Why I Personally Don’t Like Bitcoin

Disclaimer: I don’t own Bitcoin, however, I do own cryptocurrency in general and Bitcoin Cash, which is a fork of Bitcoin

Sah fellow Steemians, so yesterday you may have read a post of mine in which I explained a Theoretical Bitcoin Private Key Cracker, or TBPKC for short =). At one point, I stated that I did not like using Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency. In case you were curious as to why I didn’t, I’ll explain. If you’re not curious, then congrats, you don’t actually have to read this post!

#The Transaction Fees Are Far Too High
Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand why we have to have transaction fees, however, I feel they are far too high. I understand why this is, since Bitcoin has had so much media attention now, with even the YouTube comedian Jacksfilms making a joke about it. With so much media attention, it’s has had around 10 transactions a second, and it was only made to handle up to 5. All of this could be fixed, however, if my next point wasn’t true.

#Becoming A Miner Costs Thousands of $
Miners used to be able to mine with CPU, which was great! Then people found out that GPUs were waaaaaay better at that sort of stuff, which was still great!!! But then, Application Specific Integrated Circuits or ASIC was invented, and Bitcoin mining became only for the people that could afford to pay thousands of dollars =(. I remember a few years ago you could have gotten one Bitcoin every few weeks mining from an android phone. (I don’t KNOW this but I saw a YouTube video on how to mine from your android phone and it said you’d only make one bitcoin every few weeks, I first learned cryptocurrency in August)

#Bitcoin Transactions Take Too Long
At the time of writing this, there are around 267,410 unconfirmed Bitcoin Transactions, with 7 being added every second. As such, even if you pay a $20 transaction fee, you’ll have to wait around an hour for your transaction to even be confirmed! This could be fixed if the second issue I talked about was, but it’s a bit late now.

Now I wouldn’t just be complaining if I didn’t have solutions. Bitcoin has been forked several times and these forks were generally made to help improve Bitcoin. One example is Bitcoin Cash, which is a fork of Bitcoin with the theory that if a larger block size is used, then transactions will be faster and thus, the fees will be lower. And so far, this has worked! I’ve sent BCH to my frirends and the transaction was nearly instantaneous, with a tiny 1 cent fee. Even with BCH being almost triple the price of Ether, the fee is 3 or 4 times lower. While the fee of Ether is not something I’m going to complain about, 44 cents isn’t much. But since Bitcoin was built for micro transactions, this is nice (I don’t know how low a transaction has to be to be classified as a “micro transaction”). There are cryptocurrencies built to be ASIC-Resistant such as Monero and (ew) Bytecoin. My favorite cryptocurrency (with Steem at a close second!) I’ve mentioned a few too many times is Gridcoin, which is naturally ASIC Resistant, makes microtransactions easy with a very tiny fee, helps science by giving them your idle computing power to do research to find aliens, cure diseases, and solve very complicated problems, and has instantaneous transactions! I hate doing this but I really love this coin, and it’s pretty easy to mine (I mine from 2 kindle fires!). So all in all, I don’t like Bitcoin, I like Bitcoin Cash, and I love Steem and Gridcoin. I feel Bitcoin has issues and that other cryptocurrencies have fixed them. It’s not Satoshi Nakamoto’s fault though, he was a pioneer in his field, and couldn’t possibly seen this far into the future!