Fast is a completely reliable transaction in seconds (as banks currently provide in many countries with CC or with transfers, or paypal does for example). Bitco

Fast is a completely reliable transaction in seconds (as banks currently provide in many countries with CC or with transfers, or paypal does for example). Bitcoin doesn't provide that because you need to wait for real confirmation, and it doesn't provide a predictable time-frame for that. So it is slower than many other payment methods. No cost is not accurate, because to get fast, you need to pay. Low cost is debatable but possibly accurate compared to current payment methods (though CC charges are mostly borne by the vendor, an important distinction). I do think these criticisms strike to the heart of why Bitcoin will not be successful - it doesn't compare well to other payment methods, and because of the nature of its distributed consensus and proof of work, it never will. It has some interesting ideas but also embeds some ideas about transactions which make it impossible to satisfy the requirements of most vendors/customers. We will probably see a digital global currency supplanting government-backed currencies, but it needs to have very low volatility, a transparent guidance structure, a credible backer (probably corporate in today's world), verifiable identities to prove both sides of a transaction took part and prevent fraud etc., fast and low cost transfers (BTC has the low cost bit at least at present), and most importantly of all regulated central institutions like banks or exchanges which normal people can trust to carry out business, because most people do not have the time, resources or inclination to secure their servers/computers against determined intrusion and fraud. Personally I think the concepts of mining, a distributed block chain, and unique tokens which are hoarded and passed around like gold coins are fundamentally flawed and will prevent Bitcoin taking off long-term and are the cause of many of its issues like volatility. It is full of interesting ideas though and has triggered a renaissance in online payment, so I see why people find it interesting.