Live data from Hacker News

BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

blog.bitpay.com

91–100 of 226 posts

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#91
post #45
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the community didn't reject Segwit2x, it would have been much, much worse.

Not if the core devs had implemented it.

Neither the community nor the core devs wanted 2x in the first place. That's why the original pre-segwit 2x fork didn't work; then BCH was created as a protest; and then (for some reason) the same group of people tried to push Segwit2x to get 2x into BTC yet again.

The last one (Segwit2X) had it's reference nodes so poorly coded that the mining nodes didn't even manage to mine their first block; due to 3 separate off by one errors that even basic testing would have revealed. Shoddy coding like that is yet another reason why the core devs (and the community) wanted nothing to do with the 2x team. And given how it took them months to fix BCH's difficulty algorithm, I'm not really convinced that they've improved.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#92
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only accept solutions that don't affect decentralization.

2 MB blocks (Bitcoin Classic) don't affect decentralization, if you support SegWit. SegWit blocks can be 4 MB, and that is 4 MB of data that has to be transmitted over the wire and stored unless you weaken your security model. In fact, SegWit negatively affects decentralization because it is much harder to build and maintain your wallet because of all of the complexity of SegWit, pushing people to crowd around existi…

That's why it was such a compromise. In order to get the massive decentralization and privacy boost of the malleability fix that segwit provided, the blocksize increase was included to give the increase that the classic hard-fork suggested. And it was done as a soft-fork too, which means none of the 160,000+ bitcoin nodes needed to upgrade their software.

And what happened? After they got exactly what they wanted with the doubling of capacity, they said "we want more" which demonstrated the entire exercise had nothing to do with blocksize, but about stealing the blockchain away from its users, and centralizing it in their data-centers. Which is why, months after the segwit implementation, the biggest and loudest people clamouring for a capacity increase for years, which includes bitpay, the subject of this thread, and coinbase, which has been an actively undermining the bitcoin developers for years, have not even implemented the blocksize increase. So much for blocksize being important.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#93
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bcash It’s Bitcoin Cash. You’re just making the community look like a cult.

It's bcash. From /r/bitcoin: >Starting a new company called Apple Unlimited! Please don't confuse this with our competitor, Apple. We did "borrow" all of their code, but we claim to follow the wishes of the great Steve Jobs, because the new guys that took over are ruining everything and censoring everyone!

Bitcoin Cash is closer to original Bitcoin than Bitcoin Core. What makes one more worthy of the name than the other? Both are forks.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#94
Finally. I think the bigger companies are starting to realize that bitcoin cash is taking over the smaller payments. Payments on bitcoin cash right now are under 1 penny and confirm in less than 10 minutes. Try it out for yourself, it is pretty amazing really.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#95
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's bcash. From /r/bitcoin: >Starting a new company called Apple Unlimited! Please don't confuse this with our competitor, Apple. We did "borrow" all of their code, but we claim to follow the wishes of the great Steve Jobs, because the new guys that took over are ruining everything and censoring everyone!

Bitcoin Cash is closer to original Bitcoin than Bitcoin Core. What makes one more worthy of the name than the other? Both are forks.

You can still run a 0.8 node on the bitcoin network if you are so inclined, because changes have been implemented via soft-forks. Bcash is a hard-fork of bitcoin. It is not bitcoin, or you would be able to use your existing wallets with it.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#96

Finally. I think the bigger companies are starting to realize that bitcoin cash is taking over the smaller payments. Payments on bitcoin cash right now are under 1 penny and confirm in less than 10 minutes. Try it out for yourself, it is pretty amazing really.

bcash handles a fraction of the transactions of either bitcoin or litecoin. If you want a cheap option, litecoin is great. It's been around for years, and isn't controlled by the chinese government. In bcash, the nodes, the developers, the miners, and now the payment processor, are all owned by the same chinese company.

Currently litecoin is processing about four times the transaction count of bcash. They also have a block creation time of 1/4 of the time (2.5 minutes) to bcash or bitcoin (10 minutes), so if speed of confirmation is an issue for you, then they might meet your use-case. It obviously doesn't have the decentralization of bitcoin, but at least it isn't controlled by a single chinese company.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#97
post #28
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that Segwit2x would have been good for BTC, it ultimately only kicks the can down the road a little bit. If BTC (or BCH) is going to be used at Visa/Mastercard scale then the transactions need to happen off-chain. The Lightning Network is the answer here, a lot of work still needs to be done though, particularly on the software side.

This is the major (technical - plenty of political issues) problem I have with Bcash. It’s cheap and fast because transaction volumes, and price, are 10% of BTC, yet blocks are 1.5x the size (roughly, looking at a block explorer). As soon as they fill up, they’ll have the exact same problems down the line. Increasing the block size doesn’t scale long term and is a bandaid solution at best. BTC was fast and cheap when…

Everything is relative. The significant part is that increasing the block size steadily can scale to huge transaction volumes. Visa level transaction levels of around 2,000 TPS can be achieved with block size increases and higher end computer hardware. If we are talking visa level transaction volumes then the user base has to be at least 500 million users. If the userbase is that large then think of how many people would be willing to run full nodes. Not everyone but probably 10,000+. The current crypto ecosystem is probably a few million people across all coins.

Also it is important to note that BTC could be like BCH at higher transaction levels if they increased the block size but that won't because of this lightning network idea. Which is what I don't get. You can increase the block size right NOW and work on the lightning network as well. Yet, they don't do that because the lightning network is everything and any other solution is not even considered.

I used to also think that bigger blocks were always bad but that is simply not true. The original block size limit was purely implemented to stop spam when bitcoin's userbase was very low. Satoshi actually wanted to implement bigger blocks as the userbase grew. Bigger blocks is the not the long-term solution but it is a solution that we have right now that works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SJm2ep3X_M

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#98
post #86
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do some people call Bitcoin Cash "Bcash?" It seems to accompany critical statements. I'll assume you're not doing it to save 6 letters, because later you refer to Bitcoin as BTC. You could have saved more letters by referring to Bitcion Cash at BCH. Is this a campaign to rebrand Bitcoin Cash as something other than a Bitcoin fork?

It's more a reaction to Bitcoin Cash officially insisting that it's the "real" bitcoin, and trying to actively misleading users by referring to BTC as "Bitcoin Core", creating a false parity to make it seem like they're both equal "forks" that bitcoin split into. I've tried to refer to them using the less loaded "BTC" and "BCH" symbols instead; but it's kindof getting tiring, hearing people insist "Bitcoin Cash is Sa…

The difference is that you have to look at the attributes of each coin and see which one most likely reflects the white paper that satoshi himself wrote. He is talking about a P2P cash system, not a P2P gold system.

Just because the first generation of bitcoin was the beginning doesn't mean it still reflects the original vision.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#99
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could start using 'Side chains' today you might as well just create a bitcoin bank where everyone has an account hmmm hmm i mean a channel and all transactions can happen on your bank network and not on the blockchain. See i solved the problem. But first i need to convince everyone to use my side network, sooo if the main blockchain is like a stream what i need is for this stream to be blocked so that i can channe…

There is nothing stopping you creating your own super duper side chain if you think you have a better solution. It is open source after all.

Yeah we already did, it is called bitcoin cash lol and it works. The hell with bitcoin's high fees, never again.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#100
post #22
post #7

This was foreseeable when Bitcoin Core rejected Segwit2x. BitPay's business model simply fails unless the blockchain can scale much more than Segwit alone achieves, very soon.

While I agree that Segwit2x would have been good for BTC, it ultimately only kicks the can down the road a little bit. If BTC (or BCH) is going to be used at Visa/Mastercard scale then the transactions need to happen off-chain. The Lightning Network is the answer here, a lot of work still needs to be done though, particularly on the software side.

It only kicks the can until you scale the remaining components to where it can scale:

- the whitepaper itself solved the storage problem with old transaction pruning.

- The block propagation and validation bandwidth requirements can be brought down 90%+ by canonically ordering transactions, memoizing transaction validation, and propagating only the block header and metadata.

- the inefficiencies in the actual code are being worked out by Bitcoin unlimited's gigablock project among others.

Post reply on HN