Just try selling your bitcoin: Cryptocurrency pioneer warns against 'extremely risky' investment
The co-founder of Bitcoin.com, one of the world’s largest sites devoted to the leading virtual currency, has sold all his bitcoins and recommends people stay away from it for the moment and look for alternatives.
“I would say an investment in bitcoin is right now the riskiest investment you can make. There’s an extremely high risk,” Emil Oldenburg said in an interview with Swedish tech site Breakit.
“I have in fact sold all my bitcoins recently and switched to bitcoin cash,” he added.
Oldenburg complains about long transactions with high fees. According to some estimates, bitcoin transaction fees are doubling every three months, and an average bitcoin transaction is takes four and a half hours to be confirmed. The average trading fee peaked at $26 recently.
The reason why bitcoin users don’t understand its cons is that they only buy it and don’t sell or trade it, according to Oldenburg.
“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,” he said.
The investor explained fees for bitcoin cash transactions are more reasonable.
“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.”
Bitcoin cash split from bitcoin this summer after a minority of developers decided to implement an upgrade that increased the block size to eight megabytes from one megabyte. The community behind the original bitcoin has decided against upgrading the network.
According to Oldenburg, bitcoin will not become a substitution for fiat money, because of its drawbacks as a currency.
“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.”
