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Explain if I’m wrong but last I checked the transaction fee to transfer from 1 Bitcoin wallet to another is like $30 Australian dollars? My bank charges less fo

Explain if I’m wrong but last I checked the transaction fee to transfer from 1 Bitcoin wallet to another is like $30 Australian dollars? My bank charges less for an international wire transfer much less non bank. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees... Can we stop pretending it’s a future payment system?

rvz 6y ago
> Can we stop pretending it’s a future payment system? Exactly. There are other alt-coins that are better suited to this purpose, unlike Bitcoin is a complete failure in regards to this.
- rvz 6y ago
  Downvoters: So is it better to send lots of Bitcoin including the high network fees all over the network then and also waste that money? There is a reason I said 'in regards to this' While I am bullish on bitcoin and some cryptocurrencies in general, I've known that several HN folks here have been very bearish on cryptocurrencies since they always refer it to another ponzi scheme or a general scam. I guess on HN, one bad ICO spoils the bunch. But at least give a response to this claim or a reason as to why this is 'wrong', rather than simply downvoting without a counter argument.
rantwasp 6y ago
1) it’s not 30$ for all transactions 2) how much time does your international wire transfer take to clear? can you do this transaction anywhere in the world where you have an internet connection?
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  For your last question, not only is the answer "Yes", I think the wire transfer wins on flexibility because there's several fallback options for when you don't have an internet connection.
  - krageon 6y ago
    If you want the ability to globally transfer funds the answer is no. Within a single relatively homogeneous economic zone, sure it is easy. Once you move beyond that it becomes a huge PITA.
- smachiz 6y ago
  LOL. It's the next payment system, as argued by people who don't use the current payment system.
- kube-system 6y ago
  When I bought my house here in the US, the wire transfer was quicker than it took me to drive across town to my real estate agent's office, and I sent it via fax.
  - rantwasp 6y ago
    hah. try sending a wire transfer from the US to Asia
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
xiphias2 6y ago
Bitcoin is the solution for the biggest problem of mankind: inflation. While economists are talking about how good it is, everybody else is complaining about prices of everything going up.
- Hammershaft 6y ago
  Can you explain why you think inflation is the biggest problem of mankind?
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    It destroys savings of people, they work for nothing. Most people in the world need savings that they can be used if they have some health issue, or lose their job. But as their savings lose value all the time, they become slaves to their own savings. I had the same thing happening to me before I started using Bitcoin as my savings account. Now I am able to offer every expensive cancer treatment to my girlfriend (TIL therapy) if her cancer doesn’t respond to her treatment (she’s in stage 4 :( )
    - yxhuvud 6y ago
      Most people have no savings to speak of and that is not the fault of inflation, so that is not a problem. And anyhow, I don't really see why the work of my grandparents should be valued equally by society as work that happens now.
      - xiphias2 6y ago
        It’s because your grandfather sacrificed himself so that you can have a better life. One of the most noble thing a person can do to his grandson. And I personally saw Bitcoin change people from a non-saver to saver. Also I know many poor people who save all the time without access to markets.
        orwin 6y ago
        Last deflation in the us was 2007 to 2008, and the one prior to that was 1930 to 1933
boxingdog 6y ago
it is also $30 to move a billion, so
toomim 6y ago
You're referring to the BTC fork, which has artificially limited itself to 3-7 transactions per second. I suggest you look into the BCH fork, which has 3,000 tps, and can scale much further as needed.
tartoran 6y ago
Bitcoin not so much but other cryptos will definitely going to improve in terms of transaction costs, speed, and energy efficiency and that will make paper money obsolete.
- andresp 6y ago
  Paper money is already obsolete in many countries. They didn't need any cryptocurrency.
LeoPanthera 6y ago
This is an intentional decision on the part of the developers of Bitcoin Core, although I do not understand why. The original plan for Bitcoin envisioned larger blocks to keep transactions fees down. This plan has been realized in "Bitcoin Cash" which, although technically a fork, strays less from the original bitcoin design than Core now does.
- tracedddd 6y ago
  That is indeed the claim made by Bitcoin Cash promoters. However it’s not particularly convincing to treat Satoshi’s vision as the ultimate truth, and borders on religious. Shouldn’t developers who have now worked with this technology for a decade have a greater understanding, now? One of Bitcoin’s greatest attributes is that it can evolve and be updated! Furthermore BCH has seen virtually no transactions, especially compared to bitcoin, so all it’s claims of superiority are untested. This makes people who proclaim them as facts quite suspect. For example - since you don’t understand why - big blocks centralize. “Just make the blocks bigger” means more and more storage of a permanent ledger, which means less and less people can run a node. Of course, since there have historically been virtually no transactions on BCH, it’s easy to throw this consideration to the wind and claim the solution is infallible. Is that the future we want, when even when pushed to it’s maximum vanilla on-chain cryptocurrency struggles to compete with Visa or Coinbase for usability? Or should we strive to maximize what cryptocurrency really delivers on: uncensorable settlement of a stateless store of value?
  - suikadayo 6y ago
    > “Just make the blocks bigger” means more and more storage of a permanent ledger, which means less and less people can run a node." This argument was already debunked by the Bitcoin community from the beginning before the hard fork even happened though - Moore's Law. Disk space rises and price goes down as time goes by - it really wasn't ever an issue. Even 2mb, 4mb would've been enough for the next few years.
    - tracedddd 6y ago
      We’re outpacing Moore’s law 2mb or 4mb would have helped, yes. I don’t think it would have been too big of a problem, but I don’t think it would help much either. We’d just be back against the limit. If we want to really succeed we need innovation.
vinni2 6y ago
For large transactions like buying a Tesla does it matter that the fees is $30. I wouldn’t use it for buying a coffee of course. But for high value products. Why not.
- hocuspocus 6y ago
  It certainly matters. Wiring 50k to buy a car or 500k to buy a house costs me literally zero, and maybe a few cents on the receiving end. Why would anyone be willing to pay 100x more?
  - ignoramous 6y ago
    > Why would anyone be willing to pay 100x more? Transferring money across geographies is one of the prime use-cases for crypto these days.
    - hocuspocus 6y ago
      No, it is not. I've lived in several countries/continents in the past decade. So did many friends. We used traditional banks and newer players like Transferwise. Using BTC or any other shitcoin would have been less practical, riskier and more expensive, when not downright illegal (some countries control and limit capital outflows).
      - 177tcca 6y ago
        Riskier only because of the lack of experience of the people involved, and the UX gaps still being filled in - cryptocurrency is a very early-stage success(?) story of what will be a 1,000+ year journey.
        killingtime74 6y ago
        You sound like a high priest of Bitcoin lol... “1000+ year journey”
aaron695 6y ago
> My bank charges less for an international wire transfer. This is a rich persons point of view, you have rich persons financial accounts and knowledge. Also Australian's largest Bank's fees are often more in total than $30, perhaps you are transferring to your motherland of England? A small town in Africa is hard and costly. https://www.commbank.com.au/international/fees-charges.html https://www.commbank.com.au/international/fees-charges.html
- hocuspocus 6y ago
  > A small town in Africa is hard and costly. And what does BTC solve in this case exactly? You think places that lack the infrastructure to receive a SWIFT transfer will use BTC for anything practical?
  - sueders101 6y ago
    BTC seems to have found a use in Nigeria as a means of dealing with inflation, and a USD shortage in the country. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nigeria-one-bitcoin-cost-68-202538773.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nigeria-one-bitcoin-cost-68-2...
tradertef 6y ago
The point of Bitcoin now is not really payments. But it is a store of value. In that case, 30$ is not much for ability to send it anywhere in the world within minutes and store it for free as long as you want. Compare that with gold, or any other asset. People supporting Bitcoin "Cash" are of the view that Bitcoin should be used for everyday transactions. They are really minority.
- adventured 6y ago
  > Compare that with gold, or any other asset. Depends on what you're trying to do of course. If you're looking to physically send gold somewhere, you're spot on. I can buy and sell GLD at a zero transaction cost. I can buy $100,000 of GLD at zero transaction cost, then sell it, then repeat that a hundred times. What will Coinbase charge for the same thing in Bitcoin for $10 million worth of transactions? I can also store that virtual gold purchase at a low cost indefinitely (GLD has a 0.4% annual fee that it extracts; IAU is 0.25%). After you account for fees, that is likely to compare well with using a service like Coinbase to store your Bitcoin.
  - 177tcca 6y ago
    Coinbase ≠ the Bitcoin network. Ask the fees it would cost if years you were buying from someone, 1:1, privately.
- blueblisters 6y ago
  > The point of Bitcoin now is not really payments. But it is a store of value. Let's stop calling it crypto "currency" then since the point of any currency is to act as a medium of exchange. > In that case, 30$ is not much for ability to send it anywhere in the world within minutes and store it for free as long as you want. Compare that with gold, or any other asset. You can trade assets much more easily on highly sophisticated futures markets, much faster, cheaper and with higher liquidity. Too complex? You can buy an ETF that tracks a single asset like gold or a mix of assets like bonds, equities etc. There is nothing that bitcoin claims to be that isn't done better by existing financial instruments, except "decentralization".
jhanschoo 6y ago
Come to think of it, do institutional stakeholders have an incentive to reduce these costs when they can value-add with lower tranasction fees within their platform for unified wallets on their platform?
krucraft 6y ago
You can think of Bitcoin more as a settlement layer. Think of it differently: while sending $5 for a $30 fee makes no sense, sending $1B for a $30 fee makes a ton of sense. The average consumer does not necessarily need the settlement functionality afforded with an individual ledger entry in a global blockchain. Consumer payments will take place on 2nd layer solutions like the Lightning Network or on centralized platforms (like Cash App), but those platforms themselves will settle balances on the Bitcoin blockchain. But now, because of Bitcoin, you as an individual can interact with, audit, and build technology within the world of finance without going through the traditional gatekeepers of our current financial system.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jariel 6y ago
  So build a non-distributed trust-based system based over top BTC instead of something else? Gold would be a much better thing to do that with? " without going through the traditional gatekeepers of our current financial system. " You can make create a bank anytime you want and rules are in place for regulatory reasons. If BTC ever becomes important, the same rules will apply. So: 1) Currency -> Too expensive. 2) 2cnd layer -> Gold is better. 3) Store of value -> almost every classical store of value is better. These are are all 'how we can make BTC possibly useful' instead of 'why BTC is useful'. It doesn't tick any of the boxes. There will be public ways to short BTC soon I wonder what kind of effect that will have.
  - Kathula 6y ago
    Have fun staying poor if you gonna short Bitcoin.
    - UncleMeat 6y ago
      All of these discussions always devolve to “to the moon”. That’s not exactly a compelling response to technical concerns.
hotgeart 6y ago
Lightning Network : https://www.coinhouse.com/coinhouse-academy/bitcoin/what-is-the-lightning-network/ https://www.coinhouse.com/coinhouse-academy/bitcoin/what-is-...
lrvick 6y ago
I gladly make Bitcoin transactions regularly online for the same reason I use cash in person: privacy. Everyone is selling data but they can't sell what they don't know. That is worth a premium to me.
- michielderhaeg 6y ago
  Can you explain the privacy argument to me? Bitcoin is a massive public ledger, I have a local copy of literally every transaction ever made. How is that better for privacy?
  - supermatt 6y ago
    You are anonymous until you are linked to your wallet. Anyone who has transacted with you can do that, so then anything sent/received from that wallet address is linked to you. You can get around this by having many wallets. If you don't reuse those wallets, then a counterparty cant directly identify your other transactions. That means you need to have your balance distributed among many wallets, in denominations small enough that they would be consumed in a single spend. But - you need to get the funds into those wallets in the first place. You cant simply split up your wallet, as these wallets would be linked to each other via a common ancestor. Instead, you would need to receive from a 3rd party, but then they would be able to identify the transaction from that wallet as coming from you... So to remain anonymous, you simply never transact with anyone other than yourself ;)
    - ajkdhcb2 6y ago
      Yes you can have privacy with bitcoin only if you never transact with it... lol
    - johnyzee 6y ago
      Is this FUD or just a lack of understanding? Staying anonymous is very easy. You can choose between a number of ways to move coins into a separate address in an untraceable way. E.g. (1) CoinJoin transactions (which are natively supported in the protocol), (2) through Lightning, which is also an official extension, usable in production right now, or (3) using a third-party mixing service. Those are just off the top of my head.
Kathula 6y ago
It's 2.67 USD for a transaction to be confirmed quickly as of right now. You misunderstand how the current economic system is built and functions. Bitcoin isn't the equivalent of VISA. Bitcoin is the equivalent of the fedwire.
sperma 6y ago
You can choose to pay any fee you want. The higher you pay the more likely it is for a miner to pick your transaction for the next block. You can pay $3 right now to have your on-chain transaction confirmed within a day. Then there's the lightning network, which allows you to transact BTC an infinite amount of times off-chain for next to 0 fees. I've used it countless time this year and the prior and have probably spent less than a dollar in fees total. A lot of crypto exchanges are implementing it too, which will drastically lower the fees on the overall network. Bitfinex has support for it right now. Kraken will support it this year
- devoutsalsa 6y ago
  Can you be a miner & process your own payment?
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    You could, long ago. Now, it's unlikely you'll manage that.
  - kevincox 6y ago
    Sure. But you don't actually save any money. Instead of paying the "market rate" transaction fee you turn away one "market rate" transaction fee to include yours instead.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  The Lightning Network has no chance of gaining mass-adoption. It has high start up and capital lock-up costs, proportional to on-chain transaction fees, which only grow as Bitcoin/LN adoption ramps up. It has high upkeep costs, requiring you to have your LN node online to receive payments, and for your node to have access to the LN funds via a connection to the private keys, which is a security liability. To monitor for fraudulent channel closes in order to be able to react in time to challenge them, it also requires you to have an always on-line node, or a trusted third party delegated to do that on your behalf. And if you want rapid/automated reaction to fraudulent channel closes, that node needs to have access to the private keys to your LN funds. Then there are routing issues when the topography of the network changes with every transaction, and where the existence of routes is dependent on sufficient capital being locked up in channels. There's a reason why there's 100 times more BTC locked up for use in Ethereum dApps than for use in the LN. Ethereum-based scalability solutions could, ironically, provide BTC with the scalability needed to gain mass-adoption as an instrument for peer-to-peer payments.
ajkdhcb2 6y ago
>Can we stop pretending it’s a future payment system? This is technology, why talk about it like it can't change and be improved upon? Bitcoin has serious flaws like having zero privacy but it has demonstrated a working foundation - transacting without an intermediary and being able to hold your own money is absolutely revolutionary. Even the way things are now, $30 is a low price to be able to avoid storing your net worth in malicious banks and government/corporation property
somezero 6y ago
Move 2 million dollars.

rvz 6y ago

> Can we stop pretending it’s a future payment system? Exactly. There are other alt-coins that are better suited to this purpose, unlike Bitcoin is a complete failure in regards to this.

rvz 6y ago
Downvoters: So is it better to send lots of Bitcoin including the high network fees all over the network then and also waste that money? There is a reason I said 'in regards to this' While I am bullish on bitcoin and some cryptocurrencies in general, I've known that several HN folks here have been very bearish on cryptocurrencies since they always refer it to another ponzi scheme or a general scam. I guess on HN, one bad ICO spoils the bunch. But at least give a response to this claim or a reason as to why this is 'wrong', rather than simply downvoting without a counter argument.

rantwasp 6y ago

1) it’s not 30$ for all transactions 2) how much time does your international wire transfer take to clear? can you do this transaction anywhere in the world where you have an internet connection?

Rebelgecko 6y ago
For your last question, not only is the answer "Yes", I think the wire transfer wins on flexibility because there's several fallback options for when you don't have an internet connection.
- krageon 6y ago
  If you want the ability to globally transfer funds the answer is no. Within a single relatively homogeneous economic zone, sure it is easy. Once you move beyond that it becomes a huge PITA.
smachiz 6y ago
LOL. It's the next payment system, as argued by people who don't use the current payment system.
kube-system 6y ago
When I bought my house here in the US, the wire transfer was quicker than it took me to drive across town to my real estate agent's office, and I sent it via fax.
- rantwasp 6y ago
  hah. try sending a wire transfer from the US to Asia

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

xiphias2 6y ago

Bitcoin is the solution for the biggest problem of mankind: inflation. While economists are talking about how good it is, everybody else is complaining about prices of everything going up.

Hammershaft 6y ago
Can you explain why you think inflation is the biggest problem of mankind?
- xiphias2 6y ago
  It destroys savings of people, they work for nothing. Most people in the world need savings that they can be used if they have some health issue, or lose their job. But as their savings lose value all the time, they become slaves to their own savings. I had the same thing happening to me before I started using Bitcoin as my savings account. Now I am able to offer every expensive cancer treatment to my girlfriend (TIL therapy) if her cancer doesn’t respond to her treatment (she’s in stage 4 :( )
  - yxhuvud 6y ago
    Most people have no savings to speak of and that is not the fault of inflation, so that is not a problem. And anyhow, I don't really see why the work of my grandparents should be valued equally by society as work that happens now.
    - xiphias2 6y ago
      It’s because your grandfather sacrificed himself so that you can have a better life. One of the most noble thing a person can do to his grandson. And I personally saw Bitcoin change people from a non-saver to saver. Also I know many poor people who save all the time without access to markets.
      - orwin 6y ago
        Last deflation in the us was 2007 to 2008, and the one prior to that was 1930 to 1933

boxingdog 6y ago

it is also $30 to move a billion, so

toomim 6y ago

You're referring to the BTC fork, which has artificially limited itself to 3-7 transactions per second. I suggest you look into the BCH fork, which has 3,000 tps, and can scale much further as needed.

tartoran 6y ago

Bitcoin not so much but other cryptos will definitely going to improve in terms of transaction costs, speed, and energy efficiency and that will make paper money obsolete.

andresp 6y ago
Paper money is already obsolete in many countries. They didn't need any cryptocurrency.

LeoPanthera 6y ago

This is an intentional decision on the part of the developers of Bitcoin Core, although I do not understand why. The original plan for Bitcoin envisioned larger blocks to keep transactions fees down. This plan has been realized in "Bitcoin Cash" which, although technically a fork, strays less from the original bitcoin design than Core now does.

tracedddd 6y ago
That is indeed the claim made by Bitcoin Cash promoters. However it’s not particularly convincing to treat Satoshi’s vision as the ultimate truth, and borders on religious. Shouldn’t developers who have now worked with this technology for a decade have a greater understanding, now? One of Bitcoin’s greatest attributes is that it can evolve and be updated! Furthermore BCH has seen virtually no transactions, especially compared to bitcoin, so all it’s claims of superiority are untested. This makes people who proclaim them as facts quite suspect. For example - since you don’t understand why - big blocks centralize. “Just make the blocks bigger” means more and more storage of a permanent ledger, which means less and less people can run a node. Of course, since there have historically been virtually no transactions on BCH, it’s easy to throw this consideration to the wind and claim the solution is infallible. Is that the future we want, when even when pushed to it’s maximum vanilla on-chain cryptocurrency struggles to compete with Visa or Coinbase for usability? Or should we strive to maximize what cryptocurrency really delivers on: uncensorable settlement of a stateless store of value?
- suikadayo 6y ago
  > “Just make the blocks bigger” means more and more storage of a permanent ledger, which means less and less people can run a node." This argument was already debunked by the Bitcoin community from the beginning before the hard fork even happened though - Moore's Law. Disk space rises and price goes down as time goes by - it really wasn't ever an issue. Even 2mb, 4mb would've been enough for the next few years.
  - tracedddd 6y ago
    We’re outpacing Moore’s law 2mb or 4mb would have helped, yes. I don’t think it would have been too big of a problem, but I don’t think it would help much either. We’d just be back against the limit. If we want to really succeed we need innovation.

vinni2 6y ago

For large transactions like buying a Tesla does it matter that the fees is $30. I wouldn’t use it for buying a coffee of course. But for high value products. Why not.

hocuspocus 6y ago
It certainly matters. Wiring 50k to buy a car or 500k to buy a house costs me literally zero, and maybe a few cents on the receiving end. Why would anyone be willing to pay 100x more?
- ignoramous 6y ago
  > Why would anyone be willing to pay 100x more? Transferring money across geographies is one of the prime use-cases for crypto these days.
  - hocuspocus 6y ago
    No, it is not. I've lived in several countries/continents in the past decade. So did many friends. We used traditional banks and newer players like Transferwise. Using BTC or any other shitcoin would have been less practical, riskier and more expensive, when not downright illegal (some countries control and limit capital outflows).
    - 177tcca 6y ago
      Riskier only because of the lack of experience of the people involved, and the UX gaps still being filled in - cryptocurrency is a very early-stage success(?) story of what will be a 1,000+ year journey.
      - killingtime74 6y ago
        You sound like a high priest of Bitcoin lol... “1000+ year journey”

aaron695 6y ago

> My bank charges less for an international wire transfer. This is a rich persons point of view, you have rich persons financial accounts and knowledge. Also Australian's largest Bank's fees are often more in total than $30, perhaps you are transferring to your motherland of England? A small town in Africa is hard and costly. https://www.commbank.com.au/international/fees-charges.html https://www.commbank.com.au/international/fees-charges.html

hocuspocus 6y ago
> A small town in Africa is hard and costly. And what does BTC solve in this case exactly? You think places that lack the infrastructure to receive a SWIFT transfer will use BTC for anything practical?
- sueders101 6y ago
  BTC seems to have found a use in Nigeria as a means of dealing with inflation, and a USD shortage in the country. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nigeria-one-bitcoin-cost-68-202538773.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nigeria-one-bitcoin-cost-68-2...

tradertef 6y ago

The point of Bitcoin now is not really payments. But it is a store of value. In that case, 30$ is not much for ability to send it anywhere in the world within minutes and store it for free as long as you want. Compare that with gold, or any other asset. People supporting Bitcoin "Cash" are of the view that Bitcoin should be used for everyday transactions. They are really minority.

adventured 6y ago
> Compare that with gold, or any other asset. Depends on what you're trying to do of course. If you're looking to physically send gold somewhere, you're spot on. I can buy and sell GLD at a zero transaction cost. I can buy $100,000 of GLD at zero transaction cost, then sell it, then repeat that a hundred times. What will Coinbase charge for the same thing in Bitcoin for $10 million worth of transactions? I can also store that virtual gold purchase at a low cost indefinitely (GLD has a 0.4% annual fee that it extracts; IAU is 0.25%). After you account for fees, that is likely to compare well with using a service like Coinbase to store your Bitcoin.
- 177tcca 6y ago
  Coinbase ≠ the Bitcoin network. Ask the fees it would cost if years you were buying from someone, 1:1, privately.
blueblisters 6y ago
> The point of Bitcoin now is not really payments. But it is a store of value. Let's stop calling it crypto "currency" then since the point of any currency is to act as a medium of exchange. > In that case, 30$ is not much for ability to send it anywhere in the world within minutes and store it for free as long as you want. Compare that with gold, or any other asset. You can trade assets much more easily on highly sophisticated futures markets, much faster, cheaper and with higher liquidity. Too complex? You can buy an ETF that tracks a single asset like gold or a mix of assets like bonds, equities etc. There is nothing that bitcoin claims to be that isn't done better by existing financial instruments, except "decentralization".

jhanschoo 6y ago

Come to think of it, do institutional stakeholders have an incentive to reduce these costs when they can value-add with lower tranasction fees within their platform for unified wallets on their platform?

krucraft 6y ago

You can think of Bitcoin more as a settlement layer. Think of it differently: while sending $5 for a $30 fee makes no sense, sending $1B for a $30 fee makes a ton of sense. The average consumer does not necessarily need the settlement functionality afforded with an individual ledger entry in a global blockchain. Consumer payments will take place on 2nd layer solutions like the Lightning Network or on centralized platforms (like Cash App), but those platforms themselves will settle balances on the Bitcoin blockchain. But now, because of Bitcoin, you as an individual can interact with, audit, and build technology within the world of finance without going through the traditional gatekeepers of our current financial system.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jariel 6y ago
So build a non-distributed trust-based system based over top BTC instead of something else? Gold would be a much better thing to do that with? " without going through the traditional gatekeepers of our current financial system. " You can make create a bank anytime you want and rules are in place for regulatory reasons. If BTC ever becomes important, the same rules will apply. So: 1) Currency -> Too expensive. 2) 2cnd layer -> Gold is better. 3) Store of value -> almost every classical store of value is better. These are are all 'how we can make BTC possibly useful' instead of 'why BTC is useful'. It doesn't tick any of the boxes. There will be public ways to short BTC soon I wonder what kind of effect that will have.
- Kathula 6y ago
  Have fun staying poor if you gonna short Bitcoin.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    All of these discussions always devolve to “to the moon”. That’s not exactly a compelling response to technical concerns.

hotgeart 6y ago

Lightning Network : https://www.coinhouse.com/coinhouse-academy/bitcoin/what-is-the-lightning-network/ https://www.coinhouse.com/coinhouse-academy/bitcoin/what-is-...

lrvick 6y ago

I gladly make Bitcoin transactions regularly online for the same reason I use cash in person: privacy. Everyone is selling data but they can't sell what they don't know. That is worth a premium to me.

michielderhaeg 6y ago
Can you explain the privacy argument to me? Bitcoin is a massive public ledger, I have a local copy of literally every transaction ever made. How is that better for privacy?
- supermatt 6y ago
  You are anonymous until you are linked to your wallet. Anyone who has transacted with you can do that, so then anything sent/received from that wallet address is linked to you. You can get around this by having many wallets. If you don't reuse those wallets, then a counterparty cant directly identify your other transactions. That means you need to have your balance distributed among many wallets, in denominations small enough that they would be consumed in a single spend. But - you need to get the funds into those wallets in the first place. You cant simply split up your wallet, as these wallets would be linked to each other via a common ancestor. Instead, you would need to receive from a 3rd party, but then they would be able to identify the transaction from that wallet as coming from you... So to remain anonymous, you simply never transact with anyone other than yourself ;)
  - ajkdhcb2 6y ago
    Yes you can have privacy with bitcoin only if you never transact with it... lol
  - johnyzee 6y ago
    Is this FUD or just a lack of understanding? Staying anonymous is very easy. You can choose between a number of ways to move coins into a separate address in an untraceable way. E.g. (1) CoinJoin transactions (which are natively supported in the protocol), (2) through Lightning, which is also an official extension, usable in production right now, or (3) using a third-party mixing service. Those are just off the top of my head.

Kathula 6y ago

It's 2.67 USD for a transaction to be confirmed quickly as of right now. You misunderstand how the current economic system is built and functions. Bitcoin isn't the equivalent of VISA. Bitcoin is the equivalent of the fedwire.

sperma 6y ago

You can choose to pay any fee you want. The higher you pay the more likely it is for a miner to pick your transaction for the next block. You can pay $3 right now to have your on-chain transaction confirmed within a day. Then there's the lightning network, which allows you to transact BTC an infinite amount of times off-chain for next to 0 fees. I've used it countless time this year and the prior and have probably spent less than a dollar in fees total. A lot of crypto exchanges are implementing it too, which will drastically lower the fees on the overall network. Bitfinex has support for it right now. Kraken will support it this year

devoutsalsa 6y ago
Can you be a miner & process your own payment?
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  You could, long ago. Now, it's unlikely you'll manage that.
- kevincox 6y ago
  Sure. But you don't actually save any money. Instead of paying the "market rate" transaction fee you turn away one "market rate" transaction fee to include yours instead.
CryptoPunk 6y ago
The Lightning Network has no chance of gaining mass-adoption. It has high start up and capital lock-up costs, proportional to on-chain transaction fees, which only grow as Bitcoin/LN adoption ramps up. It has high upkeep costs, requiring you to have your LN node online to receive payments, and for your node to have access to the LN funds via a connection to the private keys, which is a security liability. To monitor for fraudulent channel closes in order to be able to react in time to challenge them, it also requires you to have an always on-line node, or a trusted third party delegated to do that on your behalf. And if you want rapid/automated reaction to fraudulent channel closes, that node needs to have access to the private keys to your LN funds. Then there are routing issues when the topography of the network changes with every transaction, and where the existence of routes is dependent on sufficient capital being locked up in channels. There's a reason why there's 100 times more BTC locked up for use in Ethereum dApps than for use in the LN. Ethereum-based scalability solutions could, ironically, provide BTC with the scalability needed to gain mass-adoption as an instrument for peer-to-peer payments.

ajkdhcb2 6y ago

>Can we stop pretending it’s a future payment system? This is technology, why talk about it like it can't change and be improved upon? Bitcoin has serious flaws like having zero privacy but it has demonstrated a working foundation - transacting without an intermediary and being able to hold your own money is absolutely revolutionary. Even the way things are now, $30 is a low price to be able to avoid storing your net worth in malicious banks and government/corporation property

somezero 6y ago

Move 2 million dollars.