Here’s an articel about the difficulty of scaling up transaction time for Bitcoin.
Currently, Visa can handle 24,000 transactions per second.
Bitcoin can handle 7 per second.
The article goes into a deep analysis to review ways that transaction speed might be improved (which i frankly cannot follow), but at the moment, Visa beats Bitcoin by a factor many magnitudes.
You win the Internet for today.
Thanks. Could you have it delivered please?
One of my friends is a budget analyst for the Federal government with a degree in economics. When we were chatting about crypto and I expressed some bewilderment, he described the situation in a simple way.
“Remember when we lived in the dorm and needed quarters to do our laundry? We would save quarters all week, but we usually had a few less than we needed to do all our loads. Other residents were reluctant to give up their own quarters, so we often ended up trading three quarters for a dollar bill. That’s crypto in a nutshell. The quarters were of more use to us because of their “qualities” and utility. If someone needed to do laundry, quarters could have a premium exchange price. Some a##holes realized this and would even demand a one dollar bill for just TWO quarters. And some guys would just do their own laundry at home and collect quarters over the week so they could sell them at a profit on laundry days. It didn’t really make any difference what a quarter was actually worth off-campus. But the smart guys got rolls of quarters at the bank.”
It already is.
Just be sure not to pull that network cable out of the wall jack or the whole damned internet will come spilling out on your floor. Cleaning up the goat spooge, Trump porn, and all the other internet … delicacies … is not easy. And there’s LOTS of it. 
I think a better description of crypto would be if everyone needed quarters for the laundry machines, and so there was some guy who was selling dimes: For a dollar, you’d roll a ten-sided die, and get that many dimes. Because after all, dimes can be traded for quarters.
I think crypto is faster for cross-border transactions. Sending money between international banks could take days as each made sure they had the funds before releasing them. That or you paid a premium to something like Western Union.
In theory, crypto ignores borders and transfers relatively quickly.
Remember that while Visa can do 24,000 TPS they charge a fortune in fees and interest rates.
I have a Mastercard with no fees and interest only if I’m late. It’s essentially a free service for me.
But, probably not a free service to the merchant. One side or the other of the transaction is likely paying something.
Cryptocurrency is increasingly correlated with tech stocks. Although it once traded pretty independently of financial markets, the greater correlation with tech stocks means it is decreasingly useful as a diversification tool.
It’s hard to sort out the inflation aspects of it but it is, in theory, deflationary. There is a limited supply that grows slowly according to a particular formula, which should stabilize its value. But it becomes deflationary because people keep losing access to their wallets, so the actual amount of Bitcoin in circulation is continually dropping,. This tends to make the remaining scarcer and more valuable. Roughly 20% of bitcoin are believed to be irretrievably lost. As more people invest in bitcoin, there are fewer people with giant amounts of bitcoin in a single wallet and as bitcoin becomes more valuable, people tend to safeguard it better. thus, the tendency for people to lose access to their wallets is diminishing and the rate of growth in the hoard of lost bitcoin is likely dropping.
Of course, this slight tendency towards scarcity propping up Bitcoin’s value is swamped by the volatility due to its primary use as a vehicle for speculation and investors’ rapidly changing opinion of its value. You can’t really see that it’s deflationary when it loses a quarter of its value in a week or two.
“Communism works- IN THEORY!”- Homer J Simpson.
I’m not disputing you; I have zero knowledge either way.
Do you have a cite, and does anyone credible have a theory as to why this is becoming / has become true?
Damn near everything is going downwards these days for all the obvious reasons. That means everything has been behaving correlatedly. But they may not be moving down because they’re connected. Correlations are only financially useful to the extent they describe a real mechanism and can be used to predict future behavior.
It sounds like your logic supports the thinking that any given currency is deflationary. But lost e.g. Bitcoin should not affect the value of Boguscoin or Putincoin. or whatever.
In general, whether a currency is inflationary or deflationary is mostly down to whether the supply of currency multiplied by its velocity is growing slower or faster than the economy it serves.
I think it’s fair to say the total supply of cryptocoins of all types has grown faster than the underlying world economy since e.g. 2000.
As more of them die off that may change. Of course as soon as any cryptocoin starts gaining value rapidly, various copycat coins (or outright scamcoins) immediately appear to soak up some of that schweet schweet inflation bubble. So the deflationary aspect of the coin universe is inherently self-limiting
I can’t speak at all to the velocity component of crypto in general or Bitcoin in particular. All I can say is that any argument or prediction missing a velocity term is bogus.
Here is one cite: Bitcoin's Correlation with Nasdaq Keeps Increasing; Here's Why It's Bad News
Here is another: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2022/09/21/strengthening-ether-nasdaq-correlation-muddles-post-merge-bullish-plays-cumberland/
If I had to guess why, it’s because bitcoin and tech stocks share a lot of investors. They are using them speculatively and they tend to get nervous and sell off both at the same time and they get excited and buy both at the same time. There are actual mechanisms that could link them, like margin calls on declining tech stocks causing investors who also hold Bitcoin to liquidate that instead, or rising tech stocks giving would-be investors capital to borrow and invest in cryptocurrency.
No, most currencies aren’t deflationary because central banks will print replacement currency faster than it is lost and physical currency is only a small part of the money supply that contributes to the inflation rate. In fact, centrally managed currencies are generally managed to have a low rate of inflation. Mismanagement can cause hyperinflation since there is no limit to how fast a currency can be “printed” when you are dealing with electronic deposits. Even if you are physically printing bills, the government can cause hyperinflation by just adding zeros to the bills and spending them. I’ve never heard of hyper deflation.
Centrally managed currencies are fundamentally different than Bitcoin, of course, because the money supply of a centrally managed currency incorporates more than just physical currency and the money supply can be increased in many other ways, including by managing interest rates and banks’ reserve requirements. Suffice it to say, most nation’s currencies have no particular tendency to deflation even if they sometimes experience limited periods of deflation.
Cryptocurrencies are also correlated with each other, to some degree. So Bitcoin seemingly shouldn’t affect the price of Boguscoin but it does. And people can lose the leys to Boguscoin wallets as easily as Bitcoin wallets.
This is a fair statement and is a reason that I have not been interested in cryptocurrencies as an investment. But investors seem to have settled on a pretty small universe of, let’s call them “investment grade” cryptocurrencies. As a result, the supply of the relevant cryptocurrencies is not as unlimited as you suggest.
If you need a velocity term, the average velocity of crypto in a wallet whose key is lost is exactly zero forever (barring breakthroughs in quantum computing rendering crypto money worthless). And the share of money in lost wallets will only grow, so the share of crypto in lost wallets having a velocity of zero is increasing. Thus, if the velocity of all the other crypto remains the same, the average velocity of crypto is dropping, which is deflationary. Again, this deflationary tendency in crypto is swamped by changes in value due to speculative trading.
My error. The word “currency” in my post as you quoted it was intended to be “cryptocurrency”. Oops.
Your thoughts on what I actually wrote are spot on. Central bank currencies totally suffer from all the inflationary issues you rightly raise, whereas cryptos (or at least well-designed / honestly-designed cryptos) don’t.
Sorry to muddy my waters right out of the gate.
The real bottom line on velocity at least in 2022 is that, like with ordinary government-backed currency trading on the Forex markets, the velocity of speculators’ trading activity swamps the activity of the currencies as used for their real purpose, as a medium of exchange.
« I got mine, Jack — pull up the ladder! ». 
vs
The finite supply of Bitcoin being analogous to the latter.
Is there any surprise that different cryptocurrencies would be correlated with each other? Most folks don’t understand the technical distinctions between them anyway. If some problem crops up with one of them, then most folks hearing the news will assume that the same problem will apply to all of them, regardless of whether or not that’s true. And the same factors, like lack of trust in more conventional currencies or investments, that boost one crypto will boost all of them.
There’s going to be a small anticorrelated component between them, from die-hard crypto fans switching from one to another for various reasons, but that’ll be small compared to the factors that affect all of them.