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Because Ether is actually usable (even without smart contracts) as a form of money since the transaction fees are really low compared to Bitcoin. When you pay s
by lnsp 9y ago
Because Ether is actually usable (even without smart contracts) as a form of money since the transaction fees are really low compared to Bitcoin. When you pay somebody using Bitcoin, you currently pay $5 to $8 as transaction fee and it needs about 1 1/2 hours for the money to arrive. When you use Ether, you only pay $0.25 (or even lower) as a fee and the system needs less than 20 seconds to confirm your transaction.
The Bitcoin model is simply unsustainable if the exchange price continues to explode.
- once_inc 9y agobitcoin's mempool is being cleared off 5-10 and even some 0-5 sat/byte transactions. If you set a correct fee, you can have $0.5 transactions that confirm within 10min.
- aquadrop 9y agoIf you set fee at $100 for $0.5 transaction? Not really sustainable...
- aquadrop 9y agoBitcoin also worked ok before the number of transactions went high, is ether protected from that kind of thing? If for example amount of ether transactions go up 3 orders of magnitude? And it would be nice to have even smaller fees on Ether and transaction time less than a second, so it could be better than VISA/Mastercard.
- charlesdm 9y agoAfaik Ethereum is already processing double the transactions of Bitcoin, very cheaply, and near instantaneous (e.g. little to no transaction backlog). The issue of Bitcoin is not the technical part; it's that no consensus can be reached between people on what is the right course of action, leading to multiple forks of the network.
- nope96 9y ago> Ethereum is already processing double the transactions of Bitcoin Take a look at the charts here, http://bc.daniel.net.nz http://bc.daniel.net.nz It's not "free" to process more transactions. At some point you are no longer p2p and decentralized when the requirements to run a node go up so high, so quickly .
- charlesdm 9y agoI'm not sure on the exact details, but I believe those are full nodes. I believe there are also light nodes that are only a few gb in size when you sync them (e.g. a lot of the historical less relevant data is truncated). I'm assuming those full nodes will eventually be intended to be run in data centers.
- aquadrop 9y ago> Afaik Ethereum is already processing double the transactions of Bitcoin I was talking just about Ether, what happens to time/fees if number of transactions goes 1000x? > The issue of Bitcoin is not the technical part; it's that no consensus can be reached between people on what is the right course of action, leading to multiple forks of the network I don't think it's a problem of Bitcoin. It has its pros and cons, but it allows bitcoin evolve, assessing different approaches. It's like saying that main problem of open source projects is that they can be forked. Is it a problem or is it a feature?
- charlesdm 9y agoI don't disagree with that premise, but I do think it makes things overly complicated and confusing for people. It dilutes the Bitcoin brand. And crypto in itself isn't exactly the easiest topic to grasp. At this rate we'll have 10 forks with minor changes in 5 years, and that just isn't good. Some pragmatism in working towards a common goal should be expected. Unless people believe the current state of Bitcoin is good enough to be digital gold. It might very well be.
- golergka 9y ago> Because Ether is actually usable (even without smart contracts) as a form of money I'm curious, how many drug dealers do you know that accept Ether?