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Bitcoin.org removes “fast” and “low fees” from Bitcoin description page
- TomMarius 9y agoWell, I mean, these are not and never have been the main benefits of Bitcoin. EDIT: Thanks for the downvotes (please check out their purpose, it's not to disagree with people). You guys should go and read the Bitcoin Whitepaper.
- JonnyNova 9y agoThey were absolutely the main features of Bitcoin when it first came around.
- TomMarius 9y agoDefinitely not. Check out the whitepaper.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mitchdoogle 9y agoWhite paper doesn't really matter in this regard. Bitcoin has been praised for years as a potential replacement for fiat currency, and the people doing the praising would use speed and low cost transactions as the hallmark of Bitcoin. The white paper is nice for getting an idea of how Bitcoin works.
- TomMarius 9y agoYou know that the people doing the praising are not affiliated with Bitcoin itself, right?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ep103 9y agoI agree, this is good for bitcoin!
- CreepGin 9y ago> never have been the main benefits of Bitcoin Then why the $#@! did they include "fast" and "low fee" as 2 of the 3 main points on their website.
- TomMarius 9y agoDon't know. Probably because they wanted to have something catchy there. It changes nothing about my point. Don't forget that Bitcoin.org doesn't represent the Bitcoin "society". It's operated by a very small group of very opinionated people that aren't doing what the community tells them, but whatever they wish (I don't mean to say that they go against the community - but they don't ask about everything, like this). If this group wants to do a change in the Bitcoin itself, it first needs an approval of the community.
- highace 9y agoApart from the first 8 and a half years when speculators were predicting it would replace fiat for everyday transactions, you mean?
- TomMarius 9y agoTheir prediction wasn't based on speed and low cost.
- dboreham 9y agoEvery single piece I read or heard on Bitcoin talked (only) about how Visa et al skim off excessive fees and Bitcoin would be so much cheaper. I don't remember hearing anything about speed, probably because at the time nobody realized Bitcoin wouldn't be transaction latency-competitive with traditional payment solutions.
- TomMarius 9y agoSee and everything I saw was about decentralization and other blockchain/cryptography-related things. I of course saw some people talk about Bitcoin as "cheaper than bankwire", but I definitely wouldn't say that was the main driving point of all Bitcoin adopters; not even a significant minority.
- spookthesunset 9y agoUm, bitcoin was for years touted as "free and instant".
- ashelmire 9y agoThis was absolutely proselytized as a core tenet of cryptocurrency, starting with bitcoin. Obviously, it has not remained true.
- statoshi 9y agoSome people proselytized it, sure. And they're generally the folks who are upset with the current situation and have switched to various altcoins that will suffer from the same scalability issues if they ever become particularly popular.
- elif 9y agoI believe your fundamentalist accounting of history has error.
- Retroity 9y agoThe low-fee, fast transactions were absolutely the main benefits of bitcoin, especially in comparison to Visa or PayPal.
- TomMarius 9y agoOh really? Can I have a quote from the whitepaper then, please? It says nothing like that.
- Retric 9y agoClearly you never actually read it start here: "The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions" Clearly lowering transaction cost is one of the basic ideas behind Bitcoin that has now failed.
- TomMarius 9y agoNope, it doesn't mean that. There is one point you seem to miss: relative to Bitcoin, the transaction fee is nonexistent. Yeah, it's high when converted to dollars, but still, the promise is fulfilled.
- Retric 9y agolimiting the minimum practical transaction size If the minimum transaction fee is X then the minimum reasonable transaction is ~10-20x. Based on current fees you can't do 0.0001 BtC transactions, thus it fails one of the primary goals and the entire value from irreversible transactions. Really this get's to the hart of irreversible transactions. Without artificial limits like the current 1MB block size transactions take meaningless amounts of computation and bandwidth and so they should basically be free. It's really oversight which is why Visa can get away with 30cents or more for what take a computers well under 1/1,000th's of a cent to maintain.
- gooseus 9y agoSo looking at the updated site, I see: 1) Peer-to-Peer transactions Thats's nice, but so do Square Cash, Venmo, Paypal, etc... and they currently do it cheaper. 2) Borderless payments How do we define borders? They're just arbitrary demarcation lines regulated by governments, so wouldn't the developing regulations in South Korea and China be creating borders for bitcoin? 3) Fraud Protection Maybe someone can explain this to me. If any weird activity happens on my bank account, my bank contacts me and shuts down my card until I verify transactions. If I make a purchase with my CC and the seller is fraudulent, I can charge-back and have the CC deal with the seller. How does Bitcoin even come close to that level of fraud protection? I assume multi-sig is their way of defining "fraud protection"? Is it the decentralization? Because isn't the bulk of the mining being done by large pools that can then be regulated and controlled by the governments of the countries in which they operate? I just checked the mining breakdown[0] and the two top mining pools (BTC.COM and AntPool) are owned by Bitmain[1], which is a Chinese company, and the next two (BTC.TOP and ViaBTC) also look they're controlled by Chinese companies. I'm not anti-chinese, but lets not pretend that companies operating in China aren't in some way beholden to their highly centralized and non-democratic government. So what are, and have always been, the main benefits of bitcoin again? [0] https://blockchain.info/pools https://blockchain.info/pools [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitmain https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitmain
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago> Thats's nice, but so do Square Cash, Venmo, Paypal, etc... and they currently do it cheaper. With the difference that your wallet and means of transferring funds is centralized; you can't transfer money from your Paypal wallet without using Paypal's services. With crypto all you need is a connection to the network and your private key. > How do we define borders? They're just arbitrary demarcation lines regulated by governments, so wouldn't the developing regulations in South Korea and China be creating borders for bitcoin? They are, plenty of countries where crypto tech is not officially allowed. Or well, they can block the exchanges; in theory, using a VPN service people could still get on the network. But that too can be blocked. So you have a point there, while transferring coins is a global thing, there will be countries without an open internet where it won't be possible. Re: fraud protection, that's a tough one indeed. I think that implies that you can't get hit by a malicious bank? I'd argue it's more insecure than regular currencies, and like you said, official banks and currencies have a guarantee system, that is, if e.g. a bank gets hacked, or even when, due to your own fault, you get scammed, banks and credit card companies will reimburse you, often backed by national / global banks and systems.
- ozim 9y agoGoing to get popcorn, when it will hit news BTC will drop another 30%.
- romanovcode 9y agoBut this is good for Bitcoin.
- cableshaft 9y agoIt's not news for anyone already in bitcoin. It's been clear that this is (currently) the case for awhile.
- statoshi 9y agoThis is not news; we adjusted the bitcoin.org site to match reality.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoDid anyone make a bitcoin miner that doubles as a popcorn machine? That would be fitting, and would at least put electricity to some more reasonable use.
- paulmd 9y agoI don't think anyone's done popcorn, but perhaps you would care for some delicious (filthy) rigberries? https://twitter.com/a_man_in_black/status/639287717705089024 https://twitter.com/a_man_in_black/status/639287717705089024
- dmm 9y agoMaybe it will be true again someday... Here's a cool map of mainnet lightning network node: https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/ https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/
- codegeek 9y agoI am still struggling to understand the whole crypto currency thing. I just don't get it. Clearly, it has become a tool for speculation and quick money for most people. Everyone is trying to get on the crypto bandwagon but to speculate. What is the point ? I thought it was supposed to decentralize currency and make it easy to "transact" with low fees and less redtape. Also I could be really dumb but isn't centralized wallets/exchanges like coinbase defeating the entire purpose of crypto currency ? Weren't we supposed to manage it peer to peer so that anyone could get paid anytime without worrying about borders and boundaries ?
- yohann305 9y agowell said. You know what makes me really sad? This money ($Billions+) is being stored in cryptocurrencies instead of being put to good use, such as investing in companies that actually build things... Am I seeing it wrong? Tell me! Note: I am not a big fan of the stock market either (it's pretty much a fake investment), we need investing 2.0, we have the tools, we just need the "Elon Musk" of finance Note #2: I don't do what i'm preaching. I do own Ethereum because i'm hoping the smart contract layer might actually become useful someday (right now there are about 1000 DApps and they aren't that useful just yet IMHO)
- JonFish85 9y agoJust to play devil's advocate on this, the money in the stock market (i.e. any stock transaction outside of a public offering) is generally not being invested in companies that actually build things, it's getting stored.
- quadcore 9y agoAnyone has an idea as to when the lightning network will get out and how good it is?
- serg_chernata 9y agoI'm sure it's still months away but they're already performing test transactions such as buying coffee with the tech.
- dmm 9y agoThere are experimental lightning network nodes on mainnet now and the first transaction has been made: https://cointelegraph.com/news/lightning-networks-pizza-day-first-ever-physical-purchase-on-lightning-network https://cointelegraph.com/news/lightning-networks-pizza-day-... Here's a map of the LN network. So far there are about 100 nodes: https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/ https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nwah1 9y agoI'm extremely skeptical that they can solve the double spending problem in a trustless way, without all the same scalability drawbacks of the blockchain. Once you insert trust and centralization, then all of the supposed benefits of the blockchain are gone, but all the shady behavior will remain and almost certainly get worse. My understanding is that it is a bit like IOUs redeemable for bitcoin. But just like with Tether and so many other supposedly-redeemable IOUs on the blockchain, there's always going to be serious doubts about whether there really is anything backing them.
- dmm 9y agoThe lightning network is(can be) trustless and decentralized. It uses time based transactions to transfer bitcoin. It does have complications though. If you send money with the LN you have to regularly(about once a week) connect and verify that no one is trying to cheat you. If you only receive through a channel you don't have to do this. In principle it's possible to delegate this to a third party. Another complication is that sending funds to an arbitrary party involves finding a path through a graph of nodes. We'll see how this works out in practice.
- shawn 9y agoThere was interesting discussion here about disk usage over time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16154682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16154682 I wanted to ask again here, directly to Bitcoin techies: How can BTC survive 100 years if no one can download the massive blockchain? Most residential IPs enforce a 1TB/mo cap. Much of the internet is also on slow connections (Australia). The BTC whitepaper is surprisingly hand wavey on this one subject, and the more I think about it, the more it seems like an Achilles' heel. Can we eventually reboot BTC back to the genesis block, but with all current BTC pre-mined and allocated to current holders? Kind of like a manual GC, or hard reset back to initial commit. But it doesn't seem that simple. Millions of people have certain quantities of BTC, and even tiny ones add up. You have to track that data somewhere. It doesn't seem possible to encode the whole state of the world into a 1MB genesis block. So the question becomes, at what point to we reboot, how, and by what mechanism can we achieve community consensus? This is combined with the fact that BTC is deflationary, so eventually miners will charge nothing but tx fees. No more block reward = the TX fees must be at least as high as the current block reward. That is a staggering cost since a 1MB block can only encode a couple thousand tx. That leads to the difficulty death spiral: difficulty re adjusts every 2016 blocks. Two weeks when every block mines at ten minutes. But if miners leave en masse, then suddenly it will take a very long time to mine blocks. It could be months before the difficulty readjusts down. This must sound identical to all the previous BTC naysayers, but believe me when I say I believe this can work. I'm trying to discuss the technical merits and set aside the question of whether it will fail.
- api 9y agoI've always considered BTC an alpha release and a prototype. Kind of amazing it's gotten this far.
- always_good 9y agoI've always considered these comments as taking the easy route of skepticism since you can never be wrong on a long enough time scale. "Hah, knew it wouldn't pan out!"
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- elmar 9y agoIn the long term you can't have fast and low fees with decentralized and censorship-resistance you have to chose one or the other. Bitcoin Cash is fast and as low fees but if it manages to scale to something like a Visa network number of transactions, it will be centralized and then some geographical jurisdiction or miner cartel will try to have control over it lowering the censorship-resistance characteristic. I think is great to have to different paths on Bitcoin BTC vs BCH so we have opportunity to see own they evolve.
- jamoes 9y ago> Bitcoin Cash is fast and as low fees but if it manages to scale to something like a Visa network number of transactions, it will be centralized This just isn't true. Today's commodity hardware can already process gigabyte blocks[1], which corresponds to approximately 3000 tx/s globally. In addition, Moore's and Nielsen's laws will bring down the cost of cpu power and bandwidth, and will enable terrabyte-sized blocks within the next decade or two - all while still running on commodity hardware. [1] https://news.bitcoin.com/gigablock-testnet-researchers-mine-the-worlds-first-1gb-block/ https://news.bitcoin.com/gigablock-testnet-researchers-mine-...
- statoshi 9y agoThis was a highly contrived test - an interesting point to note is that they don't talk about how long it would take new nodes to perform an initial sync if there were weeks / months / years worth of gigablocks in the chain.
- elmar 9y agoA big problem is latency even today anything above 3s is unacceptable for mining, half of miners are not validating blocks before starting to mine because it takes to "long", miners spy on other miners and then try to mine empty blocks, Bitcoin doesn't have a lot of orphan blocks today because mining is centralised in China, do you think increasing the block size will help with any of these problems? One thing is to test on a controlled environment another completely diferent thing is to test on real world.
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- jpmoyn 9y agoBitcoin is too energy intensive, slow, and the fees are crazy. It served a good purpose for educating the market, but I think a second-mover might end up taking over The only truly 0 fee, virtually instant cryptocurrency i have encountered so far is raiblocks. It only achieves this by using block-lattice, not blockchain. The whitepaper is pretty interesting.
- nwah1 9y agoThere is no such thing as a free lunch.
- jpmoyn 9y agoI never said there was such thing as a free lunch, I just said that the only crypto currency I have encountered with no fees on transactions is raiblocks
- TeMPOraL 9y agoNo, but there is such a thing as morally repugnant dish you should abstain from, no matter the price. For instance, one that promises to waste unbounded amounts of energy just to make some anti-authoritarians and some scammers rich.
- lawlessone 9y agowhat magical machine does raiblocks run on that doesn't consume energy?
- rplnt 9y agoThe comments there make me sad.
- statoshi 9y agoThe pull request was brigaded by folks from /r/btc who were not interested in positively contributing to the discussion; they just wanted to waste our time rehashing the past 3 years of scaling debate.
- statoshi 9y agoI'm the author of the pull request that made this change; feel free to AMA related to it.
- quadcore 9y agoWhy did you do it? Fast and low are relative terms when it comes to marketing, isnt?
- crispytx 9y agoI thought bitcoin was 'legit' until I actually bought some in the summer of 2017. Before ever purchasing any Bitcoin, I assumed that transactions were either free, or the fees were extremely low. However, after actually purchasing some Bitcoin and trying to move it between wallets, I found that the fees to make a transaction with Bitcoin are extremely high! In August of 2017 it cost me around $5 to make a single transaction using Bitcoin. At this point I knew for certain that Bitcoin would go to $0. Convenience store owners hate the $0.30 transaction fees currently associated with VISA debit cards, how do you suppose consumers and merchants are going to feel about $5 transaction fees? And the technology behind Bitcoin, blockchain, is equally ridiculous. In order to make a single transaction, one has to process a record of every other transaction that has ever occurred? That is a horrible idea.
- lawlessone 9y agoYou did 0 research before buying.
- j0rd 9y agoI've been running e-commerce stores for 12+ years. The main business I work for started to accept bitcoins for our physical goods in 2014ish. I did the integration. I adopted Bitcoin because I'm not a huge fan of payment processors, I'm a cryptonerd and because I wanted to provide a use case for a technology I believe in, which wasn't illegal. I've also helped chime in with devs on open Bazaar and assist them with issues people who run stores have. Over the years we've processed ~10,000 dollars worth of Bitcoin transactions. We've ran into issues where confirmations take longer than our fulfilment center are used to, so we needed to wait to ship out orders. We've run into issues where refunds get weird due to price fluctuations. I've always noticed customers buying our products when the price of Bitcoin was too high and due for a crash, but since it's run up over $2000 I've noticed barely any transactions. This is a fundamental change in how people are using it, and due to the high fees and slow confirmation times, it's no longer useful for us and it seems people would rather HODL than use. Personally I enjoy the tech, but never cared for it as a speculative asset, which now I believe it has become (but kinda always was). Have fun with your digital gold.
- jraedisch 9y agoIt is a combination of HODLing, long transaction times and high fees. At least the latter two can (and hopefully will) be lowered by improving the tech. And HODLing should lessen if Bitcoin become less volatile. It might still take a while though. In the meantime will/do you try any altcoins?
- mrfusion 9y agoLevel with me guys. Is there any chance bitcoin can survive? How might it happen? Has there ever been a technology that had a first mover advantage and large network effect but still got bested by a superior technology?
- andrewla 9y agoWhen was the last time you played a VHS tape. For that matter, when was the last time you played a DVD?