Yes, most volatile currency ever, prone to hacking, prone to "exchange website screwed you over", not accepted in the shops, and it is just a big ponzi scheme in the first place. What could possibly go wrong.
And humanity wastes 83TWh every day into this.
They should just make it illegal.
I love how the first real Bitcoin currency exchange (Mt. Gox) was actually a website originally dedicated to buying, selling and trading Magic the Gathering cards (hence the acronym, MtGOX, or Magic the Gathering Online Exchange). It was run by some dude out of his mom’s basement. He converted it from Magic to Bitcoin pretty early in Bitcoin’s public history. Within six months he was handling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of transactions.
Think about that for a minute, people were literally saying, “Wait, you’re just a neck beard in a basement? ... Here’s a certified check for $10,000, please send me Bitcoins, kthx!”
If that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about Bitcoin’s hardcore fan base, maybe this will:
There was also the guy who died mining Bitcoins early on, after he filled his tiny, non-air conditioned bedroom up with GPUs and power supplies, in the middle of the summer, during a heatwave. Then died from heatstroke in his sleep.
The worst part of Bitcoin is that it’s popular for the wrong reasons. I think that having a decentralized crypto currency isn’t actually a bad idea for some scenarios, however to really be useful it needs to A) Have value by itself and B) Not require the “coins” to be “mined”.
Any crypto currency could satisfy point A, however (realistically) in order to do so, you’d have to get people to use it to pay for goods and services. That’s a hard sell considering the fact that “dirty capitalists fiat money” is already so well entrenched. That’s mainly because it works well enough, is anonymous and untraceable when used as cash, convenient when used as credit or debit and can be used as an investment vehicle when placed in stocks or bonds.
The fact that Bitcoin requires exchanges where you can transfer from Bitcoin to real money and back is proof that it’s not a real currency, but instead nothing more than day trading for people who think Atlas Shrugged is erotic literature.
That’s just my two cents, err, 0.000000021B.