The cons to Cryptocurrency

When you hear the word “cryptocurrency” your mind may go straight to bitcoin because that’s the name you hear the most but there are plenty more options when talking about crypto. Just like anything there are pros and cons but do the pros outweigh the cons, I don’t think so and I’ll tell you why.  

Scaling is a huge problem that crypto faces, scaling is the limitations of the blockchain for the processing of multiple transactions. Essentially this means that it takes about 10 minutes 10 minutes for a transaction to go through and the maximum block size is 1 megabyte. The disadvantage of this is that it will take around 10 minutes to complete one transaction when using a regular dollar bill or a credit or debit card only takes a couple seconds making crypto a hassle to use in person transactions. 

Crypto has faced a couple of cyber security issues over the years, Crypto is subject to breaches and could be hacked. “There was evidence of this with multiple ICOs getting breached and costing investors hundreds of millions of dollars this summer alone.”  One of these attacks led to the loss of 473 million dollars. Mitigating this wouldn’t be practical and would require continuous upkeep of security infrastructure.

Lastly, I’m going to talk about price volatility and inherent value. Price volatility is tied to inherent volatility and is a major problem with crypto “and one of the specifics that Buffet referred to specifically a few weeks ago when he characterized the cryptocurrency ecosystem as a bubble.” This means that crypto currency is not linked to tangible assets making it less in value and is not widely accepted throughout the country. This could be a major disadvantage to crypto if you can only use it with certain and limited transactions.

Ultimately the choice to use Crypto currency is up to the consumer but after doing research I feel that sticking with the current form of currency is a safer and more efficient method of payment. Crypto has potential to grow and become a world wide currency but where it is at now I wouldn’t choose to go that route.