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>The whole point of Bitcoin is to make money permisionless, i.e. the right tool for this particular job. May have been true long ago, but when speculators are

>The whole point of Bitcoin is to make money permisionless, i.e. the right tool for this particular job. May have been true long ago, but when speculators are hoping to get rich-quick holding bitcoin for another n months, no one's going to spend it. Bitcoiners ruined bitcoin. It's not the right tool for anything, other than maybe paying traceless bribes to Congressmen.

troyvit 1y ago
Yeah I would love to hear from people who know what _would_ be a better coin to use than a) Bitcoin and b) your own meme-coin.
- alxfoster 1y ago
  IMHO, Monero checks every box. Bitcoin is not as anonymous as most think. Monero may be a little more difficult to exchange but last I checked, most major exchanges outside of Coinbase still support it.
- stavros 1y ago
  I agree about Monero, it's anonymous, fungible, and has low fees and high speed.
  - immibis 1y ago
    It only has low fees because nobody uses it. The same thing happens to Bitcoin. Someone said the transaction fee is about $0.10 right now (I didn't check) but when people are actually using Bitcoin, that jumps up to around $20.
bawolff 1y ago
> It's not the right tool for anything, other than maybe paying traceless bribes to Congressmen. If its useful for that, then presumably it would also be useful to giving traceless donations to criminals, since that is effectively the same thing. Hence seems like the right tool for the job.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  >If its useful for that, then presumably it would also be useful to giving traceless donations to criminals, One would think that, but these sorts of tricks don't always scale down to the level of paying someone a buck to get a copy of this week's Nature. When you pay a Senator $6million in bitcoin to get something through committee, there's also the unspoken truth that you can pay someone else $150,000 to go suicide the pesky journalist poking his nose into that business... not so with microtransactions. Though bitcoin still has fractional amounts small enough (looks like 1 satoshi is about a tenth of a cent?), it seems as if the fee for sending that is nearly a dollar itself. The only people who would be rewarded would be ASIC miners siphoning off stolen electric power from some third-world hydroelectric plant. Theoretical bitcoin from 2009 is not the same thing as real world bitcoin in 2025, and hasn't been for a long while.
  - beeflet 1y ago
    payment channels and the "lightning network" present solutions to the micro-transaction problem for bitcoin. They are worth looking into. However on bitcoin, they wouldn't be sufficient alone to scale up the network. The problems of bitcoin go back to the 2017 block size wars. I think it is possible to scale the network up through a combination of measures (bigger blocks, payment channels, atomic swaps). But for better or worse, the current (BTC) developers have prioritized maintaining bitcoin's legacy and have split off from the other group of developers (BCH and others) specializing it into an efficient payment network. So BTC itself is a bad example of what cryptocurrency is capable of today, it has old network parameters that sort of gimp it. Those $1 fees you're seeing are not representative of the current state of technology. You make a good point that bitcoin isn't really divisible enough, with the current prices. The floor of 0.1 cents is prohibitive for a lot of micro-transactions. It's not hard to imagine a world in which 1 satoshi is worth a couple dollars or something, which would pretty much eliminate the use case of micro-transactions altogether.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
      >You make a good point that bitcoin isn't really divisible enough, with the current prices. I don't know that it's a divisibility problem in general... I would say that the USD conversion ratio is instead just insane. If it had kept to something reasonable in that regard, then divisibility wouldn't be an issue. It's something like 1 millionth of a bitcoin, more than enough. When I looked it up just before posting, I thought "I'll have to delete this comment before I finish writing it out, because you can still send small enough dollar amounts". And it kind of does work, the only thing I know of that's marked in tenths of a cent is gasoline. But the transaction fees are just absurd. $1 per just isn't low enough for anything smaller than buying a new car. If it is truly meant to be a currency, then I should be able to buy anything I can buy with the dollar at any retail store. Without thinking "Hey I need to buy more stuff so my transaction fee isn't wasted." I wish bitcoin could've worked. But not only did it flunk out hard, it's just sucking up all the air out of the room so that newer, better solutions could get a foothold. If I was only a little more paranoid, I'd see conspiracy in all of this.

troyvit 1y ago

Yeah I would love to hear from people who know what _would_ be a better coin to use than a) Bitcoin and b) your own meme-coin.

alxfoster 1y ago
IMHO, Monero checks every box. Bitcoin is not as anonymous as most think. Monero may be a little more difficult to exchange but last I checked, most major exchanges outside of Coinbase still support it.
stavros 1y ago
I agree about Monero, it's anonymous, fungible, and has low fees and high speed.
- immibis 1y ago
  It only has low fees because nobody uses it. The same thing happens to Bitcoin. Someone said the transaction fee is about $0.10 right now (I didn't check) but when people are actually using Bitcoin, that jumps up to around $20.

bawolff 1y ago

> It's not the right tool for anything, other than maybe paying traceless bribes to Congressmen. If its useful for that, then presumably it would also be useful to giving traceless donations to criminals, since that is effectively the same thing. Hence seems like the right tool for the job.

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
>If its useful for that, then presumably it would also be useful to giving traceless donations to criminals, One would think that, but these sorts of tricks don't always scale down to the level of paying someone a buck to get a copy of this week's Nature. When you pay a Senator $6million in bitcoin to get something through committee, there's also the unspoken truth that you can pay someone else $150,000 to go suicide the pesky journalist poking his nose into that business... not so with microtransactions. Though bitcoin still has fractional amounts small enough (looks like 1 satoshi is about a tenth of a cent?), it seems as if the fee for sending that is nearly a dollar itself. The only people who would be rewarded would be ASIC miners siphoning off stolen electric power from some third-world hydroelectric plant. Theoretical bitcoin from 2009 is not the same thing as real world bitcoin in 2025, and hasn't been for a long while.
- beeflet 1y ago
  payment channels and the "lightning network" present solutions to the micro-transaction problem for bitcoin. They are worth looking into. However on bitcoin, they wouldn't be sufficient alone to scale up the network. The problems of bitcoin go back to the 2017 block size wars. I think it is possible to scale the network up through a combination of measures (bigger blocks, payment channels, atomic swaps). But for better or worse, the current (BTC) developers have prioritized maintaining bitcoin's legacy and have split off from the other group of developers (BCH and others) specializing it into an efficient payment network. So BTC itself is a bad example of what cryptocurrency is capable of today, it has old network parameters that sort of gimp it. Those $1 fees you're seeing are not representative of the current state of technology. You make a good point that bitcoin isn't really divisible enough, with the current prices. The floor of 0.1 cents is prohibitive for a lot of micro-transactions. It's not hard to imagine a world in which 1 satoshi is worth a couple dollars or something, which would pretty much eliminate the use case of micro-transactions altogether.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    >You make a good point that bitcoin isn't really divisible enough, with the current prices. I don't know that it's a divisibility problem in general... I would say that the USD conversion ratio is instead just insane. If it had kept to something reasonable in that regard, then divisibility wouldn't be an issue. It's something like 1 millionth of a bitcoin, more than enough. When I looked it up just before posting, I thought "I'll have to delete this comment before I finish writing it out, because you can still send small enough dollar amounts". And it kind of does work, the only thing I know of that's marked in tenths of a cent is gasoline. But the transaction fees are just absurd. $1 per just isn't low enough for anything smaller than buying a new car. If it is truly meant to be a currency, then I should be able to buy anything I can buy with the dollar at any retail store. Without thinking "Hey I need to buy more stuff so my transaction fee isn't wasted." I wish bitcoin could've worked. But not only did it flunk out hard, it's just sucking up all the air out of the room so that newer, better solutions could get a foothold. If I was only a little more paranoid, I'd see conspiracy in all of this.