Bitcoin.com is one of the world’s largest bitcoin sites and has grown exponentially this year due to the sudden price surges. However, the co-founder and CTO of the website, Emil Oldenburg, a Swedish native, is not very hopeful about bitcoin’s future.
In an interview with the Swedish tech site Breakit, he said “I would say an investment in bitcoin is right now the riskiest investment you can make. There’s an extremely high risk. I have in fact sold all my bitcoins recently and switched to bitcoin cash,”
The reason behind the switch is high transaction costs and lead times. The bitcoin transaction fees are doubling every three months and recently reached $26 per trade, and it takes an average of 4.5 hours to confirm a bitcoin transaction.
The website has tens of millions of unique monthly visitors and has their biggest revenue stream in the bitcoin mining pool where new units of cryptocurrency are forged and released to the market. Oldenburg refused to reveal any numbers but said “it’s an awfully lot of money,” He also added that his salary has been in bitcoin for the past three years but its time to change to bitcoin cash.
Oldenburg says that people don’t understand the risk associated with the coins as they only own them and have not sold or traded with them. “As soon as people realize that this is how it works, they will start to sell. The old bitcoin network is as good as unusable.”
According to the expert, the problems arise when bitcoin transactions are recorded on the blockchain, the digital ledger that records all transactions. The problem is that you can only make a limited amount of transactions per second, which depends on the formation of the memory block size that store the transactions. This is what makes the currency illiquid and unusable.
Since the amount of bitcoin trades per second is limited and you with a great number of new investors in the market looking to make a big score is leading to higher transaction costs and longer transaction times.He refers to the old bitcoin network a “fanatical bitcoin talibans” He goes on to say, “[They ]want things this way. They see bitcoin as a digital gold and a technical experiment, as opposed to something you can actually use.”
Bitcoin cash split from bitcoin back in August and recently overtook Etherium as the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency. Bitcoin.com is also slowly distancing itself away from bitcoin and has stopped developing services for it and is now diverting its attention towards bitcoin cash.
“It only costs $0.012 to send a [Bitcoin Cash transaction] and there are no lead times. The only drawback is that you need larger hard drives, but that’s not a problem for most people,” Oldenburg says to Breakit.
All in all, he doesn’t believe bitcoin will be the currency for everyday use the world is hoping for. “Not as long as the network is run by this group of people [in the old bitcoin network]. The solutions will be found in bitcoin cash, that’s where I see a future.”
So if you were thinking about going big into bitcoin to make a quick payday, it might not be such a good idea at the time.