16 ms·

BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

143 points by bitjson 9y ago

gressquel 9y ago
The article sounds like a propaganda for BCash. For common peoples information, BCash is supported by chinese miners, Satoshi Nakamoto impersonator, a convict named Roger and other types of dubious characters.
- tmp9876 9y ago
  Really dude? This is not /r/bitcoin.
- paulgb 9y ago
  What about it sounds like propaganda? They link to a source that currently shows an $18 fee to have a transaction in the next Bitcoin block, which seems to rule out the sort of transactions they are trying to do. If Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash are decentralized, why should it matter who supports them? Shouldn't they be judged on technical merits alone? (I have no holdings in either one)
  - vkou 9y ago
    You don't have to pay $18, you can wait a little for multiple confirmations instead. By the time you're done waiting, volatility in BTC's price may put you $18 ahead. Or $18 in the hole. /s
- Cyberdog 9y ago
  How are Chinese miners dubious characters? Also, Roger Ver got convicted of selling varmint-grade firecrackers on eBay. Who cares.
  - ohhhlol 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Roger_Ver#Explosives_vs_firecrackers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Roger_Ver#Explosives_vs_f... 'As for fireworks vs explosives, the current limit on firecracker size in the US is 50mg of flash powder. The "Pest Control Report 2000" was 1000mg'
    - anonymous5133 9y ago
      This is what everyone resorts to when you know they can't win the argument. They have to attack the messenger. It never works in the end.
- arkona 9y ago
  > Bcash It’s Bitcoin Cash. You’re just making the community look like a cult.
  - sergiotapia 9y ago
    It's bcash. From /r/bitcoin: >Starting a new company called Apple Unlimited! Please don't confuse this with our competitor, Apple. We did "borrow" all of their code, but we claim to follow the wishes of the great Steve Jobs, because the new guys that took over are ruining everything and censoring everyone!
    - sincerely 9y ago
      Fortunately for everyone involved, this isn't r/bitcoin
    - takeda 9y ago
      Bitcoin Cash is closer to original Bitcoin than Bitcoin Core. What makes one more worthy of the name than the other? Both are forks.
      - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
        You can still run a 0.8 node on the bitcoin network if you are so inclined, because changes have been implemented via soft-forks. Bcash is a hard-fork of bitcoin. It is not bitcoin, or you would be able to use your existing wallets with it.
        joseluis 9y ago
        Soft doesn't mean it's still Bitcoin. This word doesn't grasp the true difference between these fork kinds. What is it? Softfok is a coercive change. You can't oppose it unless you make some counter-hardfork (this is what happened in Bitcoin Cash). Softfork is a sneaky change that non upgraded nodes don't notice. Meanwhile, hardfork (especially with replay protection) leaves everyone the freedom of accepting it or not and make it obvious to nodes that it happened. These are technical terms that were fine when used technically by technical people who understand them. But they are kind of loaded what can be used to trick nontechnical people into believing that 'hard' means 'big' and 'soft' means 'small'. And 'big' means 'abandonment of true bitcoin' while 'soft' means 'still following the true bitcoin'. Easy thought experiments can prove these is not the case. Let's think of some possible changes that can be made as softforks and are clearly a violation of the original idea: - a requirement that every transaction has an additional output for tax collection - a requirement that every transaction contains KYC/AML tag. - addresses blacklist - decreasing the max block size to 10 kB - lowering the block reward to 0 from tomorrow, miners get only tx fees (it is possible because the protocol defined the max block reward rather than exact block reward) - adding a second PoW algo (it can be put in coinbase) - a requirement for coinbase to contain a specific Quran verse https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7jehc2/we_should_abandon_terms_soft_and_hard_forks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7jehc2/we_should_aband...
LyndsySimon 9y ago
It seems clear to me at this point that the cryptocurrency revolution is now bigger than Bitcoin itself. Years ago, I saw three long-term outcomes: Bitcoin being king and altcoins dying on the vine, Bitcoin being one of innumerable blockchains in use, and cryptocurrencies in general failing to gain adoption. I'm scratching the first outcome off the list, and my pen is hovering over the last outcome.
- lawn 9y ago
  The first version of new and revolutionary technology rarely (if ever?) becomes the dominant one. Obvious examples are search (Altavista -> Google) and social networks (MySpace -> Facebook).
  - down 9y ago
    right MySpace, was a technology?, I think they were build on php or so, was a slow site, Google is not a technology either, golang it is, and is somehow revolutionary through simplicity and first-ish.
    - RandomInteger4 9y ago
      Agreed! Bridges aren't technologies either, only rivets and steel beams! I keep telling people, but they just won't listen. Cars? Not a technology, only wheels and motors are technologies.
  - nlperguiy 9y ago
    None of these technologies are dominant enough. Not a single one is a usable product. All cannot support a large number of transactions, not even those that do not have proof of work. There's research-level problems being solved (like bulletproofs for compact private transaction - hides amounts). After research is done there's engineering. Then testing until it is ready to use. People really don't realize how early this is. Lightning network, a proposed solution for Bitcoin scaling problem, was announced 2 years ago, and they identified many issues with it since then. There's talks of layer number 3 etc. This is way too early and there's no winner. Bunch of cryptocurrencies are riding on the research-wave behind Bitcoin.
modeless 9y ago
This was foreseeable when Bitcoin Core rejected Segwit2x. BitPay's business model simply fails unless the blockchain can scale much more than Segwit alone achieves, very soon.
- davej 9y ago
  While I agree that Segwit2x would have been good for BTC, it ultimately only kicks the can down the road a little bit. If BTC (or BCH) is going to be used at Visa/Mastercard scale then the transactions need to happen off-chain. The Lightning Network is the answer here, a lot of work still needs to be done though, particularly on the software side.
  - hrrsn 9y ago
    This is the major (technical - plenty of political issues) problem I have with Bcash. It’s cheap and fast because transaction volumes, and price, are 10% of BTC, yet blocks are 1.5x the size (roughly, looking at a block explorer). As soon as they fill up, they’ll have the exact same problems down the line. Increasing the block size doesn’t scale long term and is a bandaid solution at best. BTC was fast and cheap when adoption was low.
    - r1ch 9y ago
      Some of the blocks appear larger on Bitcoin Cash even though they have a lower transaction count because they contain transactions that are consolidating unspent outputs (example: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/transaction/5254e22a6a5fc63f0dc171fbee250644d5b9db998b75e810378a2ec1e9ab930c https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/transaction/5254e22a6a5f...). These kinds of transactions aren't feasible on the Bitcoin chain since the fees are prohibitive, so all those small unspent outputs remain in the UTXO set forever and are essentially unspendable. I'd also argue that increasing the block size scales fine as long as network speeds and storage continue to scale as they have been over the past years.
      - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
dahdum 9y ago
Just this May their CEO was singing a different tune: "We have carefully studied the most significant alternatives to the Bitcoin Blockchain and have concluded that none of them are compelling" [1] He's been a bitcoin maximalist for a while, so it's notable to see him finally cave due to the mining fees. [1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitpay-ceo-we-studied-bitcoin-blockchain-alternatives-none-are-compelling https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitpay-ceo-we-studied-bitcoin...
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  He 'caved in' because bitpay was bought by bitmain, the largest centralized chinese miner.
  - dahdum 9y ago
    Bought or invested in? Bitpay was shooting themselves in the foot by not branching out into other digital assets while fees and transaction time skyrocketed. If it took Bitmain to force the issue congrats to them.
    - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
      The chinese government wanted a crypto they could track, because they want to own all of the mining infrastructure, all of the nodes, all of the code base and the payment gateway to it. So that's what they got. Bcash.
      - r1ch 9y ago
        Who mines a block or where the nodes are etc is irrelevant, the ledger is open and public for both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. This isn't the place for wild anti-Chinese conspiracy theories.
        Frogolocalypse 9y ago
        Centralized chinese miners, centralized chinese nodes, and centralized chinese payment processor. The chinese government appreciates your compliance with its crypto implementation.
Frogolocalypse 9y ago
Bitpay is owned by bitmain, the miner that controls bcash. You will have every one of your transactions tracked if you use this alt. I'm sure the chinese government will appreciate your compliance. This is nothing more than self promotional spam.
- arkona 9y ago
  > You will have every one of your transactions tracked if you use this alt I don’t think you understand the concept of a blockchain.
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    I think you wildly overestimate yours. As a 'for instance' i know what a node does. And what decentralization means.
  - jcranmer 9y ago
    Actually, I think that it's he doesn't understand that trying to uncover anonymous identities in financial transactions is a problem that governments have been solving for decades (I'd say centuries, but I'm not sure the problem is that old). Pretty much the only difference with a blockchain is that you can no longer rely on banks cooking their books to protect you.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gtrubetskoy 9y ago
Fascinating how all the comments explaining that for fast and cheap transactions there is Litecoin (which has SegWit and Lightning) and pointing out BCash (still vulnerable to transaction malleability because it does not have SegWit) technical and governance problems immediately got downvoted into oblivion. Edit: including this comment.
- wmf 9y ago
  Fascinating how all the "just use Litecoin" comments don't count the value of continuity of the UTXO set, etc.
  - ryebit 9y ago
    What is the value of maintaining continuity of the UTXO set? Pretty much any BTC spinoff can and has forked the chain, auto-airdropping their coin to all BTC holders. You don't even have to go that far though, a coin could easily have a smart-contract style method of signing a message with your BTC private key, and get granted an equivalent in free starter coins. Coins are also becoming increasingly fungible ... there's more exchanges every day, shapeshift/changelly style portals, and lightning adding atomic swaps across chains. More importantly though, whether this is the end of the early adopter phase, or just a "late end of early adoption" phase... most people coming in won't want a coin with a lot of baggage and most of the value hoarded into a few accounts (inheriting BTC's chain could be seen as a negative there; and BCH's speedmining run didn't help it out).
- ryebit 9y ago
  There is a LOT of money being invested to make BCash appear legit. One bit I noticed was this address -- https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin%20cash/address/19hZx234vNtLazfx5J2bxHsiWEmeYE8a7k https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin%20cash/address/19hZx234vNt... which has been quietly accumulating (yet never spending) a massive amount of BCH. My best guess is this is bitmain accumulating part of their mining proceeds, but isolating it away to create artificial scarcity to inflate the price. (That's just one of a bunch of similar addresses). They sort of depend on keeping the price inflated; because without that, their difficulty would adjust & drop to the point where a 51% attack was actually feasible. Per https://fork.lol/security/fork https://fork.lol/security/fork it would only take 50 days for 25% of the BTC hashrate to remine the entire BCH fork, undoing any BCH transactions the miner might have made. It's an incredibly shaky coin in a large number of ways.
anonymous5133 9y ago
Finally. I think the bigger companies are starting to realize that bitcoin cash is taking over the smaller payments. Payments on bitcoin cash right now are under 1 penny and confirm in less than 10 minutes. Try it out for yourself, it is pretty amazing really.
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  bcash handles a fraction of the transactions of either bitcoin or litecoin. If you want a cheap option, litecoin is great. It's been around for years, and isn't controlled by the chinese government. In bcash, the nodes, the developers, the miners, and now the payment processor, are all owned by the same chinese company. Currently litecoin is processing about four times the transaction count of bcash. They also have a block creation time of 1/4 of the time (2.5 minutes) to bcash or bitcoin (10 minutes), so if speed of confirmation is an issue for you, then they might meet your use-case. It obviously doesn't have the decentralization of bitcoin, but at least it isn't controlled by a single chinese company.
  - anonymous5133 9y ago
    bcash still has lower fees. I am using exodus and I am getting quoted 2 cents for bcash. Litecoin I am getting quote of 22 cents while bitocin is like 5 bucks. Though I would agree that litecoin is better than the original bitcoin. However, litecoin does not beat bcash, IMO.
    - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
      There are lots of altcoins that have low fees. When you are getting a single company to process your payments, it is always likely to be at a lower cost. The only question is why they're even bothering to store the information in a blockchain. It would just be easier if they used an SQL database. Without the decentralization, it is the same risk profile. They know who you are, what you're spending your money on, and they can black-list your spending addresses with trivial ease. Like paypal. Just less efficient.
wyldfire 9y ago
Is Bitcoin Cash fast because of greater capacity or with low competition to get into blocks? Better options for cheap + fast transactions: Litecoin or Raiblocks. Litecoin has a great history and community is ready and willing to innovate. Raiblocks has a good story too: doesn't waste the currency's OPEX on proof-of-work, accounts don't face contention on serialized resources like a linear blockchain and delivers no-fee transactions. No crazy experimental-and-vulnerable-to-differential-cryptanalysis like IOTA.
- babaganoosh89 9y ago
  Both, they have much less transactions and their block size is 8x larger so they can do 8x more transactions/sec. But still pales in comparison to Visa’s throughput.
empyrical 9y ago
I wonder if "BitPay Card" will end up supporting BCH?
paul7986 9y ago
Newbie ... what apps turn BitCoin into cash .... I assume Coinbase can when you sell a BitCoin or a portion of BitCoin to a third party? What other ways and or apps are people using to turn BitCoin into cash/USD?
- pmorici 9y ago
  If you are in the USA you have numerous options including; Coinbase, GDAX, Gemini, itbit, and Kraken among others.
  - paul7986 9y ago
    Thanks, yet how do you find buyers .. do these marketplaces connect you with buyers? As a newbie i went ahead and bought a tiny portion of a Bitcoin recently from say GDAX. So, since I bought it from them I can also sell it back them at a profit or I have to find another interested buyer like a friend?
    - pmorici 9y ago
      They all work just like stock markets
nextstep 9y ago
Every time there is something mentioning Bitcoin Cash or the scaling issues with Bitcoin Core, the same people show up in these threads attacking everyone and spamming the comments with the same arguments over and over. (I’m not going to name names but look through these comments and see some of the posters calling Bitcoin Cash “bcash” and posting 30+ comments.) Can we please not turn this forum ito the childish name calling of r/Bitcoin? There are good arguments for and against the two main Bitcoin forks and I’d like HN to be a place where these can be discussed without name calling and personal attacks.
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  I agree. They should be immediately closed. The problem with them is that crypto is a collision between tech and money. It, unfortunately, brings out the worst part of people wanting to get rich. I like yc because it isn't like that, but it just gets brigaded these days. I would completely respect a complete ban of all crypto discussion on yc. I like the fact that it isn't that.
  - pmorici 9y ago
    The op is talking about accounts like yours Frogolocalypse. You only comment on crypto related articles on HN and it's always the same talking points over and over. Edit: I see further down the page someone even called you out for spamming this thread and others with identical comments over and over.
    - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
      I try to talk about the technical implementation of bitcoin and the game theory that supports it. There are lots of kids whose understanding of bitcoin extends to reading reddit. That is what we see here. Unfortunately. I would prefer if reddit discussions, vote brigading, and sockpuppets, remained on reddit.
      - awemany 9y ago

143 points by bitjson 9y ago

The article sounds like a propaganda for BCash. For common peoples information, BCash is supported by chinese miners, Satoshi Nakamoto impersonator, a convict named Roger and other types of dubious characters.

tmp9876 9y ago
Really dude? This is not /r/bitcoin.
paulgb 9y ago
What about it sounds like propaganda? They link to a source that currently shows an $18 fee to have a transaction in the next Bitcoin block, which seems to rule out the sort of transactions they are trying to do. If Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash are decentralized, why should it matter who supports them? Shouldn't they be judged on technical merits alone? (I have no holdings in either one)
- vkou 9y ago
  You don't have to pay $18, you can wait a little for multiple confirmations instead. By the time you're done waiting, volatility in BTC's price may put you $18 ahead. Or $18 in the hole. /s
Cyberdog 9y ago
How are Chinese miners dubious characters? Also, Roger Ver got convicted of selling varmint-grade firecrackers on eBay. Who cares.
- ohhhlol 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Roger_Ver#Explosives_vs_firecrackers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Roger_Ver#Explosives_vs_f... 'As for fireworks vs explosives, the current limit on firecracker size in the US is 50mg of flash powder. The "Pest Control Report 2000" was 1000mg'
  - anonymous5133 9y ago
    This is what everyone resorts to when you know they can't win the argument. They have to attack the messenger. It never works in the end.
arkona 9y ago
> Bcash It’s Bitcoin Cash. You’re just making the community look like a cult.
- sergiotapia 9y ago
  It's bcash. From /r/bitcoin: >Starting a new company called Apple Unlimited! Please don't confuse this with our competitor, Apple. We did "borrow" all of their code, but we claim to follow the wishes of the great Steve Jobs, because the new guys that took over are ruining everything and censoring everyone!
  - sincerely 9y ago
    Fortunately for everyone involved, this isn't r/bitcoin
  - takeda 9y ago
    Bitcoin Cash is closer to original Bitcoin than Bitcoin Core. What makes one more worthy of the name than the other? Both are forks.
    - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
      You can still run a 0.8 node on the bitcoin network if you are so inclined, because changes have been implemented via soft-forks. Bcash is a hard-fork of bitcoin. It is not bitcoin, or you would be able to use your existing wallets with it.
      - joseluis 9y ago
        Soft doesn't mean it's still Bitcoin. This word doesn't grasp the true difference between these fork kinds. What is it? Softfok is a coercive change. You can't oppose it unless you make some counter-hardfork (this is what happened in Bitcoin Cash). Softfork is a sneaky change that non upgraded nodes don't notice. Meanwhile, hardfork (especially with replay protection) leaves everyone the freedom of accepting it or not and make it obvious to nodes that it happened. These are technical terms that were fine when used technically by technical people who understand them. But they are kind of loaded what can be used to trick nontechnical people into believing that 'hard' means 'big' and 'soft' means 'small'. And 'big' means 'abandonment of true bitcoin' while 'soft' means 'still following the true bitcoin'. Easy thought experiments can prove these is not the case. Let's think of some possible changes that can be made as softforks and are clearly a violation of the original idea: - a requirement that every transaction has an additional output for tax collection - a requirement that every transaction contains KYC/AML tag. - addresses blacklist - decreasing the max block size to 10 kB - lowering the block reward to 0 from tomorrow, miners get only tx fees (it is possible because the protocol defined the max block reward rather than exact block reward) - adding a second PoW algo (it can be put in coinbase) - a requirement for coinbase to contain a specific Quran verse https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7jehc2/we_should_abandon_terms_soft_and_hard_forks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7jehc2/we_should_aband...

LyndsySimon 9y ago

It seems clear to me at this point that the cryptocurrency revolution is now bigger than Bitcoin itself. Years ago, I saw three long-term outcomes: Bitcoin being king and altcoins dying on the vine, Bitcoin being one of innumerable blockchains in use, and cryptocurrencies in general failing to gain adoption. I'm scratching the first outcome off the list, and my pen is hovering over the last outcome.

lawn 9y ago
The first version of new and revolutionary technology rarely (if ever?) becomes the dominant one. Obvious examples are search (Altavista -> Google) and social networks (MySpace -> Facebook).
- down 9y ago
  right MySpace, was a technology?, I think they were build on php or so, was a slow site, Google is not a technology either, golang it is, and is somehow revolutionary through simplicity and first-ish.
  - RandomInteger4 9y ago
    Agreed! Bridges aren't technologies either, only rivets and steel beams! I keep telling people, but they just won't listen. Cars? Not a technology, only wheels and motors are technologies.
- nlperguiy 9y ago
  None of these technologies are dominant enough. Not a single one is a usable product. All cannot support a large number of transactions, not even those that do not have proof of work. There's research-level problems being solved (like bulletproofs for compact private transaction - hides amounts). After research is done there's engineering. Then testing until it is ready to use. People really don't realize how early this is. Lightning network, a proposed solution for Bitcoin scaling problem, was announced 2 years ago, and they identified many issues with it since then. There's talks of layer number 3 etc. This is way too early and there's no winner. Bunch of cryptocurrencies are riding on the research-wave behind Bitcoin.

modeless 9y ago

This was foreseeable when Bitcoin Core rejected Segwit2x. BitPay's business model simply fails unless the blockchain can scale much more than Segwit alone achieves, very soon.

davej 9y ago
While I agree that Segwit2x would have been good for BTC, it ultimately only kicks the can down the road a little bit. If BTC (or BCH) is going to be used at Visa/Mastercard scale then the transactions need to happen off-chain. The Lightning Network is the answer here, a lot of work still needs to be done though, particularly on the software side.
- hrrsn 9y ago
  This is the major (technical - plenty of political issues) problem I have with Bcash. It’s cheap and fast because transaction volumes, and price, are 10% of BTC, yet blocks are 1.5x the size (roughly, looking at a block explorer). As soon as they fill up, they’ll have the exact same problems down the line. Increasing the block size doesn’t scale long term and is a bandaid solution at best. BTC was fast and cheap when adoption was low.
  - r1ch 9y ago
    Some of the blocks appear larger on Bitcoin Cash even though they have a lower transaction count because they contain transactions that are consolidating unspent outputs (example: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/transaction/5254e22a6a5fc63f0dc171fbee250644d5b9db998b75e810378a2ec1e9ab930c https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/transaction/5254e22a6a5f...). These kinds of transactions aren't feasible on the Bitcoin chain since the fees are prohibitive, so all those small unspent outputs remain in the UTXO set forever and are essentially unspendable. I'd also argue that increasing the block size scales fine as long as network speeds and storage continue to scale as they have been over the past years.
    - Frogolocalypse 9y ago

dahdum 9y ago

Just this May their CEO was singing a different tune: "We have carefully studied the most significant alternatives to the Bitcoin Blockchain and have concluded that none of them are compelling" [1] He's been a bitcoin maximalist for a while, so it's notable to see him finally cave due to the mining fees. [1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitpay-ceo-we-studied-bitcoin-blockchain-alternatives-none-are-compelling https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitpay-ceo-we-studied-bitcoin...

Frogolocalypse 9y ago
He 'caved in' because bitpay was bought by bitmain, the largest centralized chinese miner.
- dahdum 9y ago
  Bought or invested in? Bitpay was shooting themselves in the foot by not branching out into other digital assets while fees and transaction time skyrocketed. If it took Bitmain to force the issue congrats to them.
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    The chinese government wanted a crypto they could track, because they want to own all of the mining infrastructure, all of the nodes, all of the code base and the payment gateway to it. So that's what they got. Bcash.
    - r1ch 9y ago
      Who mines a block or where the nodes are etc is irrelevant, the ledger is open and public for both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. This isn't the place for wild anti-Chinese conspiracy theories.
      - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
        Centralized chinese miners, centralized chinese nodes, and centralized chinese payment processor. The chinese government appreciates your compliance with its crypto implementation.

Frogolocalypse 9y ago

Bitpay is owned by bitmain, the miner that controls bcash. You will have every one of your transactions tracked if you use this alt. I'm sure the chinese government will appreciate your compliance. This is nothing more than self promotional spam.

arkona 9y ago
> You will have every one of your transactions tracked if you use this alt I don’t think you understand the concept of a blockchain.
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  I think you wildly overestimate yours. As a 'for instance' i know what a node does. And what decentralization means.
- jcranmer 9y ago
  Actually, I think that it's he doesn't understand that trying to uncover anonymous identities in financial transactions is a problem that governments have been solving for decades (I'd say centuries, but I'm not sure the problem is that old). Pretty much the only difference with a blockchain is that you can no longer rely on banks cooking their books to protect you.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

gtrubetskoy 9y ago

Fascinating how all the comments explaining that for fast and cheap transactions there is Litecoin (which has SegWit and Lightning) and pointing out BCash (still vulnerable to transaction malleability because it does not have SegWit) technical and governance problems immediately got downvoted into oblivion. Edit: including this comment.

wmf 9y ago
Fascinating how all the "just use Litecoin" comments don't count the value of continuity of the UTXO set, etc.
- ryebit 9y ago
  What is the value of maintaining continuity of the UTXO set? Pretty much any BTC spinoff can and has forked the chain, auto-airdropping their coin to all BTC holders. You don't even have to go that far though, a coin could easily have a smart-contract style method of signing a message with your BTC private key, and get granted an equivalent in free starter coins. Coins are also becoming increasingly fungible ... there's more exchanges every day, shapeshift/changelly style portals, and lightning adding atomic swaps across chains. More importantly though, whether this is the end of the early adopter phase, or just a "late end of early adoption" phase... most people coming in won't want a coin with a lot of baggage and most of the value hoarded into a few accounts (inheriting BTC's chain could be seen as a negative there; and BCH's speedmining run didn't help it out).
ryebit 9y ago
There is a LOT of money being invested to make BCash appear legit. One bit I noticed was this address -- https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin%20cash/address/19hZx234vNtLazfx5J2bxHsiWEmeYE8a7k https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin%20cash/address/19hZx234vNt... which has been quietly accumulating (yet never spending) a massive amount of BCH. My best guess is this is bitmain accumulating part of their mining proceeds, but isolating it away to create artificial scarcity to inflate the price. (That's just one of a bunch of similar addresses). They sort of depend on keeping the price inflated; because without that, their difficulty would adjust & drop to the point where a 51% attack was actually feasible. Per https://fork.lol/security/fork https://fork.lol/security/fork it would only take 50 days for 25% of the BTC hashrate to remine the entire BCH fork, undoing any BCH transactions the miner might have made. It's an incredibly shaky coin in a large number of ways.

anonymous5133 9y ago

Finally. I think the bigger companies are starting to realize that bitcoin cash is taking over the smaller payments. Payments on bitcoin cash right now are under 1 penny and confirm in less than 10 minutes. Try it out for yourself, it is pretty amazing really.

Frogolocalypse 9y ago
bcash handles a fraction of the transactions of either bitcoin or litecoin. If you want a cheap option, litecoin is great. It's been around for years, and isn't controlled by the chinese government. In bcash, the nodes, the developers, the miners, and now the payment processor, are all owned by the same chinese company. Currently litecoin is processing about four times the transaction count of bcash. They also have a block creation time of 1/4 of the time (2.5 minutes) to bcash or bitcoin (10 minutes), so if speed of confirmation is an issue for you, then they might meet your use-case. It obviously doesn't have the decentralization of bitcoin, but at least it isn't controlled by a single chinese company.
- anonymous5133 9y ago
  bcash still has lower fees. I am using exodus and I am getting quoted 2 cents for bcash. Litecoin I am getting quote of 22 cents while bitocin is like 5 bucks. Though I would agree that litecoin is better than the original bitcoin. However, litecoin does not beat bcash, IMO.
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    There are lots of altcoins that have low fees. When you are getting a single company to process your payments, it is always likely to be at a lower cost. The only question is why they're even bothering to store the information in a blockchain. It would just be easier if they used an SQL database. Without the decentralization, it is the same risk profile. They know who you are, what you're spending your money on, and they can black-list your spending addresses with trivial ease. Like paypal. Just less efficient.

wyldfire 9y ago

Is Bitcoin Cash fast because of greater capacity or with low competition to get into blocks? Better options for cheap + fast transactions: Litecoin or Raiblocks. Litecoin has a great history and community is ready and willing to innovate. Raiblocks has a good story too: doesn't waste the currency's OPEX on proof-of-work, accounts don't face contention on serialized resources like a linear blockchain and delivers no-fee transactions. No crazy experimental-and-vulnerable-to-differential-cryptanalysis like IOTA.

babaganoosh89 9y ago
Both, they have much less transactions and their block size is 8x larger so they can do 8x more transactions/sec. But still pales in comparison to Visa’s throughput.

empyrical 9y ago

I wonder if "BitPay Card" will end up supporting BCH?

paul7986 9y ago

Newbie ... what apps turn BitCoin into cash .... I assume Coinbase can when you sell a BitCoin or a portion of BitCoin to a third party? What other ways and or apps are people using to turn BitCoin into cash/USD?

pmorici 9y ago
If you are in the USA you have numerous options including; Coinbase, GDAX, Gemini, itbit, and Kraken among others.
- paul7986 9y ago
  Thanks, yet how do you find buyers .. do these marketplaces connect you with buyers? As a newbie i went ahead and bought a tiny portion of a Bitcoin recently from say GDAX. So, since I bought it from them I can also sell it back them at a profit or I have to find another interested buyer like a friend?
  - pmorici 9y ago
    They all work just like stock markets

nextstep 9y ago

Every time there is something mentioning Bitcoin Cash or the scaling issues with Bitcoin Core, the same people show up in these threads attacking everyone and spamming the comments with the same arguments over and over. (I’m not going to name names but look through these comments and see some of the posters calling Bitcoin Cash “bcash” and posting 30+ comments.) Can we please not turn this forum ito the childish name calling of r/Bitcoin? There are good arguments for and against the two main Bitcoin forks and I’d like HN to be a place where these can be discussed without name calling and personal attacks.

Frogolocalypse 9y ago
I agree. They should be immediately closed. The problem with them is that crypto is a collision between tech and money. It, unfortunately, brings out the worst part of people wanting to get rich. I like yc because it isn't like that, but it just gets brigaded these days. I would completely respect a complete ban of all crypto discussion on yc. I like the fact that it isn't that.
- pmorici 9y ago
  The op is talking about accounts like yours Frogolocalypse. You only comment on crypto related articles on HN and it's always the same talking points over and over. Edit: I see further down the page someone even called you out for spamming this thread and others with identical comments over and over.
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    I try to talk about the technical implementation of bitcoin and the game theory that supports it. There are lots of kids whose understanding of bitcoin extends to reading reddit. That is what we see here. Unfortunately. I would prefer if reddit discussions, vote brigading, and sockpuppets, remained on reddit.
    - awemany 9y ago