It likely would not be fair to suggest that bitcoin is without disadvantages since there can be some challenges in regards to both knowing how to use bitcoin effectively, protecting oneself and the responsibilities of being ones own bank, for those who choose to hold bitcoin and perhaps also trying to figure out successorship issues, which could be problematic if they keys (or how to access them) are not sufficiently explained and/or left to your chosen successors.
I would not call this a disadvantage of Bitcoin. Is it a disadvantage that credit cards and bank accounts can be hacked because people fall to phishing scams? If we are talking about the thing itself, disadvantages would be other things like it is hard to use or slow confirmation speeds. I would more call it a consequence of radically new technology, because they all have these problems. Teaching people how to use smart phones was hard when they were new, and it opened up people to many different ways to get hacked or lose money that didn't exist before.
We can agree to disagree.
The ramifications are pretty large when you fuck up in bitcoin, and newbies might even presume that they have more back ups than they do, like if they get hacked, social engineered, sim swapped or they don't save their private key, so losing money (especially a lot of it) can be a difficult way to learn about the irreversibility of bitcoin transactions.. or even the unforgivenness if you messed up how you wrote down your back up seed words.. or even if you overly complicate your back up system so either you or your heirs end up having hardly any clue how to get access to your wallet, even if you might still be able to see the balances of your addresses through a block explorer..
yeah that's true. i know surely that even as we proclaim the importance of bitcoin over gold doesn't mean that bitcoin is risk free. one of the most risky part of bitcoin is loosing access to your wallet, that will automatically make a person lose all his asset forever.
there are guys who made such mistake back then and to day they have lose access to their wallet forever. example of such people are
1.
James Howells who lost a hard drive containing 8000 bitcoin in 20132.
Stefan Thomas is also another guy who lost access to his hard drive containing a total of 7,002 bitcointhere are many folks who lost access to their wallet and that is how they lose fortune forever so it is good to prioritize safety or safeguarding our seed as that the most important thing in bitcoin investment. that's why it is often said that not your key not your coin, this implies that if it is lost you also lose your asset.
This is a very low risk scenario. These days almost all wallets try to force you to create backups. If you don't do the backup or if you do do it wrong, it is more a you problem not a Bitcoin problem. A much bigger risk for normal users is getting hacked I would say.
We are talking about user problems that come from their failure/refusal to take proper steps and perhaps even sometimes assuming too much that someone will be able to help them if they cannot remember whether some of the letters of their back up seeds are spelled properly or in the right order or if they took a picture of their back up seeds because they forgot that portion of the instructions... and sure maybe no one got access to that file until 9 years later when they happen to have 70% of their networth connected to the private keys (wallet) whose contents are all of a sudden $0.
There are all kinds of examples of silly mistakes that bitcoiners make, and I recall a recent example of a guy whose computer was stolen and he had the back up keys (on a sticky attached to the computer), and surely he got lucky because he was able to move the coins (within a day or two, yet prior to the computer thief realizing what he had). User errors are disadvantages of the system, which could also be referred to as a learning curve that is not even necessarily static, since also their will be changes in user-interfaces and a variety of wallets, some of which are more forgiving of mistakes or protective of their users than others, yet there still will likely be trade-offs in interface, and you can proclaim until you are blue in the face that it is the user's problem and not bitcoin's problem blah blah blah...