I no longer consider bitcoin as a decentralized currency...

[Dogtanian]

The volatility is killing it - small deviations are fine but not the huge drops and rises we see every few months

There's nothing you can really do about that. We're just going to hope it can settle eventually, but I'm not sure it ever will.

[desired_username]

The volatility is killing it - small deviations are fine but not the huge drops and rises we see every few months

There's nothing you can really do about that. We're just going to hope it can settle eventually, but I'm not sure it ever will.

Volatility will only settle if there will be better coin distribution (eg. big holders selling). It's completely natural at this point.

@OP: Bitcoin is far from centralized. There are a lot of mining companies and small time miners as well, not to mention the distribution of full nodes.

[dogechode]

I do not know of too many businesses where you can buy hardware for $500 and have a payback within six months.  There is hardware out there that is profitable now if you know where to look.  The barrier to entry is quite low. 

I do not know of anything out there that can be purchased for $500 and used to mine bitcoin, that will break even let alone provide ROI in six months.

[Maidak]

I think some of you guys are missing the point here. The bottom line is that pretty soon a lot of miners are liable to just give up and sell their equipment off and we will be left with a handful of massive datacenters doing all of the mining. So instead of hundreds of thousands or even millions of individuals all around the globe mining, you will have consolidation occurring until perhaps a few hundred companies with massive datacenters/farms are doing all of the mining. How will that be any different from banks, visa/MC, etc?

This is one of the reasons I don't see decentralized anymore. I do my part to let every business owner know about BTC, costs nothing to start accepting no chargebacks and little fees. I've let everyone from my local doughnut shop to gun dealers I even offer free help to get them setup and started as well as free advertising.

In my eyes anymore there is nothing decentralized about bitcoin anymore. Out of everyone who replied I still haven't seen anything that proves otherwise.

You have huge data centers seen here and cloud hashing data centers like cex.io or the hardware manufacturers that only ship out the hardware that YOU pre-ordered which those funds were more then likely used to pay for development, production then "tested" for a few months prior to shipping.

How about an exchange funded by the bitcoiners. I've been a self employed and a entrepreneur for 8 years now who can say with confidence my success was because of my honesty which in the online world of commerce is hard to find. I only know a few who haven't been taken over by greed.

What bitcoin needs is less greed and more open source. How about a open source ASIC chip not funded by a pre-order that you own no rights to or even considered a share holder. I would love to setup a project like this and confident it would be successful but who else here is on the same page as I am? I still have faith in bitcoin for the simple fact that it puts faith in the merchant. Back to the subject I'm waiting for someone to tell me what is decentralized about BTC anymore.

[ar9]

I actually tend to agree with you, Maidak.

[TheIrishman]

I totally agree with the OP. What amazes me (and annoys me) is some people even trying to deny the obvious. If the latest high-end ASIC's were readily available for anyone to buy like CPU's and graphics cards are, then OK, I'd swallow the argument that people with more money to invest could buy more ASIC's and then profit more because they invested more. The thing is, they aren't available. How many people got scammed and lost money with the Butterfly Labs (and probably other companies) pre-orders? If it were up to me, I'd change the mining algorithm to something ASIC-hostile and fork Bitcoin. Since this is unlikely to happen, I'll be rooting for other coins to grow popular enough to take bitcoin's place.

[jabo38]

I love bitcoin and think it is a great idea whose time has come, buuuuuuut the exact set up of bitcoin was off I think.  It has a huge mining problem.  If things keep on going like they are, the only miners will be a few huge megacorporations that make their own in house miners and everyone else will be out of the game.  We need a real CPU mined coin that can't be abused by GPUs or ASICS.  Maybe something that can't even be pooled. 

[Maidak]

I actually tend to agree with you, Maidak.

Thanks i'm not bashing or trying to bring negativity. I'm trying to get a point across that this is suppose to be considered a global currency and that in order for it to succeed we need a change. I understand you need some sort of profit in order to survive but it doesn't need to be outrageous profit margins. What I see happening right before my eyes is the same statistic here but with bitcoin. What everyone does is looks the other way.

I've pitched ideas like offering car insurance that can be paid with bitcoin to gauge interest but not enough support to really make it happen. When I first looked at bitcoin I didn't just see a great idea I seen the first step towards what we really need and you all know what I am talking about.

[LostDutchman]

I'm not saying I have lost any faith but it is lost its touch since I was introduced in 09 if anything it has become monopolized.

What is killing the bitcoin are the multi-million dollar data-centers dedicated to mining, little to no acceptance as an alternative payment method, nearly impossible to keep up with difficulty increases, and limited peer to peer exchanges.

Tell me otherwise?

Nope, you are correct.

Those who seek "universal acceptance" of bitcoin done messed it up.

Time to move on.

My $.02.

[lordscales91]

You are totally right, today the mining is handled only by a few mining networks, that should not suppose a problem as long those networks are not able to falsify BTC (at least I think so, but... Is it possible for a mining pool to validate fake transactions?). On the other hand there is another problem related with that: The Rogue pools.

Pools that only think in money, what will happen in 2050 by the time when the maximum BTC will be reached? If there is no profit for validating a transaction. Why would a miner spend his computing power (with all its related costs) for nothing?

[Lauda]

You are totally right, today the mining is handled only by a few mining networks, that should not suppose a problem as long those networks are not able to falsify BTC (at least I think so, but... Is it possible for a mining pool to validate fake transactions?). On the other hand there is another problem related with that: The Rogue pools.

Pools that only think in money, what will happen in 2050 by the time when the maximum BTC will be reached? If there is no profit for validating a transaction. Why would a miner spend his computing power (with all its related costs) for nothing?

2050 isn't the ending year for Bitcoin. The estimate is 2140, although I think that it might come up to 5-10 years earlier than that.
After that the miners will be earning the fees that is it. Let the people of the 22nd century worry about that.

[seriouscoin]

You are totally right, today the mining is handled only by a few mining networks, that should not suppose a problem as long those networks are not able to falsify BTC (at least I think so, but... Is it possible for a mining pool to validate fake transactions?). On the other hand there is another problem related with that: The Rogue pools.

Pools that only think in money, what will happen in 2050 by the time when the maximum BTC will be reached? If there is no profit for validating a transaction. Why would a miner spend his computing power (with all its related costs) for nothing?

Stop posting and start reading noob, so much BS in one post.

[salsacz]

you are right,

see why Bitcoin is centralized, why Nxt - pure proof of stake - is decentralized: http://nxter.org/nxt-solutions-financial-decentralization-financial-freedom/

[strimbello]

From the moment I heard about bitcoin, until now, I always said the same: I'll invest in it and start to use it as soon as my local bakery is accepting bitcoins in exchange for bread.  That's about it, you want acceptance and real use for any currency, then the local store needs to accept it, and these stores will only do so when they can pay their suppliers with it (or easily transfer to fiat money).
This last part will be the show-stopper in my opinion... You can have ATM machines, exchanges, brokers, miners all you want, as long as you're not able to walk around in any city in either Europe, Asia, US, Africa ... and pay in the locals stores with bitcoin, then there's no use of all these mining rigs, start-up companies and venture capitalists who try to secure their place. 
The main thing they're usually forgetting is getting the local shops and their manufactureres / suppliers to accept it and embrace it. 
If bitcoin is able to overcome this hurdle it will truly go through the moon   - and back.

[solarion]

From the moment I heard about bitcoin, until now, I always said the same: I'll invest in it and start to use it as soon as my local bakery is accepting bitcoins in exchange for bread.  That's about it, you want acceptance and real use for any currency, then the local store needs to accept it, and these stores will only do so when they can pay their suppliers with it (or easily transfer to fiat money).
This last part will be the show-stopper in my opinion... You can have ATM machines, exchanges, brokers, miners all you want, as long as you're not able to walk around in any city in either Europe, Asia, US, Africa ... and pay in the locals stores with bitcoin, then there's no use of all these mining rigs, start-up companies and venture capitalists who try to secure their place.  
The main thing they're usually forgetting is getting the local shops and their manufactureres / suppliers to accept it and embrace it.  
If bitcoin is able to overcome this hurdle it will truly go through the moon  - and back.

Until that happens, we have to use excellent companies like gyft and bitpay to enable bitcoin adopters to be able to use their bitcoins in more places. If, as a community, we continue to reward companies that have helped move bitcoin forward (overstock, tigerdirect, amazon) and avoid companies that do not (newegg) then we're exerting influence in the marketplace where it actually counts. Fiat shackles will not be broken overnight imo, they'll be broken one tiny piece at a time.

If everybody bashes on Walmart for retracting their gyft support then maybe they'll realize they made a mistake. Stranger things have happened.

[desired_username]

So much BS. Mining never was a surely profitable endeavour.

I'm mining since the GPU days and If I had sold the generated BTC immediately (or too soon) I wouldn't have been able to turn a profit.

It was like this soon after GPU mining started.

I'm not sure why the whining (especially from a long time member) it seems quite idiotic to me.

[Lauda]

So much BS. Mining never was a surely profitable endeavour.

I'm mining since the GPU days and If I had sold the generated BTC immediately (or too soon) I wouldn't have been able to turn a profit.

It was like this soon after GPU mining started.

I'm not sure why the whining (especially from a long time member) it seems quite idiotic to me.

It was never surely profitable yes, but if you believed in the whole crypto world you would have made a lot of money. Remember those miners who were mining LTC and could barely pay off the electricity when LTC was around $1-2? Whoever kept those LTC and paid the electricity using fiat profited a lot. LTC later on jumped to $30-40 or more (I'm not sure about the exact numbers).

[Light]

So much BS. Mining never was a surely profitable endeavour.

Did you even read the OP? Because to me it doesn't sound like you did. Maidak ain't complaining about the profitability of mining - he's arguing that Bitcoin is becoming increasingly centralised as a result of large mining conglomerates and that merchant acceptance hasn't improved as significantly as expected.

[Bit_Happy]

I'm not saying I have lost any faith but it is lost its touch since I was introduced in 09 if anything it has become monopolized.

What is killing the bitcoin...

Nothing is killing bitcoin things are going great compared to any other year. 

[dogechode]

I don't know what is scarier, the people denying that control of BTC is slowly concentrating into the hands of large organizations and/or a few super-wealthy investors, or the people who think btc is doing fine and dandy despite being on a hardcore price decline for a solid 4+ months now...