That is what bitcoin cash is suppose to address.
Bitcoin Cash is only one of a number of alternative versions of Bitcoin.
Which of them, if any, will catch on is a good question, but the fact that there are so many means that it’s very difficult for any of them to get the same level of public recognition as the original Bitcoin.
Forks:
Bitcoin XT
Bitcoin Classic
Bitcoin Unlimited
Bitcoin ABC
Hard Forks:
Bitcoin Cash (Forked at Block 478559[1], 1 August 2017)
Bitcoin Gold (Forked at Block 491407[2], 24 October 2017)
Bitcoin Diamond (Forked at Block 495866[3], 24 November 2017)
BitcoinX (Forked at Block 498888[4], 12 December 2017)
Super Bitcoin (Forked at Block 498888[5], 12 December 2017)
I think this is all going to end in tears.
A good article on Bitcoin forks, as of Oct 30, 2017:
https://howtotoken.com/explained/bitcoin-forks-chronology-ultimate-list-forks/
That’s not really true.
The current protocol only allows transactions to be specified down to the 100-millionth of a Bitcoin (called a Satoshi).
But if a majority of miners wanted to change that, they could via hard fork, and then you could send smaller amounts.
Of course, they could also decide to start mining more Bitcoin, which makes the claim that they’re never going to make more on just as shaky ground.
All Bitcoin is is a shared agreement to use a particular algorithm to keep track of a distributed ledger. If you convince enough people to use a different algorithm, then you get to do whatever you’ve convinced them to do.
I’m also pretty bearish on Bitcoin, but its ability to adapt and fork means that it may be able to engineer its way out of some of its more obvious problems.
There is a maximum limit of about 21 million bitcoins. By design, the supply is limited and there can never be more than this.
Nearly 17 million have already been mined, and mining becomes more and more difficult over time. Of those 17 million, about 25% have been ‘lost’ or ‘disappeared’, and are probably irrecoverable.
Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious founder of bitcoin, owns over one million bitcoins. These have never been spent or moved, and nothing is known about them.
Isn’t this why some users created Bitcash?
How do you go about converting $17billion in bitcoin to cash? That’s probably what he’s spending his time trying to figure out.
Same problem as anyone with a large position in a market. You can’t sell your 5% of <whatever> without moving the price hard against you. The thinner & less liquid the market the worse the problem is.
Satoshi’s position is big enough and identifiable enough that selling even a fairly small hunk of it could be the pin that bursts the confidence bubble.
But it would be a fun problem to have. If he can’t sort it out he could transfer it to me and I’ll wrestle with it for a few years. 
Yes, any attempt to cash out would crash bitcoin, because all the exchanges put together couldn’t even begin pay out that much.
The same thing will happen if there’s a sudden hack or fraud scandal, and the value of bitcoin drops dramatically. There will be large numbers of people all wanting to cash out at the same time, and it won’t be possible. It will be like a bank run.
Again: no.
The current agreed-upon algorithm will stop producing new bitcoins at around 21 million. But like everything about Bitcoin, it’s enforced by a majority of mining power. If they want to change it, they can.
Several things have already changed about the Bitcoin protocol since its inception. Maybe that will change too.
To change the maximum, you would need to make major fundamental changes to the bitcoin protocol, and then get the whole bitcoin network to adopt them.
To get all the major players to agree about exactly what should be done, and exactly how it should be done, would be impossible in practice. Even minor changes have caused huge disputes and dissent. A major change to the whole protocol would be never be practical. You’d just get the same unsatisfactory situation occurring as is now happening with bitcoin forks, but far worse.
I noted the other day that Steam has stopped accepting Bitcoin.
IMHO it won’t be much longer before the bubble bursts and the whole thing is forked.
LOL. The issue isn’t Bitcoin but the volatility in the market.
It is really very premature to consider using Bitcoin as if it were a normal fiat currency - its like accepting stocks for payment, i.e. never quite knowing what the price will be tomorrow but understanding the long term direction is only one way.
The reason people might want to accept bitcoin is because it is (a) going up in value and (b) untraceable in the way a $20 bill is untraceable, except it’s untraceable on the Internet.
Bitcoin has an inherent value in the same way that real estate in a city with a lot of business has an inherent value. That inherent value isn’t infinite, however.
First, the real estate example : real estate has value in a city with a lot of jobs. Say you have the right background and have been offered a developer position that makes 150k in silicon valley. Much more than you can get elsewhere. You need a place to sleep and to secure your stuff so that you can rest after each 12 hour workday. A nicer place with more room and a nicer view might let you attract a mate so you can continue the cycle. So you are able to pay a lot - especially if you can get a spouse with the same earning potential - but it’s not infinite. You would not be able to pay 150k a year in rent or mortgage payment, because that’s all of your income and you have to pay for taxes and food.
Let’s suppose you want to do an illegal transaction on the dark web. You need to convert some dirty $20s to bitcoins and buy that illegal good. While that illegal good is being shipped (maybe it’s drugs or weapons or equipment so you can commit fraud), the bitcoin fraction you bought to do the transaction has to sit in escrow. Once the shipment arrives, and you report the illegal goods (or lie and attempt to steal them - dark markets work because even criminals are apparently more often honest than not) were successfully delivered, the coin goes to the seller’s wallet, and the seller immediately sells the bitcoin. It takes another day or so for the transaction to clear.
So there is a certain market demand for these bitcoins for use in illegal businesses. It’s a “working fluid”, like refrigerant in heat engine or radiator fluid, etc. The coins get recycled over and over, and their value comes from the fact that transaction volume needs a certain amount of them for the business to run.
The reason bitcoin is beating out the other cryptocurrencies is that network effect. If bitcoin ATMs are easily available, making it trivial to do illegal deeds via the internet, but other crypto-currencies are not so convenient to use, bitcoin dominates in value.
On the other hand, other currencies are being tried that have supposed advantages over bitcoins, such as being able to obscure the transaction history better.
But if Bitcoin were ever to be used as a real medium of exchange, there are only so many Bitcoins. That’s not a problem, you can just spend milliBitcoins or nanoBitcoins when you buy your pizza. But it means that Bitcoin is inherently deflationary. That is, the economy grows but the number of Bitcoins in circulation doesn’t. That means each Bitcoin represents a larger and larger share of the economy. Or in other words, the value of each Bitcoin grows. But this leads to a deflationary spiral. Are you going to spend your milliBitcoins on pizza and beer today, knowing that your money will get your more tomorrow than it will today?
And so you don’t spend those Bitcoins, you hoard them because they are increasing in value. Your Bitcoins are no longer on the market, and neither are anyone else’s. Bitcoins stop being a medium of exchange because nobody ever exchanges them for goods and services, they hoard them instead.
And of course another fundamental problem is that Bitcoin technology can’t handle large amounts of transfers anyway. Millions of people can’t buy stuff on Amazon using Bitcoin, even if Amazon agreed to accept Bitcoin as payment. Which they might, but there’s no point in Amazon doing this because nobody in the current market would buy crap from Amazon with Bitcoin, because Bitcoin is going up, up, up baby! Sell Bitcoin now, when it could be worth 10 times as much next year? No, buy, buy, buy! It’s going up, so buy! The price is an an all time high, so now is the perfect time to buy! Past performance is a 100% guarantee of future results!
Bitcoin is a classic bubble, and all the chumps buying Bitcoin today are buying it because the price is being bid up, which means the price keeps going up, which entices more chumps to buy now, which bids the price up even further.
When is Bitcoin going to collapse? I have no idea, the market can stay irrational for a long long time. All I can say is that the time to buy Bitcoin was years ago, and the time to sell is now. Or next week, the price will be even higher, so don’t sell now. Or maybe next month, definitely higher then too. Heck, don’t sell, because the price is just gonna climb. The time to sell is of course when the price starts to drop, right? Then you dump that commodity like yesterday’s garbage. And so does everyone else who bought because Bitcoin was going up up up. You don’t want to be the last chump holding the hot potato, do you? And the rest of us watch as the value of Bitcoin plummets to zero.
All I can say is that if I had any Bitcoins I’d be on the phone to my broker, or however you do it, screaming at him to sell now. Yeah, I would miss selling at the top of the bubble. But everyone is going to miss selling at the top of the bubble. If your plan is to buy now and sell later, when exactly is that “later”? What’s the top of the bubble? The top is inherently unpredictable, because the top is governed by irrational behavior. You can’t wait to sell close to the top because you don’t know where that will be because the value of a commodity in a speculative bubble isn’t governed by fundamentals, it’s governed by mass hysteria.
There may be a future in cryptocurrencies. But Bitcoin ain’t it. Or maybe I’m wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong.
Agree. But I sold 200 bitcoins when the price was $10.
The long term direction is only one way. Past performance is a guarantee of future results.
A place like Amazon won’t accept Bitcoins even though Bitcoins are going up in value. And that’s because Amazon would have to hold those Bitcoins to realize the appreciation in value. You sell stuff for Bitcoins and hold the Bitcoins, the Bitcoins increase in value, you’re rich. Except that’s not how retailers work. They sell you stuff for money, then use the money to buy stuff and sell that stuff to the next guy. They don’t sell stuff and keep the money, because they need to keep selling stuff to keep making money, and that means using the money to buy stuff at price $X and selling it at price $X+Y.
Also, Bitcoins are 100% completely traceable. Every owner of a Bitcoin knows exactly what wallet every Bitcoin is in. The only thing people don’t know is who controls the key to which wallet. But when you exchange Bitcoins for dollars or dollars for Bitcoins, that transaction is just as traceable as any other dollar transaction. You aren’t handing a guy on a streetcorner an envelope of $20 bills when you buy Bitcoins. When you infect someone’s computer with ransomware and accept payment in Bitcoins, it’s true that nobody knows who controls the key to the wallet the victim transfers the Bitcoin to. But we know the wallet, or we would if the cops paid attention, and the wallet owner wasn’t a guy in Russia and thus invulnerable to western law enforcement. The wallet is anonymous in the same way the owner of a particular webmail address is anonymous.
Well, you have to get a majority of mining power to adopt them, which might be significantly less than “the whole bitcoin network”. Which is exactly what I said in my initial post.
The protocol has already been modified in the past, so it can obviously be done. The question is whether there is the will to do so. There are many scenarios in which I can see something like this happening.
“Hard” is very different from “impossible”.
Right now, I think the issue is transaction fees. You want to pay for a $5 dollar game on Steam, but the fee is $20? Not a good value proposition. That, and probably very few people actually paid with BTC, meaning that the support and development costs for supporting BTC transactions was more than it was worth.
It’s not really untraceable, though. Not if you want to liquidate it, though. Every bitcoin has a unique fingerprint, and you can see when that bitcoin was born, what wallets is passes through, and ultimately where it ends up. The bitcoins I bought last year? There’s an electronic trail from BTC China to whatever company I transferred them to, to Coinbase. If I sell them, the capital gains can be traced back to at least BTC China. I could “wash” them in some type of bitcoin trade agreement, I guess, but that involves a lot of trust. If I spend them, they’ve been tied to at least three accounts that have my personal identifying information, so they’re not anonymous.
You could wash them several times through several third parties. Let’s suppose that the bitcoin had been used to pay for the assassination of a government official, and thus it’s extremely hot. The assassin could still use many washing systems and even if some of them are lying and keeping records of which coins went where, just a single server out there (you can build an automated bitcoin wash relatively easily) that doesn’t store records, and the trail is broken.