I know you want to downvote this post as you probably have some Bitcoin yourself just like I do.
With the incoming drop of Bitcoin's market dominance to 30%, it's time to address the giant elephant in the living room. We all know the problems with Bitcoin but let's collectively think about how those problems scale in to the future.
Mining
Mining one Bitcoin currently uses the same amount of energy to power your house for a week. Do not brush aside that fact as no big deal. This is a huge problem.
Proof of work is a terrible concept for cryptocurrencies. I imagine most people here are young and tech savvy with many years to live and have read about some problems humanity will face in the future.
Bitcoin is directly contributing to the degradation of the environment that we will inhabit.
By buying Bitcoin, we're directly incentivizing miners by increasing the price of Bitcoin and adding to the number of people who go out and buy mining hardware.
Some people make the argument that it depends on what the energy source is and that's true but how much Bitcoin do you think is really being mined by solar panels? You might have mined some Ethereum yoursef, where's your energy coming from? I live in the relatively prosperous city of Toronto and much of my electricity comes from natural gas.
Then some people make the argument that some coal energy generated in China would go to waste anyways in China, which may be true, but if there was no long-term demand for that energy, it wouldn't be produced AS much in excess in the first place. It's analogous to the argument that people have against vegetarianism; that if you don't eat meat the meat will just go to waste in a supermarket anyways. But if a city of 100 people that eat meat is all of a sudden cut down to 20 people, producers will no longer ship meat supplies for 100 people, cutting down the amount of livestock and thus there is no longer waste as it's not produced in the first place.
Of course, this goes for every proof of work cryptocurrency, but Ethereum is already moving to PoS.
Transactions
Bitcoin's transactions per second is abysmmal, end of story. Why would we choose to use a terribly low tx/sec cryptocurrency when MANY ALTERNATIVES EXIST. Why choose the inferior product? How is Bitcoin going to operate in the year 2020 at a low tx/sec? Or the year 2030, when China, India and Africa are truly online?
Lightning network may not even work and in its current state seems much too convoluted for anyone to get running and understand for everyday transactions.
The first line of the Bitcoin whitepaper is for Bitcoin to be used as "a peer-to-peer electronic cash system". Who uses Bitcoin as cash anymore? The number of users have far outpaced what Satoshi ever imagined.
Fees
I fucking hate fees.
Conclusion
Don't let money blind you, we need an alternative to Bitcoin and in this subreddit we're essentially playing a game of natural selection looking for those currencies.
This post isn't meant to shill any particular currency. BCH and LTC face the (or eventually) same problems as BTC. I just know that whatever the future currency will be for the year 2030, 2040, 2050, it CANNOT be PoW, it CANNOT have a high fee and it CANNOT have 7 tx/sec.
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