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When I use $payment_processor/card_network then I need to trust a corporation again. I don’t want to do that due to bad experiences. Yes, unfortunately mining

When I use $payment_processor/card_network then I need to trust a corporation again. I don’t want to do that due to bad experiences. Yes, unfortunately mining is too profitable with the current prices, we need it to go back to a much lower price. Probably won’t happen for a long time (bubbles can exist for decades). Bitcoin can in theory transact more volume than VISA while using the same energy as it is now since the block time is always 10 minutes.

hannasanarion 5y ago
The payment processor is the party to the transaction whose trust is least dangerous. You swipe at the grocery store, what's Visa gonna do, not record your transaction? Why is that the only part of the exchange that you're worried about? Why is it them you want to stop trusting, and not the POS terminal manufacturer who could be lying about the total on the screen? Or the grocery store you're buying from who could be selling you poison, or who could refuse to carry out a delivery you ordered after taking your money, or who could mischarge you for the items you bought? And how is your situation improved by switching away from the payment processor with legal responsibilities and administrative controls, to an immutable system that will never, ever, ever let you get the money back in the event of any of the other parties to the transaction turning out to be untrustworthy, even if a court orders it? Immutability is not correctness. In fact it is the opposite, because in any system that takes input from the real world, errors are guaranteed, whether malicious or accidental. Eliminating the possibility of error correction from the system decreases it's trustworthiness. > Bitcoin can in theory transact more volume than VISA while using the same energy as it is now since the block time is always 10 minutes. No it can't. The bitcoin block size is fixed at 10mb, and they've been full for years. It is theoretically possible for consumption to go down as people exit the network, but that won't ever happen, because the POW system is inherently a power-consumption arms race. There is not, nor can there ever be, a disincentive from buying more hardware and consuming more power. If you crunch more than the other guys you're going to win more blocks and be financially rewarded. The protocol guarantees that the ROI is always positive.
- MrMan 5y ago
  I hope you and your machete of common sense are not allowed into any meetings to ruin any big deals! billions are being raised right now to do web3 things, which we dont know what they are. who are you to ruin this ecstasy of grift? what scares me is that I dont really have any idea of what the really good useful investable things are underlying all this bullshit, because I trained up in computer programming and time series analysis and trading and machine learning not crypto. so while I can squint and see that like in authentication maybe, or maybe tokenizing assets, or maybe that distributed name service, some of it is interesting, but why are we putting billions into all this crap instead of electrolysis or better fission reactors, or biotech to create chemicals without oil, or ammonia, we are investing in this behavioral social tech which feeds off of, and amplifies, our worst social traits? it doesn't even help us with our number one collective behavioral shortcoming which is how to reach consensus about externalized problems. it just encourages more externalization so that VCs can make money. I love money but I dont like society choosing only to solve the easy problems while neglecting everything else. I dont think we can live in crypto fantasy land for example while all the new supply chain problems create real new challenges which require trillions of investment to fix. "how I pay for things" kind of pales in comparison to "why cant we manufacture electronics" Maybe I am wrong
olliej 5y ago
No, the BTC protocol is limited to an upper limit determined by the maximum blocksize. Last I checked that put the limit of BTC at something in the region of 7 transactions/second without increasing the block size. To match Visa alone you'd need to increase that by a factor of 250 - you could reduce block time, increase block size, whatever. But that would also by necessity increase the storage requirements of each node by a similar factor.
- mccorrinall 5y ago
  You don’t need to settle every transaction instantly on the blockchain. http://lightning.network/lightning-network.pdf http://lightning.network/lightning-network.pdf
  - olliej 5y ago
    Lightning seems explicitly worse than any non crypto-adjacent payment system, as in addition to having to trust people, there's also no ability to reverse a transaction, and no ability to identify who defrauded you.
  - hannasanarion 5y ago
    Ah, yes, a system where you can steal an unlimited amount of money from somebody else without any possibility of recourse by just saying that they agreed and hoping that nobody notices, clearly this is better than a trusted processor with strict legal obligations and easy reversibility in the event of error.
    - nullc 5y ago
      That isn't how it works at all. The whole reason that Bitcoin has smart contracting is to enable this kind of scalability without compromising the security. After all, all that fancy decentralized stuff wouldn't be useful if you had to go use a centralized server (or abandon security) to make use of it. Imagine you, me, and some of the other posters here decide we'd like to transact efficiently amongst ourselves without the resource expenditure of telling others about our transactions but we don't trust each other, so we establish a set of rules about the records we need to keep when doing so. If there is never a dispute great! But if there is a dispute, we take our agreement and our transaction records and head off to court to settle the dispute. To apply that to Bitcoin: the rules and records get made machine interpretable. Transact as you like, and if there is a dispute you take the relevant records to the blockchain and it enforces according to them. Because the enforcement is automatic and untamperable there isn't any reason to cause a dispute in the first place (which creates some challenges for software Q/A)... so then when channels are used globally broadcast transactions are only needed to enroll or unenrole coins in a scheme (or in the event of a dispute or a software fault). You could, of course, instead have some insecure trust based way of exchanging coins-- that is, after all, how all legacy banking technology works. But with Bitcoin you don't have to. The system offers a spectrum of different ways to transact, each with their own costs and benefits.

hannasanarion 5y ago

The payment processor is the party to the transaction whose trust is least dangerous. You swipe at the grocery store, what's Visa gonna do, not record your transaction? Why is that the only part of the exchange that you're worried about? Why is it them you want to stop trusting, and not the POS terminal manufacturer who could be lying about the total on the screen? Or the grocery store you're buying from who could be selling you poison, or who could refuse to carry out a delivery you ordered after taking your money, or who could mischarge you for the items you bought? And how is your situation improved by switching away from the payment processor with legal responsibilities and administrative controls, to an immutable system that will never, ever, ever let you get the money back in the event of any of the other parties to the transaction turning out to be untrustworthy, even if a court orders it? Immutability is not correctness. In fact it is the opposite, because in any system that takes input from the real world, errors are guaranteed, whether malicious or accidental. Eliminating the possibility of error correction from the system decreases it's trustworthiness. > Bitcoin can in theory transact more volume than VISA while using the same energy as it is now since the block time is always 10 minutes. No it can't. The bitcoin block size is fixed at 10mb, and they've been full for years. It is theoretically possible for consumption to go down as people exit the network, but that won't ever happen, because the POW system is inherently a power-consumption arms race. There is not, nor can there ever be, a disincentive from buying more hardware and consuming more power. If you crunch more than the other guys you're going to win more blocks and be financially rewarded. The protocol guarantees that the ROI is always positive.

MrMan 5y ago
I hope you and your machete of common sense are not allowed into any meetings to ruin any big deals! billions are being raised right now to do web3 things, which we dont know what they are. who are you to ruin this ecstasy of grift? what scares me is that I dont really have any idea of what the really good useful investable things are underlying all this bullshit, because I trained up in computer programming and time series analysis and trading and machine learning not crypto. so while I can squint and see that like in authentication maybe, or maybe tokenizing assets, or maybe that distributed name service, some of it is interesting, but why are we putting billions into all this crap instead of electrolysis or better fission reactors, or biotech to create chemicals without oil, or ammonia, we are investing in this behavioral social tech which feeds off of, and amplifies, our worst social traits? it doesn't even help us with our number one collective behavioral shortcoming which is how to reach consensus about externalized problems. it just encourages more externalization so that VCs can make money. I love money but I dont like society choosing only to solve the easy problems while neglecting everything else. I dont think we can live in crypto fantasy land for example while all the new supply chain problems create real new challenges which require trillions of investment to fix. "how I pay for things" kind of pales in comparison to "why cant we manufacture electronics" Maybe I am wrong

olliej 5y ago

No, the BTC protocol is limited to an upper limit determined by the maximum blocksize. Last I checked that put the limit of BTC at something in the region of 7 transactions/second without increasing the block size. To match Visa alone you'd need to increase that by a factor of 250 - you could reduce block time, increase block size, whatever. But that would also by necessity increase the storage requirements of each node by a similar factor.

mccorrinall 5y ago
You don’t need to settle every transaction instantly on the blockchain. http://lightning.network/lightning-network.pdf http://lightning.network/lightning-network.pdf
- olliej 5y ago
  Lightning seems explicitly worse than any non crypto-adjacent payment system, as in addition to having to trust people, there's also no ability to reverse a transaction, and no ability to identify who defrauded you.
- hannasanarion 5y ago
  Ah, yes, a system where you can steal an unlimited amount of money from somebody else without any possibility of recourse by just saying that they agreed and hoping that nobody notices, clearly this is better than a trusted processor with strict legal obligations and easy reversibility in the event of error.
  - nullc 5y ago
    That isn't how it works at all. The whole reason that Bitcoin has smart contracting is to enable this kind of scalability without compromising the security. After all, all that fancy decentralized stuff wouldn't be useful if you had to go use a centralized server (or abandon security) to make use of it. Imagine you, me, and some of the other posters here decide we'd like to transact efficiently amongst ourselves without the resource expenditure of telling others about our transactions but we don't trust each other, so we establish a set of rules about the records we need to keep when doing so. If there is never a dispute great! But if there is a dispute, we take our agreement and our transaction records and head off to court to settle the dispute. To apply that to Bitcoin: the rules and records get made machine interpretable. Transact as you like, and if there is a dispute you take the relevant records to the blockchain and it enforces according to them. Because the enforcement is automatic and untamperable there isn't any reason to cause a dispute in the first place (which creates some challenges for software Q/A)... so then when channels are used globally broadcast transactions are only needed to enroll or unenrole coins in a scheme (or in the event of a dispute or a software fault). You could, of course, instead have some insecure trust based way of exchanging coins-- that is, after all, how all legacy banking technology works. But with Bitcoin you don't have to. The system offers a spectrum of different ways to transact, each with their own costs and benefits.