Bitcoin Is the New Gold

Invest in it, perhaps. But don't try to shop with it.

A steady trickle of companies is no longer accepting Bitcoin as payment for goods and services. Such transactions never became very widespread in the first place. Even a Bitcoin conference in Miami refused to accept Bitcoin for its attendance fees!

There are essentially three reasons Bitcoin isn’t working out as a currency -- two technological, and one economic. Technologically, Bitcoin tends to be slow and laborious to use because it verifies transactions in small blocks. That problem isn’t particularly hard to overcome -- just use bigger blocks, or use a form of temporary credit to ease the burden on the network. More ominously, Bitcoin relies on people known as miners to verify all transactions, and compensates them by creating new Bitcoins. But soon, this will stop, since the total number of Bitcoins is capped at 21 million -- at that point, transaction fees will be needed to pay miners.