Bitcoin is the same speed it’s always been. Blocks happen every 10 minutes. Pay a high fee? Get in on the next block. Want to save on fees? Maybe it takes a few blocks for your transaction to go through.
This is a fancy way to say that it is slower unless you pay higher fees.
Fees are much, much lower than credit card, paypal, or other similar competitors. You could send a billion dollars in a single transaction and pay $1.50 on main chain, or you could send $5 on lightning and pay <1c in fees. Lightning has been around for 5 years now, it works, I use it regularly.
While it is true you could pay lower fees if you send larger amounts, if we take your 5$ fee at face value, then any transaction below 147.35$ will have lower fees on a payment service like Stripe (3.4% for international transactions + 0.30$ per transaction).
The supply of Bitcoin, 21 million coins, is known and has always been known. It can’t be diluted beyond that point.
I did not claim otherwise.
Nobody owns 51% of the network. Even such an actor can’t print extra BTC or force money to move without the appropriate private key. The best they can do is temporarily delay transactions while burning north of a trillion dollars in energy and equipment doing so. Which is why nobody has ever done it.
Nobody currently does. However, it is my understanding that theu could fork the network and update it if they had 50%+1 of the network. It is not impossible.
Given that fees have continued to increase with time, this seems like not a problem. It’s not “dangerous”, it’s part of the design. If hashrate drops, it drops, but given that fees and hashrate have continued to grow despite continually minting less coins, it’s not really a problem.
It is a problem because people do not want to pay higher fees.
Anybody can have a cash wallet without disclosing their identity, yet they still pay taxes.
They can pay taxes but they don't have to. There is no system to know the identity and know the tax rate that should be applied using the raw bitcoin transaction method. This has to be applied using an external centralized service at best.
Bitcoin’s rules prevent the kind of fraud where the value of your money is printed away via supply inflation of central banks or “currency restructuring” on the global scale by the the world bank.
This is not fraud and it is not what I'm talking about.
People pay taxes because they think it’s the right thing to do and/or because the government has guns and makes them. Either way, if you run a company, if you are providing goods and services, you have a place you can send somebody with a gun and enforce those rules. All the companies currently paying taxes would keep paying taxes if they used Bitcoin.
The tax and identity layers have to be added on top. They are not built-in. While it is true a country can force things, it is not true they can force the bitcoin network to apply these rules. This is in fact one of the selling points of Bitcoin according to this video.