71–80 of 149 posts
People who actually use bitcoin must be ignorant of all the much more usable and useful alt-coins. Can anyone think of a good reason to actually use bitcoin vs. ripple/stellar/dash/zcash/monero/nem/...? Maybe it's just cause so many platforms have been built around bitcoin?
Because your drug dealer only accepts bitcoin? Does anyone else actually use it? Other than as a get rich quick scheme?
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Most wallets allow you get out of this situation with a clever feature. What you do is raise the insufficient fee after the fact by issuing a new transaction that is dependent on the first one, and adding a large enough fee to the second one. This is known as "child pays for parent" in BTC lingo. That being said, the fee for a good transaction now is around $22 so it might not be worth doing for your $50 send.
Where does this $22 go? What hard ware do I need to set up my own machine to process these transactions and get the fees to keep?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most wallets allow you get out of this situation with a clever feature. What you do is raise the insufficient fee after the fact by issuing a new transaction that is dependent on the first one, and adding a large enough fee to the second one. This is known as "child pays for parent" in BTC lingo. That being said, the fee for a good transaction now is around $22 so it might not be worth doing for your $50 send.
Where does this $22 go? What hard ware do I need to set up my own machine to process these transactions and get the fees to keep?
You'll probably find it's not worth it...
People who actually use bitcoin must be ignorant of all the much more usable and useful alt-coins. Can anyone think of a good reason to actually use bitcoin vs. ripple/stellar/dash/zcash/monero/nem/...? Maybe it's just cause so many platforms have been built around bitcoin?
Because your drug dealer only accepts bitcoin? Does anyone else actually use it? Other than as a get rich quick scheme?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of the coins mentioned above can scale to become a mainstream currency. They're just the most hyped ones. Blockchain-based coins are hard to scale. The most scalable ones at the moment use a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) instead of a blockchain. I think that IOTA and Byteball (both DAGs) are the most advanced at the moment in terms of scalability. In the long term, Ethereum may have potential if they manage to im…
Last I heard, IOTA had collapsed under the load of all the transactions from speculators, with people complaining it took days to get transactions to confirm. A blog post about this even made it to HN a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15944112 (As far as I can tell it took a much lower transaction volume than the Bitcoin one to cause this too, though there doesn't seem to be that much in the way of…
I'm sure that IOTA still has issues but I think that the core DAG/tangle concept is sound. Unlike with most other tokens, these problems should be relatively easy to fix... My bet is that it's much easier to scale a DAG than a Blockchain. But I'm sure that some blockchain-based tokens will also scale eventually.
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Craigslist now allows people to mark their posts as crypto-friendly. Anyone who accepts Bitcoin runs into the problem where others can know their balance by looking up the address (and thus could be at risk for theft/mugging). If people want to keep their balances private and not share their transaction history (or later transactions), they should use a coin that's private by default such as Monero. Additionally, Mon…
You should create a different address for each post on Craigslist. It is pretty easy and prevents this problem. If you have a website and have an address displayed for donations, then you will get multiple donations to the same address. With any one-off just make a new address in your wallet. (I use bitcoin core wallet. Not sure how others work.)
You'll notice the entire Bitcoin community has changed tone. It used to be "this is the currency of the future, down with cash/Visa!" but now you hear "Bitcoin is not a currency, it's a store of value". The wild price swings, slow transactions, high fees, and loq merchant acceptance make it complete garbage as a currency. But as a store of value, none of those arguments apply. It only has to compete with gold bars, w…
You'll notice the entire Bitcoin community has changed tone. It used to be "this is the currency of the future, down with cash/Visa!" but now you hear "Bitcoin is not a currency, it's a store of value". The wild price swings, slow transactions, high fees, and loq merchant acceptance make it complete garbage as a currency. But as a store of value, none of those arguments apply. It only has to compete with gold bars, w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> much more usable and useful alt-coins I agree. I researched Ripple a lot and am sold on it, since it's not just a crytocurrency (XRP Ticker) but is also a protocol that Gates Foundation, AMEX and other banks are using to perform cross-border payments almost instantly and with a lot lower fees and overheads. Are any of the others you mentioned, ex : stellar, dash, monero etc similar to Ripple? If not, what are their…
Ripple is a pre mined token that has central control. It's not really comparable to Bitcoin.