They are all ponzi schemes... Cheap transactions??? Whose going to pay for a massive distributed computing network to maintain a block chain in the absence of the expectation of quick, large profits of the back of speculation??
Transactions may be relatively cheap now but that's of the back of computers making £££' s mining away to pay their dues...
How's the economics going to work when you can no longer mine new currency as the market is already saturated with what's available crypto currency wise and adding more only devalues the purchasing power of whats in the pool?
Which crypto currencies are going to be useful ones considering how easy it is to set them up?
The UK governent backs a single currency, sterling, giving it a degree of relative stability....
With tens or hundreds of crypto currencies out there in any given market how's that going to work?
And I repeat a fundamental property of a successful currency is the degree to which its purchasing power remains steady over time.... Something no crypto has approached
I also don't seek to conceal that I personally wish for crypto currencies to collapse sooner rather that later as the ones using regular computing hardware as opposed to ASIC's are hurting consumer computing in the long run
You're talking bitcoin. Forget bitcoin. There are other cryptocurrencies. Some of which, with no mining, have 0 transaction fees (personally I think this is a design flaw which should be remedied, a tiny token fee is better than 0 fee). Others near zero. MASSIVELY cheaper than current financial institution costs.
I agree not all the many currencies will survive. But to suggest the whole thing won't is beyond daft - there is a reason stock exchanges are building new exchanges on crypto (not FOR crypto, just using it for regular exchange duties.). It's because it is cheaper for them to run, to the tune of hundreds of millions a year. I'd not be surprised if each major financial business had it's own coins for internal (no ICO etc, so not on the traded markets) then a couple of coin types because the goto for inter-institution transfers (possibly something that exists, quite probably a new coin anyway and again might well not be an ICO'd coin)
So yes, the markets can crash, but your opinion above just demonstrates you've heard a news report on bitcoin, maybe seen a miners thread, and stopped there. I personally look forward to the current mining craze dying as it's pointless and already IMO superseded by better tech but the speculative bubble keeps it going for the time being. That doesn't mean crypto-currencies themselves will cease. Still, regardless of if they cease, I think mining will die which would be the goal* for me as a GPU buyer.
* Though less GPUs sold in total reduced R&D budgets for the makers which can actually hurt us too if the supply/demand imbalance gets worked out.
(As for a currency having steady purchasing power over time - that's not a feature of most fiat currencies either so dunno where you got that idea. Exchange rates fluctuate all the time making items prices fluctuate all the time even in stable economies never mind when inflation gets out of hand or similar)
