Hi guys, I am trying to educate myself about bitcoins, watched about a dozen of videos or so - mostly advertising kind of videos, praising videos, people are so excited and up-bid, and enthusiastic and so on.
Yet, some features of bitcoins don't appear to be very appealing to me.
Maybe because I am new.
Perhaps some of you can dispel some of my "concerns", and here they are:
1. Bitcoin reliance on word-wide-web.
Imagine (hypothetically) if the global network is cut in half.
The two parts will continue working separately, adding blocks to their own version of the chain.
Once the connection is reestablished in between the two and two versions are reconciled, then only one of the versions of the chain will survive.
All accumulated transactions of the chain that lost will be canceled out.
You think that will never happen? Why then the recommended wait time for large transactions is at least one hour ( or six blocks ) for the sync to propagate over the entire world?
So, if Internet is censored and divided into country-zones what will happen to wallets and to ability to transact?
Even more - what if networks start filtering out bitcoin peer-to-peer traffic?
2. Claimed Inflation immunity. Is it really-really immune?
These days new bitcoins come into existence from mining.
The bitcoin inflation is limited by the fact that the mining rewards are cut in half every four years.
Sounds like a promise.
So, how this promise is different from promises of central banks or governments of the world?
What guarantees there are that this rule/principle will never be broken in the future?
Compare that to PMs.
The difficulty of finding and then mining the PMs out of the ground provides a rock-solid protection from inflation.
3. Maintaining the global bitcoin system is not free
The system needs a world-wide network of millions of computers, constantly solving complex mathematical puzzles in order to produce new blocks to chug alone.
Neither electrical energy no computers are cheap.
Compare that to a brick of silver doubling as a door stop. Does it need electrical power to support its existence?
4. Bitcoin system depends on complex glitch-free software
Which means that there could come a day when a software glitch or a malicious attack corrupts the entire distributed ledger, destroying all wallets, transaction history and the entire system
Compare that to a brick of silver. Will it get corrupted? Will it dissolve into thin air?
5. Bitcoin system is also called crypto-currency, owing to the fact that it is totally dependent on encryption. The encryption may be unbreakable today, but will it be unbreakable tomorrow? Future advances in technology and in mathematics may open up wholes in the encryption, similar to what happened to “unbreakable” German ENIGMA system, which would spell a doomsday for all crypto-currencies. One of such advances, such as quantum computing is already on the horizon and is already coming very close to cracking the kind of encryptions that is behind the bitcoins. Who knows, maybe such machines already exist even today, hiding in a basement of some shady government agency.
6. This is more philosophical, perhaps no need to answer this - bitcoin is yet another system both made and maintained by humans.
Therefore it got to be as imperfect and as corruptible as humans who made it are.
Compare that to PMs were made by God and ordained by Him to be money.
These kinds of questions are not addressed in any youtube videos I watched.