4 ms·

Friction, lowest friction tends to win and bitcoin demands friction to run the blockchain. I don't think electronic exchange mechanisms are daft, but I do think

• wyager 12y ago
  >bitcoin demands friction to run the blockchain It requires (electrical) power. I don't think this could reasonably be called "friction". When I think "friction", I think of burdens imposed on users. Bitcoin has relatively few of those.
  • lotsofmangos 12y ago
    Cost per transaction of $19 is a fair amount of friction - https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction
    • wyager 12y ago
      >Cost per transaction of $19 is a fair amount of friction Haha, I have no idea what that chart is talking about. It might be in cents. Even then, it seems expensive. My phone client uses a ~$0.05 fee, I think. All fees are optional. Your transaction might just take longer without one.
      • lotsofmangos 12y ago
        Yeah, just thinking about that fee graph. I have no idea of the transaction size it is based on and without that it is pretty useless.
      • backdraw_ 12y ago
        There are about 500 transactions per block; each block contains 25BTC + fees (the fees are negligible at the moment). At the current price of $350/BTC that means that the revenue per transaction is 25*350/500 = $17, which means that the cost per transaction should be around that area. This means that the low transaction fee is actually massively subsidized by the fixed block reward.