- Irreversible Transactions
As existing merchants will be well aware, when accepting credit card payments, or even bank payments the sender has the ability to reverse or chargeback the payment. There is nothing worse than sending products to a customer, only to receive a message that the payment has been reversed, you have been cheated and there is nothing you can do about it.
Bitcoin is the only payment method that is 100% irreversible and cannot be charged back. For this reason you should be careful when sending Bitcoins; be sure that you are sending them to a trusted vendor.
This is not as big of a benefit as people claim. All this does is shift all the power from the consumer to the merchant with no mediation in the middle that exists in the current system. Now merchants can rip off consumers by sending them faulty products and leave consumers with no recourse. The reversibility of payments in the current system allows for mediation for disputes, which will wholly disappear under a system where there is no reversibility. People who scam the current system get banned from the payment platforms. It's not perfect, but it's better than a system where there is no mediation required like Bitcoin would usher in.
- No Paperwork
Anyone, from any country, of any age can accept Bitcoins within minutes. There is no ID card, passport or proof of address that all conventional banks required to open an account. All you need to do to start sending and receiving Bitcoins is to download a Bitcoin Wallet program and generate a Bitcoin Address.
You could have 1000s of different addresses if you wanted, there is no limit to the number of Bitcoin Addresses that you can have.
This is a legitimate benefit, although I would expect KYC laws to apply to Bitcoin. There's no benefit in allowing pure anonymous transactions, we don't live in a world where that will turn out well for anyone.
- Appreciating Value
As you can see from the Bitcoin exchange value graph shown on our homepage, the value of Bitcoins were initially highly volatile during the first few years of its inception, however during the last 6 months the currency has stabilized and has been steadily increasing in value on a daily basis.
Nope. Not only is the value in a long term down trend, but it is highly volatile on the way down as well. Volatility hasn't leveled off. The unstable price is the biggest detriment to Bitcoin being used a currency. Even appreciating value is bad for the economy because it incentivizes people not to spend and reduces economic activity. Bitcoin isn't a suitable currency, and it probably never will be, for commerce.
- Quick and Cheap Transactions
When making a Bitcoin transfer the fees are extremely low compared to conventional methods of moving money. A normal Bitcoin fee is 0.0005 BTC per transfer, whereas with a typically international wire transfer you could expect to pay 700THB-1300THB per transaction. Accepting credit cards will generally cost 3-5% of the transfer amount, which again is much more expensive than a Bitcoin transaction.
International wire transfers can take from a few days to more than a week, whereas Bitcoin transactions are generally confirmed with an hour.
Quick, yes. Cheap, sometimes. There was a one year period where it wasn't even competitive with traditional wires, and because Bitcoin hasn't even solved the scaling issue, wider adoption will bring back the cost issue. Plus, the more halvings we have, the more fees miners will demand to process transactions to keep their revenue up, so unfortunately it seems cost of transactions is only going up over time.