Ending Bitcoin Support • Hacker News Board

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#411

Post by ActsJuvenile » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:51 PM UTC

Klathmon wrote: post #182

underwires wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But (correct me if I'm wrong) payment channels are connected to particular sets of recipients, but not necessarily any and all recipients. Your money is locked into that channel until you close it. You might need to open a different channel to reach your actual recipient.

No, you are missing the "network" part of "Lightning Network" it uses an onion-routing-like protocol to allow you to pay "through" other people. So if I have a channel with you, and you have one with coinbase, I can buy bitcoin from coinbase through you without ever opening another channel, entirely counterparty-risk-free. And in that scenario if you "refuse" to relay my transaction, or you try to do something sneeky…

Counter-counter-transactions sound like textbook example of overengineering.

Bitcoin's only advantage at this point is its price, which will go away as soon as there is a crash. Then we can scrap Bitcoin, LN, and all the baggage and start with a clean 3rd generation crypto slate.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#412

Post by nerdponx » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:52 PM UTC

montrose wrote: post #15

This reads a bit like the sort of things people say when breaking up so as not to upset the other person too much. You're a great person, but you're just more of an asset than a medium of exchange, and what I need in my life right now is a medium of exchange. What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? That is not a purely rhetorical question; cryptocurrencies change things a lot. But t…

It's a death knell for the very first cryptocurrency, which its creator(s?) explicitly acknowledged was an experiment.

Bitcoin is (hopefully soon-to-be) dead, long live cryptocurrency!

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#413

Post by Operyl » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:53 PM UTC

eosrei wrote: post #405

bparsons wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Bitcoin is the AOL of blockchain technology. It was a first mover, it had huge uptake and valuation, but in a few years (or perhaps already) someone is going to build a protocol that is capable of hundreds of thousands of secure transactions a second, and it will make Bitcoin look archaic.

FWIW that is the goal of the Lightning Network on Bitcoin: https://lightning.network/

I keep seeing this brought up over months and months, but how close are we even to using it? Is the technology a thing yet? Or is it all white papers.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#414

Post by lawn » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:54 PM UTC

regularhackerer wrote: post #322

vec wrote: post #18

For what it's worth, we just spent two weeks trying and failing to get Stripe's Bitcoin integration working on our site. The short version is that Stripe guaranteed a USD BTC exchange rate for an hour, after which they would automatically cancel the transaction. Given that most transactions now take well over an hour to be verified on the blockchain, that means basically every transaction fails.

I just used the bitcoin stripe thing couple days ago. Time limit was indeed quite scary: they had a timer on the side running with something like 15 minutes to go until you need to request a new temporary address. Mine ran out but luckily it was still accepted.

Same here. Luckily I got confirmed in time as well.

For the interested I donated to charity water: https://www.charitywater.org/

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#415

Post by wyager » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:55 PM UTC

Operyl wrote: post #413

eosrei wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW that is the goal of the Lightning Network on Bitcoin: https://lightning.network/

I keep seeing this brought up over months and months, but how close are we even to using it? Is the technology a thing yet? Or is it all white papers.

Working implementations exist and are usable, but they are being very cautious before releasing to the general public.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#416

Post by tdb7893 » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:55 PM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #388

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they will grow substantially as the only way to mitigate the governments efforts to enforce surveillance and regulations Cash comes with substantial privacy benefits. It's also inconvenient. TL; DR Most people trade privacy for convenience.

What makes you sure convenience will not improve?

With increasing regulations around cryptocurrencies large private transactions will be much more regulated, or possibly illegal, which will cut down on usability. Even if it's actually anonymous and buyers don't have to worry about it sellers will have to or risk being shut down

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#417

Post by vkou » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:57 PM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #323

vkou wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But only a one-way retail value. No diamond dealer will give you anything close to their retail price, when you try to sell them diamonds.

I always wonder about this when I see films where criminals mastermind a plan to steal diamonds.

Films also have criminal masterminds ask undercover police officers "Are you a cop?", followed by a tense musical score, and a close-up shot of the cop's face...

And a "Ha, ha, just kidding, of course you're not a cop."

Crime dramas and action films tend to have an incredibly poor understanding of money, crime, policing, and Newton's laws of physics.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#418

Post by thickblockchain » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:57 PM UTC

Yeah, but who really cares?

95% of people buy, sell and transfer Bitcoin to do one thing: speculating on Crypto-Assets. It really doesn't matter if the fees are so high, it's not like people buy crypto like candy, they buy it like stocks.

Who cares if there's a 30$ fee on a 1000+$ transfer? That's still cheap compared to other methods of international money transfer. People are obviously ready to spend that much.

Bitcoin has always been terrible as an everyday currency, even when transactions were practically free and fast, who wanted to wait 10 minutes to confirm their purchase of a Grand Latte? Just pay with any of the existing methods, they work just fine, it's a solved problem. There's probably 1000 cryptocurrencies that could work for that just fine, but nobody really needs that in the first place.

You gotta realize that Bitcoin is gonna be worth A MILLION dollars or maybe just one dollar, but then it could go back up to a thousand again! That is the real value of Bitcoin.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#419

Post by Kiro » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:58 PM UTC

saosebastiao wrote: post #292

beaker52 wrote: post #230

It's nice to see they're still interested in payment-oriented tech in this area, such as Lightning and OmiseGO. Another one to watch out for is RaiBlocks. Currently has a functioning net, featuring instant, fee-less transactions. The thing that's really impressing me about RaiBlocks is the community that's around it - so much community dev effort going into payment adapters and services. People are already accepting…

It looks really promising. Unfortunately, it can only be bought on two relatively unknown exchanges.

They won the Binance community vote so it will be there soon.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#420

Post by tfha » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:58 PM UTC

rwcarlsen wrote: post #300

nwah1 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stripe is getting rid of bitcoin because it has proven to be impractical at scale. It is impractical at scale because the fundamental technology, proof-of-work, is impractical at scale. The two alternatives mentioned are the same in this respect, with only the smallest differences.

Bitcoin (BTC) chain stakeholders (miners, etc.) have chosen to make the current level of transaction throughput be expensive and relatively slow. But there is no such binary tradeoff between "does scale" and "doesn't scale". It is a spectrum. It would be (technologically) trivial for bitcoin to support its current transaction rate with cheap, fast transactions - but the community has opted not to. There are alternati…

Uh, unless you've got some way to make a decentralized blockchain function at 2.5 GiB every 10 minutes, it's effectively not a spectrum.

At 8mb block size we'd still have the same problem. Except instead of happening at 5 million weekly users it happens at 40 million weekly users. And at 100mb block size we might get to 100 million daily users.

Still haven't scaled the thing. We'd need to support billions of daily users for people to be happy. It's an open question right now