speed: The blockchain is updated only every 10 minutes and you need to wait for even longer if you want to be 100% sure a longer fork won't show up.
cost: bitcoin miners must spend enormous amounts of energy in an inefficient process in order to keep the network running. Right now, most of the mining costs are covered by the bitcoin bounty that is awarded to miners that successfully mine a block but this reward decreases with time and eventually and transaction fees will have to increase to compensate.
Speed- The difference is after that 10 minutes, the transaction is settled. The money has moved. What you have with a credit card in 10 minutes is a promise that the money will move, possibly days or even weeks later.
The bitcoin can be moved again (spent by the receiver) after 10 minutes. Try that with money you received by a credit card payment.
This really is the fundamental difference of bitcoin- once the money has moved, it's really moved. It takes some time and thinking to appreciate how that opens things up quite a bit.
> The difference is after that 10 minutes, the transaction is settled. The money has moved. What you have with a credit card in 10 minutes is a promise that the money will move, possibly days or even weeks later.
In a spherical-cow sense bitcoin is better. In practice, if I'm paying with amex I tap my card on the reader and the waitress hands me the cup of coffee in seconds; if I'm paying with bitcoin I'm standing there for half an hour.
> The bitcoin can be moved again (spent by the receiver) after 10 minutes. Try that with money you received by a credit card payment.
If a friend's sending me money it's by "faster payment"; theoretically it can take up to 2 hours (similar to bitcoin's max times), in practice it's a couple of minutes. My bank's happy for me to "spend it instantly" in terms of not charging me an overdraft fee (in fact I can spend it before I get it, as long as I put the money in by the end of the day), so I have GBP1500 (let's call it $2500) of float.
There are edge cases where this doesn't work - more than $2500, or paying internationally over the internet. But they really are edge cases; the problems bitcoin solves are problems I've never had, and I suspect that's true for the vast majority of "normal people".
> In a spherical-cow sense bitcoin is better. In practice, if I'm paying with amex I tap my card on the reader and the waitress hands me the cup of coffee in seconds; if I'm paying with bitcoin I'm standing there for half an hour.
This is a myth. Once the transaction has propagated through the network, it's pretty difficult to double-spend, even with zero confirmations. So difficult, in fact, that payment processors like Stripe/Coinbase/BitPay will completely absorb that risk for you and consider the order complete within a second or two of seeing the transaction on the network.
Try buying something online with Bitcoin sometime, it really is faster and easier than using a credit card (if you already own some).
Which pizza place? Was this in-person or online? The animation on Stripe's launch page is pretty much what buying things with Bitcoins is like for me: https://stripe.com/bitcoin.
Pembury Tavern. Last time I went there they weren't advertising "pay with bitcoin" any more, only "send us bitcoin tips", which avoids the problem. Maybe the tech's gotten better (this was a year or so ago now), but from here that looks like at least one early adopter who's given up.
Current block size limits bitcoin to ~3 transactions per second. It would take bitcoin 22 days to handle just 1 day of Visa's global transactions.
This is a serious problem because in order to increase the block size, it requires a consensus amongst all miners, merchants, etc.
Bitcoin effectively suffers from Tragedy of the Commons, because it can't scale unless every rational actor stops trying to get their own profit out of it.
