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Binance moves $1.26B worth of Bitcoin for $125 in network fees
- jraines 7y agoI'm probably more favorably inclined to cryptocurrency & bitcoin than 98% of commenters here but this is becoming a rather stale boast. Quoting @jgreco on Twitter: "Why are crypto people so impressed by this? 1) Do they think wires cost more as the dollar amount increases? 2) Do they not understand that wires are free for corporations and HNW individuals?"
- conanbatt 7y agoYou have lots of police and regulation in the bank transfer. Lawyers galore, and the promise of the state to back it. They are very different finance operations.
- benj111 7y agoWouldn't that tend to push up the cost of the bank transfer though? With cash you wouldn't even need to do this kind of transfer anyway, partly because of all the things you mention.
- conanbatt 7y agoNot if you can offload those costs to the taxpayer. How much state money ends up as profits for the banks?
- benj111 7y agoTax payer subsidy would seem to be a feature from a consumer perspective. Surely its better for someone else to be paying the fees?
- conanbatt 7y agoThats one way to look at it. I would answer that what the tax payer pays is much higher than what the consumer gets, and both groups are large enough to not easily prioritize one over the other. Bitcoin was born on dissent on how governments bailed banks with tax-payer money.
- jraines 7y agoI'm very happy with the liberty/access aspect of it, but it's much more relevant for small transfers. People moving this amount of money already have access, unless they're a drug lord or from a sanctioned country (and ofc they have their ways, too, shoutout to HSBC, Wachovia, DB, etc)
- conanbatt 7y agoI think everyone wanted/expected bitcoin to serve for the distributed/small case, but reality has made it the other way around so far. The capacity to avoid sanctions and the enforcement of law are greatly valuable assets: anything that limits the power of the state is a step towards liberty. (Not towards crimeless-ness)
- cortesoft 7y agoIf I was moving over a billion dollars, I think I would want those police and regulations.
- conanbatt 7y agoBitcoin has created/revealed players that don't. (Binance, Bitfinex, exchanges and Tether).
- SilasX 7y agoI was going to say something similar, but I think that response is going too far. If it's only "free" by virtue of the bank absorbing the costs to suck up to big clients, that's not much of a boast either. What's the comparable internal cost borne to process such transactions? And I assume bigger transactions in the regular financial system do take more documentation and have to adhere to more safeguards, which, to correctly account for, you'd amortize over the cost of each transaction.
- beefield 7y ago> If it's only "free" by virtue of the bank absorbing the costs to suck up to big clients, that's not much of a boast either. Frankly, I first thought you were sarcastic given the massive subsidies by miners in the BTC and given that in my neck of woods ( Europe) bank transfers of all sizes are for all practical purposes free.
- SilasX 7y agoThe tweet specifically said, "Wires are free for corporations and HNW (high net worth) individuals", meaning they're not free for others. That implies there is some cost they have to absorb, and I was asking about the apples-to-apples comparison to those costs. And what miner subsidies are you talking about?
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago> 2) Do they not understand that wires are free for corporations and HNW individuals?" They are also free for people living in countries with healthy banking systems (i.e. most EU countries)
- cortesoft 7y agoAlso, fees are probably the last concern you have when moving over a billion dollars. Safety and security is what you care about, and I am sure a person with a billion dollars would be happy to pay many thousands to keep it safe.
- osrec 7y agoEven $124.60 seems high for moving a number from one place to another! I'm kidding of course, but we do live in a world where transaction costs bolster some of our biggest businesses. Not sure if that's a good thing.
- dmix 7y agoThe article mentions the person transferring $212 million for just $3.93.
- sdinsn 7y agoSo $124.60 more than the cost of a wire. Wow, BTC is sooo efficient.
- zippzom 7y agoIs this due to some special technology or implementation details they used, or just the current going rate of getting your bitcoin transactions confirmed?
- nosuchthing 7y agoDon't forget the total costs of running Bitcoin software: Bitcoin's current estimated annual electricity consumption* (TWh) 63.23 Bitcoin's current minimum annual electricity consumption (TWh) 38.25 Annualized global mining revenues $6,705,703,327 Annualized estimated global mining costs $3,161,647,973 Current cost percentage 47.15% Country closest to Bitcoin in terms of electricity consumption Switzerland Estimated electricity used over the previous day (KWh) 173,240,985 Implied Watts per GH/s 0.125 Total Network Hashrate in PH/s (1,000,000 GH/s) 57,577 Electricity consumed per transaction (KWh) 465 Number of U.S. households that could be powered by Bitcoin 5,854,904 Number of U.S. households powered for 1 day by the electricity consumed for a single transaction 15.7 Bitcoin's electricity consumption as a percentage of the world's electricity consumption 0.28% Annual carbon footprint (kt of CO2) 30,036 Carbon footprint per transaction (kg of CO2) 220.7 Source: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
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- jraines 7y agomy response is admittedly whataboutism, but it's worth comparing to say, the dollar. The cheeky answer to "what backs the dollar?" is "guns, missiles, and aircraft carriers" but in reality it's "growth". The cost of the extant financial system isn't, say, the sum of bank branch construction & bank employees' gas commuting to work, etc -- it's the sum of all economic activity driving growth, which as of now is still inextricable from dirty resource extraction, conversion, and movement. Which isn't to say it's OK to throw bitcoin mining on top of that, or that bitcoin can fix it. Just that we're on an unsustainable trajectory with or without it, barring an energy revolution or a very painful collapse -- at which point I suppose we can just plug the miners into the local fusion plant (or trade in ammunition and the chit of the local warlord).
- fargo 7y agowhat backs bitcoin though?
- xchaotic 7y agoApp stores and various middlemen like Uber getting a cut funded a lot of tech innovations and SV fortunes, I wouldn't say low fees are absolutely best. In this case though, the fees are mostly spent on electricity and are rather large for a single transfer.
- 781 7y agoI'm, all for bitcoin, but articles like these are bullshit. How many cryptography and bitcoin experts were consulted/hired to babysit this transaction, knowing that the smallest mistake could lead to total and irreversible loss of funds? What was their compensation?
- mpoteat 7y agoProbably none... That just isn't how it works. What do see the "bitcoin expert" doing in this case other than double checking the receiving address is correct?
- mirimir 7y agoI do lots of transfers between VMs (different personas) via mixing services. So I always verify receiving addresses using md5sum. I presume that prudent folk routinely do something like that. It's ~hard to see some single-character errors, but md5sum changes completely.
- dawhizkid 7y agoMy hunch is the number of crypto-related articles on HN is correlated with upward price movement
- annonch 7y agoI think that this is misleading, they didn't really "move" anything, they just used a current key that was locking 1.26B to lock the funds with a different key. So the network only processed this small amount of cryptographic computation. For the Bitcoin network, the size of the transfer (i.e., fee) can be the same for sending 1 BTC as 1000000 BTC