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store of value adds very little value to the rest of the world yet to adopt it. buying bitcoin/sending it is more expensive than a wire transfer. this isn't wha

store of value adds very little value to the rest of the world yet to adopt it. buying bitcoin/sending it is more expensive than a wire transfer. this isn't what bitcoin was meant to be. I no longer use bitcoin for anything other than HODLing, LTC has completely displaced it for as a means of exchange. That seems like the more important problem to solve for mass adoption. Can't have people paying for food/goods with bitcoin, it just won't work for that any more.

djtriptych 9y ago
Bitcoin has a flat transaction rate for moving any amount of value. So yes, more expensive if the amount being transferred is low, and I mean really low.
- dfox 9y ago
  Bitcoin's transaction fees are more complex than flat per transaction. It depends on the size of transaction which then in turn depends on how many incoming payments you have to combine into the amount of BTC you want to send. This has somewhat surprising and unfortunate high-level effect that the smaller transactions you do, the higher are fees for your future ones. The same is true for all cryptocurrencies where you spend transaction outputs (all bitcoin derived ones) instead of moving abstract numbers between "accounts" (ethereum), where the transaction fee is essentially flat and often insignificant. I'm not sure how Monero and Zcash works in this regard. Edit: tl;dr: problem with bitcoin's transaction fees is that they are not flat, but instead depend on non-obvious technical details of the protocol.
  - TD-Linux 9y ago
    While it is true that Bitcoin transaction sizes* vary depending on the coins available in your wallet (vs Ethereum only depends on the account), most of the volatility is based on the pricing of gas or bytes, not coin selection. Also, pertaining to the original article, it's unclear if either ring signatures or bullet proofs can be made to work with an account model. Is there any examples of this? *Bitcoin now measures transactions in weight, not size, a similar concept to Ethereum's gas (though much simpler)
illustrioussuit 9y ago
Bitcoin Cash was a hard fork intended to solve the problem of fungibility. (Low fees, fast transactions, etc)
- Bootvis 9y ago
  That’s not what’s meant by fungibility[1]: In economics, fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are essentially interchangeable [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility
  - illustrioussuit 9y ago
    My mistake. I thought fungibility=spendability. Am I thinking about liquidity?
    - Bootvis 9y ago
      No, liquidity is a measure of how easy and cheap an asset can be traded in the markets.
      - illustrioussuit 9y ago
        In economics, liquidity is often referred to as "spendability".
        Bootvis 9y ago
        Never seen that and when an economist says spendable income or some such he is not thinking about liquidity. Do you have a source for that?
    - QML 9y ago
      You're close, since fungibility affects spendability. In terms of currency, fungibility essentially means that money of the same denomination is indistinguishable. So if I had a $5 bill that I got from a marijuana dispensary, and another $5 bill that came from the Treasury, at the register both of them would be equally treated as $5. In the case of Bitcoin, fungibility is a bit harder to have since any merchant can parse the block history and find where a Bitcoin came from. Tangentially, this also relates to the notion of privacy, since if you gave me a Bitcoin, I could also find the address of your wallet, and see outgoing or processed transactions -- like, this is pretty bad if you used the same wallet to buy drugs.

djtriptych 9y ago

Bitcoin has a flat transaction rate for moving any amount of value. So yes, more expensive if the amount being transferred is low, and I mean really low.

dfox 9y ago
Bitcoin's transaction fees are more complex than flat per transaction. It depends on the size of transaction which then in turn depends on how many incoming payments you have to combine into the amount of BTC you want to send. This has somewhat surprising and unfortunate high-level effect that the smaller transactions you do, the higher are fees for your future ones. The same is true for all cryptocurrencies where you spend transaction outputs (all bitcoin derived ones) instead of moving abstract numbers between "accounts" (ethereum), where the transaction fee is essentially flat and often insignificant. I'm not sure how Monero and Zcash works in this regard. Edit: tl;dr: problem with bitcoin's transaction fees is that they are not flat, but instead depend on non-obvious technical details of the protocol.
- TD-Linux 9y ago
  While it is true that Bitcoin transaction sizes* vary depending on the coins available in your wallet (vs Ethereum only depends on the account), most of the volatility is based on the pricing of gas or bytes, not coin selection. Also, pertaining to the original article, it's unclear if either ring signatures or bullet proofs can be made to work with an account model. Is there any examples of this? *Bitcoin now measures transactions in weight, not size, a similar concept to Ethereum's gas (though much simpler)

illustrioussuit 9y ago

Bitcoin Cash was a hard fork intended to solve the problem of fungibility. (Low fees, fast transactions, etc)

Bootvis 9y ago
That’s not what’s meant by fungibility[1]: In economics, fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are essentially interchangeable [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility
- illustrioussuit 9y ago
  My mistake. I thought fungibility=spendability. Am I thinking about liquidity?
  - Bootvis 9y ago
    No, liquidity is a measure of how easy and cheap an asset can be traded in the markets.
    - illustrioussuit 9y ago
      In economics, liquidity is often referred to as "spendability".
      - Bootvis 9y ago
        Never seen that and when an economist says spendable income or some such he is not thinking about liquidity. Do you have a source for that?
  - QML 9y ago
    You're close, since fungibility affects spendability. In terms of currency, fungibility essentially means that money of the same denomination is indistinguishable. So if I had a $5 bill that I got from a marijuana dispensary, and another $5 bill that came from the Treasury, at the register both of them would be equally treated as $5. In the case of Bitcoin, fungibility is a bit harder to have since any merchant can parse the block history and find where a Bitcoin came from. Tangentially, this also relates to the notion of privacy, since if you gave me a Bitcoin, I could also find the address of your wallet, and see outgoing or processed transactions -- like, this is pretty bad if you used the same wallet to buy drugs.