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Pretty sure the fund I work for moved several billion dollars for free on Friday...and will do the same thing again this Friday, the Friday after that, and the

Pretty sure the fund I work for moved several billion dollars for free on Friday...and will do the same thing again this Friday, the Friday after that, and the Friday after that. Cryptocurrency's obsession with fees is baffling. Fees are not why moving money is hard.

dylkil 6y ago
Whats worse is Bitcoin's security depends on high fees, but you have articles like this celebrating low fees. Satoshi intended for bitcoin to scale to hundreds of millions of transactions, all paying sub cent fees. All those fees would add up to millions of dollars per day. The fees are what secure the chain when the block reward runs out. Around 2014/2015 some devs who worked with blockstream started campaigning to keep the block size limit at 1mb. They succeeded and now bitcoin can only process an average of 350k transactions per day. In order to provide the same financial incentive to miners when the block reward gets too small to matter, the minimum fee on the network will need to be $25 per transaction. But ye, horray, this whale got to send big cash for a "low fee"
- johnpaulkiser 6y ago
  That isn't even slightly true. This debate has been settled a long long time ago. Running a full node is the only way to assure the integrity of the currency. Increasing the block size decreases the number of people that run full nodes. It's obvious to anyone who works on Bitcoin that a linear increase to blocksize can never scale, while maintaining an open and decentralized environment.
  - dlubarov 6y ago
    > Running a full node is the only way to assure the integrity of the currency. Another method is to use cryptographic proofs to demonstrate the validity of a blockchain state. A lot of newer projects are taking this approach, such as the project I work on, Mir Protocol. Granted, it doesn't seem like a realistic option for Bitcoin. The community doesn't seem very open to major protocol changes, and even if it were, cryptographic proofs for Bitcoin might be prohibitively expensive since the protocol wasn't designed with that in mind.
  - dylkil 6y ago
    >Running a full node is the only way to assure the integrity of the currency. Increasing the block size decreases the number of people that run full nodes. where is the evidence for this? complete bullshit. How much fewer people would run a full node if the block size was increased from 1mb to 2mb?
- rudolph9 6y ago
  You and Satoshi go way back I take it?
centimeter 6y ago
Building relationships with brokers that allow you to move billions of dollars "for free" is hard and expensive.
- kchoudhu 6y ago
  In my experience having a billion dollars to move is pretty much all you need to generate those relationships.
mumbisChungo 6y ago
I think the crypto community has a complex about it because of how often tx fees are used as a weapon against them. In reality, intelligent people on both sides of that dichotomy should recognize tx fees (within reason) are mostly beside the point.
bravoetch 6y ago
That's not the point though. You're not in control of that billion dollars, banks and governments are. The small 48 cent fee is the price for freedom. At any moment a bank can freeze your funds for any reason. The Bitcoin network does not suffer from that.

dylkil 6y ago

Whats worse is Bitcoin's security depends on high fees, but you have articles like this celebrating low fees. Satoshi intended for bitcoin to scale to hundreds of millions of transactions, all paying sub cent fees. All those fees would add up to millions of dollars per day. The fees are what secure the chain when the block reward runs out. Around 2014/2015 some devs who worked with blockstream started campaigning to keep the block size limit at 1mb. They succeeded and now bitcoin can only process an average of 350k transactions per day. In order to provide the same financial incentive to miners when the block reward gets too small to matter, the minimum fee on the network will need to be $25 per transaction. But ye, horray, this whale got to send big cash for a "low fee"

johnpaulkiser 6y ago
That isn't even slightly true. This debate has been settled a long long time ago. Running a full node is the only way to assure the integrity of the currency. Increasing the block size decreases the number of people that run full nodes. It's obvious to anyone who works on Bitcoin that a linear increase to blocksize can never scale, while maintaining an open and decentralized environment.
- dlubarov 6y ago
  > Running a full node is the only way to assure the integrity of the currency. Another method is to use cryptographic proofs to demonstrate the validity of a blockchain state. A lot of newer projects are taking this approach, such as the project I work on, Mir Protocol. Granted, it doesn't seem like a realistic option for Bitcoin. The community doesn't seem very open to major protocol changes, and even if it were, cryptographic proofs for Bitcoin might be prohibitively expensive since the protocol wasn't designed with that in mind.
- dylkil 6y ago
  >Running a full node is the only way to assure the integrity of the currency. Increasing the block size decreases the number of people that run full nodes. where is the evidence for this? complete bullshit. How much fewer people would run a full node if the block size was increased from 1mb to 2mb?
rudolph9 6y ago
You and Satoshi go way back I take it?

centimeter 6y ago

Building relationships with brokers that allow you to move billions of dollars "for free" is hard and expensive.

kchoudhu 6y ago
In my experience having a billion dollars to move is pretty much all you need to generate those relationships.

mumbisChungo 6y ago

I think the crypto community has a complex about it because of how often tx fees are used as a weapon against them. In reality, intelligent people on both sides of that dichotomy should recognize tx fees (within reason) are mostly beside the point.

bravoetch 6y ago

That's not the point though. You're not in control of that billion dollars, banks and governments are. The small 48 cent fee is the price for freedom. At any moment a bank can freeze your funds for any reason. The Bitcoin network does not suffer from that.