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Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
Stoic Joker:
My question is, does anyone here still use Bitcoin?-Deozaan (November 08, 2017, 02:55 PM)
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I'm still mining it. I used the (mined post Alice) coin we had to upgrade the pair of S2's to a single S9 (way cheaper to run) back in May. The S9 has managed to produce about 0.62 since then running out of the AntPool.
Anybody have a better/best/favorite pool suggestion??
Stoic Joker:
Total received from those 12 payments was 287mBTC which apparently is worth about $2,000 USD currently :huh:
-mouser (November 08, 2017, 03:09 PM)
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wow, maybe it's time to cash in?
then again...
-tomos (November 08, 2017, 03:16 PM)
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At least hold until after the SegWitx2 split on the 16th, then at least you get "free" coin - of questionable value - off the new fork.
Stoic Joker:
I still try to follow the news, and I still have some BTC, but I hate to use it because it's just so expensive these days.
-Deozaan (November 08, 2017, 02:55 PM)
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IIUC the cost in satoshis per transaction hasn't changed. It's just that with the rise in the coins value the # of satoshis the transaction cost are worth more. So technically we've always paid the same...it's just more noticeable now.
And it costs nothing to sit on ... In the hopes it will "hatch".
Deozaan:
At least hold until after the SegWitx2 split on the 16th, then at least you get "free" coin - of questionable value - off the new fork.
-Stoic Joker (November 08, 2017, 03:47 PM)
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Segwit2X has been canceled.
IIUC the cost in satoshis per transaction hasn't changed. It's just that with the rise in the coins value the # of satoshis the transaction cost are worth more. So technically we've always paid the same...it's just more noticeable now.
-Stoic Joker (November 08, 2017, 03:54 PM)
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That's not (entirely) correct. You could always customize the amount of satoshis per byte you paid with your transaction, and there used to be a time when you could set the fee to 0 and still get your transaction included within a few blocks because there was extra space for it. But now that blocks are full, you have to pay more satoshis per byte to get your transaction included or else risk having your transaction stuck in limbo for days.
That said, it is true that the increasing value of each BTC is making the fees more noticable in USD amounts. Even if you only paid 1 satoshi per byte on a regular ~220 byte transaction, that's still about 1.5 cents at today's current price.
Back when I first got into Bitcoin toward the end of 2015, I sent a test transaction to Renegade after he sent me what was then just a few dollars worth of BTC (now worth almost $200! Wish I had kept it...). I paid 5 sat/byte for that transaction, which at the time was less than 1 cent. But now the recommended fee is 300 sat/byte to get your transaction included quickly.
To further illustrate the point: Just for fun back in 2015 I gave a friend $1 worth of BTC for Christmas (the low value was an inside joke) to try to get him interested in cryptocurrency. It failed to pique his interest. With the value of BTC going up so much this year (by my calculations that $1 gift is now worth about $22.50), he has finally taken an interest in crypto, and asked me how to access the funds I gave him. But it would cost ~$5 in transaction fees for him to do anything with it so I've told him not to bother.
That's about $5 to send a transaction at current prices. And if you have a bunch of small amounts in different addresses, which is the recommended way to do it for privacy, transactions can easily be over 1,000 bytes (or over $20 in fees to send a transaction). And if you try to pay a lower fee, you could be waiting days before your transaction finally goes through, if it ever does.
-Deozaan (November 08, 2017, 02:55 PM)
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it's ironic that it's so user-un-friendly, considering the opposite was the intention.
Was that covered here in this thread -- how that changed
-tomos (November 08, 2017, 03:45 PM)
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Yes.
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=32392.msg394988#msg394988
In a nutshell: The Bitcoin "Core" developers refuse to increase the blocksize limit from 1MB to anything larger even though people and developers and businesses have been clamoring for an increase for years. So the blocks are at full capacity. Which means if you want your transaction included in the blockchain, you need to compete with others for the limited space in each block. The only way to incentivize a miner to include your transaction over others is by paying higher fees than others. But everyone else is also trying to pay higher fees than everyone else so they can get their transaction included, so the fees just go higher and higher. Meanwhile more and more transactions are being added to the backlog. So if you intentionally try to get away with paying a low fee, you could be waiting days for your transaction to clear (the backlog tends to catch up over the weekend). And even if you pay what your software deems a decent fee, but for some reason fees skyrocket due to sudden increased demand (making miners consider your fee to be a comparatively "low" fee), then you could be waiting days for your transaction to clear anyway.
Deozaan:
My question is, does anyone here still use Bitcoin?-Deozaan (November 08, 2017, 02:55 PM)
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I'm still mining it. I used the (mined post Alice) coin we had to upgrade the pair of S2's to a single S9 (way cheaper to run) back in May. The S9 has managed to produce about 0.62 since then running out of the AntPool.-Stoic Joker (November 08, 2017, 03:45 PM)
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0.62 BTC is a pretty good haul at current prices. :Thmbsup:
I never got into mining BTC because I heard it was a fast race to the bottom in terms of profitability. But I suppose that didn't take into account the price doubling every few months. . . Oh well. I didn't have the initial capital to afford an ASIC miner in the first place. :D
I did mine LTC for about two weeks on just about every machine I owned (again, toward the end of 2015), just to get an idea of what mining was like. I did it for so long so that I could earn the minimum payout from whatever pool I has signed up for. Once I got the payout I decided I was burning way more in electricity than I was earning in LTC, so I used ShapeShift to convert it to BTC. I ended up spending more in fees (and the unfavorable ShapeShift exchange rate) converting and transferring the LTC to my BTC wallet than I earned. So it was a net loss. But it was worth it for the experience. :D
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