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We have ligthning comming up, anx 600+ altcoins to test.

lern_too_spel 9y ago
Imagine that you are a business that operates in Bitcoin and pays employees in Bitcoin. How does Lightning solve that? It doesn't. Lightning falls apart if the graph has heavily asymmetric connections, and the only solution is to have banks, which is what these crypto enthusiasts want to get rid of in the first place. https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightning-network-cannot-be-a-decentralized-bitcoin-scaling-solution-1b8147650800 https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...
- nybble41 9y ago
  > Imagine that you are a business that operates in Bitcoin and pays employees in Bitcoin. Then you use a single, non-Lightning transaction with an output for each employee, and the fee for that transaction is most likely less than half a percent of the total amount being transferred[1]. [1] Actually just 0.35% ($170 fee / $48k wages) assuming a fee of 520 satoshis/byte, 34 bytes per output, 140 bytes of fixed overhead, $15k/BTC, 60 employees, and an $800 after-tax biweekly paycheck per employee ($20k/year). The ratio improves for higher wages since the fee is unaffected by the amount being transferred.
  - lern_too_spel 9y ago
    You've ignored how the business got the Bitcoins to begin with. Its customers have to pay the transaction fee to send the Bitcoins to the business. The business's wallet is therefore fragmented, so the number of bytes in its transactions to pay its employees is higher than your estimate. Or they could pay you via the bank and accept payments through their bank like every other business. Then the transaction fees are negligible. The Lightning network did not help at all in this scenario.
acdha 9y ago
… and perhaps that'll work out but a huge business like Visa isn't going feel threatened by an untested marketing pitch. A very small percentage of people are ideologically committed to cryptocurrencies but everyone serious is going to be looking for proven yes answers to “Does it work at production-level volumes?”, “Is it cheaper than a credit/debit card?”, and “Can my customers use it?”. For Bitcoin, the answer is no for all three but even if the first and last question were true for something else, the real question is whether #2 could be true: Visa is making a lot of money at 2-3%. If something else started making a serious play, what are the odds that they'd a) give up and go bankrupt or b) lower their fees and be slightly less profitable?

Imagine that you are a business that operates in Bitcoin and pays employees in Bitcoin. How does Lightning solve that? It doesn't. Lightning falls apart if the graph has heavily asymmetric connections, and the only solution is to have banks, which is what these crypto enthusiasts want to get rid of in the first place. https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightning-network-cannot-be-a-decentralized-bitcoin-scaling-solution-1b8147650800 https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...

nybble41 9y ago
> Imagine that you are a business that operates in Bitcoin and pays employees in Bitcoin. Then you use a single, non-Lightning transaction with an output for each employee, and the fee for that transaction is most likely less than half a percent of the total amount being transferred[1]. [1] Actually just 0.35% ($170 fee / $48k wages) assuming a fee of 520 satoshis/byte, 34 bytes per output, 140 bytes of fixed overhead, $15k/BTC, 60 employees, and an $800 after-tax biweekly paycheck per employee ($20k/year). The ratio improves for higher wages since the fee is unaffected by the amount being transferred.
- lern_too_spel 9y ago
  You've ignored how the business got the Bitcoins to begin with. Its customers have to pay the transaction fee to send the Bitcoins to the business. The business's wallet is therefore fragmented, so the number of bytes in its transactions to pay its employees is higher than your estimate. Or they could pay you via the bank and accept payments through their bank like every other business. Then the transaction fees are negligible. The Lightning network did not help at all in this scenario.

acdha 9y ago

… and perhaps that'll work out but a huge business like Visa isn't going feel threatened by an untested marketing pitch. A very small percentage of people are ideologically committed to cryptocurrencies but everyone serious is going to be looking for proven yes answers to “Does it work at production-level volumes?”, “Is it cheaper than a credit/debit card?”, and “Can my customers use it?”. For Bitcoin, the answer is no for all three but even if the first and last question were true for something else, the real question is whether #2 could be true: Visa is making a lot of money at 2-3%. If something else started making a serious play, what are the odds that they'd a) give up and go bankrupt or b) lower their fees and be slightly less profitable?