What do you guys think about Bitcoin? And the future of blockchain in general?🤔

Bitcoin in particolar: meh, it's only alive due to momentum and hype generated by being the first.

Cryptocurrencies in general: they have great potential, some have already acheived some very interesting and groundbreaking results.
I just wish people hadn't turned the hole fucking thing into a giant shitty meme, to the point that you can't even have a serious discussion about the technology without people getting bad kneejerk reactions.

The terrible amount of speculation, scams, and 'moon lambo' memes certainly doesn't help its image, but I guess that comes with the (unregulated) territory

Also, rant tags are just comma-separated here, no hash symbol. And please learn to use the right category (question, in this case) :)

If people one day decide to free themselves from governments and corporations cryptography, blockchain and decentralization are obvious choices.

It’s not technology that will take over the world in this or even next century but 2300 who knows.

Now it’s only a toy and some sort of experiment on human mind.

Overhyped. Small-scale shit in the natural course of the larger scale decentralization taking place across all industries.

Not convinced it's a good idea as the primary currency, because it's tied to a limited resource which can only be obtained in limited quantities through one time consuming process (mining), which makes it basically like gold or gold-backed dollars. That severely constrains how your economy can grow and adapt.

Plus, all the tools of modern economics which are super useful in controlling prices and reducing the impact of extreme inflation/depression would basically be unavailable because there's no central authority.

Also I'm not fond of how much energy goes into mining.

@RememberMe not all cryptos adopt the same economical model of Bitcoin: Monero, for example, has a small linear 'tail emission' that kicks in after the main emission curve is over, creating a small (<0.6%), decreasing yearly inflation.

Furthermore, all the monetary policy decisions can still be made: ultimately, the users and miners 'vote' by choosing to run a specific version of the code. If they don't agree with it, they can fork away if they so choose, and economics and the market will dictate the success or failure.
Here, the concept of 'non-contentious hard forks' is important (users agree on the changes ahead of time, so when the update rolls around everybody switches at the same time) - Monero has been pretty successful at this.

@RememberMe As for the energy spent on mining: that's a very fundamental (yet terribly common) misunderstanding of what 'mining' does.
Mining is not just about minting new coins, but also about validating transactions and keeping the coin secure.

There needs to be at least one miner to keep a cryptocurrency going, and the more widespread and decentralized the mining power is, the more secure the coin is from manipulations and attacks.

Again, to cite Monero's case, they've been fighting non-stop to keep asics and fpgas away, thus ensuring that anyone can join the mining force with common cpus and gpus and not be at a disadvantage.

@endor I'm not familiar with how Monero works, will look it up, thanks. But those numbers still look way too small to support a developing economy (if you're talking about an already developed country that's growing at like 1%, I guess it'll work, but it also removes flexibility to grow if some new economic boom could happen).

I'm also not convinced that complete self-regulation by users will perform better than the system we have right now for regular money. Users look out for themselves and their own immediate needs, it's just human nature. You need organizations that look at the bigger picture and long-term stuff.

@endor I'm aware of what mining does :) and Monero doing all that doesn't change how inefficient the system is compared to say transaction through a regular old bank. Also the number of transactions/second is much lower than what regular institutions can provide.

@RememberMe keep in mind that the inflation rate (and the emission curve itself) could always be changed at any time - it's all code, after all. You just gotta convince everybody that your idea is an improvement over the current system.

It's true that users are fickle creatures. Cryptocurrencies rely on a very fine balance of powers and aligned interests. So every decision made and implemented has to be weighed and studies carefully ahead of time.
Pretty much all cryptos have a core group of maintainers that take upon themselves the task of keeping things sane and functional. From the point of view of miners, it's pretty much a direct democracy.

As for the inefficiency and transactional power compared to a centralized system, I guess that's the price we pay for stronger financial security. At least for now, until we make things better.

I've been hyped and had an intense look into it. Was terribly disappointed by cryptocurrencies. In most countries you cannot use bitcoin to pay anything in the real world and the currency itself is very unstable, does not follow an economic model and is not very useful in this regard.

The technology behind it however is very useful: Since its upbringing, blockchain has been implemented by banks and logistics companies to track their inventory and transactions.

This is the internal blockchain I am talking about, so it's a blockchain only accessible by the company and not by the public. Internal blockchains are easy to set up and can be a big plus on security and traceability.

Public blockchains are overhyped and do not bring any significant advantages in a modern day setting. That is only my personal opinion, I am not a huge fan of it as I think it falls a bit flat on functionality. I have yet to see a real world application where a public blockchain makes sense.

Exchanging people you can't trust by technology you can't trust controlled by people you can't trust.

Bitcoin, not so much, to unstable snd resource hogging.

Blockchains in general, interesting.

The real thing is not the blockchain by it self but the distributed consensus but its also the akilles heal as it limits the speed of transactions.

There are projects to alleviate that but they are, as far as know, not standardized and therefore not usable with all parties.

Blockchain (which is NOT cryptocurrencies) is a revolutionary technology and i hope to see it applied more widely.

Blockchains can be very cool but crypto currency was always a dubious bet, full of people looking to get rich off speculation and a ton of scammers. Could still work but there are more interesting and potentially valuable applications for the technology