Bitcoin has come a long way and matures into a full-fledged currency in the upcoming years.
Bitcoin price update
As per my article 3 days ago regarding Bitcoin's price USD6,600 returning to its baseline has occurred today as we see Bitcoin price hitting a 50-day low at USD6,630. Bitcoin may have reached the final phase of the bear run as its relative strength index (RSI) drops below 30 Source: Forbes.
1. Bitcoin price stability issues
What cryptocurrency investors and users want is an economically stable Bitcoin like most fiat currencies that are turbulence-resistant. We do not usually see US Dollars fly up and drop back down again in a matter of days (that might change while Trump's president). Listed company stocks that achieve a slower but stable growth is much more attractive to risk-averse investors. This by definition makes Bitcoin a high-risk investment knowing that rewards and profits are not guaranteed. Hence Bitcoin must allow its stakeholders or users to feel secure enough to hold Bitcoin and not do a crazy sell-off every other day.
2. Bitcoin's energy usage
Bitcoin mining's high power consumption is worrying.
According to a study by Digiconomist, bitcoin mining accounted for 29.05 terawatts of electricity in 2017. That equates to 13% of all energy consumed by the world as of November 2017. Bitcoin mining ideally consumes more power than Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy and one of the most populous countries in the world.
Source: Techworm
We already have US tech company Intel filing a patent for a bitcoin mining hardware accelerator (Source: cointelegraph). I have read the original patent here and in simpler terms, hardware datapaths have been optimized for mining purposes. Knowing that mining hardware is constantly being improved is an assurance for Bitcoin's future and other cryptocurrencies.
However the waste of power to generate Bitcoin is not just an environmental problem, but a scalability problem of the coin. If the entire world uses Bitcoin, we will experience a global power deficit. This brings me to my next point.
Img source: http://ablogaboutnothinginparticular.com
3. Bitcoin's bandwidth issues
The Bitcoin community wants to add Lightning, a second layer payment, on top of its existing network (Source: arsTechnica).
The key ideas behind Lightning were proposed by Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja in a 2015 white paper, but it's taken three years to translate the proposal into fully working code. Today, three different companies—San Francisco startups Blockstream and Lightning Labs and Paris startup ACINQ—are working on parallel implementations of the Lightning technology stack. The trio released version 1.0 of the Lightning specification in December, and the companies are now racing to get their software ready for use by the general public.
Source: arsTechnica
This is an important step to address the narrow transaction bandwidth of Bitcoin and could be Bitcoin's long term solution.
All we want is a cryptocurrency that remains stable in its own "economy", reduced side effects such as huge power consumption and wastage as well as fast transactions performed with fees lower than what our credit cards charges now.
-tysler
