3 ms·
Early adopters promoted bitcoin as 'fast' and 'free'. So it's not surprising that people are getting annoyed when transactions can take ages to be confirmed and
by joosters 10y ago
Early adopters promoted bitcoin as 'fast' and 'free'. So it's not surprising that people are getting annoyed when transactions can take ages to be confirmed and the fees are growing large.
Worse still is that dynamic fee calculation is a hard problem. You can look at past fees to try and guess a fee for a fast confirmation, but as more and more people do this, the guesses will get worse and worse. It becomes a silly game of trying to guess what fee other people are going to pick for new transactions, and then adjusting your fee accordingly.
Just look at one of the most popular fee calculation page: https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ - it's far too complicated, and has a bewildering range of numbers. Just to make it worse, they mix up bitcoins, satoshis and dollars to confuse people further. On top of that, fees have to determined based upon your transaction size. So users have yet another complication to the fee selection.
You need a calculator and a deep knowledge of game theory to make a transaction work. Currency of the future!
- jsprogrammer 10y agoDon't think that banks didn't take calculators and game theory to their currencies many decades ago. I don't see how anyone could have claimed Bitcoin was free, while having even a basic understanding of it. The entire system relies on proofs of work and transaction fees are part of the original paper.
- sliverstorm 10y agoI think the vision was that transaction fees were going to be a satoshi or three.
- bduerst 10y agoMaybe they did, maybe they didn't. It's irrelevant to deflect. The point is that banks use a relatively simple / flat fee structure now because user expectations are important for payment transactions. This whole "Banks had this problem centuries ago" doesn't make a strong argument for bitcoin's competitive use as a currency.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoI missed that point. I argue exponential compounding interest is not so simple and certainly not flat. The US Federal government has required banks to produce standard term sheets that supposedly more clearly describe a bank's particular fee scheme. That is how bad "they" are.