What's your heartache with BTC?
Nearly everything. Starting with coin creation from working through transactions to core issues with the protocol.
First is how coins are created. It's a lottery. Because that's how I want my currency to be created by a fucking lottery. Not only is it a lottery, but it's a lottery wherein it pays out less and less despite more and more energy going into the system and thus creates a distribution of wealth that Russian oligarchs would be ashamed of. But, Tea, you get more tickets to that lottery based on how much you contribute to the network thereby securing the network from attack! Great except you secure the network by literally wasting energy. The whole thing is enormously inefficient, which some people will say is the nature of a decentralized system vs a centralized one. It's trading efficiency for distributed control. There's definitely truth in that, but it doesn't have to be as jarringly inefficient as every cryptocurrency currently is. Which isn't even the biggest problem with how the network secured because your contribution not only determines the number of lottery tickets you get, but how big your vote is. So, you have a psuedo-democratic system with disproportionate payout that has a positive feedback loop wherein the top get to make the rules and those at the bottom have no power. Not only that, but go to basically any bitcoin forum from reddit to bitcointalk and you'll see that the majority who has control of protocol also have essentially zero understanding of economics. Because the people who I want controlling how my currency works are the guys who think a deflationary currency is a good thing. It's a god damn disaster. The most telling thing is that the biggest proponents rightly recognize that the current system does many of the same things and is all around sort of awful. Their solution is not to balance the system but make a new one, where they can be on top, which is in no small part why they never will be.
Then we move on to transactions and blockchain. 10 minute transaction windows are laughable. The transaction limit as it currently stands is laughable, but that could actually be fixed, but not without bloating the blockchain. Now in order to fix that you can actually prune the blockchain to get around the bloat if you have a trusted central authority, which is in no way open to abuse on your top down distributed network. No sir. Even all of this is still ignoring the complete lack of consumer protections, which is actually a good thing because... I have no idea.
These aren't even the most daunting errors because right now cryptocurrencies don't actually fix most the problems they claim to. Low fees? The fees are lowish because the backend security of companies actually doing exchanges is egregiously bad, and they're running on cargo cult infrastructure. One of the few places where BTC actually offers an advantage is in international transfers, which it does quicker and cheaper than the current system right now if you manage to exchange money-BTC-BTC-money in widely divergent places and circumstances. Except this isn't an inherent advantage of cryptocurrencies, but a result of a pretty shitty international banking infrastructure and market forces. If there were actual market pressure than the current systems could be upgraded to be as quick and cost effective as BTC is, but it's a tiny fucking market. The largest group of people transferring cash internationally are immigrants sending remittances, which don't use the conventional banking system that much anyway.
The #1 problem though is it's built on SHA-256. Encryption works right up to the point where it's broken. Maybe SHA-256 will never be cracked, but building an entire currency on an awfully big maybe strikes me as the worst idea in a bunch of bad bitcoin ideas.
Also because the community is insufferable.
Also, also fuck effort posting.
