I might be just too stupid to grasp this bitcoin thing, but for me it seems that people who approves the idea of cryptocurrency are on some kind of a "HypeTrain" and doesn't realize (or deny to do so) that its still too far from becoming a real currency. Im just a simple man but I think that stable currency has to be controlled by someone and bitcoin feels like bubble right now. A lot of people are talking about it so there's a demand (for now at least)
Can someone explain me the idea of bitcoin and cryptocurrency?
I agree there's definitely still some distance left to make cryptocurrencies completely practical like physical currencies.
We'll need someone more knowledgeable about the technicalities of cryptocurrencies than myself to argue strongly in any direction on exactly how big that gap is and how long it's going to take to reduce or remove that gap entirely to make cryptocurrency a viable day-to-day currency, but I can fill in the rest, hence this post.
Cryptocurrencies, like I said in an earlier post, is still in development by, as monkey-swag Arashel would say, a bunch of technohipsters, i.e. it has not been developed by some billionaire group with near-unlimited resources, but by random Internet people, similar to how Linux, the Internet, Open Tibia, and a very large portion of other big and small open source projects has been made.
Meaning it (cryptocurrencies) still has a way to go in many different ways and is (at least probably in my estimate) being relatively slowly developed compared to say products of NASA.
I don't think anyone is expecting that next month you can go buy groceries for Bitcoin, well, except perhaps for another Arashel with a stance on the other side of the spectrum on this issue, he would believe pretty much anything it seems.
Cryptocurrencies is at least arguably a revolutionary idea, and the thing with revolutions is that you can never tell what's going to happen, all you can say is that it's definitely going to upset somebody/people that doesn't want things to change, and IF it succeeds it's going to set a precedent and change the world forever.
How long it's going to take, how much opposition it's going to be met with, how many problems there'll be on the way, those are all factors completely open to debate and for the most part hard to pin down.
I'll also backup Lordfire's second paragraph, he neatly and imo. aptly summarizes the differences between crypto and regular currencies in a simple nutshell kind of way I think.