeping their ASICS on because at this moment, considering the current Bitcoin price, they can mine and obtain a profit, if the price of Bitcoin drops a lot, the miners will have losses and then will turn off their machines.

The high fee tax happens when the Bitcoin price is very high and the demand for block size is too big!

[Mr.sprin]

I think the biggest disadvantage of bitcoin is internet connection and second is the high transaction fees. You can't use bitcoin without internet and if you make transaction you need to pay a higher fees in order to make sure that you will have a successful transaction.

Digital currency bitcoin of course uses the internet and high cost bitcoin according to its high price, all digital currencies of altcoin also use the internet and transactions also require fees.

[taufik123]

Bitcoin got off from a bad start that's why I am thinking this is the biggest disadvantage of Bitcoin. What I mean by a "bad start" is peoples' general idea of Bitcoin is it is a dark web money that it is simply a money from criminals this thing led to a great contribution why isn't it accepted by majority of the businesses out there. If the government has accepted Bitcoin from the beginning and didn't treat it as some kind of accessory to any crime I believe Bitcoin's acceptance must be better right now.

Initially, bitcoin was known as a means of payment for Deepweb and was used as a tool for laundering money by criminals. But the original purpose or origin of bitcoin was made as a digital transaction that is transparent and is not controlled by anyone. However, some uses of bitcoin have changed the viewpoint of bitcoin.

But in recent years Bitcoin has become increasingly recognized as a revolutionary alternative payment platform and can be used anywhere. For the problems of regulations provided by several governments, it does hinder the growth of bitcoin, but some of these regulations do not completely prohibit the use of bitcoin. Many of the adoption of bitcoin by large companies have made the name bitcoin soar, such as Paypal, which added bitcoin to its platform.