Crypto Currencies

[phycokiller]

8 hours ago, lkn said:

The example with a four hour disconnect between Asia and Europe might be an unlikely event, but otherwise my post was an objective description of the problems that bitcoin has to solve.

 

This was in response to your statement that bitcoin will be easier and cheaper than fiat in the future, which I call counterintuitive because of the problems outlined.

 

You may say it works fairly well in practice, but it will nonetheless always be handicapped compared to electronic money based on a system with trust, i.e. where we can have a clearing authority rather than have to use distributed consensus algorithms.

 

As for “Most of these things arent happening in practice”: They are! These are factual numbers I gave, and it’s actually closer to best-case. Where were you a few weeks ago when average transaction fee was $55 and delays were measured in days?

 

And:  “in fact it works pretty well, its ease of use is part of the reason it has become so popular for speculation.”: No, it’s original deflationary nature made it a target for speculation, there is virtually no-one using bitcoin for actual transactions these days, even many darknet exchanges have abandoned it, and bitcoin.org removed cheap and fast transactions from the description.

 

I dont think you are right about fees, the thing is if you are paying a premium as $55 it would be for a fast transfer, I never saw it get that high, its about $2 now but you can pay less if you dont mind waiting a few hours or a day, its predictable and should be made easier to calculate in wallets and a $2 fee is still too high altho fine if you are transferring thousands. I dont think you are right about the darkmarkets either, that accounts for millions a day  and growing altho probably a small portion of the total and it might change to another coin eventually, monaro perhaps

 

[lkn]

3 hours ago, phycokiller said:

I dont think you are right about fees, the thing is if you are paying a premium as $55 it would be for a fast transfer, I never saw it get that high, its about $2 now but you can pay less if you dont mind waiting a few hours or a day, its predictable and should be made easier to calculate in wallets and a $2 fee is still too high altho fine if you are transferring thousands. I dont think you are right about the darkmarkets either, that accounts for millions a day  and growing altho probably a small portion of the total and it might change to another coin eventually, monaro perhaps

For fees, you can’t deny that 7 transactions per second is a major bottleneck, nor that the system is so that the higher fee you pay, the faster your transaction will be picked up by a miner, hence the more popular the system gets, the higher the fee you’ll have to pay to get your transaction through, and fees are actually not that predictable, as there are many mempools and each one works as an auction.

 

As for you thinking I am wrong regarding DarkNet, there are even bitcoin conferences not accepting bitcoins, both for tickets and merchants sold at the conference:

 

 

[phycokiller]

3 hours ago, lkn said:

For fees, you can’t deny that 7 transactions per second is a major bottleneck, nor that the system is so that the higher fee you pay, the faster your transaction will be picked up by a miner, hence the more popular the system gets, the higher the fee you’ll have to pay to get your transaction through, and fees are actually not that predictable, as there are many mempools and each one works as an auction.

 

As for you thinking I am wrong regarding DarkNet, there are even bitcoin conferences not accepting bitcoins, both for tickets and merchants sold at the conference:

 

as far as fees go competition works both ways so fees could just as well go down, as well as things like lightning network coming in. you can check how long a transaction will take when you make it, always been accurate enough for me. as far as darknet markets they have grown hugely since silkroad days and continue to grow, as far as I know the majority of trades are still done using bitcoin but whatever they all use cryptos

[lkn]

24 minutes ago, phycokiller said:

as far as fees go competition works both ways so fees could just as well go down

You seem to ignore the technical limitations of bitcoin.

 

When you only have 7 transactions per second, there is limited capacity, and no matter how many more miners you add, this won’t change.

 

In fact, if you add more miners, it means more people compete about clearing transactions (producing blocks). As you may know, creating a block gives you a reward (of currently 12.5 bitcoins). If the number of miners (total hash rate) doubles, it means your chance of getting 12.5 bitcoins (for producing a block with transactions) is cut in halve, and if you’re running a break-even mining operation, it means you need to double your fees to break-even.