It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin
medium.com
medium.com
So you can take the Gov't control out of the equation, but I still have yet to hear a scenario that crypto-currrency itself makes better than fiat - it's always about the cost, complexity, and regulation of the services on top. Eventually, those will reappear because people and business want them.
It's a big world out there, most of which has no easy way of integrating with modern systems of credit, lending and other financial instruments. I see blockchain technology as a promising way for distributed groups to organize, create operating agreements, and execute contracts for market rate on a global setting.
Erm... BTC is less stable than USD by every conceivable measure.
http://www.orchardplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/bt...
Tell me: would you be surprised if BTC changed in price by 50% by the end of this month? I wouldn't be, I simply don't trust BTC to retain its value in any way. BTC goes up or down, and that's bad for "currencies"
Bitcoin being a globally distributed ledger has the ability to represent shares of commodities and equities. It's why Delaware is considering incorporating blockchain tech.
You could imagine merchants pricing in shares of Apple - and customers paying in shares of oil and Google - to be settled at PoS. Check out shapeshift.io to see how fluid crypto-to-crypto trades can be.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/delaware-considers-using-blockch...
What? Do you change all of your savings into stocks or bonds each month?
Currency is the best short-term store of value. And "short term" means anything I plan to use in the next 6 months (My emergency fund will last 6 months without me being forced to touch my bonds or stocks, giving me breathing room for when to liquidate my long-term savings.)
I trust cash to be stable in the short term, even if it loses value long-term. I can't trust BTC as either long-term or even short-term storage.
BTC utterly fails at "6-month" storage due to its volatility. BTC has no history for growing (stocks are based on company profits. So as long as companies are profitable, they'll grow). Bonds are strong guarantees for growing: only bankruptcy can prevent me from getting me money promised through a bond.
What guarantees do I have for long-term BTC storage? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Short term? Well, again, stability is more important than gains in the short term (which is why my short-term is cash... not stocks).
Work costs money: like electricity isn't free at the scale of the BTC Network. It costs thousands of dollars of electricity to run those BTC mining rigs to verify the ledger.
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If you're saying the future of "blockchains" is just a cryptographically signed ledger, without any proof of work or BTCs being assigned, I think I can agree with you on that.
But at the moment, "blockchain" is the new cloud. No one really knows what a "blockchain" is anymore, aside from a new electronic ledger of some kind. BTC is clearly a blockchain, but a lot of the "blockchain-based technologies" are nothing like BTC at all.
A lot of these "blockchains" are just centralized banks electronically verifying transactions. Like a notarized bill of sale, except the 'notarized' portion is electronic. Proof of work and all that stuff just don't exist in a lot of the "blockchain" solutions coming out.
This is not the case for BTC or AAPL. If I get 1BTC today, some new MtGox story might wreck its value before I buy groceries with it tomorrow. AAPL is unlikely to move as much, but it moves around by several percent on a fairly regular basis, and some huge negative news could send it plunging.
I could imagine your scenario of pricing in AAPL and paying in oil and GOOG in a technological sense, but I have a hard time imagining anyone actually doing it.
In Kenya people trade in cell phone minutes (MPESA). It's not a huge stretch to imagine trading in units of energy or other commodities.
It seems to me that having an instant settlement layer challenges the need for currency as an intermediary.
1 cell phone minute today is 1 cell phone minute tomorrow - it's a real thing with real utility. Not so with BTC.
Now the kicker is, the bitcoin transaction fee is increasing rapidly due to (self-induced, political and totally fixable) bottlenecks in the network. I foresee an alternative taking over bitcoin if this isn't resolved soon.
So when you want to buy cell phone minutes, you simply convert your oil certificate to cell minute certificates through a settlement layer. This means merchants can denominate prices in whatever they'd like - and buyers can pay in whatever currency/asset they'd like.
But then fails to be better or even different to what we have now:
This means merchants can denominate prices in whatever they'd like - and buyers can pay in whatever currency/asset they'd like.
Indeed! We have that now. Where I live we use the Australian Dollar because that's what buyers and pays like. When I want to convert stock to cell phone minutes I do that through a settlement layer: log on to stock trading platform, sell shares, wait two days, buy cell phone minutes - it's sufficiently instant for my needs, and appears to be meeting everyone else's needs as evidenced by the continual churn of economic activity.
One issue I see with your proposal is I'm not convinced I know how to rationally price an oil certificate vis-à-vis a cell phone minute. That's why we need markets, I guess.
Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. The problem of converting stock certificates to cell phone minutes is largely solved for most people who own stock. The problem of purchasing cell phone minutes is largely solved, and for those places where it isn't slapping a blockchain on it won't help any more than slapping whatever database is popular this week on it.
It doesn't matter if I hold a bitcoin or an oil certificate or a share of AAPL or a futures contract for polar bear fur, I don't want to use stuff as currency where I don't know how much groceries it'll buy next week.
There's places in this world where the idea of an apolitical central bank is unimaginable. If you don't have an imagination I can't help you there. Or maybe you don't car about humans from non-western countries. Either way, this innovation clearly isn't for you.
Bitcoin has the advantage over fiat of having been designed with incentives of participants aligned so as to make the likelyhood of inflation extremely small over the long term. So the scenario that Bitcoin makes better is the one in which money printing would have occurred, but now can't because of recourse to Bitcoin.
one other thing - with regards to fiat, BTC does have one theoretical advantage - the ability to limit government spending because it cannot be created out of thin air to be created as credit and spent as debt. and that is why no government will ever use it. but we wouldn't want this anyway because we actually DO want government to be able to create money as needed. the reason is that because the stated goal of the fed is "stable prices and full employment" stable prices are simple - your monetary supply expands AND CONTRACTS with GDP, pure and simple. 100 bushels of wheat in your economy and $200 in money? that's $2 per bushel. if your economy doubles due to additional population or technological/productivity improvements and starts producing 150 bushels, you need to have $300 in your economy for stable prices. the issue is that our government increases its spending at a rate that far exceeds the growth of GDP.
want a great idea for a far superior monetary system? read this: https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=209282
This is historically and factually inaccurate. Currencies typically originated as highly marketable commodities that are naturally scarce and fungible - salt, gold, silver, cigarettes in jail, etc.
One could argue that's the definition of real money - but to say Bitcoin isn't real money is to move the goal post when what you mean is Bitcoin isn't a traditional fiat currency. There's no debate there.
See also: taxis
The customer interface is (was? I don't know if taxi companies competes on the app side) way above and that's the value here. Better information and information model, almost no idle time.
Uber came in and was very clearly illegal here, but they offered significantly better service and had more drivers available. A couple years on after fighting the government for a long time, Uber finally came to an agreement with the government and new regulation was passed. Rides sharing vehicles will now require nearly all the same regulations as a taxi, but the larger affect is more competition to traditional all taxis.
People do enjoy complaining but I quite like being able to fly cheap without paying for stuff I don't need. Admittedly it was more appalling when you couldn't even pay for your ticket without paying a fee (unless you had one particular laser card) but the most onerous ones have been phased out.
Citibank is, well, a bank. Coinbase is a currency exchange, and more analogous to those Forex booths you see in airports.
There are Bitcoin banks, but putting your Bitcoin into a bank loses the decentralization benefits. Admittedly holding onto your own BTC requires more security than many people are capable of implementing, but better and better solutions are being created to solve this problem.
Sure, it's easier and cheaper to wire USD to another country than it is to exchange USD for BTC, send BTC, and then exchange BTC to USD. Just like it's cheaper to wire USD to another country than it is to exchange USD for literally anything, send that literally anything, and then exchange that literally anything to USD.
If you insist on using BTC as a transfer mechanism for USD, you're going to incur most of the fees and risk you would if you used GBP, CAD, AUD, Yen, or any other currency as a transfer mechanism for USD. I'm not sure why anyone would expect anything different.
However, if you compare apples to apples, transferring BTC which is denominated in BTC throughout the transaction is much easier and cheaper than transferring USD which started is denominated in USD throughout the transaction.
Why do you even need to know about Bitcoin at all? Why isn't it just a cheap(ish) financial resolution layer?
In other words, their fee is really 1.01%. If the author can be bothered he should explain this to them and ask for his 55 cents back.
If you need to buy some groceries in the US, you wouldn't trade your USD for CAD (Canada money), then bring CAD to a grocery store that also accepts USD. You would only bring CAD if you already had CAD.
Yes, some retailers accept bitcoin, most don't.
I've been doing it myself for years. You have to use limit orders on cheap exchanges (not brokers!) and sometimes wait for the spread to close but you can usually get it within 25 basis points of spot.
(but then again, it ended up not being very decentralized, either)
Which, as we can see, costs a lot of money and doesn't add much value for legal uses.
OP is either an idiot who thinks he can day trade but can't plan ahead and calculate fees or (more likely) he has an agenda against Bitcoin.
If I really was converting from USD to CAD and back, would the experience be better? Would the fees be lower? I suspect they would. Would it take as long?
if he already owned BTC he would have avoided the first two steps and saved himself $180.
and still ended up paying $20 more as for using a wire.
But you can't send cash over the internet.
Do people who are in to Bitcoin think intermediaries solely exist to extract value from transactions? There's actually a service being provided.
The internet IS NOT neutral. Never has been, never will be.
Regarding the first point: To my understating, as a Ex-Bitcoiner, the whole point is a massive distrust in financial institutions + the idea that the whole hierarchy of banks and clients seems superfluous, and could be done away with. Insted of giving up your responsibilities that you get by having money, you take them into your own hand, leaving banks and the similar with nothing left to do.
Now it will obviously make no sense to use bitcoin like Dollar/Pound/Euro+bank, because it isn't made for that. Currently (as far as I know) there are some internal struggles between the "core developers" because of this fact. For-Profit companies like CoinBase and BitPay would like to expand their market at the cost of the distributed network, while others say the whole point of the network would be lost by giving in to them.
Trust is a social problem and simply cannot be solved via technology because the infrastructure that technology is built on cannot be neutral... we live on a planet with limited resources. If your master plan includes chopping down the tree that holds your treehouse... sounds pretty terrible. Look at international politics to see what "neutrality" in the real world looks like. It's just power dynamics that are outside our control. Is that really what we want out of our financial system?
You see the same thing in the eth community thinking they can use "code" to solve the problem of trust. You can't. Lawyers have been trying for millenia. Bitcoiners are going to need a much more compelling reason/feature than they do now if they want any sort of widescale-adoption (and beyond that, to avoid being smashed when the illegal activities that take place on the network force someone to care)
Though not competitively, which was the point being made in the article.
heck, you can transfer huge piles of cash with paper checks, which cost around 75¢ around here, try to beat those kind of fees...
I don't think Bitcoin is made at will out of thin air like flat currency routinely is. You can still argue that this is not a problem with flat currency itself, but the problem is, unlike Bitcoin, the laws regarding printing and production of flat currency are not governed by hard-to-break math.
This is a gross oversimplification of how the vast majority of central banks(ie: the ones that matter) handle their fiat currency. In theory, yes, they could just print money, in practice, they don't "just print money".
There's nothing they can do that gets rid of your bitcoin though. That's the "math" point. As long as they're on the main chain the rules (expressible as math) prevent arbitrary creation or destruction of coins.
I don't like X, I love X.
Your distrust of human nature has caused you to double-down on trusting human nature. Those elaborate systems to counter human nature are built on, get this, more human nature.
> the future of the financial system be controlled by an "algorithm" that is built on a technology (non-quantum crypto) that could be dead in less than 50 years?
Well, it's only one coin, with one algorithm, and people are pricing that into its value. But show me a better system. Not even the USD has a 50-year guarantee. Not only are your dollars likely worth 10% of their current value in fifty years, but there's an even chance that something has wiped their value out completely.
You're just irrationally afraid of crypto risk and irrationally accepting of human risk.
> Why should I sign up
Oh, I see your issue... Don't worry, nobody wants your permission any more than they do with USD. You don't need to, and can't, do anything.
This is not to say that our current batch of social institutions are even as trustworthy as TCP, just that it is possible to build institutions that are, and that we have a lot more experience as a civilization with debugging social institutions than we do debugging software. Thus, I do not think it is paradoxical to lean on social institutions to reign in raw human nature.
Not even remotely. Everyone is China is acutely aware that the government can print their money into oblivion. That's why they're rushing to dump it into anything. Hundreds of millions have been through this in other countries in recent years.
> Piggybacking on the electrical grid to turn "fairness" into "how much electricity you can afford"
Piggybacking doesn't mean what you think it does.
> How is that fair?
Fair doesn't apply in the world. It's hard to cheat and thus predictable and that's all it needs to be.
fwiw, fiat isn't fair either. Nobody came by to give me my share...
I see no reason why an arbitrary rate is better than a rate chosen to minimize inflation and deflation.
Bitcoin basically is a fiat currency, except no government forces people to use it.
smh
It's not about the rate, but about the EXACT rules being agreed upon up front by the MAJORITY of the network and actually enforced by a proven algorithm, rather than people's conscience alone.
In either case it's not relevant to the article.
He's also bitching about an overall 4% fee, which isn't a whole lot.
2) USD to BTC can suck depending on the company (1-2%) fees
3) Yes most of these first gen companies are expensive due to lack of large volumes and high risk
No seriously, though. Who knew that the libertarian cyberpunk dystopian future would be full of people trying to scam a nickel off you every couple of seconds...oh wait, everyone ever. That's the market, man. Don't taunt the market. Don't even look at it funny. It's sentient and can hear your insults.
[1] https://medium.com/@sondre.kolaautomat/how-to-pay-freelancer...
Even so, I still think bitcoin is a brilliant tech and valuable experiment.
It is wrong to think of bitcoin as a direct competitor to fiat.
Just like mp3 / bittorent did not destroy the music / movie industry, bitcoin isn't going to replace fiat currency. Not now and not in it's current form.
But it's going to be around as an alternative to the centralised banking system and as a very interesting social experiment and self-governance technology.
In time, both techs are going to merge - meaning that banks will implement all kinds of 'blockchain technologies', while virtual currencies will implement all kinds of services which the banks currently provide.
Of course, fees for converting USD -> BTC -> USD are not that cheap, but neither are the fees for converting USD -> YEN -> USD.
As a counter-anecdote I saved hundreds of dollars transferring USD10,000 in the US to THB cash in Thailand via Bitcoin.
"Blockchain" initiatives at banks are just about implementing cryptography as part of solving larger technical challenges they have. Using Bitcoin as "rails" isn't there yet. Using Bitcoin in places where only Bitcoin makes sense will make it a cockroach, and open protocols that survive tend to become important.
* Blocks are now so full that transactions have stopped flowing and there's no solutions that will address any of this without forcing any of the thousands of systems already built on top of Bitcoin to migrate = slow confirmations = massively higher fees
* Slow confirmations for every day payments = credit card use-case somewhat ruled out
* Double-spending is now a feature of Bitcoin = 0 confirms are now less secure (I understand the logic but its black and white. Instant payments should be possible but obviously zero confirms aren’t the way to do it.)
* Horrible black and white thinking for seemingly everything in Bitcoin -- especially security -- whereby nobody can imagine a fail-safe system and the community blames anyone who loses their coins even though the Bitcoin protocol is inherently unsuitable for building fail-safe wallets.
* Terrible user-experience on the protocol, infrastructure, and application levels. So much so that Bitcoin will likely never experience mainstream adoption for this reason.
* Community has become a toxic circle jerk of investors who ignore any of Bitcoin's problems in favor of its myopic benefits in the hope that they can still ride the blockchain to the bank (somewhat literally.)
* A hostile dev community that is so utterly clueless when it comes to real world business that their choices have managed to cripple the entire system.
* Community is an echo chamber of ignorance that blindly believes that all advances outside of Bitcoin are traitorous, incorrect, and not worth knowing about; Outright hostile towards new users with an air of technology snobbery that makes the Linux community seem like a welcoming party at an Apple store.
* The technology is inherently unscalable -- in fact, the only currently good plans for scaling Bitcoin involve not using it (No, I'm really not joking, that's literally what “off-chain” means) But the real problem here is really the fact that the development team have refused to increase the block size even though this was always intended in the design of Bitcoin by Satoashi and even though there are plenty of resources to do it.
* Bitcoin is now more centralized than any dictatorship -- the development team have become controlled largely by a single corporation (meaning a single CEO -- we all know who) and mining pools have become so large that at any time the miners can collude to reverse recent transactions.
Bitcoin has failed at every goal that it set for itself and the biggest issue out of all of this is the fact that the system can be so easily controlled by standard social engineering. If a decentralized system can be circumvented through moronic human and political means then it loses any advantage that it might have had by being decentralized. So philosophically and practically – Bitcoin has failed as both a consensus system and as an idea.
In fact -- probably the biggest advance that Bitcoin made was in the use of smart contracts to enforce agreements which actually already existed prior to Bitcoin. So I think going forward banks will end up using Bitcoin-inspired technology but they will ignore its consensus system completely (which frankly sucks) and instead use what is now being referred to as "smart signatures" (or programmable signatures) as a way of enforcing complex agreements between institutions.
Tl; dr; Bitcoin was an experiment that proved that certain things could be done better but it failed at a lot of things. It turns out that Bitcoin probably won't be the next Internet but it did make for quite an interesting ARPANET ...
You understand that there's more data in the world than is practical for all of us to store... The solution is to pick and choose which pieces need to be globally visible (ie, on-chain) and which do not. When I play poker I don't wire-transfer the result of each hand, that's what the chips are for.
> Blocks are now so full that transactions have stopped flowing
You mean, near-zero fee transactions... Because blocks are being published, and they're full of transactions.
Nobody ever said it was going to be free, it's just been small enough to tolerate the odd free-rider. That phase is coming to an end.
> But the real problem here is really the fact that the development team have refused to increase the block size even though this was always intended in the design of Bitcoin by Satoashi and even though there are plenty of resources to do it.
If transactions were free why wouldn't I backup my photos into the blockchain?
If we expand the blocks now we'll just end up with the same amount of waste and the same whining. If we let the fee rise first, then expand the blocks to balance both fee and network cost, we'll end up with something stable.
Also, Satoshi was wrong about some things. Why are you trying to treat "him" like a god?
> A hostile dev community that is so utterly clueless when it comes to real world business that their choices have managed to cripple the entire system.
No, that's exactly backwards. Bitcoin is an open system, not a startup incubator. It's not bitcoin's responsibility to support your business, it's your business' responsibility to function on the infrastructure available. Going to large blocks would benefit some companies who don't like paying for infrastructure. It'd keep their free-ride going longer, but at the cost of all the other players.
> Community is an echo chamber of ignorance that blindly believes that all advances outside of Bitcoin are traitorous, incorrect, and not worth knowing about; Outright hostile towards new users with an air of technology snobbery that makes the Linux community seem like a welcoming party at an Apple store.
Well, if you're judging by the response you've gotten, there may be confounding factors your analysis has missed... What reaction should an anti-vaxxer receive at a medical-policy conference when they stand up and declare that science has failed, etc?
If, on the other hand, he already had $5-6k worth of Bitcoin somewhere, he could have eliminated one of those conversions and it would have cost about the same. Alternatively, he may have been able to find an exchange that accepts Bitcoin directly rather than through some intermediary with a conversion fee, in which case his total deposit fee would have been < $1.
I have a GNU/Linux server. Which service providers can I eliminate?
Using my own server, suppose my neighbor has a bunch of BTC and I have a bunch of cash. If I want to buy BTC from her (by physically handing over the cash), what service providers do we need to use? Suppose my neighbor uses the same providers (or some subset) the author of this article uses.
This is the easiest to answer so I'll start here. You don't need any service providers beyond:
1) Any one of the many free bitcoin clients out there to
a) create a wallet for you, and
b) send the bitcoin to that wallet
1) Wire it from the bank
2) Convert your dollars to bitcoin, send that bitcoin to BitPay, which will send it to WB1, which will send it to TradeZero. Oh, and everyone will take a fee out in the process.
My suggested alternative, is that if the author already has bitcoin, is to find a stock-trading company that will just let him fund the account with bitcoin. Then the options would be:
1) Wire cash from the bank
2) Send some bitcoin to the company's bitcoin wallet
In that case, the fees incurred from 1 would be $25-50, and the fees incurred from 2 would be approximately 5 cents.
Given all that, I have no idea if there exists even a single stock brokerage that just accepts bitcoin directly, so that likely isn't a real option.
If you have to exchange BTC to USD to pay for your costs, then sure, it's going to cost more than PayPal.
And you denominated that in $$ instead of BTC why?
Because the value of BTC fluctuates so much that its worthless to denominate goods in terms of BTC. Only USD is stable enough to actually denominate the value of goods with.
And its not like USD is rock solid: we've got an inflation-based government pushing the value of USD down ~2% each year. But that's a lot more stable than BTC.
As long as BTC remains more volatile than my freaking stock portfolio, it is worthless to trade goods with it directly. Everything will need to be converted to and from USD if I'm actually to run a business. BTC could double in price (or half in price) in the next year and no one would be surprised.
The Swiss Franc is also very stable and has similar qualities to USD. Would you not have complained if he cited the figure in Swiss Francs?
Don't like Paypal? Use Dwolla. Don't like Dwolla? Use Bank of America for direct transfers. Don't like BoA? Use Venmo.
Not very excellent if you ever need to get money to/from the States and a foreign country.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/money-mule-gangs-turn-to...
Again, Bitcoin is a great alternative to banks where banks fail. Just, you know, I wouldn't advise using it as your first choice.
Bitcoin has been around for 8 years, and general awareness has really only kicked in over the last 4. These Bitcoin companies are the first generation. I think it's reasonable that in the next 10 years the tasks you performed will be more seamlessly orchestrated, and greater competition will drive the price down. It would take an order-of-magnitude improvement to undercut the wire fee ($35) which may well happen.
To make matters worse crypto currencies like bitcoin appear to incentivize early adopters to act in bad faith like a pyramid scheme. That they are open to monopolization by those who have disproportionate access to cheap electricty and resources can't help build trust.
So the early adopters have every incentive to spin it and on cue they talk it up deceptively on decentralization, anonymity and control as if the protocol develops itself and is not under the control of an inner cotorie.
Aren't governments and financial systems supposed to work for us and if they aren't is the solution to make sure they do, or a flawed technology workaround that benefits early adopters and concentrates power and influence in the hands of a few? The cure seems worse than the disease.
Or sponsored articles. I would love the author to mention where he works, and if that article was sponsored.
Consequently, nobody really cares about the fees as it's all about the ability to move your money around while avoiding government scrutiny. And these fees are what they are willing to pay to accomplish that.
Yeah, cooperative/reversible financial fund transfer systems that interoperate with bitcoin are at enormous risk during these transactions, so they charge large fees and create red tape to avoid/mitigate fraud. It's probably been bitcoin's biggest stumbling point since forever. I don't think that it's a disaster though.
> The Bitpay invoice has a 15 minute timer. So I wait and wait ... last few minutes on that timer so I start to get a bit nervous.
This problem could've actually been one to blame on bitcoin. It might be due to bitcoin's low transaction throughput. I haven't followed the blocksize debate but IIRC there have been lots of talk about slow transactions.
I doubt it ever will become mainstream, but one path to "mainstream" is when merchants, banks, companies, and payment providers just accept Bitcoin rather than:
1) Pretend to accept bitcoin 2) Pay a sub-par service with high fees to convert any received BTC into USD immediately 3) Encourage customers that don't already hold BTC to pay in BTC, adding another conversion step from USD -> BTC
If 90% of the people I give money to just accept Bitcoin as payment, then it makes sense for me to have a "Bitcoin account", as payment fees could be lower.
That's not a path to becoming mainstream, that is mainstream.
There is however, valid criticism of the various middlemen that have propped up to take advantage of the hype surrounding Bitcoin.
I think in the Bitcoin lifecycle a number of these early services exist at the pleasure of serving pioneering Bitcoin users / miners who have a lot of digital currency already.
It costs me $7 to change my stocks into cash and vice versa. Frankly, turning BTC -> USD -> BTC is harder than turning Apple stock -> USD -> Apple stock.
I have had people from across the globe send me BTC in minutes with a few button clicks and no additional parties involved.
I'm guessing this also makes me a "Bitcoin defender."
Wire transfers are $35.
You'd think that BTC would be able to be cheaper than that.
If you do an international wire and change currencies you'll pay much more than $35.
Bitcoin is still an emerging technology. You can do things with it you can do with _anything_ else. You can create 100 wallets right now and start receiving bitcoin to them. Please show me how to do that without interacting with anyone with traditional bank accounts.
Bitcoin is here to stay and we're going to continue to discover interesting use cases for it. Sorry this guy is bailing before he learns what it's all about.
I don't have any affiliation with them. I just always thought trading stocks was schleppily difficult, and was delighted to discover it was not so. I believe some company will do well; I'm not interested in understanding spreadsheets or hiring anyone; here's my money; how do I buy shares? What is the Uber-like, magic-button product here? Robinhood, it turns out.
If you don't know enough to stock pick, buy the index.
Fun fact: brokerage accounts were easier to open in 2005 before the recent more stringent money laundering regulation.
While I am in general agreement with your position, I see statements like this frequently when stock trading comes up. References to the market or the index. There isn't one, monolithic tradable "market". Rather there are dozens of different index views of the broader market, some of which are better than others. If you know so little about stock trading that you think a service like Robinhood is a good idea you probably don't know enough to choose a good index either.