Quote from: legiteum on Today at 04:58:43 PM

There's a lot of disinformation and incorrect notions going around about the legality of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and digital currencies.

Here is a good place to start if you want the facts about Bitcoin's legality:

Legality of cryptocurrency by country or territory

What you can learn from is that for almost all purposes, Bitcoin (and by extension cryptocurrencies and digital currencies) are not meaningfully curtailed by government regulation on individuals. Even China's ban on Bitcoin hasn't stopped Binance from trading $90 billion per month there. Based on this, you would be hard-pressed to find a civilized country where you could be put in jail for owning or trading Bitcoin. They exist, but they amount to a tiny fraction of the world's economy.

And yet in the face of these facts, a near constant refrain from many crypto enthusiasts is that the reason Bitcoin hasn't replaced the world's sovereign currencies like the USD and the Euro is because there's a conspiracy of government regulations to stop it. They can't point to how exactly this works, but more importantly, they seem to ignore the fact that Bitcoin transactions can take 30 minutes to complete and cost 30 US dollars, making the transaction unthinkable for all but a microscopic fraction of worldwide daily transactions. And while more centralized blockchain-based approaches improve this situation somewhat, they are still orders of magnitude away from the scalability necessary, and the key pair requirement for end-users is clunky and makes it hard to adopt.

When I first designed the Haypenny transaction platform, my first task was to calculate the number of monetary transactions going on in the whole world on any given day, and then calculate that number for peak times of the year (e.g. Christmas), and then multiple that by a factor for the peak hours of the day, and then multiplying that by a factor of five to account for "peak-second" loads (yes, my professional background is whole-internet scale systems in case you couldn't tell

).

The number you arrive at when you do these calculations is that you'd need a system that could handle a transaction load in the signal-digit millions of transactions per second if you wanted to replace daily credit card and physical cash transactions worldwide. And you'd need to handle several hundred billion transactions a month.

That is what is required for a currency to replace the current status-quo, and Bitcoin and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies can't do it, and they can't even get close.

And it should go without saying that transactions would need to cost far less than today's transactions in order to replace the status-quo: people don't make a major change to their long-held behavior unless there is a significant incentive to do so.

And then there's the usage model. Not only does any new technology that replaces the exact functionality of an existing one need to be far cheaper in order to have a chance, it needs to be easier for end-users, too. Requiring every consumer to have a private key is something we've been dreaming about since about 1994 (I was there

), but its a pain in the ass that most consumers don't want to deal with.

These are the reasons there is not mainstream adoption of Bitcoin for everyday payments, not some conspiracy by "the government".

I am USA based I can send cash for no cost using Zelle.
I do not need to use BTC for sending money in the USA.

Zelle is pretty much irreversible way to send money.

I use it often enough and I know I must be careful and not enter the worth info as I can lose the cash I send.

Does Zelle have weaknesses yes it does.

Does sending BTC have weaknesses yes it does.

But If I am selling something and you pay me with Zelle I am pretty safe.

So I agree with you that btc simpley is not a great way to send money/wealth.

It is a very good way to get money out of a bad country or a country that becomes bad.

So if you are middle class you should have some in case you need to leave your country.