I will try my best to express my worst feelings about the cryptocurrencies. And this is not because I want them to fail, it's the opposite. I believe (and hope) that they could be a big thing in the near future, but I also want to point at the "elephant in the room" that I see now.
All I want is simplicity, freedom, stability and fairness, but I see some issues.
Simplicity
Dealing with cryptocurrencies is not easy, especially for the newcomers. There is so much terminology to learn and so much actions to take. Newcomers are overwhelmed with information and uncertainty.
Few years ago I created my first bank account + debit cards + I integrated my website with PayPal to receive payments, all within a month or less. I lost so much more time and effort to learn Bitcoins and I still have issues with them.
Blockchain, keys, endless types of wallets, passwords, seeds, miners, pools and what not... so much stuff to learn.
And OMG, eventually I realized that there are almost 1000 other cryptocurrencies, ICOs and who knows what follows. Now I don't know whether I want to play with Bitcoin, some other crypto or none of them.
Not only that, but it's sooo hard to buy Bitcoins with regular currency. And even if you have Bitcoins, it's still not possible to use them regularly because of technical problems - too slow transactions and too high taxes.
Unfortunately I don't see how cryptocurrencies can become mainstream if it's so complicated to work with them. But people will slowly get used to this... hopefully.
Freedom
Cryptocurrencies are supposed to free the people from governments and banks, but is this really possible? Every time some country hints that Bitcoin is gonna be illegal, the price plummets and people don't want to touch it. People are still too scared and too sheep, they do whatever their government says.
For me it's also scary when a country declares that Bitcoin is fine and it's gonna be legal. This is not normal, governments and banks (as they exists today) cannot be friends with any decentralized cryptocurrency. Let's not forget that they want you to pay taxes to them, otherwise they could not exist (in this form).
And what stops the banks to start manipulating the price of cryptocurrencies like they do it with gold, silver and everything else? Yes, cryptos are decentralized, but the price in USD comes from not so decentralized exchanges. What if these exchanges start to manipulate the price by trading crypto units that they don't actually have? How can a regular person be sure that all orders listed in the exchanges are made by humans? Only if we don't compare cryptocurrencies with USD we could have a true freedom.
With this, I'm pretty sure that we will see troubles with our freedom in the future.
Stability
21 million Bitcoins - what a good idea! Until you find almost 1000 other cryptocurrencies and tokens. We don't use even one cryptocurrency in our daily life seriously, why do we need hundreds of them?!
Ok, ok, this is a free market, I like the word "free". And I'm not afraid of 50% price drop in a day, I understand that everything is still new and small. But please, stop making more useless copies of Bitcoin.
I actually think that those big price movements can only bring more people to this game, so I'm optimistic. The only thing we don't want to happen is governments to offer their help to keep the prices stable.
Fairness
There are many people who want to quickly become USD millionaires and they don't care what will happen with the cryptocurrencies tomorrow. That's why there are so many alternative cryptocurrencies that are pretty much the same as Bitcoin. I know, this is open source technology and everyone is free to do this, but I just don't like that part of the human behavior that seeks to profit at the expense of others.
And there are so many (ICO) companies offering promises and then collecting millions of dollars in minutes. Will they actually deliver their promises? I don't think so. Or, even if they do, it would not be something so huge as our current expectations. There is something wrong with getting too much money too quickly.
that's what's up! can you tell me how to link your crypto to your paypal?
What do you mean? Because as I know, PayPal doesn't like cryptos very much. I use VirWoX to buy some Bitcoins, but oh man, these guys are getting probably 20% of the incoming money in taxes!