There is a better and safer online payment method its called Bitcoin
But the existing financial and payment companies realize that this new technology makes them largely redundant hence they lobby and make it hard to acquire bitcoin for the average person with existing payment methods.
The attitude of banks and regulators towards bitcoin is the same of the motor industry and governments towards the electric car, somewhere between dismissive to fearful.
Give it time tho' I suppose, after all the same arguments were made by many industries against the early web and hell computers for that matter.
a) Yes, likes of Circle and are solving this with USD balances and instant conversion to btc, also bitcoin has not been that volatile in last year
b) Coinbase a YC company and Circle mentioned already are doing great job on this end
c) Since bitcoin is basically digital equivalent of cash thats like asking for wings on a car. As for security I have a hardware Trezor wallet on my desk which keeps keys secure even if my computer is infected.
You see problems, I see opportunities for startups
The early internet had many problems, those companies that solved these problems are now household names.
People may also not like bitcoin because they want a democratic say in the design and operation of their currency. Bitcoin has economic features built into it that its users simply have no democratic redress to change, even if they wanted to. Power should be to the people, not some guy who likes deflation and baked that in years ago.
Yes because the average person has power over the central banks
Anyways it is sad being down-voted in technical forum by people who should better than most understand that bitcoin despite its faults is still a damned good online payment method especially when compared to existing alternatives.
It does everything the OP i replied to wants.
Anyways fuck this place, people use their votes as a way to not encourage conversation but as a punishment tool.
I get to vote on the people who appoint the fed chief every so often. There is no mechanism, even theoretical, to put that democratic power in the hands of the citizen user of bitcoin.
Edit: Wow you changed your comment a lot in the edit!
Good, bitcoin is not going to replace central banks, what it is a great online payment system not a replacement for world banking.
Some of us have no issues trusting cold hard maths, cryptography and computer science behind bitcoin which give so much certainty and such clearly defined rules for how the system works. As compared to some central bankers who have no issues with whole countries going down the drain (Greece) due to their policies which often change based on politics.
There sure as hell is no chance that trillions of bitcoins will suddenly appear out of thin air Fed style.
I don't think it's true that you can't change how bitcoin works. I'm no expert, but as I understand it, if more than half the network agrees with you, you can change it.
I think the main problem with bitcoin is that it doesn't scale, because every transaction has to be approved by the entire network. More payments and a bigger network means the number of validations goes up quadratically.
The federal reserve system was designed to be resilient against the democratic whims of the people; any minuscule control you have over the management of the US Dollar is a bug, not a feature.
But the existing financial and payment companies realize that this new technology makes them largely redundant hence they lobby and make it hard to acquire bitcoin for the average person with existing payment methods.
The attitude of banks and regulators towards bitcoin is the same of the motor industry and governments towards the electric car, somewhere between dismissive to fearful.
Give it time tho' I suppose, after all the same arguments were made by many industries against the early web and hell computers for that matter.