| First off, thank you for making fair criticisms. Unfortunately some of your information is old. You don’t need a bitcoin backed token, lightning does it. Transaction rates are not artificially kept low. In fact most the vast majority of the time bitcoin has excess capacity. Privacy- this is a legitimate concern but it is improving, slowly. Taoroot and Lightning are both privacy improvements. So your daily transactions aren't meant for bitcoin. A distributed ledger that replicates all data globally for eternity is not an appropriate method for recording coffee purchases. Though I have done it. Bitcoin makes sense for settlement, and lightning is appropriate for coffee. That said, I regularly clear bitcoin transactions for $1 or less in fees, and it is cheaper then every other form of payment in the world. You may think a SWIFT transaction is “free”, but its merely the cost is hidden. And don’t forget the inflation tax, that is a global wealth tax on any money held in an inflating currency. So compared to that, $1 to send $100 is cheap. Online Only- I don’t think there is a solution to this criticism, but not sure what the issue is. Lightning allows speed without double spend problems. Personally when moving large (for me) amounts of money I font mind waiting an hour for the confirmations. I certainly won’t trust a payment without them. But bitcoin is voluntary, it doesn't have to be perfect in every regard. |
The fact that I need to connect to some peer-to-peer network or third party service for every transaction is a limiting factor. It reduces the efficiency of the system and increases latency, and it adds additional points of failure.
In fact it can be solved for electronic transactions and there is a mountain of published research on the topic that dates back to the late 80s. Here is a recent research paper:
https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1220.pdf
The idea is to ensure that users who attempt to double spend can be identified and penalized later (e.g. by being added to a blacklist; some systems actually ensure that all transactions in which the cheating user participated can be identified, so merchants who try to evade the blacklist can also be penalized). The money has to be issued by a bank under the security definition. If anonymity is not a requirement -- and presumably a Bitcoin enthusiast does not care about anonymity since Bitcoin is not anonymous -- this can be easily achieved by using ordinary digital signatures.