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It's not clear why the article is claiming that there are no transaction fees in Bitcoin, my understanding was that high transaction fees was one of the main r

It's not clear why the article is claiming that there are no transaction fees in Bitcoin, my understanding was that high transaction fees was one of the main reason that Steam, for example, dropped Bitcoin support (I think it was something to the tune of several dollars per transaction, targeting for the transaction to be finalized in <30 minutes?).

sireat 6y ago
In the beginning there were no transaction fees. Miners were happy to include your transactions because of the mining rewards alone. Plus there were just not enough transactions to charge a fee. It was cool to use Bitcoin in 2013 as a currency and sadly the number of useful things you could buy then are about the same as today. These days Bitcoin is too expensive and too slow to be used as actively used currency for every day transactions. Lighting Network is not looking too hot either.
- xur17 6y ago
  > Lighting Network is not looking too hot either. In what way?
lgl 6y ago
If I recall correctly, transaction fees went through the roof when everybody was fomoing to buy and trade bitcoin starting at around 2017 and low-fee transactions were getting stuck in the pool as there weren't enough blocks being mined to confirm them as miners were obviously prioritizing the higher fee ones. You can still transact with very low fees, but this is kind of directly related with the amount you want to move. For instance, somebody transferred $2.2bn by paying a $7 fee [0]. That seems super cheap, but if you wanted to transact $2, paying $7 would be ridiculous. I believe this was at least one of the motivators for the big-block/small-block debate and subsequent forks. [0] https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-whale-transfers-2-2-billion-worth-of-btc-for-just-7/ https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-whale-transfers-2-2-billion...
mr_woozy 6y ago
It's slightly more complicated than that. Steam was using a payment processor called Bitpay which at the time had gone to one side of the small blocks vs big blocks political issue (big blockers went on to form Bitcoin Cash {BCH} and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision {BSV }with Roger Ver and Craig S. Wright, make of that what you will). Coinbase at that time was spamming the blockchain with dust right before the halving and finally got called out on it over twitter. Transaction fees went back down shortly after that.

sireat 6y ago

In the beginning there were no transaction fees. Miners were happy to include your transactions because of the mining rewards alone. Plus there were just not enough transactions to charge a fee. It was cool to use Bitcoin in 2013 as a currency and sadly the number of useful things you could buy then are about the same as today. These days Bitcoin is too expensive and too slow to be used as actively used currency for every day transactions. Lighting Network is not looking too hot either.

xur17 6y ago
> Lighting Network is not looking too hot either. In what way?

lgl 6y ago

If I recall correctly, transaction fees went through the roof when everybody was fomoing to buy and trade bitcoin starting at around 2017 and low-fee transactions were getting stuck in the pool as there weren't enough blocks being mined to confirm them as miners were obviously prioritizing the higher fee ones. You can still transact with very low fees, but this is kind of directly related with the amount you want to move. For instance, somebody transferred $2.2bn by paying a $7 fee [0]. That seems super cheap, but if you wanted to transact $2, paying $7 would be ridiculous. I believe this was at least one of the motivators for the big-block/small-block debate and subsequent forks. [0] https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-whale-transfers-2-2-billion-worth-of-btc-for-just-7/ https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-whale-transfers-2-2-billion...

mr_woozy 6y ago

It's slightly more complicated than that. Steam was using a payment processor called Bitpay which at the time had gone to one side of the small blocks vs big blocks political issue (big blockers went on to form Bitcoin Cash {BCH} and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision {BSV }with Roger Ver and Craig S. Wright, make of that what you will). Coinbase at that time was spamming the blockchain with dust right before the halving and finally got called out on it over twitter. Transaction fees went back down shortly after that.