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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

#81

Post by tananaev »

0wing wrote: post #74
erentz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please explain how the Lightning Network developers solve an unsolved NP-Hard problem in computer science regarding routing? [1] The Lightning Network design is exactly what the first sentence of Satoshi's Bitcoin whitepaper seeks to avoid - payment processor middlemen. "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a f…

Personally I don't really mind having a few main hubs because Lightning Network allows trust-less payments. Your hub can never steal your money. It's guaranteed by math and Bitcoin network itself.

Lightning Network might not be perfect solution, but it is a solution to scaling problem. Increasing block size is certainly not a long term solution.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#82

Post by lumberingjack »

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 fees are weird I can get a payout for almost free from some pools but it cost me $40 to send anything?

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#83

Post by jstanley »

0wing wrote: post #74
erentz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please explain how the Lightning Network developers solve an unsolved NP-Hard problem in computer science regarding routing? [1] The Lightning Network design is exactly what the first sentence of Satoshi's Bitcoin whitepaper seeks to avoid - payment processor middlemen. "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a f…

Fiestly, LN routing is actually closer to a shortest-path problem than the TSP.

Secondly, even if it was the TSP, you don't need to 100% solve it in order to have a working system. How do you think actual travelling salesmen can exist? They just pick a good enough route, nobody is checking whether they picked the perfect route, and nobody cares.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#84

Post by lumberingjack »

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…

1gb is not that big now and bandwidth is getting uped all the time for free.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#85

Post by lalaland1125 »

lumberingjack wrote: post #82
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 fees are weird I can get a payout for almost free from some pools but it cost me $40 to send anything?

Your payouts are probably being batched with other people's payouts, resulting in a lower per-person fee.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#86

Post by mulmen »

chii wrote: post #66
westoque wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

My understanding of gold as a currency is that it naturally occurs with about the right frequency to be used as a money supply. It's rare enough you can't just make more but its plentiful enough to be in wide circulation.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#87

Post by mulmen »

DSingularity wrote: post #77
chii wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin could be used to back currencies but why does currency need a 'backing' like this (of which was the purpose of gold originally)?

Because it needs to have value everyone agrees on.

But we don't all agree on the price of bitcoin and I don't see why we would just because it's rare.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#88

Post by 0wing »

jstanley wrote: post #83
0wing wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain how the Lightning Network developers solve an unsolved NP-Hard problem in computer science regarding routing? [1] The Lightning Network design is exactly what the first sentence of Satoshi's Bitcoin whitepaper seeks to avoid - payment processor middlemen. "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a f…

Fiestly, LN routing is actually closer to a shortest-path problem than the TSP. Secondly, even if it was the TSP, you don't need to 100% solve it in order to have a working system. How do you think actual travelling salesmen can exist? They just pick a good enough route, nobody is checking whether they picked the perfect route, and nobody cares.

Either the Lightning Network has found a solution to the routing problem which the entire internet has relied upon since 1989 [1], or the LN marketing is disingenuous and the actual implementation will be nothing more than an excuse to extract wealth to centralized payment processor hubs, further distancing Bitcoin from the main design of electronic cash:

  "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would 
  allow online payments to be sent directly from one party 
  to another without going through a financial institution."
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2015/05/31/net-of-...

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#89

Post by dsacco »

ThomPete wrote: post #53
EpicEng wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Gold has not intrinsic value either. Nothing has to be honest. What it's all based on is trust whether FIAT, Gold or Bitcoin.

> Gold has not intrinsic value either. Nothing has to be honest.

Unless you mean something very different from the established consensus of economics when you use the term, “intrinsic value”, both of those statements are false.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#90

Post by lumberingjack »

DINKDINK wrote: post #78
mrb wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 averag…

>The real-world median txn fee is far from $1.50... it's $13: The site you quote is showing the median transaction fee of each block. That's not what I stated: "The median fee for a typical transaction in the past week" >- A real-world txn is on average 500 bytes, not 250. What's your source? https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ indicates 225. It seems like you're using a source that assumes two UTXO inputs, which would res…

I cant pay for anything with out it being about $40 in the last month. I sent $50 in btc from my local wallet to my bitpay debit card the other week not paying attention and it cost me $37 for max block time.
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