> The difference is that you have a level of guarantees that it is going to clear - at least in the UK, the second I make a payment I get a notification and the

> The difference is that you have a level of guarantees that it is going to clear - at least in the UK, the second I make a payment I get a notification and the debit is posted onto my account in real time. If someone sends me money I receive it within seconds at no fee. With Bitcoin you don't have that guarantee until it has cleared which can take hours and cost over $2. While this might be true in the UK, it's untrue in the US. In fact, in the US the ACH protocol is such that you never get a failure (a "return") within the 1 business day, you only receive successes. You may receive a "return" any time over the period of the following month. Most payment processing systems empirically work out a rough time limit before deciding that an ACH transaction was successful after all. This diagram captures the intended use case for the blockchain. You'll notice that it's the lowest level, at the Settlement layer -> https://twitter.com/stlouisfed/status/1358883628600721411/photo/1 https://twitter.com/stlouisfed/status/1358883628600721411/ph... > Your bitcoin doesn't produce that - your bitcoin sits there not doing anything. The transactions are verified by actual assets (servers). The same way that your specific gold isn't used to manufacture microchips or make jewelry, it's just sitting as gold bars in vaults managed by bullion trusts. The reason why gold has intrinsic value is that there is some use for your specific gold bar in theory, but not in practice. And yet, gold is still a viable store of value with intrinsic value. The same holds true for Bitcoin and its peers. > Even the bulls seem to admit that the transaction fees of BTC are too high and the validation time too slow - this is why they seem to push towards alt coins. Sure, I'm speaking of cryptocurrencies in general. Bitcoin, specifically, may not be the implementation that wins out. Transaction fees of altcoins like ETH and LTC are much lower, for example. They are also set per transaction rather than being a function of the actual amount size, so as long as the raw blockchain is merely used as a settlement layer, most institutions would submit large batches of transactions of high dollar amounts and pay a flat transaction fee per batch...not too dissimilar from ACH. > I can see that someone might be able to live their entire life off bitcoin, but I still wonder why. I mean I live in the UK and people can hold all their money in Yen and pay via MasterCard if they want which will automatically do the currency conversion, but people don't do it because it would be insane. I don't see why BTC is any different. Because foreign exchange fees. These don't necessarily exist with cryptocurrencies in the same way that they necessarily exist for actual fiat currencies.