In these desperate/FUD times, here's my (I hope) unbiased view of Bitcoin.

[btcxyzzz]

The problems I see:

1) Lack of innovation. Absolutely nothing big happened for years now. Anonimity would be a helpful thing, even if it means hard fork. I'm starting to think this is being intentional. Anonimity is essential property.
2) 7 transactions per second, it's clear that Bitcoin can't compete with other paying systems with a constraint like that.
3) Much energy lost on various alt-coins. We're fighting a war against banksters and fiat money. This is whole new healthy economy and sense of unity and focused work would be better than what we have now - 150 new altcoins every month. In the other hand I keep questioning myself is it really possible to code for Bitcoin now, are people allowed to? Not much into Bitcoin development, so I just don't know how much Bitcoin is open to development by public.
4) We run out of geeks and early smart investors. There's nowhere 1.5mil USD to be found daily just to keep the price steady.
5) Right now, Bitcoin is much more of a speculation/investment vehicle rather than currency/payment system, and that is changing slowly. Price stabilization is good, but can and will happen only when adoption as currency is much much greater.

I think we can safely conclude no merchant adoption will help it rise. It's weak factor. Even if Amazon, Google, Ebay and Paypal fully accepted it, I feel like maximum 2x rise is possible and then again slow decline. Besides, we already know Bitcoins spent for purchases are in most cases immediately converted to fiat.

For the Bitcoin price to rise, either somehow big investors realise that they have interest to invest, or some big financial crysis hit somewhere and many average Joes decide to try to save their own wealth. Remember, Bitcoin is more accessible to people than gold. The more - gold is a scam afaik, they say there's 7 times more of a gold in papers than in reality, correct me if you think I'm wrong.

The last thing I said makes me very nervous selling my portion of Bitcoins. Another bubble may kick-in, because those two scenarios I mentioned may be reality any minute now, especially as we're in ~300$ waters. Remember it's close to previous peak of 270$, and price around $300 may be considered bottom.

Discussion welcome.

[TrailingComet]

I think it is a mistake to over-focus on price, I disagree that there is no innovation happening, it is just a little less visible now as VC money means you can't open source everything, you need to build in stealth to maximise payback
BTC is an opensource start-up growing up under the glare of publicity with every misstep highlighted, which doesn't help price discovery

[Fabrizio89]

You're not half right in any of your statements, but since these things are brought up and discussed at least 10 times per day in this forum you could have at least used the search before beginning the same discussion another time.

[BitCoinNutJob]

All the fundamentals are still better then ever BTC seems to average 600% price growth per year thus far people are just getting confused by short term dips.  We do have a user friendliness problem which is stopping the mainstream going crazy about bitcoin.

[btcxyzzz]

All the fundamentals are still better then ever BTC seems to average 600% price growth per year thus far people are just getting confused by short term dips.  We do have a user friendliness problem which is stopping the mainstream going crazy about bitcoin.

So nothing until someone hands his credit card and then either gives his bitcoin address or receives login/pass for online wallet. That kind of simplicity is what we need...

[Lethn]

We've seen these kind of slumps before and everybody swarms the forums screaming about how Bitcoin is going to fail blah blah blah, happened with ASIC's, happened with MTGOX, happened with scrypt mining. While I don't think that Bitcoin is going to be as strong as it once was because of Altcoin competitors I'm certain it will still be around and still worth more than the dollar ever will be.

[TaunSew]

There's already anonymity in Bitcoin - it's called being able to open a wallet without needing to submit identification.  These anonymity coins are a joke as their solution is to take away a public ledger but without said ledger how do we know someone isn't cooking the books or something?


Although yes it's true mining and the ex-hibernating whales are killing Bitcoin.

$1.5 million in Bitcoin is mined everyday and this is an A) inflation (hidden tax on existing holders) and B) these miners dump up to 80% to pay for their electrical costs.

[maurya78]

BTC has a role to play in the world economy as a technology, the early onset of PR and hype is deeply unhelpful but is there to stay
Still long-term bullish but think we are in for a volatile ride

[yayayo]

The problems I see:

1) Lack of innovation. Absolutely nothing big happened for years now. Anonimity would be a helpful thing, even if it means hard fork. I'm starting to think this is being intentional. Anonimity is essential property.

I agree that anonymity should be improved. It's also a top priority for me, because actions of some governments could be threatening the fungibility of Bitcoin.
But I understand that improving Bitcoin Core is not an easy job, because any mistake could have disastrous consequences. So improvements need time, because everything has to be tested thoroughly.

I don't agree on your other points. I think these fears lack substance and are mostly based on the depressed price environment we're currently in.

ya.ya.yo!

[cyberpinoy]

Yep DOWN DOWN DOWN we go where the slide stops NOBODY knows. I said it would be under 200 by the end of the year, and so far, there is nothing stopping it. Maybe we will be lucky and it will hit 90 dollars. Alot of people here are banking on the christmas holiday, the tax people and a lot of variables that just are not worth it to rely on anymore. Christmas is going to force it even farther down, because There are people holding their coins they have collected in various ways to spend them on new computers and other things they can buy with BTC for christmas, when that happens the retailers they use are just going to dump them as fast as they can to get the most out of their value as possible during those months. These retailers are not looking at this in a bigger picture, Let me just say it is not Bitcoin that is in its infancy its the people using bitcoin that are in their infancy. not enough research on their part.

But its ok

Here very very soon this is going to become very problematic for Bitcoin itself, we are very very close to mining not being profitable, people are going to want to force the difficulty down and that means a lot of miners will have to join forces and shut operations down until the price goes back up a little. (or solo mine some alt coins like me) If the right amount of miners pull away from BTC to lower the difficulty this may hurt transaction times.

I know there are a lot of "IFs" but so far things I have posted in the past have came true, ( Just the other day bI told some people Bitcoin will be falling another 30+ dollars better sell now if you want to get it at 400 dollars a coin, cause it wont be there in 3 to 4 more days, and look 368 it is HAHAHA) My nonsense, and "FUD" as others put it, so far has been so true it makes me feel like the Nostradamus of Bitcoins HAHAHA. If only I could tell when the price is going to go back up. Much like Nostradamus I can only foretell destruction, chaos and negative impacting factors, I can not see the silver lining that will make me and my friends rich. Hehe.

You're not half right in any of your statements, but since these things are brought up and discussed at least 10 times per day in this forum you could have at least used the search before beginning the same discussion another time.

The OP was correct about most all of what he said, Gold is oversold in paper contracts, contracts that the banks buying and selling do not have the gold to support, that is how the Gold market is manipulated on a daily basis.

Retailers are dumping coins as fast as they are getting them, why because the price is falling as fast as they are getting BTC, what they sold an item yesterday for in BTC is not what it is worth today and most definitely not what it will be worth in two weeks. you have seen a consistent decrease in value for the past several months in BTC, of 30 to 80 dollars decrease every two weeks, so the retailers have to sell them fast to get their worth to be able to conduct their business, (which does NOT revolve around BTC but rather local currency).

there is no innovation in Bitcoin itself, No one is even attempting to create a demand for this or any other coin at the moment, Aricoin However is on the right track) but the lower the price goes the harder it is to even have the ambition to do anything for the coin for those outside of the development team.

Right now, Bitcoin is much more of a speculation/investment vehicle rather than currency/payment system, and that is changing slowly.

Correct once again the ONLY thing moving Bitcoin is its tradable market, the only thing that used to attract people was Bitcoins tradable value. As the tradable value decreases across the board so does interest in the coin.

So I 100% agree with the OP and add we have NOT seen the worst for it is yet to come!!

[teukon]

3) Much energy lost on various alt-coins. We're fighting a war against banksters and fiat money. This is whole new healthy economy and sense of unity and focused work would be better than what we have now - 150 new altcoins every month. In the other hand I keep questioning myself is it really possible to code for Bitcoin now, are people allowed to? Not much into Bitcoin development, so I just don't know how much Bitcoin is open to development by public.

Energy being spent on altcoins is indicative of the health you reference.  The population of altcoins roughly following a Pareto distribution (in their "market caps")  is validation that this movement is rooted in liberty and therefore a proper opponent of the fiat money system.  Unity is good but too much unity suggests poor health.

As far as I'm aware, Bitcoin has had an open development model since satoshi released v0.1-alpha at the beginning of 2009.  Check out the stickied threads in the development subforum.  Indeed, it's some of the altcoins which are developed in private (Nxt comes to mind).

[Beliathon]

The problems I see:

1) Lack of innovation. Absolutely nothing big happened for years now.

Thank you for putting this nonsense right up front, I knew to stop reading without wasting too many of my valuable seconds.

[btcxyzzz]

Thank you for putting this nonsense right up front, I knew to stop reading without wasting too many of my valuable seconds.

Then please tell me what has substantially changed in design of Bitcoin and are there any new and significant improvements even being planned? My impression is that it stagnates. Again, anonymity is the right way to go.

[inBitweTrust]

Thank you for putting this nonsense right up front, I knew to stop reading without wasting too many of my valuable seconds.

Then please tell me what has substantially changed in design of Bitcoin and are there any new and significant improvements even being planned? My impression is that it stagnates. Again, anonymity is the right way to go.

Seriously, you want us to list the bitcoin development and plans within one post? That info is contained within large mailing list, sections of forums ,github repositories, whole wikis, whitepapers....

Have you even tried researching Bitcoin development? Just because Bitcoin Core looks similar over the years and doesn't have some fancy skin doesn't mean their isn't development in the bitcoin space . Their is more development and more developers within Bitcoin than all of the other alts combined. This is because with BTC there has been serious VC money supporting dev between open source projects, wallets , aps, API's and alternative implementations.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=6.0  
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/bitcoin-development/

How do you even define "substantially"... would you prefer bitcoin to be flopping between PoW to PoS to PoSv to DPoS every month? Would that make you happy by seeing lots of changes instead of import work like testing, cleaning up the code, and patching vulnerabilities that don't have the marketing prowess as some fancy new scheme?

Perhaps, bitcoins problem more has to do with perception than development? Perhaps the solution to these perception problems is people doing research before spreading FUD.

[1anonymous]

Alt payment systems usually have a huge new tech or site connected to its success.

Example

Paypal when eBay decided it was a valid payment system before they bought it out.

So if some new site or tech gets hot and says we want bitcoins here is how you get them

Bitcoin won't become an ingrained payment method

Big retailers saying we take bitcoin, so what, they take mc/visa/ae/paypal too

Silk Road was why a year ago btc popped, it was the way underground stuff was moving via btc

So another underground market needs to make btc the way you pay

Another Silk Road? Maybe a group of huge p0rn sites, some adult teen p0rn star saying I only want btc for private web cams

Maybe an alt music download site saying music for 10 or 20 cents

So when a new site or tech comes along with huge traffic and says due to major payment systems being traceable we can't use paypal or whatever you must get a btc wallet and here is how easy it is

BANG

Traffic to something people wants and having btc as the way to pay is how the next push will occur

My .000001 Satoshi

[herzmeister]

3) Much energy lost on various alt-coins. We're fighting a war against banksters and fiat money.

Much energy lost on various automobile companies. We're fighting a war against horses and carriages.

[btcxyzzz]

How do you even define "substantially"... would you prefer bitcoin to be flopping between PoW to PoS to PoSv to DPoS every month? Would that make you happy by seeing lots of changes instead of import work like testing, cleaning up the code, and patching vulnerabilities that don't have the marketing prowess as some fancy new scheme?

Perhaps, bitcoins problem more has to do with perception than development? Perhaps the solution to these perception problems is people doing research before spreading FUD.

Well, I already emphasized what I consider to be substantial improvement, nothing of that calibre showed up for years now. Yeah, I'm not into Bitcoin development, but I do read crypto news from various sources and I'm active on Reddit and I definitely can't remember when I read something about some big improvement to Bitcoin. So you can assume I'm an average crypto-holder and my impression may be the impression of many.

Apart from anonymity which is very important, but not even considered for implementation, I see confirmation times are huge problem. Those are the core problems that need to be solved, I don't want to read about new fancy wallets in the subforums you suggested to be read. Core problems need to be solved and some logic new features to be implemented.

And I really have no interest in FUDing because I'm 100% crypto now, I just wanted to give my impression.

[franky1]

The problems I see:

1) Lack of innovation. Absolutely nothing big happened for years now. banks have been using the same technology for atleast 2 decades
2) it's clear that Bank wire transfers can't compete with other paying systems such as credit cards.
3) Much energy lost on various FIATs. they're fighting a war against private investments and cryptocurrencies. In the other hand I keep questioning myself is it really possible to code for Banks now, are people allowed to? Not much into Bank development, so I just don't know how much Banks are open to development.
4) smart investors run from banking. There's nowhere 1.5trillion USD to be found daily just to keep the dollar price steady.
5) Right now, FIAT is much more of a speculation rather than currency/payment system, compared to the 1930's

[inBitweTrust]

Apart from anonymity which is very important,

Stealth addresses and coinjoin take care of this and there are several choices that allow this.
Here is one - https://www.darkwallet.is

In a few days there are more big changes coming with -
 libbitcoin, obelisk and sx. which is another BTC implementation.

I see confirmation times are huge problem

What type of average confirmation time do you wish and what use case would it serve?

[AcerGreen]

Just another thread where people complain about Bitcoin.  It's not going to stagnate, it just fluctuates.