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Check out /r/Bitcoin sometime for users complaining about transactions fees :) (Actually more the threat that some day there will be significant fees) Unfortun
by tdryja 11y ago
Check out /r/Bitcoin sometime for users complaining about transactions fees :)
(Actually more the threat that some day there will be significant fees)
Unfortunately Bitcoin has often been oversold as being "free"; but if transactions are free, and there's a fixed number of coins to mine, who pays for this whole network in 30 years?
The motivation behind the design of LN is to minimize the number of transactions which need to be globally verified (which has a cost) while still adhering to the general model of Bitcoin (decentralized, pseudonymous, etc).
You're right though that with tx fees being on the order of ~0.05 USD, you don't really need LN yet. I've long assumed that fees would become significant, pushing out some use cases. That's already happened with e.g satoshidice.
- 3dfan 11y agoUh oh ... for all I know, r/bitcoin is not a free community but gets heavily censored. A more balanced perspective can be found on r/btc: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc https://www.reddit.com/r/btc So you say LN is to solve future problems. Because transactions are free and in 30 years nobody will do the mining for free. Well, thats why bitcoin has fees. And a mechanism to let the market decide on those fees. This has been planned from the beginning. From what I can see, all is fine with bitcoin. And there is no need for the complexity LN brings.
- josephpoon 11y agoIt's already infeasible to directly make a single spend of $0.0001 on the blockchain itself (transaction fees are $0.02-$0.05).
- 3dfan 11y agoWhat is the use case of spending $0.0001?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Taek 11y agoDownloading a webpage, for example. Sending an email, giving someone an upvote, making use of a caching service. Basically any sort of payment you would want to do at the machine level. If I'm uploading a file to you, I would want you to pay per MB because I'm not sure if you're going to leave after you have 50% of the file.
- freework 11y ago> who pays for this whole network in 30 years? Why pays to seed torrents? Who pays to run NTP servers? Who pays for running game servers? Its is wrong to assume that something has to be profitable in order for it to exist.
- tdryja 11y agoIf both transaction fees and the coinbase are zero or negligible, there is potential revenue in mining: to reverse transactions and rip people off. Altruism certainly exists, but assuming that altruistic actors (rather than self-interested actors) will expend more resources than attackers is a very different security model than what Bitcoin is designed upon.
- maaku 11y agoRunning the Bitcoin mining network costs millions of dollars per day in electricity costs alone. Who's going to to pay that when the subsidy goes away?
- oafitupa 11y agoThe block reward only halves, it doesn't "go away". Unless you are talking about when it can't halve anymore because of the 8 decimals limit, which we could just remove, just like Satoshi wanted (same situation as with block size limit).
- supermari0_ 11y agoIf we keep the 21M limit, subsidy will be insignificat at one point.
- mrb 11y agoYou are wrong about mining costs. Miners are estimated to consume 100-200 megawatt. Most of them pay below worldwide average electricity prices, being located in Iceland (KnC), WA state (BitFury), etc; maybe around $0.05/kWh. So the miners' daily costs would be $120 000 to $240 000.