alleged 'illusion of bitcoin liquidity'? Citation requested.
alleged 'illusion of bitcoin liquidity'? Citation requested.
Posted Jan 14, 2018 11:10 UTC (Sun) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)In reply to: alleged 'illusion of bitcoin liquidity'? Citation requested. by Garak
Parent article: Welcome to 2018
To put that number into perspective, existing cash alternatives like credit and debit cards between them handle millions of transactions per hour. In the UK, there are around 3.7 billion card transactions per quarter, which is nearly 2 million transactions per day. Put another way, this means that every single person in the UK (adults and children between them) averages a card transaction every 2 days. One million transactions per month implies that Bitcoin as-is could only replace cards for 70,000 people (globally) or so at current rates of trading.
This would not be an issue if Bitcoin was set up such that transaction fees and time would fall if there were more users; however, that's not how Bitcoin works, and transaction delay and fees are already higher than card networks.
Where this does compare adequately is with shares - it's about the same trade rate as the average NASDAQ security. But then, that leads to the question; what, exactly, is Bitcoin, if it's supposed to be compared to shares in something, not to currency instruments?