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Any fees above $0.01 make microtransactions unlikely. Maybe not a bad thing though. However, if fees hit the $0.30 and up range they stop losing their competit

Any fees above $0.01 make microtransactions unlikely. Maybe not a bad thing though. However, if fees hit the $0.30 and up range they stop losing their competitive edge against credit cards. If consumer retail on the Bitcoin blockchain isn't a concern for you (as it doesn't appear to be for Bitcoin Core), then high fees aren't an issue. If consumer retail is a use case you want for Bitcoin, fees need to stay low to offset Bitcoin's other disadvantages against credit cards. That being said high fees don't negatively affect the main retail use cases Bitcoin has demonstrated the best suitably for: cryptolocker payments and contraband.

nadaviv 11y ago
We're still quite off from $0.30, though. At the peak of the recent transaction flood attack, you only had to pay $0.06 (60 satoshis/byte for a 250 byte tx) for a 90% chance to get including in the upcoming block. Now, that the attack has somewhat calmed down, we're down to the $0.04-$0.05 range, and will probably continue going down over time. > as it doesn't appear to be for Bitcoin Core Source? Core has shown a very promising roadmap for scaling the bitcoin network. This includes SegWit, which gives us a 170%-400% capacity bump without requiring a network-wide upgrade (at the risk of splitting the payment network and currency in two if everyone doesn't upgrade in time), work on IBLT/weakblocks to improve network propagation times and bandwidth usage, and research on compressing data more efficiently [0]. Several of the Bitcoin Core members have also committed to working on an hard-fork to raise the block size [1], propose it to the development community and try to build consensus around that. In addition to that, Blockstream, which was founded by a few of the core developers, is funding work on Lighting Network, a write-cache for bitcoin transactions based on payment channels, which would allow for scalable, instant, nano, near-free payments. [0] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1377298.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1377298.0 [1] https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-consensus-266d475a61ff https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-con...
- schmichael 11y ago
  > Source? I was making an inference but one it seems Gavin Andresen agrees with: "Over the last year of trying, and failing, to reach a reasonable compromise, it has become clear to me that some developers don’t want any on-chain scaling solution any time soon. [goes on to reference Lightning]" http://gavinandresen.ninja/satoshi-roundtable-thoughts http://gavinandresen.ninja/satoshi-roundtable-thoughts
Inthenameofmine 11y ago
> That being said high fees don't negatively affect the main retail use cases Bitcoin has demonstrated the best suitably for: cryptolocker payments and contraband. They do. Hugh fees per tx bite means higher cost for multisig transactions. All on-chain market already use some sort of multisig setup, including legal ones such as OpenBazaar. Furthermore, this high cost also makes both metacoin protocols, timestamping services, as well as oracle services (smart contracts) very costly.

nadaviv 11y ago

We're still quite off from $0.30, though. At the peak of the recent transaction flood attack, you only had to pay $0.06 (60 satoshis/byte for a 250 byte tx) for a 90% chance to get including in the upcoming block. Now, that the attack has somewhat calmed down, we're down to the $0.04-$0.05 range, and will probably continue going down over time. > as it doesn't appear to be for Bitcoin Core Source? Core has shown a very promising roadmap for scaling the bitcoin network. This includes SegWit, which gives us a 170%-400% capacity bump without requiring a network-wide upgrade (at the risk of splitting the payment network and currency in two if everyone doesn't upgrade in time), work on IBLT/weakblocks to improve network propagation times and bandwidth usage, and research on compressing data more efficiently [0]. Several of the Bitcoin Core members have also committed to working on an hard-fork to raise the block size [1], propose it to the development community and try to build consensus around that. In addition to that, Blockstream, which was founded by a few of the core developers, is funding work on Lighting Network, a write-cache for bitcoin transactions based on payment channels, which would allow for scalable, instant, nano, near-free payments. [0] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1377298.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1377298.0 [1] https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-consensus-266d475a61ff https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-con...

schmichael 11y ago
> Source? I was making an inference but one it seems Gavin Andresen agrees with: "Over the last year of trying, and failing, to reach a reasonable compromise, it has become clear to me that some developers don’t want any on-chain scaling solution any time soon. [goes on to reference Lightning]" http://gavinandresen.ninja/satoshi-roundtable-thoughts http://gavinandresen.ninja/satoshi-roundtable-thoughts

Inthenameofmine 11y ago

> That being said high fees don't negatively affect the main retail use cases Bitcoin has demonstrated the best suitably for: cryptolocker payments and contraband. They do. Hugh fees per tx bite means higher cost for multisig transactions. All on-chain market already use some sort of multisig setup, including legal ones such as OpenBazaar. Furthermore, this high cost also makes both metacoin protocols, timestamping services, as well as oracle services (smart contracts) very costly.