Today, bitcoin is more of a business than a cryptocurrency. People earn both…

Today, bitcoin is more of a business than a cryptocurrency. People earn both on trading and on the popularity of coins - conduct seminars, produce, create exchanges and exchangers, analytical services, attract money from banks and hedge funds.
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And, despite the popularity, the market itself is not yet sufficiently studied – attempts to pass on his model of the stock exchanges or Forex, of course, unfounded, but widespread availability of coins for trade users around the world, many points of sale, the lack of regulation, the possibility to issue anonymous participants of the market, theft of bitcoins from exchanges, the withdrawal of the coins by the authorities in the closure of sites on the darknet, the anonymous exchange, prohibit / permit trading in different countries, raising money through the ICO (including fraud), manipulation of exchange rate through blogs, Youtube and the media, the endless forks, other coins, tokens and much, much more make predictions, let's say, difficult. Rather, the whole world is trying to figure out how to live with these coins now, and whether it's worth it now to enter the game or wait for some stabilization.
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I wish you to make your own choices, and I invite to discussion in comments) Thank you for your attention!
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Pros

Advantages of bitcoin Bitcoin does well-known brand Bitcoin today is known to almost everyone – it is actively promoted in the news on TV, in videos on YouTube constantly spinning advertising with "investors" and "experts", on each news site wrote about its value of $ 20,000, etc. You do not need to explain to people what you want to sell or what they will get after the purchase – and Stepan Vasilyevich from the third entrance, and albert from the second B class know that you can get on this. If you offer them to buy, say, BNB coins, then you will be looked at as a foreign swindler. The same applies to business and investment – large offices are more willing to invest in bitcoin, because either it will grow in price and they will make a profit, or they will pampan and sell it on the already promoted market, using the theory of "the greater fool". With unknown coins also have to wait until the market is ripe for its mass purchase. Bitcoin has a developed infrastructure Many exchanges appeared before the birth of the Ether, before the mass issue of various tokens, and began to trade bitcoin and other first currencies – litecoin, dodgecoin, Darkcoin / XCoin / Dash, etc. you can Buy or sell bitcoin almost everywhere, including for Fiat money from different countries. There are many exchange offices, many people are willing to give you bitcoin for cash, services that allow you to implement accepting bitcoin on a website, shops and organizations accepting bitcoin for payment, etc. Other coins and tokens mainly designed for investing, and buying and selling of them is often reduced to the translation of the same BTC and exchange it for Fiat. Bitcoin has a history Trust is not easy to earn, but bitcoin has been on the market for 9 years. At first he was known only to enthusiasts, then gained fame coins for laundering dirty money, then became the main driver of investment in cryptocurrencies. In bitcoin already invested a lot of money, so he actually found the body. If earlier bitcoin was only a set of bytes in the blockchain, now it is also the amount of dollars spent on its purchase. If a person has spent, say $ 10,000 to buy these bytes, it is unlikely he will want to sell them for less. Contractual relationships between people and the exchange of Fiat money move the bitcoin market and create interesting volatility – in one trading day, the value of bitcoin can change by $ 1,000 per coin several times. There were days when the cost fell and grew by much larger amounts. Well, bitcoin has a lot of training materials in the language of the end user. Today anyone can read an article, watch a video, go to a conference (which grow like mushrooms) and find out everything he would like to know about this coin. There are analytical sites where you can read forecasts of growth / decline, there are specialized blogs of professional investors, telegram channels with news and forecasts, and even dozens of books written. There is a cyclical relationship – bitcoin owns a larger market share, bitcoin sell and talk about him. The more people talk about it-the more it expands the sphere of influence and the more it captures the market. Other coins are growing against the background of General interest, but bitcoin is the locomotive. Anonymity I did not refer this item to the advantages or disadvantages, because this effectiveness of this feature, firstly, controversial, and secondly can go both to harm and good. Both the rescue of drowning people and the anonymity of bitcoin owners are the hands of the owners themselves. To remain truly anonymous, you need to follow the rules-create separate addresses for each transfer / receipt, do not transfer between your addresses, do not combine money from different addresses within one transfer, do not store bitcoins in the clouds and use them locally, the local node must go to the network through a proxy, and the proxy and synchronization ports of the node must be changed during each operation, in some cases it is necessary to use bitcoin mixers (which sometimes adds risk), etc. In General, the rules need to know, and they are very easy to break – and then the anonymity will not be so anonymous. No, random robbers won't find you, but organized, targeted structures can. Now the identity of the bitcoin owner is determined by a number of factors – for example, the authorities receive information from exchanges and exchangers, who from what IP address paid from what addresses, receive information from large IT companies (which we all use, for example, for search, e-mail or as a mobile phone OS, Internet providers, etc.) about money transfers between nodes, look what other sites visited by people who transferred bitcoins, and what other bitcoin transactions were carried out on these sites (this allows you to determine with high probability the belonging of different addresses to one person) and much more. In General, anonymity is a matter of a separate close study for those who really need it. Price The price of bitcoin can be both a plus and a minus – the high price limits the entry into the market of people with a small amount of funds, but attracts people and organizations with large capitals. Again, buy for expensive scary, but sell more than they bought, nice. Price volatility allows you to increase capital in a few days, and lose a significant part of the investment. For trading on such waves need experience, calculation, patience and nerves of iron. There is no accurate information about the number of actually invested money-hence there is no possibility at least approximately to calculate the actual value of the coin. Different experts give different figures, but no one knows for sure where bitcoin has a "bottom". In addition, people with really big money come to the market from time to time, influencing the price both in the big and in the smaller party – because of the features of bitcoin there is no opportunity to detect such phenomena in advance. Transactions may be conducted through the exchange (with effect on rate and volume), and through darkula (without affecting the market in General, a simple huge redistribution of funds).

Cons

Disadvantages of bitcoin Slow transactions The blockchain of the" original " bitcoin (BTC) is capable of carrying out from 3 to 7 transactions per second. In today's world, where bitcoin is worth several thousand dollars, where many people want to buy it or sell it, where bitcoin payment methods are introduced to almost every site, this is not enough. For example, Visa conducts several thousand transactions per second (2000, according to Wikipedia). If the card can be paid in a coffee shop and immediately get a coffee, with bitcoin you can wait from 10 minutes to several days. Some forks, cryptocurrencies and tokens (for example, Ripple) lay in a high speed of transactions, but it's not about bitcoin (and other coins have other problems). The cost of the Commission Despite the fact that the Commission can not be paid at all, you have to pay it – the more Commission, the faster the transaction will take place. The more the transaction takes up space (in bytes), the more the miner wants to get money for adding it to the block. The fact is that each block in the blockchain has a fixed size (initially 1Mb), so it is more profitable for each miner to push as many small transactions into this block as possible, and for each one to receive a Commission. What kind of transactions will be added to the block depends on the settings of the software miner, but in General, the block will first get transactions with a larger Commission and a smaller size. The size of the transaction depends on the inputs and outputs. For example, if money came to your address from one address, and you send them all to someone else, then you have one input and one output. If you send part of the money (30% send, 70% leave), then you have one input and two outputs – one output is 30% to the recipient, the other output is 70% delivery to you at your address. If you received 10 payments for 0.1, and you want to send it to 100 addresses for 0.01, then you will have 10 inputs and 100 outputs. The more inputs and outputs you have, the larger the transaction in bytes, and the older your inputs, the more expensive it is to service your transaction. So, the size of the Commission is not fixed, but, with the high rate of bitcoin, the Commission is a significant amount. Transferring small amounts is simply unprofitable – you might want to send 0.000001 BTC (about 100 rubles) to a friend, but the Commission today (February 2018) will be 0.0001-50 rubles. In December 2017, the average cost of the transaction ranged from 40 to 70 dollars-the network was overloaded, and that would "push" your transaction, had to strangle the toad. PreMain Technically, the term is not quite correct, but it reflects the essence well. Before bitcoin went into General use, the technology and code were tested and tested. The same Satoshi nominal his million bitcoins when it was possible to do on a home computer, and still no one knows how other "early programmers". Think about it, somewhere there is a person who has a million bitcoins – a million coins of $ 10,000 each, he got for free.. What would happen if he got rid of them on the market? Attack 51% The bitcoin blockchain is vulnerable to the so-called "51% attack". This means that as soon as someone takes over the computing power of 51% of the network, he can write anything to the blockchain. For example, such an attacker can attribute bitcoins or false transactions to himself, after which he will need to generate 6 blocks in a row, and the blockchain will go along his chain. The developers of the blockchain provided for this type of attack, but, according to them, it will be more profitable for such an attacker to mine bitcoins with such power, because if people stop trusting the blockchain, then this type will not benefit – bitcoin will depreciate very quickly. Mining difficulty Once bitcoin could be mined by dozens on a home computer. Later I had to buy video cards. Now buy dozens of ASICS, and they are quite a long time to beat their value. Most of the production facilities are located in China, where hangars and plant shops are equipped for mining, it is difficult for an ordinary user to compete with them, even with the help of pools. Other cryptocurrencies are relatively profitable for mining today.