4 ms·

Have you used cryptocurrency for payments lately? Unless you want to pay $25 to wait 6 hours while your transaction is confirming, stick to venmo/zelle/paypal/e

by lxe 6y ago

Have you used cryptocurrency for payments lately? Unless you want to pay $25 to wait 6 hours while your transaction is confirming, stick to venmo/zelle/paypal/etc... Unless, of course, you use places like Coinbase that pool transactions or bypass the network altogether, but then... what's the point of cryptocurrency?

FDSGSG 6y ago
>Unless you want to pay $25 to wait 6 hours while your transaction is confirming, stick to venmo/zelle/paypal/etc Those take much longer than 6 hours to "confirm", no? The sender can chargeback these transactions months after the money shows up in your account. You don't even need to wait for confirmations unless the sum is huge. It's quite safe to accept most 0conf transactions.
whimsicalism 6y ago
Ethereum definitely doesn't cost that much and take that long as of late.
- colecut 6y ago
  I paid multiple $30 ethereum gas fees yesterday. I've seen them over $60
  - brianobush 6y ago
    This will be addressed by EIP 1559 in the next year or so.
- rglullis 6y ago
  The point still stands. Any ERC20 transfer is going to cost a substantial amount of ETH if you want to confirm quickly and even after mined should only be considered confirmed after 10 blocks at least. It is not practical for payments. Layer-2 does alleviate some of the issues though, and all those talking about Lightning Network should look into Raiden.
haskaalo 6y ago
Have you looked into the bitcoin lightning network? Iirc, it has a much more bigger transaction per second rate than Visa network.
eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
> Have you used cryptocurrency for payments lately? Unless you want to pay $25 to wait 6 hours while your transaction is confirming, stick to venmo/zelle/paypal/etc... Nobody forces merchants to stick to requiring block confirmations for e.g. Bitcoin transactions. They just do it because that's the way it always has been. Instead of that, for low price purchases, they could also monitor the network for how well-spread a transaction is and once it is sufficiently propagated assume that a double-spend won't be possible anymore because miners will refuse to accept a transaction which conflicts with the one they saw much earlier. And "well-spread" would be typically the case within seconds because transactions are flooded to all network nodes as they appear.
- hiq 6y ago
  > Miners will refuse to accept a transaction which conflicts with the one they saw much earlier. At the very least there's no guarantee of that. If you send a conflicting transaction with a higher fee, a miner should (rationally) discard the older one. And last I checked (Ethereum, a few years ago), that was indeed what they were doing.
  - eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
    With Bitcoin you have to enable the "replace by fee" flag on a transaction to allow that. Merchants could check transactions for if it is set. If miners did change their Bitcoin nodes to facilitate double spending even with RBF disabled, that would erode trust in Bitcoin and thereby de-valuate it, which is probably not in the interest of miners. They'd damage the thing they're heavily invested in.
    - bootlooped 6y ago
      There's probably a tragedy of the commons situation there though.
    - hiq 6y ago
      > With Bitcoin you have to enable the "replace by fee" flag on a transaction to allow that. Description of the "replace by fee" mechanism you're mentioning: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Replace_by_fee https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Replace_by_fee This page mentions that it is a "node policy", and from your comment I think we both agree that nothing in the protocol (which roughly guarantees that Bitcoin is fine as long as 51% of the hashing power belongs to benevolent actors) ensures these rules are in place. Now, you're saying there would be some reputational damage which leads to devaluation which is bad for Bitcoin, so bad for miners, so they wouldn't do that. This will not happen until such payments represent a big share of Bitcoin transactions. In particular, if a few merchants were to start accepting transactions that are not mined and just propagated, they could easily be "victims" (again, it's economically rational for miners) of double spending and there would be no impact on the valuation of Bitcoin.
GuB-42 6y ago
That's the trick, Visa won't do cryptocurrency payment, they will do "fiat currency" payment indexed on cryptocurrencies. For example, you buy 0.1 BTC using euros, you then pay a merchant asking for 0.1 BTC, which he will withdraw as dollars. Noticed that neither the buyer nor the seller manipulate bitcoin. No address, no transaction on the blockchain. It shows bitcoin on your account but in reality, it was a euro to dollar transaction. Most likely you will be able to have a bitcoin account too, but again, dollars in, dollars out. If bitcoins raises in value, you get more dollars, if it crashes, you get less, but you never get actual bitcoin. Edit: And BTW that's the reason why most people are using cryptocurrency for, as an index like gold. Besides criminals, few people use it to make payments.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  On your last point, I think it only applies to things like bitcoin where the resource cost for mining and validating is high. Litecoin and BCH are quite different and result in far lower transaction costs, but they aren’t as popular yet. There’s every reason to think in the longer term there will be some cryptocurrencies with higher costs that behave more like a custodial store of value like gold, some that behave like a cheap medium of exchange, and some that have other purposes like hedging against fiat currency or operating some smart contract based app / game / service. The valuation model would be different for each.
- imtringued 6y ago
  > If bitcoins raises in value, you get more dollars, You have to pay taxes on that gain. There is also the problem that people are unlikely to spend a deflationary currency if they can avoid it.
shuringai 6y ago
have you used fiat investment apps lately? if you dont want monolithic hedge funds close trading and sell your assets without your concent and then wipe any negative speech of the fact from the app store, stick to cryptocurrencies
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Mc_Big_G 6y ago
This is FUD. I've never waited more than 5 min and paid pennies to transfer funds for a variety of cryptocurrencies.

by lxe 6y ago

FDSGSG 6y ago

>Unless you want to pay $25 to wait 6 hours while your transaction is confirming, stick to venmo/zelle/paypal/etc Those take much longer than 6 hours to "confirm", no? The sender can chargeback these transactions months after the money shows up in your account. You don't even need to wait for confirmations unless the sum is huge. It's quite safe to accept most 0conf transactions.

whimsicalism 6y ago

Ethereum definitely doesn't cost that much and take that long as of late.

colecut 6y ago
I paid multiple $30 ethereum gas fees yesterday. I've seen them over $60
- brianobush 6y ago
  This will be addressed by EIP 1559 in the next year or so.
rglullis 6y ago
The point still stands. Any ERC20 transfer is going to cost a substantial amount of ETH if you want to confirm quickly and even after mined should only be considered confirmed after 10 blocks at least. It is not practical for payments. Layer-2 does alleviate some of the issues though, and all those talking about Lightning Network should look into Raiden.

haskaalo 6y ago

Have you looked into the bitcoin lightning network? Iirc, it has a much more bigger transaction per second rate than Visa network.

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago

> Have you used cryptocurrency for payments lately? Unless you want to pay $25 to wait 6 hours while your transaction is confirming, stick to venmo/zelle/paypal/etc... Nobody forces merchants to stick to requiring block confirmations for e.g. Bitcoin transactions. They just do it because that's the way it always has been. Instead of that, for low price purchases, they could also monitor the network for how well-spread a transaction is and once it is sufficiently propagated assume that a double-spend won't be possible anymore because miners will refuse to accept a transaction which conflicts with the one they saw much earlier. And "well-spread" would be typically the case within seconds because transactions are flooded to all network nodes as they appear.

hiq 6y ago
> Miners will refuse to accept a transaction which conflicts with the one they saw much earlier. At the very least there's no guarantee of that. If you send a conflicting transaction with a higher fee, a miner should (rationally) discard the older one. And last I checked (Ethereum, a few years ago), that was indeed what they were doing.
- eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
  With Bitcoin you have to enable the "replace by fee" flag on a transaction to allow that. Merchants could check transactions for if it is set. If miners did change their Bitcoin nodes to facilitate double spending even with RBF disabled, that would erode trust in Bitcoin and thereby de-valuate it, which is probably not in the interest of miners. They'd damage the thing they're heavily invested in.
  - bootlooped 6y ago
    There's probably a tragedy of the commons situation there though.
  - hiq 6y ago
    > With Bitcoin you have to enable the "replace by fee" flag on a transaction to allow that. Description of the "replace by fee" mechanism you're mentioning: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Replace_by_fee https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Replace_by_fee This page mentions that it is a "node policy", and from your comment I think we both agree that nothing in the protocol (which roughly guarantees that Bitcoin is fine as long as 51% of the hashing power belongs to benevolent actors) ensures these rules are in place. Now, you're saying there would be some reputational damage which leads to devaluation which is bad for Bitcoin, so bad for miners, so they wouldn't do that. This will not happen until such payments represent a big share of Bitcoin transactions. In particular, if a few merchants were to start accepting transactions that are not mined and just propagated, they could easily be "victims" (again, it's economically rational for miners) of double spending and there would be no impact on the valuation of Bitcoin.

GuB-42 6y ago

That's the trick, Visa won't do cryptocurrency payment, they will do "fiat currency" payment indexed on cryptocurrencies. For example, you buy 0.1 BTC using euros, you then pay a merchant asking for 0.1 BTC, which he will withdraw as dollars. Noticed that neither the buyer nor the seller manipulate bitcoin. No address, no transaction on the blockchain. It shows bitcoin on your account but in reality, it was a euro to dollar transaction. Most likely you will be able to have a bitcoin account too, but again, dollars in, dollars out. If bitcoins raises in value, you get more dollars, if it crashes, you get less, but you never get actual bitcoin. Edit: And BTW that's the reason why most people are using cryptocurrency for, as an index like gold. Besides criminals, few people use it to make payments.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
On your last point, I think it only applies to things like bitcoin where the resource cost for mining and validating is high. Litecoin and BCH are quite different and result in far lower transaction costs, but they aren’t as popular yet. There’s every reason to think in the longer term there will be some cryptocurrencies with higher costs that behave more like a custodial store of value like gold, some that behave like a cheap medium of exchange, and some that have other purposes like hedging against fiat currency or operating some smart contract based app / game / service. The valuation model would be different for each.
imtringued 6y ago
> If bitcoins raises in value, you get more dollars, You have to pay taxes on that gain. There is also the problem that people are unlikely to spend a deflationary currency if they can avoid it.

shuringai 6y ago

have you used fiat investment apps lately? if you dont want monolithic hedge funds close trading and sell your assets without your concent and then wipe any negative speech of the fact from the app store, stick to cryptocurrencies

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Mc_Big_G 6y ago

This is FUD. I've never waited more than 5 min and paid pennies to transfer funds for a variety of cryptocurrencies.