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Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

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Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#61

Post by JumpCrisscross »

redorb wrote: post #55
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Currently, to send money between two people in the US, it takes 3 business days, typically costs some transaction fee, and is limited to the range of the border. It is slow, expensive, and local. I received funds via Fedwire today. It took about five minutes. Both sides’ banks waived fees on account of our account balances.

Why not paypal accounts with paypal debit cards? .. paypal can credit instantly and the card pulls to cash. How about western union? I don't think crypto coins or their blockchains solve billion dollar problems. I'd guess VC's have bet almost a trillion and the public a few trillion ~ this means a lot of trouble for investors and also perhaps it could wind down slowly and last for 10-15 years...

> Why not paypal accounts with paypal debit cards?

That's a fair solution. I trust my bank more than PayPal, but that's a matter of preference. Both systems are cheap, real time and covered with decades of institutional protection.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#62

Post by rtpg »

DINKDINK wrote: post #58
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #14

Bitcoin is not remotely usable as a currency now. The fees are incredible, the confirmation times ridiculous. We need to move on to something more modern like Ethereum, Stellar Lumens, etc. immediately. Asking the current 1 mb blocksize version of Bitcoin to be a currency is like Goldman Sachs writing a report saying they want to run their website on Intel 486 processors. They mention Zimbabwe moving to it as an alte…

>The average Bitcoin fee is now $40 Deception and inaccuracies in your statement: * You're using an average function in a non gaussian distribution. * Fees in a blockchain are a function of the transaction size * You can have multiple payments per transaction * The median fee for a typical transaction in the past week is about $1.50 USD. [1] [1] https://anduck.net/bitcoin/fees/1008_blocks.php Median is between $8/kB…

Do you know how much was being transffered at $1.50?

I remember when people were debating putting "almost feeless" on a bitcoin website because transaction fees were so low as a percentage of the amount, but I don't know if that still holds.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#63

Post by xiphias »

tananaev wrote: post #38
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #14

Bitcoin is not remotely usable as a currency now. The fees are incredible, the confirmation times ridiculous. We need to move on to something more modern like Ethereum, Stellar Lumens, etc. immediately. Asking the current 1 mb blocksize version of Bitcoin to be a currency is like Goldman Sachs writing a report saying they want to run their website on Intel 486 processors. They mention Zimbabwe moving to it as an alte…

On-chain scaling is not sustainable. If you want to handle as many transaction as for example Visa, you would need 1 GB blocks every 10 minutes, which would make the whole blockchain heavily centralized because regular users won't be able to host full nodes to validate payments. About "adopting" and increasing block size. I think most developers agree that we would need to increase it at some point, but I believe cor…

Segregated Witness was increasing the block size, but the trivial block size increase that Bitcoin Cash was doing was not a scalable solution because the old transaction message format had a quadratic worst case processing time.

The problem with it is that Bitcoin adaption is extremely fast (10x last year), and securely implementing and testing all these scalability solutions take years.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#64

Post by jv22222 »

erentz wrote: post #56
tananaev wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On-chain scaling is not sustainable. If you want to handle as many transaction as for example Visa, you would need 1 GB blocks every 10 minutes, which would make the whole blockchain heavily centralized because regular users won't be able to host full nodes to validate payments. About "adopting" and increasing block size. I think most developers agree that we would need to increase it at some point, but I believe cor…

Not sure why you and the other person mentioning lightning have been downvoted. I’ve noticed increasingly it’s not possible to have reasonable discussion about bitcoin on hacker news. It seems the folks from /r/btc have found this place.

Yes, agreed, it’s fucking irritating.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#65

Post by mrb »

DINKDINK wrote: post #58
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #14

Bitcoin is not remotely usable as a currency now. The fees are incredible, the confirmation times ridiculous. We need to move on to something more modern like Ethereum, Stellar Lumens, etc. immediately. Asking the current 1 mb blocksize version of Bitcoin to be a currency is like Goldman Sachs writing a report saying they want to run their website on Intel 486 processors. They mention Zimbabwe moving to it as an alte…

>The average Bitcoin fee is now $40 Deception and inaccuracies in your statement: * You're using an average function in a non gaussian distribution. * Fees in a blockchain are a function of the transaction size * You can have multiple payments per transaction * The median fee for a typical transaction in the past week is about $1.50 USD. [1] [1] https://anduck.net/bitcoin/fees/1008_blocks.php Median is between $8/kB…

There is deception in your comment too:

- You are misreading your charts. The real-world median txn fee is far from $1.50... it's $13: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-median_transact...

- A real-world txn is on average 500 bytes, not 250.

- Although you can have multiple recipients/outputs in a single txn ("batch transactions"), it is not used very often. I computed not too long ago 2.6 outputs on average (https://mobile.twitter.com/zorinaq/status/934442392501063685). If batching was unused, we would expect on average 2 outputs. One reason batching is uncommon is that it is by nature doable only by services sending multiple transactions per block, eg. a hosted wallet provider. I can't batch the occasional txns sent from my local phone wallet.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#66

Post by chii »

westoque wrote: post #33
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #14

Bitcoin is not remotely usable as a currency now. The fees are incredible, the confirmation times ridiculous. We need to move on to something more modern like Ethereum, Stellar Lumens, etc. immediately. Asking the current 1 mb blocksize version of Bitcoin to be a currency is like Goldman Sachs writing a report saying they want to run their website on Intel 486 processors. They mention Zimbabwe moving to it as an alte…

Not sure “banking the unbanked” is really the goal of Bitcoin. Think instead because of it’s scarcity, Bitcoin could be used to back currencies. Much like the gold standard before. Transaction fees in this scenario (even with it’s high transaction fees for us normies) would be considered negligible when moving large amounts of money. In this scenario, we can even have other cryptos which are better for daily use be b…

> Bitcoin could be used to back currencies

but why does currency need a 'backing' like this (of which was the purpose of gold originally)?

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#67

Post by Hasz »

DINKDINK wrote: post #58
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #14

Bitcoin is not remotely usable as a currency now. The fees are incredible, the confirmation times ridiculous. We need to move on to something more modern like Ethereum, Stellar Lumens, etc. immediately. Asking the current 1 mb blocksize version of Bitcoin to be a currency is like Goldman Sachs writing a report saying they want to run their website on Intel 486 processors. They mention Zimbabwe moving to it as an alte…

>The average Bitcoin fee is now $40 Deception and inaccuracies in your statement: * You're using an average function in a non gaussian distribution. * Fees in a blockchain are a function of the transaction size * You can have multiple payments per transaction * The median fee for a typical transaction in the past week is about $1.50 USD. [1] [1] https://anduck.net/bitcoin/fees/1008_blocks.php Median is between $8/kB…

I was looking around that site and the second graph shows a weekly median of $50ish/kB. At that .25kB rate, shouldn't it be ~$12.5USD per transaction?

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#69

Post by wallace_f »

bobwaycott wrote: post #50
EpicEng wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more like gold But without that nifty property of intrinsic value.

There is no intrinsic value in gold. Or any other thing. The only value things have are the exchange and use values humans imbue them with.

But that's consistent with what people mean when they say 'gold has intrinsic value.' All they are saying is it 'has some value that is not one of the three functions of money.'

Does anyone know what the above logical fallacy would be named? I see this kind of argumentation a lot: where one refutes an argument which has not been made.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#70

Post by MarkSweep »

DINKDINK wrote: post #58
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #14

Bitcoin is not remotely usable as a currency now. The fees are incredible, the confirmation times ridiculous. We need to move on to something more modern like Ethereum, Stellar Lumens, etc. immediately. Asking the current 1 mb blocksize version of Bitcoin to be a currency is like Goldman Sachs writing a report saying they want to run their website on Intel 486 processors. They mention Zimbabwe moving to it as an alte…

>The average Bitcoin fee is now $40 Deception and inaccuracies in your statement: * You're using an average function in a non gaussian distribution. * Fees in a blockchain are a function of the transaction size * You can have multiple payments per transaction * The median fee for a typical transaction in the past week is about $1.50 USD. [1] [1] https://anduck.net/bitcoin/fees/1008_blocks.php Median is between $8/kB…

How do you get that the median is between $8/kB and $4/kB from that page? I assume you are looking at the middle chart:

https://anduck.net/bitcoin/fees/fpkb_1008blocks.png

It looks like the green bars (median) are at most $50/kB to $70/kB, with a good number of dips to $30/kB and some to $12/kB.

Edit: it is a confusing chart because it has mBTC/kB on one side and USD/kB on the other. And also it assume a constant exchange rate, so it does not reflect the actual price of those transactions at the time they occurred.

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