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Last post Author Topic: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?  (Read 546119 times)

Stoic Joker

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #925 on: November 10, 2017, 02:49 PM »
Well... BTC is certainly taking a Red Candle ride through the freaking floor now..

Renegade

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #926 on: November 10, 2017, 11:21 PM »
@MOUSER

The real question is.. some of you crazy people who were ranting about it, and telling us how bitcoin was going to take off during the early days of it.. are any of you rich enough to retire and bankroll the rest of us yet?



Well, I can't bankroll the rest of you, but I can certainly bankroll myself.

I'm not super wealthy, but, I have options open to me and some freedom to choose what I work on.


@DEOZAAN

Would you mind briefly explaining how you solved the scalability issues? And what you mean by that? Or if it's in the whitepaper just say so and I'll try to get the time to finally read through it.


The very short answer is "Game Channels". It's a form of trustless off-chain scaling. You can read the academic paper in the journal Leger (a crypto journal) here:

https://www.ledgerjo...r/article/view/15/64

It's also in the endnotes in the White Paper. The White Paper explains it briefly.

You can think of it like this... You have the Chimaera blockchain, and then every single game running on the Chimaera platform has its own blockchain where size doesn't matter. (Get your mind out of the gutter!)

That's a bit crude, but should give you an idea.

But the reason I ask is because scalability seems to be a major issue in most of the major cryptos, especially Bitcoin. There are lots of interesting ideas out there on how to resolve or work around the issues, but as far as I know things like sidechains (Lightning, Raiden, Plasma, etc.,) are all still currently being researched and/or developed but nothing is actually released and running on the network(s) yet. If you're talking about scalability in a similar sense as for other blockchains, then solving the scalability issues could be really big news for cryptocurrency in general. :Thmbsup:

What can I say? We're ahead of the curve! :D


@MOUSER

Due to encouragement of the bitcoin evangelists here on DC I did eventually provide a bitcoin address for people who wanted to donate to DC via bitcoin, back in 2015.

There have been a total of 12 payments received in that 2 year period.

Total received from those 12 payments was 287mBTC which apparently is worth about $2,000 USD currently  :huh:


That's great! Keep it! HODL! :D

You perked my interest, so I went back through my wallet to have a peek:

https://blockchain.i...548e7e90f02934c1b170

https://blockchain.i...115e1a531b2cbf1fc3a6

Checking again... Geez... That's more than I've donated in fiat to you. I'm pretty sure I've donated to DC a few times with fiat.

HODL~!


@TOMOS - @DEOZAAN

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.

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 (I think it was, but I'm being a lazy beggar here - I mostly work on memory first, then search, but tonight I'm leaving out the search part...)


A few screwey things there...

@DEOZAAN

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.


You can choose your transaction fee rate. You're not forced to spend anything. The only issue is that the transaction may take longer.

I regularly send BTC to people and set a lower fee because I don't care if they get it in 12 seconds or 12 hours. It's all close enough.


@TOMOS

it's ironic that it's so user-un-friendly, considering the opposite was the intention.

That's soooooo far from the truth.

Have you ever had to send money to people in another country?

It's not easy.

I recently had to send funds to a company to pay for a service.

I did it in 2 parts:

1) BTC
2) Fiat

BTC was easy. I sent it. Done.

Cost me about $1.80 CAD. I could've spent less on that fee.

Fiat? F**king nightmare.

I had to drive almost an hour to another town to get to the bank to wire $$$.

The teller there didn't know how to do it. After 10 minutes.

I waited another 15 minutes.

Then it took 30 minutes to send.

The transaction fee cost me $40 CAD. That's over 22x what I spent sending BTC.

It cost me gas. Probably around $30 or $40 CAD there. Call it $35.

So, about 3 hours of my time, plus around $75 in costs (not including paying for parking), and that's the fiat world.

Sorry. No. BTC is far better. Crypto is better. By leaps and bounds.

Summary:

BTC COSTS:
2 minutes & $1.80 CAD

FIAT COSTS:
180 minutes & $75.00 CAD

Now... for a $2 coffee at a shop... The Lightning Networks are coming. That's next year.

But, even forgetting that, it's still easier to send BTC to a friend than to send fiat.

I don't send my friends BTC. I send fiat. Because it's less valuable. I HODL. :)


@TOMOS

Was that covered here in this thread -- how that changed (I think it was, but I'm being a lazy beggar here - I mostly work on memory first, then search, but tonight I'm leaving out the search part...)


We all do it. :D


@DEOZAAN

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.


Heh! I remember that!

I sent at the time about $10 USD, and Deozaan sent back about $0.40.

Now, for many of my transactions I'm spending in the area of 50k satoshis to 2k satoshis. It depends on how quickly I want it to arrive.


@DEOZAAN

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.

You can spend MUCH less. It's not hard.

The expensive fees are all fiat fees.


@DEOZAAN

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.


The Core devs rock.

Also, in Chimaera, our Lead Blockchain Developer is a Bitcoin Core contributor.

But, for the block size, that's a bit misleading.

The idea is to off-load transactions into Lightning Networks. That will solve scaling issue massively.

Those will take off next year.

This is just the beginning. There's a long way to go.

Right now Bitcoin is NOTHING in the financial world. It's a blip. A curiosity.

If you're not in already, do your due diligence and think about whether BTC has a place in your portfolio.












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Deozaan

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #927 on: November 11, 2017, 11:35 AM »
The Core devs rock.

I'm really surprised you support the Core devs (especially Blockstream) after all the censorship they're implicitly advocating and participating in. I would have expected you to be all over the conspiracies that they're being paid off by "the big, evil" banks to cripple or destroy Bitcoin from within. :huh:



While the rest of this is all in response to things you said, it's not necessarily all a direct response to you. :)

But, for the block size, that's a bit misleading.

The idea is to off-load transactions into Lightning Networks. That will solve scaling issue massively.

Those will take off next year.

My understanding is that the Lightning Network has been "18 months away" for over two, maybe three, years. And that they're still saying it's 18 months away. I know this is groundbreaking technology that is still being researched and developed, so delays should be expected. I'm just saying I don't think we'll see it next year. But it would be cool if I was wrong about that.

Lightning does sound like a cool scaling solution. But when I learned more about it and thought about what life would be like with Lightning, in real-life, practical, every-day use, I came to the conclusion that it naturally leads to something that is very much like the current traditional banking system. They advertise Lightning as a way to "open channels" with anybody you want so you can send funds back and forth to each other off-chain, to avoid the high fees associated with doing transactions on-chain. Sounds cool, until you realize that (1) there would not be any high fees to perform on-chain transactions if the blocksize limit was increased, so in that regard Lightning is a solution to an artificially created problem. That's not to say that it won't be a valid way to assist in scaling in the future, but at the very least there is an artificial demand being created for off-chain scaling (with technology that doesn't exist yet, such as Lightning) when currently on-chain scaling is very simple to accomplish and very doable with current technology that exists right now. But ignoring all that, (2) in order to create a Lightning channel you need to lock your funds up in the channel before you can use them. In other words, it's kind of like a pre-paid gift card. You have to preload it, and then you can pay any amount up to how much you preloaded it with, over many smaller transactions. Of course, that's not a great analogy because those people can also pay you, so you can send funds back and forth to each other. But I don't know about you, but the people I pay generally don't pay me. And the people who pay me generally don't get paid by me. In other words, for the vast majority of entities I interact with financially, the payments are largely unidirectional. So I'd need to open separate channels with each of these people in order to send/receive funds to/from them, which is a lot like the gift-card analogy after all. And don't forget that each time you open (or close) a channel it costs an expensive BTC transaction fee. It's a mess.

So the next obvious solution is for the "hub and spoke" system, where there are a few big Lightning Hubs that people create channels with, and those hubs have channels opened with each other, and instead of sending your funds straight to Alice, you send them to your hub, which sends them to Alice's hub, which sends them to Alice. And everybody (for the most part) uses one or two of the few/several big hubs and no one interacts directly with each other anymore because on-chain fees have gotten prohibitively expensive.

Starting to sound familiar? Isn't that just like our current banking system? I don't actually pay Walmart or Home Depot. I deposit my money into my bank (create a channel with a hub) and then when I want to buy something from someone, I tell my bank (my hub) to pay their bank (their hub). Only lightning is worse than the current banking system because the limited blocksize limit means it will be expensive to deposit your money into your "bank," and it will be expensive to withdraw your money from your "bank," should you ever need or want to use Bitcoin as cash (person to person) without involving one or more third-parties.

And (3) since these big banks/hubs will need a lot of money for these big channels being opened with everyone, they'll likely need to follow KYC laws, requiring you to give them your personal information so they can make sure you're not laundering money or supporting terrorists or whatever. As such, if they know who you are, and they don't like you or the causes you support (or the people you're trying to send money to), they can refuse to process your transactions, and now you've reached a point where BTC itself is too expensive to use because the blocks are full, and the Lightning networks can censor transactions they don't like (or are compelled to by governments).

I'm not saying Lightning is intrinsically bad. I think it could be a very useful tool in some circumstances. But I do think the consequences of essentially forcing it onto everyone in the BTC ecosystem is bad for everyone and is bad for BTC itself.


This is just the beginning. There's a long way to go.

Indeed. IMO, fees will continue to rise without on-chain scaling.

Right now Bitcoin is NOTHING in the financial world. It's a blip. A curiosity.

Imagine where Bitcoin could be if adoption and use hadn't been stalled for the past ~two years because of increasing fees and confirmation times. :(


If you're not in already, do your due diligence and think about whether BTC has a place in your portfolio.

I think that Segwit2X was Bitcoin's last hope of being usable as originally intended. With the cancellation of it, and it having sealed Core's scaling roadmap, I am no longer interested in what Bitcoin has to offer, technologically. It offers me virtually no benefit over the current fiat system (I've only ever wired money once in my life, and that was over 15 years ago, but yeah, it was unpleasant and expensive). I'd be a much richer man at the end of my life with inflation slowly devaluing my currency by 2-5% per year than if I had to pay $5-$25 (or more) in fees every time I spend any amount of money. And for anything that Bitcoin does do better than fiat, there are other cryptos that do it even better.

I'm not fully out of BTC yet, but I think I will be soon. I know this is probably premature to say since it has only been a few days, but the market seems to agree with me thus far, given the sharp rise in value of Bitcoin Cash and the not-insignificant drop in value in BTC since Segwit2X was canceled. I'm not saying BTC is dead or that it will be worthless or is a bad long-term investment or whatever. I'm just saying that it is not the technology that I got so excited about a couple years ago. It has been co-opted and changed into something else much less useful and much less interesting.

None of what I've said should be taken as investment advice. I definitely agree that people need to do their due diligence and decide whether BTC has a place in their portfolio. I'm just saying that in the past, Bitcoin's virtually free transactions, relatively instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world, and at any time, were paradigm-shifting features granting enormous freedoms. But many of those freedoms have disappeared or are in the process of being hobbled. "Nobody" uses Bitcoin anymore. They just HODL, hoping the price will go up and make them rich. People are buying it because the price is going up. The price is going up because people are buying it. But I don't really see the underlying value anymore in its current form and further down the path that Core is planning to take it.
« Last Edit: November 11, 2017, 11:50 AM by Deozaan »

Deozaan

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #928 on: November 12, 2017, 11:36 AM »
This is insane!

The fastest and cheapest transaction fee is currently 950 satoshis/byte, shown in green at the top.
For the median transaction size of 226 bytes, this results in a fee of 214,700 satoshis.

It seems my hypothetical example from the other day was prophetic.

I made a transaction yesterday and paid 310 satoshi/byte which was a recommended value. But there's been such a high demand that fees have shot up and now my transaction has been stuck in limbo for about 24 hours and there's nothing I can do about it.

Meanwhile, the value of my stuck transaction is plummeting and the value of virtually everything else is going up.

The only reason the price of Bitcoin isn't crashing even faster is because no one can move their funds out of it!
« Last Edit: November 12, 2017, 04:08 PM by Deozaan »

IainB

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #929 on: November 12, 2017, 01:39 PM »
What @Deozaan writes would seem to indicate that not only do bitcoin-type assets suffer from price instability, theft/fraud, inadvertent loss (QED), but the trading mechanisms for them are also subject to episodic interruptions, rendering them temporarily illiquid at those times and potentially worthless.
So, if it's not all media "hype" against bitcoins, then we seem to have:
  • apparently not much good as a currency.
  • apparently not a safe or liquid store of value.
  • an apparently speculative/risky and costly(?) "fiduciary instrument" to trade with.
    ____________________________
Reminds me of a friend of mine who lost his shirt and his job through betting on the gee-gees, whilst all the time telling me what big wins were in the offing.

So, in the Q: "Does anyone here use Bitcoins?":
  • what exactly is the meaning and supposed purpose of "use"?
  • why have Goldman Sachs expressed an interest in bitcoins?

IainB

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #930 on: November 17, 2017, 08:33 PM »
Crikey, as if on cue, Falkvinge.net makes similar (and more perspicacious) points to mine:
What if new Google management decided that a search should cost $20, take eight hours, and be deliberately unreliable? (Bitcoin.)

Worth a read.


Deozaan

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #931 on: November 17, 2017, 10:09 PM »
The Blockstream fanboys would further point at bitcoin’s new uselessness as a sign of its success, believe it or not, drawing the analogy “nobody goes to that restaurant anymore, because it’s too crowded”, with the subtext that a crowded restaurant must be successful. But this is not success; this is utter failure to scale exponentially when you’re an Internet startup, and it spells dooooooooooom.

It's become a meme to laugh at all the "Bitcoin is dead" articles on the internet. But I think it's finally true. It has many names these days: Bitcoin, Bitcoin Legacy, Bitcoin Segwit, Bitcoin Core. Whatever you call it, it has absolutely failed as a "peer-to-peer electronic cash system."

I don't know what the Bitcoin Segwit fork is. It frustrates me. It befuddles me. I see virtually no utility for it in its current state. I mean, sure, if you're moving hundreds of thousands of dollars worth (or more) around, especially across borders, then sure I guess a $5-$70 fee to get your transaction confirmed in the next hour or so is pretty good. But for the majority of the first-world, the traditional banking system is in many ways superior, or at least as good. And for the much of the third-world, whom Bitcoin was supposed to "bank the unbanked," the fee for a single transaction now costs more than they live on in a single day. Yet for some reason the Bitcoin price keeps going up and I sure can't see why. Maybe Falkvinge is onto something about it being propped up by Tether (i.e., it has essentially become a ponzi (or--and I can't believe I'm actually saying this--tulip mania), backed by nothing, and it's gonna come crashing down hard in a few years).

And so here we are in 2017, with a bitcoin that nobody I know uses for anything practical (last time I used it for something was about six weeks ago, when I bought a burger with bitcoin, which cost me about $2.50 in transaction fees, just as much as the burger itself; at least I didn’t have to wait eight to ten hours for the burger). What’s new on the scene in 2017 is something called a US Dollar Tether.

You see, you can’t buy big quantities of bitcoin — which is more or less “Blockstream stock” at this point — directly, not in amounts of millions of US Dollars. So this thing called Tether popped up, where a company named Tether claimed to issue US Dollar Tether, where one Tether was supposed to be good for exactly one US dollar. Today, the bitcoin price (the price of something that is unreliable, slow, and expensive, and which nobody uses anymore for anything remotely practical) isn’t driven up by people buying it for US Dollars anymore, but by institutions buying it for large amounts of Tether, which is “kind-of-dollars-but-not-really-but-we-still-pretend-so”.

The company Tether insists that they have backing; every Tether has a US Dollar backing it. There has been no proof to this. There have just been regular conjurings-up of new batches of ten, twenty, thirty million Tethers — not US Dollars, but Tethers — that are spent pushing up the bitcoin price as though the Tethers were dollars, and this happens basically every time the Blockstream PR machine happens to need a little boost. Maybe the Tethers are backed by dollars on a one-to-one ratio, as is asserted and refused to be proven. Maybe they aren’t. Sure as hell doesn’t look like they are.

This whole story reeks of a lot of people going to a lot of prison in a few years.

Everybody's buying it hoping the price will go up. The price is going up because everybody's buying it. But Blockstream/Core have removed the foundation by intentionally crippling it. Adoption has stalled. Nobody really uses it for anything but speculation/trading/hodling. Maybe I lack vision, but as long as it continues down this path, I don't see how it won't come crumbling down eventually.

Bitcoin has a problem when one its most ardent supporters you know says things like this:

I don't send my friends BTC. I send fiat.

Whatever Bitcoin Segwit is, it is definitely not the Bitcoin I got obsessed with a mere 2 years ago. Bitcoin Cash, on the other hand, has me cautiously optimistic. I think is has the potential to be the David to Bitcoin Segwit's Goliath, and return Bitcoin (Cash) to what it was originally intended to be: Peer-to-peer electronic cash which you actually can (and want to) send to your friends.

But I'm not confident it can overcome the massive censorship and smear campaign(s). I'm not sure it can overcome the public perception that Bitcoin (Segwit) is the "real" Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash is just some "pump and dump altcoin" (to put it nicely).

And I'm also not sure what any variant of Bitcoin offers these days over other cryptos that haven't had development stalled for the past 2 years. I think Dash has integrated some cool features (like InstantSend, PrivateSend, and their treasury to help fund continued development). I think Ethereum is pretty interesting because you can run programs on the blockchain.

Right now, Bitcoin is the top dog in the crypto-space. There's no denying it. And it's rather telling that every other form of cryptocurrency (including the Bitcoin forks) is generally referred to as an altcoin. But innovation has continued in the cryptocurrency scene the past couple years while Bitcoin has stalled and even regressed in its usefulness, adoption, and marketshare. And I'm starting to wonder if, in another decade or so, we'll think of Bitcoin as we now think of MySpace.

wraith808

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #932 on: November 17, 2017, 10:38 PM »
Bitcoin has a problem when one its most ardent supporters you know says things like this:

Quote from: Renegade on November 11, 2017, 01:21 AM
I don't send my friends BTC. I send fiat.


That was taken horribly out of context.

I don't send my friends BTC. I send fiat. Because it's less valuable. I HODL.

In other words, he sends fiat because fiat won't go up in value.  Bitcoin will.  BTW, HODL means to hold, as many people do with stocks.
« Last Edit: November 19, 2017, 06:34 AM by wraith808 »

tomos

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #933 on: November 18, 2017, 03:58 AM »
^ quotes got a bit messed up there wraith, but point still clear.

Out-of-context quotes aside, what you write Deozaan, sounds very convincing to me.
Tom

wraith808

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #934 on: November 18, 2017, 09:19 AM »
quotes got a bit messed up there wraith, but point still clear.


We'll have to agree to disagree.  He's not sending because of the value is a very salient rebuttal to the he's not sending because of some other reason.

Renegade

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #935 on: November 18, 2017, 11:27 AM »
Heh! Seems we have a lot of disagreements on many things.

For Bitcoin Cash, I see it as just another altcoin. The 8MB blocks solve nothing. Further, code screw-ups in it have shown that the bcash team isn't up to the same level as the Bitcoin Core team.

For SegWit2x, some people tried to pull it off. Guess what? It died immediately due to show-stopping bugs. It never got off the ground. Again, solid code review is important. (It had multiple bugs, including an 'off-by-1' bug.)

So, complaints about the Bitcoin Core team being slow are very much unfounded.

One of the greatest allies of Bitcoin is Litecoin (and others too). The Litecoin team has deployed code ahead of Bitcoin in order to provide a production environment testing ground. SegWit was in Litecoin first.

Litecoin is currently proving atomic swaps (not to be confused with atomic transactions). This is a big deal.

https://www.cryptoco...at-are-atomic-swaps/

If recent news is anything to go by, the future of atomic cross-chain trading looks bright. Creator of Litecoin, Charlie Lee, successfully completed atomic swaps using Litecoin in exchange for Bitcoin, Vertcoin and Decred.

As for fees, yes, this is an issue, but give it a bit of time and that will disappear. MimbleWimble/Grin and off-chain scaling techniques will alleviate mempool bloat.

Also, keep in mind that Bitcoin has been under attack for years now, with everything from technical attacks to nation state attacks and political attacks. And it's survived all of them. Bitcoin is highly resilient. And that's in part due to the good judgement of the Bitcoin Core team.

On the topic of Ethereum...

And I'm also not sure what any variant of Bitcoin offers these days over other cryptos that haven't had development stalled for the past 2 years. I think Dash has integrated some cool features (like InstantSend, PrivateSend, and their treasury to help fund continued development). I think Ethereum is pretty interesting because you can run programs on the blockchain.


Ethereum is constantly having to have hard forks due to serious bugs.

As a currency, Bitcoin is far superior to Ethereum because it's stable. The problem is in part due to Ethereum being Turing complete, and Bitcoin being not Turing complete. This is important. The design decision to be not Turning complete was a good one, as Ethereum has shown.

That being said, Ethereum is superior to Bitcoin as a development platform. They do different things.

One to watch is NEO.

https://www.bittrex....x?MarketName=BTC-NEO

Monday should see a pop there. Not sure though. I don't have time to dig too deep. Still mulling over whether to throw some at it and see what happens.



Bitcoin has a problem when one its most ardent supporters you know says things like this:

Quote from: Renegade on November 11, 2017, 01:21 AM
I don't send my friends BTC. I send fiat.


That was taken horribly out of context.

I don't send my friends BTC. I send fiat. Because it's less valuable. I HODL.

In other words, he sends fiat because fiat won't go up in value.  Bitcoin will.  BTW, HODL means to hold, as many people do with stocks.

Yep. I like my friends, but... Nope. Keeping my BTC. They can buy BTC if they want. If I have fiat, I'll settle in fiat. Good money drives out bad. And fiat right now is the ultimate s**tcoin.


Regarding Rick Falkvinge, he's being a dishonest shill. (Yes - he's in on the bcash nonsense.) The fee issue will be resolved, but big blocks aren't the answer -- they only create further problems. If he wants free transactions, there are plenty of coins out there. This isn't about free transactions in the least.

https://cointelegrap...o-bitcoin-block-size

It seems that late in 2010, Satoshi realized there had to be a maximum block size, otherwise some miners might produce bigger blocks than other miners were willing to accept, and the chain could split. Therefore, Satoshi inserted a 1 MB limit into the code.

Rick, Roger, Jihan, and the rest of them are behaving like petulant children. Their temper tantrums over scaling aren't helping anyone. The issue is being addressed, but it's being addressed in a responsible way that takes time.

One only needs to look at the bcash and SegWit2x code failures to see just how idiotic these children have become. The bugs seen there are catastrophic. Their rush to address scaling is reckless at best.





Regarding wire transfers, I had to send money to someone again last night. It cost me less than 10% what a bank wire transfer would cost, and it was there immediately instead of taking 3-5 business days.

And, if I really need faster or cheaper payments, I can always use Monero or Dash or whatever.

But this incessant whining about Bitcoin not being X or Y or Z is silly. Bitcoin is conservative, stable, and resilient. No other coin has been attacked as viciously as Bitcoin. And that probably plays into why Bitcoin development is so cautious.

It's like people complaining that their hammers don't have Philips and Robertson screwdriver heads on them. Well... duh! That's because those tools do different things. Pick the right tool for the job. Bitching about the wrong tool not being the right tool is just silly.









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tomos

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #936 on: November 18, 2017, 01:02 PM »
quotes got a bit messed up there wraith, but point still clear.


We'll have to agree to disagree.  He's not sending because of the value is a very salient rebuttal to the he's not sending because of some other reason.
A misunderstanding there: the quote tags got mixed up in your post.
like you I don't like things to be misqouted, nor taken out of context.
Was also saying that I nevertheless found his previous post convincing.

Now to read what Ren has to say about it all :-)
Tom

Renegade

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #937 on: November 18, 2017, 11:46 PM »
I just sent a transaction through at the maximum priority level for $4 CAD. Yes, that's a fair amount to spend, but it will arrive sooner than a wire transfer, for less, and a normal transfer of any amount in Canada cost $1.50 anyways.

So, I paid $2.50 over what an insecure, shitty, primitive system based on email would cost me. (Interac in Canada is a minimum of $1.50 per transfer.)

And guess what? I regularly have to wait HOURS for direct transfers here in Canada.

Canada is worse than the third world (I've lived there and banked there and have bank accounts there). Canada is the asshole of the banking world. It sucks. More than I can possibly say.

How much do most people spend in banking fees for their transactions? $4 a month is normal here in Canada for a small number of transactions.

I still hate paying fees, but I still pay less than with the traditional banking system when I use Bitcoin.




Consider this... When you go out for dinner with your family and spent $100, $2.50 of that is transaction fees for credit cards.
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Stoic Joker

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #938 on: November 20, 2017, 01:21 PM »
Thought this might be interesting to some: Successful completion of the first off-chain atomic swap.


Hay, does anybody know how the hell you're supposed to get the BCH from the BTC fork back in August?? I had some coin in an old Multibit wallet back then, but I gots no clue on how to jump the fork (for lack of a better/correct term) with it..

Renegade

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #939 on: November 20, 2017, 05:02 PM »
Hay, does anybody know how the hell you're supposed to get the BCH from the BTC fork back in August?? I had some coin in an old Multibit wallet back then, but I gots no clue on how to jump the fork (for lack of a better/correct term) with it..

It's pretty easy. However, make sure that you are very careful with your private keys, as if anyone sees them, all your coins are GONE.

This is the SHORT version. I recommend doing a search to find out how to do the steps you're unsure of.

1. Find which addresses have coins in your Bitcoin wallet.
2. Export the private keys for those addresses.
3. Transfer all your coins from your Bitcoin wallet to a new address (this is a paranoia step that should be followed - it aims to prevent a replay attack).
4. In your new bcash wallet, import your private keys and you'll see the coins appear in your wallet.

Thought this might be interesting to some: Successful completion of the first off-chain atomic swap.

This is a much bigger deal than I think most people realise.
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Renegade

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #940 on: November 20, 2017, 05:55 PM »
I should also mention that for some wallets, if you upgrade them, you can automatically get your bcash.
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Stoic Joker

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #941 on: November 21, 2017, 06:12 AM »
However, make sure that you are very careful with your private keys, as if anyone sees them, all your coins are GONE

In what context are we using "see"? IRL Shoulder Surfing/Trojan upload, or potential exposure on the chain during the transaction?


Hay, did I mention it's great to see you back? :D

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #942 on: November 25, 2017, 05:21 PM »

Arizona Hot

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #943 on: November 28, 2017, 03:31 PM »

Deozaan

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #944 on: December 07, 2017, 02:57 AM »
Bitcoin has a problem when one its most ardent supporters you know says things like this:

Quote from: Renegade on November 11, 2017, 01:21 AM
I don't send my friends BTC. I send fiat.


That was taken horribly out of context.

That was not my intent. Yet I disagree. I felt that I included as much context as was necessary. But maybe I didn't make my point clearly enough.

You used to be able to send your friends BTC and then immediately buy more BTC (with fiat) to replace what you sent, for sub-cent fees (plus a small percentage cut taken by the exchange). Now, ardent supporters of Bitcoin are telling people to use fiat, PayPal, or other cryptocurrencies if they don't like the BTC fees. No other context was necessary to illustrate how broken BTC has become.

You can pretend that the reason you don't want to spend it is because it's going to go up in value, but that's just silly. The reason you don't want to spend it is because it costs too much to do so (and by extension, it costs too much to replenish what you've spent).

It doesn't matter how much BTC might increase in value. If it was usable, like it used to be, you'd still send it to your friends and just keep buying more. You were going to spend that fiat anyway, right? Why send someone $5 USD when you could buy $5 worth of BTC first (or after) and send it to them? If BTC increases in value, then you'd enrich yourself and others. And that friend who you sent $5 worth of BTC who now has $15 worth of BTC is now a true believer who will encourage use and adoption even further. But no, we've got BTC hodlers hodling like they've never hedl before, meanwhile driving others away from BTC and discouraging its use. It's bonkers.

It wasn't a misinterpreted, misleading, or out-of-context twisting of a position. It's a realistic representation of their actual words and behavior:

And, if I really need faster or cheaper payments, I can always use Monero or Dash or whatever.

It's puzzling.

If you're not sending your friends BTC, but instead encouraging the use of fiat or other cryptocurrencies as a payment solution for virtually any reason, then you're actively discouraging the use and adoption of Bitcoin. People who think they are Bitcoin supporters whose actions are actually discouraging Bitcoin adoption should be met with skepticism.

On a related note: You should skeptical of anyone who refers to Bitcoin Cash as "bcash" because there are pretty much only two kinds of people who do that: 1) Troublemakers who are not acting in good faith, and 2) ignorant folks who don't know any better but whose opinions have been shaped by the aforementioned troublemakers.

The only reason to call it "bcash" is to try to intentionally remove "Bitcoin" from the name and confuse people into thinking it is an altcoin instead of a legitimate continuation of the original Bitcoin blockchain. Even Gavin Andresen, the man who Satoshi Nakamoto himself handed the reins over to when he left Bitcoin development and disappeared, says Bitcoin Cash is more aligned with the original Bitcoin he began working on years ago than the current Bitcoin Core is.

Why are so many people insistent on calling it "bcash"? Why are so many people petitioning (harassing) exchanges and other popular websites to call it "bcash"? Where's the outcry for other forks, like Bitcoin Gold, to be called "bgold"?

Instead of arguing about the merits of the technology, we instead see namecalling, mudslinging, misinformation campaigns, censorship, character assassinations, etc. I'm really surprised to see Renegade supporting and perpetuating that kind of behavior.

I don't know what happened to Renegade. He used to actually be a renegade who questioned authority and advocated for freedom, but the information in some of his recent posts is "toeing the party line" of would-be dictators, censors, authoritarians, and usurpers. There are outright falsehoods in some of his statements (e.g., "Ethereum is constantly having to have hard forks due to serious bugs."), and while he is entitled to his disdainful opinions about Bitcoin Cash--indeed he has never been one to hide his mockery of things he dislikes--it isn't like him, at least not in my experience, to outright lie about things.

So far his rebuttals to prominent Bitcoin Cash supporters is to attack their character while presenting a strawman misrepresentation of their positions:

Regarding Rick Falkvinge, he's being a dishonest shill. [...] If he wants free transactions, there are plenty of coins out there.

[...]

Rick, Roger, Jihan, and the rest of them are behaving like petulant children. Their temper tantrums over scaling aren't helping anyone.

Both Rick Falkvinge and Roger Ver are people who Renegade has linked to videos of in this very thread, exclaiming (in essence) how their ideas about Bitcoin were right on the money and implicitly endorsing them/their ideas.

What changed? To the best of my knowledge, Roger's ideas about and passion for Bitcoin haven't changed. Rick's ideas about Bitcoin haven't changed. How come in the past they were considered noble and worthwhile, but now they're considered dishonest shills and petulant children? What changed?

It's puzzling.

Why does Renegade keep saying that Bitcoin is stable? Real-world data suggests otherwise. In the past month, Bitcoin's price has almost tripled (~$5,500 to ~$14,500), which is cool and all, but not what I would call stable. Fees have been all over the place (~180 sat/byte to ~900 sat/byte or more), confirmation times have been all over the place. And for a real world example of this instability causing a regression in Bitcoin adoption, Steam just stopped accepting Bitcoin (emphasis added on relevant parts):
As of today, Steam will no longer support Bitcoin as a payment method on our platform due to high fees and volatility in the value of Bitcoin.

In the past few months we've seen an increase in the volatility in the value of Bitcoin and a significant increase in the fees to process transactions on the Bitcoin network. For example, transaction fees that are charged to the customer by the Bitcoin network have skyrocketed this year, topping out at close to $20 a transaction last week (compared to roughly $0.20 when we initially enabled Bitcoin). Unfortunately, Valve has no control over the amount of the fee. These fees result in unreasonably high costs for purchasing games when paying with Bitcoin. The high transaction fees cause even greater problems when the value of Bitcoin itself drops dramatically.

Historically, the value of Bitcoin has been volatile, but the degree of volatility has become extreme in the last few months, losing as much as 25% in value over a period of days.
This creates a problem for customers trying to purchase games with Bitcoin. When checking out on Steam, a customer will transfer x amount of Bitcoin for the cost of the game, plus y amount of Bitcoin to cover the transaction fee charged by the Bitcoin network. The value of Bitcoin is only guaranteed for a certain period of time so if the transaction doesn’t complete within that window of time, then the amount of Bitcoin needed to cover the transaction can change. The amount it can change has been increasing recently to a point where it can be significantly different.

The normal resolution for this is to either refund the original payment to the user, or ask the user to transfer additional funds to cover the remaining balance. In both these cases, the user is hit with the Bitcoin network transaction fee again. This year, we’ve seen increasing number of customers get into this state. With the transaction fee being so high right now, it is not feasible to refund or ask the customer to transfer the missing balance (which itself runs the risk of underpayment again, depending on how much the value of Bitcoin changes while the Bitcoin network processes the additional transfer).

At this point, it has become untenable to support Bitcoin as a payment option. We may re-evaluate whether Bitcoin makes sense for us and for the Steam community at a later date.

We will continue working to resolve any pending issues for customers who are impacted by existing underpayments or transaction fees.

He claims show-stopping, "catastrophic" bugs killed Segwit2X and severely hampered Bitcoin Cash. What are those bugs? I haven't heard of them. I was under the impression that Segwit2X was canceled (not because of bugs, but to prevent disunity in the community) and (virtually) nobody actually tried activating it. I haven't heard of any major bugs in Bitcoin Cash.

He keeps claiming that he's able to send funds with a "low" fee (which is still much too high, IMO) but real-world data suggests fees are currently about $5.70 on average, at current prices, if you want your transaction to go through in a timely manner. It's not that I doubt he's able to send transactions for the lower fees like he claims. It's that it doesn't represent the experience for the average Bitcoin user. And isn't he the one who keeps trying to tell us not to think of BTC in terms of fiat? Yet here he is finally admitting that his $4 CAD fee is kinda high but at least it's better (in some ways) than the fiat system.

I just sent a transaction through at the maximum priority level for $4 CAD. Yes, that's a fair amount to spend, but it will arrive sooner than a wire transfer, for less, and a normal transfer of any amount in Canada cost $1.50 anyways.

So how about we compare the BTC of today to the BTC of just two years ago? You used to be able to send BTC transactions for about a penny or less, and have your payment confirmed in the next block or two. Now it's not unusual for the fee to be in the $5-$20 USD range, and who knows if it will be included in the next block or in a block 16 hours from now. Yes, it's possible to get lucky (or just wait a very long time, or both) and pay less. It's also possible to pay much more. You could make the argument that the price of Bitcoin has gone up so much in that time (from about $350 when I first got into it 2 years ago to about $14,500 today), so it's natural for the value of fees in terms of USD to go up as well. But if that were the case, we'd still be paying only around 5 satoshis per byte, and fees would still only be about $0.15 even at current prices. The only reason for the high fees we're seeing today is because the blocks are full and the developers who have any say in Bitcoin Core refuse to allow a simple change of a 1 to a 2 (or 8, or 32, or whatever) in the code, and (implicitly if not explicitly) engage in censorship and character assassination of anyone who promotes such an idea. That is, they refuse to allow the blocksize limit to be increased from 1MB to anything larger. Larger blocks may not be the solution for all eternity, but they'd definitely reduce fees immediately and allow adoption to resume/increase while the 2nd layer solutions (lightning/side-chains) finish research and development and gain wider adoption. And if Lightning is to gain widespread adoption in the next 18 months, then allowing larger blocks shouldn't result in a catastrophic increase in the blockchain's storage, but would allow fees to come down and confirmation times to stabilize, making it realistic for companies like Valve to continue to accept Bitcoin.

Basically I just don't see how you go from, "Bitcoin is awesome! You can send it anywhere, to anyone, at any time, almost instantly, for virtually free!" to "Bitcoin is awesome! But I'm gonna use fiat to pay you. And you should use Dash or Monero if you want to use a cryptocurrency that's actually functional. Or use PayPal if you want to accept payments."

It's puzzling.

And just to be clear: I'm kind of sick of all forms of Bitcoin at this point. I see Bitcoin Cash as being the closest thing to the original vision and roadmap for Bitcoin as outlined in Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper. And I'm disgusted by the tactics used by Bitcoin Core / Blockstream and their supporters to shape the narrative and censor opposing viewpoints. And I'm frustrated by Bitcoin's slow and/or expensive transactions.

I'm not really here to push for Bitcoin Cash. I just get the feeling that people here look to Renegade as a knowledgeable and authoritative source of factual information about Bitcoin, and felt I had to point out that if you weren't already, you should be skeptical of what he says because some of it is not true. You should be skeptical of what I say, too, and do your own research. I'm certainly no expert. That said, when I first got into Bitcoin and cryptocurrency two years ago, I dove pretty deeply into the rabbit hole, even going so far as recreating my own proof of work algorithm, and have been following BTC and (some) other cryptocurrencies fairly closely ever since. So I happen to know a thing or two, and can say for a fact that Renegade has told some falsehoods in his recent posts. But again, my intention isn't to say that you should take my word for it.

And also, to be clear, I'm not trying to say that Renegade is a liar who can't be trusted at all about anything. In fact, the information he gave on how to access your Bitcoin Cash funds was spot on :Thmbsup:. I still deeply respect him and his opinion on most things. But I've learned recently that, at least on the topic of Bitcoin (and cryptos), I need to be skeptical about his matter-of-fact statements. Maybe he's just so passionate about it that he is stating his opinion as if it were fact. I don't know. I'm confused by his repeated statements that seem to contradict both my personal experience and my knowledge of certain objective, verifiable facts. Mostly, I'm puzzled by what seems to be so out of character for him.

I'm very strongly considering getting entirely out of Bitcoin and its variants, mostly because it doesn't make sense anymore. It still has the majority of the network (for now) but it no longer excites or even interests me as a technology or as a currency. I can't say one way or another whether or not that's good a good financial decision. Past results would indicate that it's probably not. But I personally see no value in Bitcoin Core as a technology; there are other cryptocurrencies that can do everything Bitcoin (any of its variants) does and more, and they do it better, faster, and cheaper. And without any merit as a technology (at least none that isn't done better by others), I can't understand why it seems to be valued so highly.

It's puzzling.
« Last Edit: December 07, 2017, 03:08 AM by Deozaan »

tomos

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #945 on: December 07, 2017, 02:14 PM »
^ thanks for that post Deozaan.
It's odd how it's been increasing so much in price in the last while. I've always been hoping that something really creative was happening, or going to happen, with Bitcoin. Seems to me like it might 'simply' be people-relations that are getting in the way of that.
Tom

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #946 on: December 07, 2017, 02:50 PM »
I still disagree with your assertion and that you quoted enough context, but I do get what you meant a bit more.

I think a lot of it depends on your personal reasons for using Bitcoin, your tolerance for paying for Bitcoins success, and how much you think Bitcoins success should be organuc. Deo, you seem to be on the side that this should be a currency to take a large chunk out of the use of fiat. Renegade seems to be on the side of making money. Unless there is a way to lump the transactions together so there is no chance of volatility entering into the transaction, youre taking a chance that by the time you replace your Bitcoins you've lost money or given the receiver not just tge amount owed, but a windfall.

Arizona Hot

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #947 on: December 10, 2017, 01:01 AM »
Conclusion
Crypto currencies, with bitcoin and ether leading the pack, have succeeded in financial markets by attracting investors, and in the public discourse by garnering attention, but they have not succeeded (yet) as currencies. I believe that there will be one or more digital currencies competing with fiat currencies for transactions, sooner rather than later, but I am hard pressed to find a winner on the current list, right now, but that could change if the proponents and designers of one of the currencies starts thinking less about it as a speculative asset and more as a transaction medium, and acting accordingly. If that does not happen, we will have to wait for a fresh entrant and the most enduring part of this phase in markets may be the block chain and not the currencies themselves.

The Crypto Currency Debate: Future of Money or Speculative Hype?

Stoic Joker

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #948 on: December 13, 2017, 01:51 PM »
Christ my luck is shit these days... Just found out that the Multibit BTC wallet has been killed off - And my current Multibit wallet has become seriously unstable. So...

With the need for importing/exporting private keys and such...(BCH stuff)...what is a good Windows desktop wallet to use these days??

Deozaan

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Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
« Reply #949 on: December 13, 2017, 04:52 PM »
If you're going for BCH, then I had success claiming my BCH after the split with the Electron Cash Wallet.

If you're wanting a software wallet which supports both BTC and BCH then... I don't have an answer for you. I recently got a hardware wallet which supports both BTC and BCH, so that's what I've been using.