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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

Be your own bank they said, it'll be awesome!

Well, the Bitcoin supporters are composed of a wide range of people. Some of them are too optimistic about the technology. Unlike some people thought, transactions are not cheap (although there are scaling plans to bring the current high cost down). Being your own bank is not easy. All the things that the current banking system does is not useless overhead. So, you can't just throw it all out. OTOH, crypto-currencies potentially allow nearly anyone to be a bank if they want. That could lead to innovation and reduced banking costs. Right now, it is the "wild west" and so caution is advised.

You raise some great points. I would love to see an banking insider document regarding a true assessment of how they could compete with bitcoin. Or in other words, what is bitcoin missing that banks account for in overhead.

I want bitcoin to succeed as much as the next but I think a lot of people are naive and convinced its ready just because they can transfer btc from one party to another.

For one, you can't undo a transaction if you made a mistake. I.e. Put in a wrong amount or sent to an incorrect address. You can't call customer service if you don't see your transaction. I think those are big and come with trade offs. Some others are the huge volatility of the value id bitcoin ..

Don't you know Bitcoin is a system with really low fees and fast transactions??

this must be sarcasm, right?

Fees are around 80c and average confirmation time is ~150 minutes. Pretty good for the first implementation of a completely new technology which has scaled 100,000x in 6 years. I don't really get the cheap shots but ok.

The problem is there are multiple new implementations that are better suited to do fast cheap transactions. Bitcoin is the Myspace of crypto.

When you use "crypto" as an abbreviation for "cryptocurrency", you promote confusion about what cryptography is.

Seems pretty clear in context to me.

The cheap shots are because people are upset they missed out on some of that sweet, sweet bitcoin early on.

Aka, nocoiners. They will always be mad

We'll see.

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