Well... BTC is certainly taking a Red Candle ride through the freaking floor now..
Topic: Does anyone here use Bitcoins? (Read 854,854 times)
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?
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.
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.
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
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...)
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't send my friends BTC. I send fiat.
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.
I don't send my friends BTC. I send fiat. Because it's less valuable. I HODL.
quotes got a bit messed up there wraith, but point still clear.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A misunderstanding there: the quote tags got mixed up in your post.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.
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..
Thought this might be interesting to some: Successful completion of the first off-chain atomic swap.
However, make sure that you are very careful with your private keys, as if anyone sees them, all your coins are GONE
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.
And, if I really need faster or cheaper payments, I can always use Monero or Dash or whatever.
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.
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.
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.
. 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.
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.
Original address: https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=32392.0
