31–40 of 128 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coinbase can't print money.
Banks can't print money either, and this isn't some "ackshually it's the Mint" thing: banks have the power to create debt. But this isn't special, because you and I also have the power to create debt. What makes a bank special is that debt is its business (so most of its operation concerns the management of debt), and much of its debt can be called on demand, and so we call banks' debts to us demand deposits. Fractio…
The high transaction fees are forcing Bitcoin in this direction. If buying a hamburger cost you $30 in fees on top of the $6 burger, you'd stop using dollars for everyday purchases, too. Seems we're stuck in this situation so long as the block size remains where it is. That artificially reduces the supply of transactions, forcing the price up. No matter how many miners there are competing for those transaction fees,…
The Lightning Network is meant to address this: https://lightning.network/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes: that it's not universally accepted (yet?) and highly volatile.
Do you mean universally accepted as payment for goods? The fact that it takes an hour+ for one transaction to be confirmed (i.e. behind ~6 blocks) seems like a huge UX problem for buyers/sellers. If I'm going to use bitcoin to buy a TV, I'm not going to wait around an hour for the merchant to say I'm good to go. And transaction fees are so high now that it makes no sense to use bitcoin for small transactions. Other i…
You want the high certainty on large sums, For small payments you could easily just take the hit on the tiny (if any, in-reality given the minimal reward for effort of fraud) transactions that don't go through.
The issue of transaction charges is a growth pain. When Bitcoin came on the scene, It was expected that the future incarnations of the protocol would handle vastly larger numbers of transactions, that view hasn't really changed. The only issue has been on the time-frame of the expansion. If anything that can be considered as being too successful. It's a little system that might be a big system one day, but people anticipating the future state of the big system is causing strain.
It will be interesting to see where things stand 30 years from now.
The high transaction fees are forcing Bitcoin in this direction. If buying a hamburger cost you $30 in fees on top of the $6 burger, you'd stop using dollars for everyday purchases, too. Seems we're stuck in this situation so long as the block size remains where it is. That artificially reduces the supply of transactions, forcing the price up. No matter how many miners there are competing for those transaction fees,…
The Lightning Network is meant to address this: https://lightning.network/
https://medium.com/@lightning_network/lightning-protocol-1-0...
It's not Wall Street's fault or whatever boogie man's fault that the Bitcoin tech doesn't actually work as some idealistic libertarian creator imagined it would; the fault is in Bitcoin's design itself. Even if the price wasn't fluctuating like crazy it simply doesn't work well as a currency due to technical limitations (eg, the time and cost it takes to process a transaction in the real world has always been impract…
I feel like it's a parable about lofty libertarian ideals -- everything's peachy until there's large sums of money involved. Bitcoin is fixable but now there's a financial incentive for never fixing it.
To me, it's a parable about the danger of following a pseudo-philosopher with no academic credibility and whose relevant oeuvre is fictional literature and not reading what Adam "Greed Is Good" Smith actually wrote about free markets AKA unregulated capitalism, which was that an economical system of people acting in their self-interest ends up promoting a greater economical and moral good for everyone but only as long as there are significant safeguards against abuse, but that's just my opinion.
The high transaction fees are forcing Bitcoin in this direction. If buying a hamburger cost you $30 in fees on top of the $6 burger, you'd stop using dollars for everyday purchases, too. Seems we're stuck in this situation so long as the block size remains where it is. That artificially reduces the supply of transactions, forcing the price up. No matter how many miners there are competing for those transaction fees,…
The Lightning Network is meant to address this: https://lightning.network/
Start fresh.
Early adopters of BTC are trying to con new users into buying coins produced for minimal capital/computational work. The flaw in BTC is inherent to the malicious minting algorithm designed to harm new users.
There's other cryptocurrencies who are far out pacing the BTC core team.
It's not Wall Street's fault or whatever boogie man's fault that the Bitcoin tech doesn't actually work as some idealistic libertarian creator imagined it would; the fault is in Bitcoin's design itself. Even if the price wasn't fluctuating like crazy it simply doesn't work well as a currency due to technical limitations (eg, the time and cost it takes to process a transaction in the real world has always been impract…
The fact that the majority of people only trade/hold bitcoin to exchange for centralized currency i.e. USD tells you something, no?