Quote from: jseverson on December 15, 2017, 03:52:21 PM

Quote from: RealJoshuar on December 15, 2017, 02:26:31 AM

1) As you can clearly see on https://blockchain.info/pools Bitcoin mining is condensed into mostly a few pools. Coinbase themselves own the largest % of Bitcoins after Satoshi.

What does mining have to do with anything? I agree that the hashpower isn't as well distributed as well as I would like it to be, but it shouldn't matter for as long as a single entity doesn't hold more than 50%.

Quote from: RealJoshuar on December 15, 2017, 02:26:31 AM

2) Constant forks that are "accepted" undermine Bitcoin, such as Bitcoin Cash, etc. This shows to the average person that Bitcoin is more like play money than anything substantial. Do you see there being any variants of the USD? No, there's only one United States Fiat

No forks are actually accepted by the community as the true Bitcoin though. Every fork is a side project and an altcoin. The moment it forks from Bitcoin, it becomes a different entity which takes advantage of Bitcoin's open source nature to use its branding. There is only one Bitcoin just like there is only one United States fiat. Bitcoin to Bitcoin Cash is far more comparable to, say, the United States Dollar to the Australian Dollar -- they may share a portion of their name but they're different entities.

Quote from: RealJoshuar on December 15, 2017, 02:26:31 AM

3) Bitcoin could never be anything close to an ideal method of payment. There is absolutely no way to solve Bitcoin's volatility currently, hence it will never become widely adopted. Not to mention once Bitcoin's are stolen, the action cannot be reversed(Like it could with banks, etc), and in the future quantamn computing will break into Bitcoin. Those few among many are reasons the average person will never use this crypto to buy groceries at the supermarket. Also, bitcoin is becoming used less, as Steam and others have stopped accepting it due to it's extremely slow confirmation times and high fees.

I respect that opinion. It's easy to be pessimistic towards Bitcoin's future as a method of payment because of how things have been going recently. However, there is no guarantee that quantum computing can break into Bitcoin. The slow confirmation times and high fees are also set to be addressed by future changes like the Lightning Network. Only time will tell.

Unfortunately quantum computing can 100% break into Bitcoins PoW. It can also break any known crypography today. The issue is, centralized services, while they can be hacked, your money is still ensured and $ gained by the attacker(digital) would be rendered void and worthless by the government. So if your bank get's hacked, you have an insurance for upto 250,000$ in the USA. So yea the hacking is going to cause problems(privacy leaks, etc), but not a total disruption.

However, if Bitcoin PoW were to be hacked, it's game over, the currency is dead from that point on. The reason being is because once your coins are stolen, you cannot get them back. There is no insurance. The only question is when will this hack occur, 5 years, a decade from now? That is unfortunately, a huge flaw in a crypto like this. The future of cryptocurrency is not bitcoin, it's a currency with a built in, very advanced A.I(this right now isn't even remotely feasible, so I'm talking maybe a few decades in the future).

The future of money as a whole, is not cryptocurrency either. In the advent of the internet shutting down or being disrupted for whatever reason, there would be no feasible way to use any cryptocurrency(crypto's require the internet). However, physical fiat would not be affected.