Having doubts about Bitcoin
I'm 100% convinced cryptocurrencies will continue to vigorously grow for many years to come because they fulfill a huge need. There has been talk about micropayments, deterrence against DDos attacks, and decentralized digital money for as long as I have been using the Internet (since 1992) but until Bitcoin came along, there was nothing like Bitcoin, a trustless peer-to-peer currency, in existence. Although I think Bitcoin will grow for some time, it has already clearly begun to lose market share as competition has been stiffening and as the inherent limitations of Bitcoin's underlying technology have become painfully obvious. The 17 euro fee for transferring a little over half a bitcoin a few days ago was painful, particularly because it took a couple of hours to confirm. This is unacceptable.
Segregated Witness will not help for long at the rate Bitcoin is currently growing. SegWit will only increase block capacity by a factor of 1.7. Increasing the block size requires a hard fork. Also, mining larger blocks will be more expensive putting more power into the hands of runners of full nodes, leading to more centralization, which is against the original premise of Bitcoin. Ultimately, no increase in block size will be sufficient for the projected growth of Bitcoin in the future. There is no way for Bitcoin to grow and to even retain its current share of the cryptocurrency market let alone capture any significant share of the remittance market, for instance, without implementing off-chain solutions. With the SegWit/Block size limit controversy beginning to look very hard to find a solution to, I can only imagine the damage the current situation will cause Bitcoin even in the medium term.
No blockchain is immune to the scaling problem. Perhaps other types of solutions are needed for implementing a single trustless and private cryptocurrency. A couple of weeks ago I ran into articles about IOTA, a distributed ledger not based on a blockchain but a directed acyclic graph called the Tangle. Here's an article about the technology that makes IOTA tick. IOTA promises to be infinitely scalable, without transfer fees thus enabling nano payments, and quantum resistant. One of its main use cases will be machine-to-machine transactions (value transfer using IOTA tokens and smart contracts). This is quite new to me so I will have to delve into the topic for some time to understand it.
The first exchange listing after the successful ICO last year will be tomorrow 13th June on Bitfinex.
Iota is also build to support not only people 2 people, but also machine 2 machine tx
That is correct. Many people had a very bad experience with the ZCash ICO. There have been other ICOs after which the price of the asset was very unstable. If you're not careful, you can lose a lot of money.
That's also true. It also depends on your strategy though. I am long term into the major Coins which actually build a foundation for any future use case, like Iota for M2M tx =)
A day ago we were talking about how a one app or a wallet for all coins would be an actual killer app. I mentioned BitShares and how it might be one.
I have now tried the BitShares client, and it pretty much seems to have the power to hold all cryptocurrencies of mine, and transfers in/out bitshares seem pretty easy and quite fast. And because it has an integrated decentralized exchange, I can do some trading on it securely without the fear of someone hacking to Kraken.
I'm now seriously considering moving most of my assets from Kraken to my BitShares account.
There's one big advantage to keeping your assets on a centralized exchange: the high speed and low cost of trading because the trades happen off-chain. Security is better on a p2p platform for sure.
But what I had in mind originally was something somewhat different. I was envisioning a future with the blockchain as a mainstream payment mechanism. One huge global ledger cannot possibly serve the needs of every conceivable market. That would be a technological impossibility. For blockchain technology to dominate, there will have to be thousands or even tens of thousands of different blockchains each serving a specific niche. There are over 800 altcoins in existence now. The future of a blockchain-powered world will look like an extreme version of the current situation. This is where interoperability between currencies will be vital. There will have to be services that deal with the cross-chain exchanges of value automatically in a manner invisible to the end user. Under this scenario, the average consumer would be using maybe dozens or hundreds of blockchains when going about his daily shopping - all under the hood without the user ever having to know which little tokens his wallet systems dealt with during the course of the day.