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Bitcoin is not remotely usable as a currency now. The fees are incredible, the confirmation times ridiculous. We need to move on to something more modern like

Bitcoin is not remotely usable as a currency now. The fees are incredible, the confirmation times ridiculous. We need to move on to something more modern like Ethereum, Stellar Lumens, etc. immediately. Asking the current 1 mb blocksize version of Bitcoin to be a currency is like Goldman Sachs writing a report saying they want to run their website on Intel 486 processors. They mention Zimbabwe moving to it as an alternative. The average Bitcoin fee is now $40 and the average weekly salary there is around $60. It is ludicrous to even think about asking someone to spend almost a week's wage for something as simple as a transaction fee. Bitcoin has failed completely at accomplishing the "banking the unbanked" goal that drew many of us to it in the first place. That story and that loss is a long, convoluted, and sad story for another time. But other cryptos with teams willing to adapt and listen to reason are moving forward with this torch.

e19293001 9y ago
Now is the era where companies are racing to replace Bitcoin. We'll see what happens at the end of this year.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
StateChannelBro 9y ago
you seem to be underestimating the value of lightning networks, TEEchains, quorums, etc.
- mulmen 9y ago
  Honest question: how does any of that help with transaction fees?
  - tananaev 9y ago
    With Lightning Network you pay fees once to create a channel and then you can use that channel to make smaller payments for very low or even no fees. Channel can stay open for a very long time (e.g. a year). So, you end up paying single Bitcoin transaction fee instead of hundreds, and it also reduces load on the Bitcoin network freeing the block space lowering fees even more.
ThomPete 9y ago
Western Union is up there I think. So at least for remittance it might make sense. Anyway I agree that Bitcoin probably won't be used as a currency but more like gold. Perhaps it will be used to back some way cheaper transaction method.
- tehlike 9y ago
  Why not have the same thing for both store of value, and medium of transaction? It makes no sense.
- EpicEng 9y ago
  > more like gold But without that nifty property of intrinsic value.
  - bobwaycott 9y ago
    There is no intrinsic value in gold. Or any other thing. The only value things have are the exchange and use values humans imbue them with.
    - wallace_f 9y ago
      But that's consistent with what people mean when they say 'gold has intrinsic value.' All they are saying is it 'has some value that is not one of the three functions of money.' Does anyone know what the above logical fallacy would be named? I see this kind of argumentation a lot: where one refutes an argument which has not been made.
      - dsacco 9y ago
        It’s an abuse of definitional scope. The commenter is not arguing against a point that has not been made (that would be a strawman); instead, they’re arguing against the applicability of terminology in an argument that was made, but by using an incorrect or alternate definition for the terminology. In this specific instance, the commenter is using a non-standard definition of “intrinsic value” to argue that gold has no such value. I like to call this “Wittgensteinian chaos” - you see it happen whenever two or more parties fail to explicitly define terms before arguing. It’s usually accidental, not deceptive. In particular, this is likely to happen with technical terminology that does not look enough like jargon to prompt people to look it up, because it also has a coherent, non-technical meaning. Now circle back to “intrinsic value” - if you aren’t immediately aware that this is a specific economic term[1], you might think to yourself, “oh I get what he’s trying to say”, and proceed to try and refute it. I think economics is particularly prone to this in internet debates.
westoque 9y ago
Not sure “banking the unbanked” is really the goal of Bitcoin. Think instead because of it’s scarcity, Bitcoin could be used to back currencies. Much like the gold standard before. Transaction fees in this scenario (even with it’s high transaction fees for us normies) would be considered negligible when moving large amounts of money. In this scenario, we can even have other cryptos which are better for daily use be backed by bitcoin.
- zik 9y ago
  The original purpose of Bitcoin was disintermediating transactions. So "unbanking the banked" would probably best describe it. It doesn't work for that use case any more unfortunately due to its high fees.
- chii 9y ago
  > Bitcoin could be used to back currencies but why does currency need a 'backing' like this (of which was the purpose of gold originally)?
  - DSingularity 9y ago
    Because it needs to have value everyone agrees on.
    - mulmen 9y ago
      But we don't all agree on the price of bitcoin and I don't see why we would just because it's rare.
      - westoque 9y ago
        I don’t think it’s just the rarity. It’s also trustless, secure and easy to transfer. For ex, with gold, you’d have to carry blocks of it to move it around. And even then, you’d still don’t exactly trust it’s source 100% unlike bitcoin, where everything is in the ledger.
tananaev 9y ago
On-chain scaling is not sustainable. If you want to handle as many transaction as for example Visa, you would need 1 GB blocks every 10 minutes, which would make the whole blockchain heavily centralized because regular users won't be able to host full nodes to validate payments. About "adopting" and increasing block size. I think most developers agree that we would need to increase it at some point, but I believe core Bitcoin developers refusing to do it to accelerate real scalability solution (e.g. Lightning Network). After we have a working scaling solution we might see increase in block size to lower fees and increase throughput.
- xiphias 9y ago
  Segregated Witness was increasing the block size, but the trivial block size increase that Bitcoin Cash was doing was not a scalable solution because the old transaction message format had a quadratic worst case processing time. The problem with it is that Bitcoin adaption is extremely fast (10x last year), and securely implementing and testing all these scalability solutions take years.
- erentz 9y ago
  Not sure why you and the other person mentioning lightning have been downvoted. I’ve noticed increasingly it’s not possible to have reasonable discussion about bitcoin on hacker news. It seems the folks from /r/btc have found this place.
  - jv22222 9y ago
    Yes, agreed, it’s fucking irritating.
  - 0wing 9y ago
    Please explain how the Lightning Network developers solve an unsolved NP-Hard problem in computer science regarding routing? [1] The Lightning Network design is exactly what the first sentence of Satoshi's Bitcoin whitepaper seeks to avoid - payment processor middlemen. "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." [2] The LN design was chosen as a solution by certain investors who want to extract fees as payment hub liquidity providers. LN can't solve the TSP without either publishing a map of all nodes and routes, or having all nodes broadcasts to all nodes. The former significantly reduces decentralization and further removes the "electronic cash" aspect requiring payment processor hubs, while the latter will suffer from latency/scaling issues/DDoS susceptibility. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem [2] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
jv22222 9y ago
IMHO: Plasma and Omise Go are going to solve this problem. Check this excllent presentation by Thomas Greco and Joseph Poon for background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOn3-OhdxnU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOn3-OhdxnU
gb123 9y ago
Raiblocks has potential to be a good currency, but like any other crypto when will people stop holding and start spending. https://github.com/clemahieu/raiblocks https://github.com/clemahieu/raiblocks
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  No offense, but could you and the other people mentioning other chains in subthreads not do that? These threads just turn into ad pages and nobody has the ability to know what advice is valuable and what is just shilling. These claims have been made about every altcoin/feature since 2009. There's too much baseless hype. You guys want me to buy Raiblocks, Plasma, or Omise Go? Are you sure the devs know what they are doing and why? Is anyone still holding Mazacoin?
  - jv22222 9y ago
    Plasma isn’t a coin it’s an open source blockchain scaling solution . The Omise Go network is an open (not owned by anyone) decentralized value exchange network.
  - rhlala 9y ago
    He should have explain that raiblock have no fees and transfers are instantaneous. Even if all humans of the world use it. That is not advertising , but show one solution to the scalability problem.
  - Kiro 9y ago
    RaiBlocks is highly relevant to mention here since it's the only coin solving these very problems while still being decentralized.
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      Maybe, but we don't know what weaknesses and unforeseen problems will present themselves at scale.
mrtest002 9y ago
I agree BTC is unusable as a currency due to high fees - however, Bitcoin Cash has low fees and because it is dedicated to on-chain scaling, it will continue having low fees as demand for blockspace increases.
- lawlessone 9y ago
  No it wont lol,
DINKDINK 9y ago
>The average Bitcoin fee is now $40 Deception and inaccuracies in your statement: * You're using an average function in a non gaussian distribution. * Fees in a blockchain are a function of the transaction size * You can have multiple payments per transaction * The median fee for a typical transaction in the past week is about $1.50 USD. [1] [1] https://anduck.net/bitcoin/fees/1008_blocks.php https://anduck.net/bitcoin/fees/1008_blocks.php Median is between $8/kB and $4/kB. $6/kB*.25 kB typical transaction size = $1.50
- rtpg 9y ago
  Do you know how much was being transffered at $1.50? I remember when people were debating putting "almost feeless" on a bitcoin website because transaction fees were so low as a percentage of the amount, but I don't know if that still holds.
- mrb 9y ago
  There is deception in your comment too: - You are misreading your charts. The real-world median txn fee is far from $1.50... it's $13: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-median_transaction_fee.html#3m https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-median_transact... - A real-world txn is on average 500 bytes, not 250. - Although you can have multiple recipients/outputs in a single txn ("batch transactions"), it is not used very often. I computed not too long ago 2.6 outputs on average (https://mobile.twitter.com/zorinaq/status/934442392501063685 https://mobile.twitter.com/zorinaq/status/934442392501063685). If batching was unused, we would expect on average 2 outputs. One reason batching is uncommon is that it is by nature doable only by services sending multiple transactions per block, eg. a hosted wallet provider. I can't batch the occasional txns sent from my local phone wallet.
  - DINKDINK 9y ago
    >The real-world median txn fee is far from $1.50... it's $13: The site you quote is showing the median transaction fee of each block. That's not what I stated: "The median fee for a typical transaction in the past week" >- A real-world txn is on average 500 bytes, not 250. What's your source? https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ indicates 225. It seems like you're using a source that assumes two UTXO inputs, which would result in a doubling of the size.
pmorici 9y ago
That is why Bitcoin Cash exists to scale through bigger blocks like was intended before the hardliners came along.
lumberingjack 9y ago
The fees are weird I can get a payout for almost free from some pools but it cost me $40 to send anything?
- lalaland1125 9y ago
  Your payouts are probably being batched with other people's payouts, resulting in a lower per-person fee.
throws990 9y ago
My Bitcoin Cash transaction for USD$280 was confirmed in 47 seconds with 0.1 USD in transaction fees (10 US cents)
- Kiro 9y ago
  That's still 46 seconds too long and how long until you got 6 confirmations? 1 hour. DAG based coins are the future.
SkyMarshal 9y ago
>We need to move on to something more modern like Ethereum, Stellar Lumens, etc. All other chains will face the same cost-of-scaling problem as Bitcoin as they grow. No one has yet developed a public consensus mechanism proven to provide the same security as PoW with the requisite order of magnitude higher scalability and lower costs. Unless some technological breakthroughs are made on that subject, they'll all hit the same wall as their usage grows.
- EricDeb 9y ago
  Where does RaiBlocks fit in here? It moved up to top 20 in market cap due to being decentralized, instant, feeless, and scalable. However it still faces the issue of being too volatile for everyday use.
- marcusestes 9y ago
  Ethereum has already surpassed Bitcoin’s transaction thoroughput and yet features significantly lower confirmation time and transaction cost.* Bitcoin core has made significant technical decisions that has hampered the project in these two areas. *Source: https://themerkle.com/bitcoin-vs-ethereum-transaction-throughput-and-fees/ https://themerkle.com/bitcoin-vs-ethereum-transaction-throug...
  - vehementi 9y ago
    Ethereum is similarly not scalable, as you know
  - SkyMarshal 9y ago
    While technically Ethereum's ~15tx/s is an order of magnitude more than Bitcoin's 7x max, that's not really what I had in mind, they're effectively equivalent in relation to where they need to be (hundreds or thousands/sec). And as expected Ethereum's tx cost is increasing with usage too. And Vitalik to his credit is clear that Ethereum still has significant work to do on this front: https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/15/vitalik-buterin-fenbushi-capital-exit/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/15/vitalik-buterin-fenbushi-c... >In a lengthy statement released to TechCrunch, Buterin explained that he plans to spend more time ensuring that Ethereum fulfills its potential as a platform. "2017 really has been the year where hype in crypto, including financial hype and social hype in general has far exceeded the reality of what existing blockchain systems can offer. There is a lot of attention, and a lot of eager expectation, but as far as reality goes the practical usability of blockchains has in some cases even regressed due to rising transaction fees." "I expect 2018, at least within the Ethereum space that I’m best able to speak about, will be the year of action. It will be the year where all of the ideas around scalability, Plasma, proof-of-stake, and privacy that we have painstakingly worked on and refined over the last four years are finally going to turn into real, live working code that you can play around in a highly mature form in some cases on testnets, and in some key cases even on the public mainnet. Everyone in the Ethereum space recognizes that the world is watching, and we are ready to deliver."
grondilu 9y ago
> Bitcoin is not remotely usable as a currency now. The fees are incredible, the confirmation times ridiculous. A currency does not have to be its own payment system. Not exclusively, anyway. Hell, before bitcoin came out, the two concepts were entirely different things. It seems that everyone is quick to forget about this when dissing bitcoin.
gluczywo 9y ago
"banking the unbanked" It has never been the goal of bitcoin. The original Satoshi paper rather implies the "unbank the banked" objective which is to remove corrupt middleman.
lawlessone 9y ago
>something more modern like Ethereum it's insecure and its programming language is bad.
mcv 9y ago
There are many cryptocurrency exchanges that don't accept real money (because then they'd be subject to regulation), so to trade there, you need to buy some cryptocurrency elsewhere and move it there before you can trade. Many sites recommend buying Litecoin or Ether for that rather than Bitcoin, exactly because Bitcoin is so impractical. Bitcoin is failing as a currency even in the cryptocurrency market. Recently there was a bitcoin conference that stopped accepting bitcoin as payment because processing was too expensive. Cryptocurrencies might become mainstream payment systems some day, but it's not going to be Bitcoin. Ether is probably the most likely candidate.
cup-of-tea 9y ago
> We need to move on to something more modern like Ethereum, Stellar Lumens, etc. Those don't fix the fundamental problem of scaling a blockchain. Raiblocks is the only big one that I'm aware of which tries to address this. I kept seeing things about third world countries using it and thought it was simply due to old-timers (in Bitcoin time that means 3-4 years ago) not realising that the block congestion and resulting fees had snuck up on them. They are even further from reality because most of them are "holding" Bitcoin rather than trying to use it. The authors of the article are clearly looking Bitcoin as what it was, or what it was designed for, rather than what it has become.
sudomake 9y ago
So how valuable would bitcoin be if it cant be used as a currency?

e19293001 9y ago

Now is the era where companies are racing to replace Bitcoin. We'll see what happens at the end of this year.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

StateChannelBro 9y ago

you seem to be underestimating the value of lightning networks, TEEchains, quorums, etc.

mulmen 9y ago
Honest question: how does any of that help with transaction fees?
- tananaev 9y ago
  With Lightning Network you pay fees once to create a channel and then you can use that channel to make smaller payments for very low or even no fees. Channel can stay open for a very long time (e.g. a year). So, you end up paying single Bitcoin transaction fee instead of hundreds, and it also reduces load on the Bitcoin network freeing the block space lowering fees even more.

ThomPete 9y ago

Western Union is up there I think. So at least for remittance it might make sense. Anyway I agree that Bitcoin probably won't be used as a currency but more like gold. Perhaps it will be used to back some way cheaper transaction method.

tehlike 9y ago
Why not have the same thing for both store of value, and medium of transaction? It makes no sense.
EpicEng 9y ago
> more like gold But without that nifty property of intrinsic value.
- bobwaycott 9y ago
  There is no intrinsic value in gold. Or any other thing. The only value things have are the exchange and use values humans imbue them with.
  - wallace_f 9y ago
    But that's consistent with what people mean when they say 'gold has intrinsic value.' All they are saying is it 'has some value that is not one of the three functions of money.' Does anyone know what the above logical fallacy would be named? I see this kind of argumentation a lot: where one refutes an argument which has not been made.
    - dsacco 9y ago
      It’s an abuse of definitional scope. The commenter is not arguing against a point that has not been made (that would be a strawman); instead, they’re arguing against the applicability of terminology in an argument that was made, but by using an incorrect or alternate definition for the terminology. In this specific instance, the commenter is using a non-standard definition of “intrinsic value” to argue that gold has no such value. I like to call this “Wittgensteinian chaos” - you see it happen whenever two or more parties fail to explicitly define terms before arguing. It’s usually accidental, not deceptive. In particular, this is likely to happen with technical terminology that does not look enough like jargon to prompt people to look it up, because it also has a coherent, non-technical meaning. Now circle back to “intrinsic value” - if you aren’t immediately aware that this is a specific economic term[1], you might think to yourself, “oh I get what he’s trying to say”, and proceed to try and refute it. I think economics is particularly prone to this in internet debates.

westoque 9y ago

Not sure “banking the unbanked” is really the goal of Bitcoin. Think instead because of it’s scarcity, Bitcoin could be used to back currencies. Much like the gold standard before. Transaction fees in this scenario (even with it’s high transaction fees for us normies) would be considered negligible when moving large amounts of money. In this scenario, we can even have other cryptos which are better for daily use be backed by bitcoin.

zik 9y ago
The original purpose of Bitcoin was disintermediating transactions. So "unbanking the banked" would probably best describe it. It doesn't work for that use case any more unfortunately due to its high fees.
chii 9y ago
> Bitcoin could be used to back currencies but why does currency need a 'backing' like this (of which was the purpose of gold originally)?
- DSingularity 9y ago
  Because it needs to have value everyone agrees on.
  - mulmen 9y ago
    But we don't all agree on the price of bitcoin and I don't see why we would just because it's rare.
    - westoque 9y ago
      I don’t think it’s just the rarity. It’s also trustless, secure and easy to transfer. For ex, with gold, you’d have to carry blocks of it to move it around. And even then, you’d still don’t exactly trust it’s source 100% unlike bitcoin, where everything is in the ledger.

tananaev 9y ago

On-chain scaling is not sustainable. If you want to handle as many transaction as for example Visa, you would need 1 GB blocks every 10 minutes, which would make the whole blockchain heavily centralized because regular users won't be able to host full nodes to validate payments. About "adopting" and increasing block size. I think most developers agree that we would need to increase it at some point, but I believe core Bitcoin developers refusing to do it to accelerate real scalability solution (e.g. Lightning Network). After we have a working scaling solution we might see increase in block size to lower fees and increase throughput.

xiphias 9y ago
Segregated Witness was increasing the block size, but the trivial block size increase that Bitcoin Cash was doing was not a scalable solution because the old transaction message format had a quadratic worst case processing time. The problem with it is that Bitcoin adaption is extremely fast (10x last year), and securely implementing and testing all these scalability solutions take years.
erentz 9y ago
Not sure why you and the other person mentioning lightning have been downvoted. I’ve noticed increasingly it’s not possible to have reasonable discussion about bitcoin on hacker news. It seems the folks from /r/btc have found this place.
- jv22222 9y ago
  Yes, agreed, it’s fucking irritating.
- 0wing 9y ago
  Please explain how the Lightning Network developers solve an unsolved NP-Hard problem in computer science regarding routing? [1] The Lightning Network design is exactly what the first sentence of Satoshi's Bitcoin whitepaper seeks to avoid - payment processor middlemen. "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." [2] The LN design was chosen as a solution by certain investors who want to extract fees as payment hub liquidity providers. LN can't solve the TSP without either publishing a map of all nodes and routes, or having all nodes broadcasts to all nodes. The former significantly reduces decentralization and further removes the "electronic cash" aspect requiring payment processor hubs, while the latter will suffer from latency/scaling issues/DDoS susceptibility. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem [2] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

jv22222 9y ago

IMHO: Plasma and Omise Go are going to solve this problem. Check this excllent presentation by Thomas Greco and Joseph Poon for background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOn3-OhdxnU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOn3-OhdxnU

gb123 9y ago

Raiblocks has potential to be a good currency, but like any other crypto when will people stop holding and start spending. https://github.com/clemahieu/raiblocks https://github.com/clemahieu/raiblocks

aaron-lebo 9y ago
No offense, but could you and the other people mentioning other chains in subthreads not do that? These threads just turn into ad pages and nobody has the ability to know what advice is valuable and what is just shilling. These claims have been made about every altcoin/feature since 2009. There's too much baseless hype. You guys want me to buy Raiblocks, Plasma, or Omise Go? Are you sure the devs know what they are doing and why? Is anyone still holding Mazacoin?
- jv22222 9y ago
  Plasma isn’t a coin it’s an open source blockchain scaling solution . The Omise Go network is an open (not owned by anyone) decentralized value exchange network.
- rhlala 9y ago
  He should have explain that raiblock have no fees and transfers are instantaneous. Even if all humans of the world use it. That is not advertising , but show one solution to the scalability problem.
- Kiro 9y ago
  RaiBlocks is highly relevant to mention here since it's the only coin solving these very problems while still being decentralized.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    Maybe, but we don't know what weaknesses and unforeseen problems will present themselves at scale.

mrtest002 9y ago

I agree BTC is unusable as a currency due to high fees - however, Bitcoin Cash has low fees and because it is dedicated to on-chain scaling, it will continue having low fees as demand for blockspace increases.

lawlessone 9y ago
No it wont lol,

DINKDINK 9y ago

>The average Bitcoin fee is now $40 Deception and inaccuracies in your statement: * You're using an average function in a non gaussian distribution. * Fees in a blockchain are a function of the transaction size * You can have multiple payments per transaction * The median fee for a typical transaction in the past week is about $1.50 USD. [1] [1] https://anduck.net/bitcoin/fees/1008_blocks.php https://anduck.net/bitcoin/fees/1008_blocks.php Median is between $8/kB and $4/kB. $6/kB*.25 kB typical transaction size = $1.50

rtpg 9y ago
Do you know how much was being transffered at $1.50? I remember when people were debating putting "almost feeless" on a bitcoin website because transaction fees were so low as a percentage of the amount, but I don't know if that still holds.
mrb 9y ago
There is deception in your comment too: - You are misreading your charts. The real-world median txn fee is far from $1.50... it's $13: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-median_transaction_fee.html#3m https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-median_transact... - A real-world txn is on average 500 bytes, not 250. - Although you can have multiple recipients/outputs in a single txn ("batch transactions"), it is not used very often. I computed not too long ago 2.6 outputs on average (https://mobile.twitter.com/zorinaq/status/934442392501063685 https://mobile.twitter.com/zorinaq/status/934442392501063685). If batching was unused, we would expect on average 2 outputs. One reason batching is uncommon is that it is by nature doable only by services sending multiple transactions per block, eg. a hosted wallet provider. I can't batch the occasional txns sent from my local phone wallet.
- DINKDINK 9y ago
  >The real-world median txn fee is far from $1.50... it's $13: The site you quote is showing the median transaction fee of each block. That's not what I stated: "The median fee for a typical transaction in the past week" >- A real-world txn is on average 500 bytes, not 250. What's your source? https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ indicates 225. It seems like you're using a source that assumes two UTXO inputs, which would result in a doubling of the size.

pmorici 9y ago

That is why Bitcoin Cash exists to scale through bigger blocks like was intended before the hardliners came along.

lumberingjack 9y ago

The fees are weird I can get a payout for almost free from some pools but it cost me $40 to send anything?

lalaland1125 9y ago
Your payouts are probably being batched with other people's payouts, resulting in a lower per-person fee.

throws990 9y ago

My Bitcoin Cash transaction for USD$280 was confirmed in 47 seconds with 0.1 USD in transaction fees (10 US cents)

Kiro 9y ago
That's still 46 seconds too long and how long until you got 6 confirmations? 1 hour. DAG based coins are the future.

SkyMarshal 9y ago

>We need to move on to something more modern like Ethereum, Stellar Lumens, etc. All other chains will face the same cost-of-scaling problem as Bitcoin as they grow. No one has yet developed a public consensus mechanism proven to provide the same security as PoW with the requisite order of magnitude higher scalability and lower costs. Unless some technological breakthroughs are made on that subject, they'll all hit the same wall as their usage grows.

EricDeb 9y ago
Where does RaiBlocks fit in here? It moved up to top 20 in market cap due to being decentralized, instant, feeless, and scalable. However it still faces the issue of being too volatile for everyday use.
marcusestes 9y ago
Ethereum has already surpassed Bitcoin’s transaction thoroughput and yet features significantly lower confirmation time and transaction cost.* Bitcoin core has made significant technical decisions that has hampered the project in these two areas. *Source: https://themerkle.com/bitcoin-vs-ethereum-transaction-throughput-and-fees/ https://themerkle.com/bitcoin-vs-ethereum-transaction-throug...
- vehementi 9y ago
  Ethereum is similarly not scalable, as you know
- SkyMarshal 9y ago
  While technically Ethereum's ~15tx/s is an order of magnitude more than Bitcoin's 7x max, that's not really what I had in mind, they're effectively equivalent in relation to where they need to be (hundreds or thousands/sec). And as expected Ethereum's tx cost is increasing with usage too. And Vitalik to his credit is clear that Ethereum still has significant work to do on this front: https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/15/vitalik-buterin-fenbushi-capital-exit/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/15/vitalik-buterin-fenbushi-c... >In a lengthy statement released to TechCrunch, Buterin explained that he plans to spend more time ensuring that Ethereum fulfills its potential as a platform. "2017 really has been the year where hype in crypto, including financial hype and social hype in general has far exceeded the reality of what existing blockchain systems can offer. There is a lot of attention, and a lot of eager expectation, but as far as reality goes the practical usability of blockchains has in some cases even regressed due to rising transaction fees." "I expect 2018, at least within the Ethereum space that I’m best able to speak about, will be the year of action. It will be the year where all of the ideas around scalability, Plasma, proof-of-stake, and privacy that we have painstakingly worked on and refined over the last four years are finally going to turn into real, live working code that you can play around in a highly mature form in some cases on testnets, and in some key cases even on the public mainnet. Everyone in the Ethereum space recognizes that the world is watching, and we are ready to deliver."

grondilu 9y ago

> Bitcoin is not remotely usable as a currency now. The fees are incredible, the confirmation times ridiculous. A currency does not have to be its own payment system. Not exclusively, anyway. Hell, before bitcoin came out, the two concepts were entirely different things. It seems that everyone is quick to forget about this when dissing bitcoin.

gluczywo 9y ago

"banking the unbanked" It has never been the goal of bitcoin. The original Satoshi paper rather implies the "unbank the banked" objective which is to remove corrupt middleman.

lawlessone 9y ago

>something more modern like Ethereum it's insecure and its programming language is bad.

mcv 9y ago

There are many cryptocurrency exchanges that don't accept real money (because then they'd be subject to regulation), so to trade there, you need to buy some cryptocurrency elsewhere and move it there before you can trade. Many sites recommend buying Litecoin or Ether for that rather than Bitcoin, exactly because Bitcoin is so impractical. Bitcoin is failing as a currency even in the cryptocurrency market. Recently there was a bitcoin conference that stopped accepting bitcoin as payment because processing was too expensive. Cryptocurrencies might become mainstream payment systems some day, but it's not going to be Bitcoin. Ether is probably the most likely candidate.

cup-of-tea 9y ago

> We need to move on to something more modern like Ethereum, Stellar Lumens, etc. Those don't fix the fundamental problem of scaling a blockchain. Raiblocks is the only big one that I'm aware of which tries to address this. I kept seeing things about third world countries using it and thought it was simply due to old-timers (in Bitcoin time that means 3-4 years ago) not realising that the block congestion and resulting fees had snuck up on them. They are even further from reality because most of them are "holding" Bitcoin rather than trying to use it. The authors of the article are clearly looking Bitcoin as what it was, or what it was designed for, rather than what it has become.

sudomake 9y ago

So how valuable would bitcoin be if it cant be used as a currency?