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Ending Bitcoin Support

stripe.com

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Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#441

Post by rwcarlsen »

tfha wrote: post #420
rwcarlsen wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 us…

There is work underway pursuing GB sized blocks (https://themerkle.com/what-is-the-gigablock-testnet-initiati...). I think it is a feasible path forward. And even if it turns out to be difficult to achieve with today's infrastructure and technology, cryptocurrencies won't suddenly have a billion people using it for daily transactions overnight. I think we could easily support 100 MB blocks now - which would be 100x what current bitcoin provides. In my opinion, that provides quite a bit of time to continue to investigate various scaling avenues.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#442

Post by naveen99 »

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.

Takes the same 10 minutes on average per block if you include recommended miner fee. binance credits you after 2 confirmations. waiting for 6 confirmations is really overkill for transactions small enough that you are worried about the fee. So in practice, a transactions will either sit for a long time or be confirmed in 10 minutes. Just pay appropriate fee.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#443

Post by Natanael_L »

hmcdona1 wrote: post #428
eosrei wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The lightning network will be far less effective than people are hoping. You have to a) pay to open up a channel with each person you wish to use it, and b) each stake capital in that channel for it to be functional. This is useful only in specific scenarios like exchange-to-exchange transfers. Exchanges are going to be very unlikely to ever set up channels to customers. They haven't even implemented segwit yet, ther…

It's named network because you do not need a channel with every individual user. You have a channel with one or more LN servers, they in turn have connections with yet more servers.

As the other guy said, there only needs to exist a path of channels between you and the entity you're paying, and the payment will be routed through the network.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#444

Post by blueprint »

topranks wrote: post #315
blueprint wrote: post #30

I don't have any place to criticize at all but this seems pretty short-sighted. The primary criticism is low tps and fees… but that's exactly what lightning was invented to solve (edit: as I now see someone else mentioned)… and it's already working, in testing phase. Isn't it more effort to remove support then add it back again soon than just to wait a few months? So it /seems/ either something else is going on or th…

A business cannot operate a payment system that isn't working for them for "months" until a long-promised alternate solution arrives. Be realistic. There is also no guarantee LN will ever see required adoption and scale to the level to solve the problems. If they were smart they'd just move on to an altcoin and leave Bitcoin, at least till LN is up and proven working at scale on mainnet.

> A business cannot operate a payment system that isn't working for them for "months" until a long-promised alternate solution arrives. Be realistic.

Who said Bitcoin isn't working? I use it all the time. At the most, it's having tps and fee issues, but that doesn't mean "it's not working".

> There is also no guarantee LN will ever see required adoption and scale to the level to solve the problems.

If you think people, who are already using Bitcoin, won't jump at the efficiency of a properly functioning Lightning network, you're the one who needs to get real.

> If they were smart they'd just move on to an altcoin and leave Bitcoin, at least till LN is up and proven working at scale on mainnet.

I suppose you think (or know of) ANY of the alts have solved this problem while retaining the properties of Bitcoin that it was invented for? If you do, please let us all in on the secret.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#445

Post by blueprint »

sincerely wrote: post #185
blueprint wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I said "wait". Do you know how long it's been in testing? Do you know how close it is to readiness?

Lightning has been close to readiness for what seems like an eternity. It's an exciting prospect to be sure (centralization worries aside) but I think it's important to keep our expectations reasonable. The long term future of cryptos is harmed by baseless hype.

What the heck are you talking about? It's only recently come close to readiness. Bitcoin secures a huge amount of capital. The people who actually know what they're doing in this space aren't going to hurry a solution to market which has not been EXTREMELY rigorously tested. I understand that takes a long time but we're talking about people's livelihoods here. You're so confident it's not ready, but can you actually answer the question of by what criteria it would even be deemable as ready? It's literally already being tested. [1, 2]

Maybe I should get some more downvotes first though.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7ieuki/how_to_test...

2. https://discover.coinsquare.io/digital-currency/lightning-ne...

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#446

Post by [deleted] »

blueprint wrote: post #30

I don't have any place to criticize at all but this seems pretty short-sighted. The primary criticism is low tps and fees… but that's exactly what lightning was invented to solve (edit: as I now see someone else mentioned)… and it's already working, in testing phase. Isn't it more effort to remove support then add it back again soon than just to wait a few months? So it /seems/ either something else is going on or th…

[deleted]

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#447

Post by simias »

topranks wrote: post #312
wyldfire wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article does mention it. > We’re interested in what’s happening with Lightning and other proposals to enable faster payments. Please be careful about promoting LN. It's great tech, yes. > this stuff really works! * yes, but please don't actually use it with money yet. [1] [1] https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning#project-status

I have major doubts about how it will work in reality. The routing of transactions just won't work in a fully peer-to-peer network. Inevitably large "Tier 1" hubs, interconnected together, will surely be needed. Djikstra or Bellman-Ford type algorithms won't scale to where they need to for anything else, likewise users won't maintain enough funds in channels to make potential routes usable.

I reached the same conclusion after looking into the matter for a while. I've mentioned it several times on HN and elsewhere and have yet to find anybody offering a rebuttal. Worse, there are very little simulations being done on how it's going to work in practice (admittedly that was about 6 months ago, but the decision to implement segwit/lightning had already been taken at that point anyway).

We're talking about a $100+ billion market cap cryptocurrency and nobody knows how it's going to work. It's hype, speculation and memes all the way down. The power of greed.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#448

Post by root_axis »

milcron wrote: post #432
WorldMaker wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't hard fork gold, either. You don't suddenly wind up with two copies of a gold bar because someone decided to Xerox your ledger to start a new one. The scarcity of Bitcoins is entirely a cultural delusion.

If your payment is denominated in BTC, you can't pay it with BCH even though they're a fork of the same blockchain. BTC proper is scarce, regardless of how many times the chain is forked.

And "BCH proper" has identical scarcity characteristics to BTC and it's not as if the creation of BCH negatively impacted the price of BTC - suddenly a new "scarce" token was created and everyone who was holding BTC before the fork is $1600 USD per coin richer today. The scarcity aspect is purely a social construct.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#449

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

stanmancan wrote: post #426
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.

There's a few different ones that have made huge jumps forward; RaiBlocks can apparently do around 7,000tx/s.

Meanwhile, your payment card provider is probably doing that many transactions per second just in the small city I live in.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#450

Post by bradjohnson »

mikeash wrote: post #229
masklinn wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be fair, people could also stop thinking gold is worth much. They've already noted that: > people's perception of its value will change But as they say, a gold bar will remain a gold bar, until and unless it is actively destroyed. Not so for bitcoins, which only remain so as long as they're actively maintained (not just individual coins but the mining networks which allows the creation of new transactions)

I’m not entirely convinced, although I’m partway there. When you “have” a Bitcoin, that means you have the private key to a wallet which the blockchain says has such-and-such amount in it. You can have that even if the miners all disappear. You can still use it to sign transactions, although they won’t get confirmed. You can even confirm them by mining a new block yourself with your transactions in it. (If all the mi…

If the miners are all gone, there's nothing to stop malicious parties from doing 51% attacks and making the entire thing not only valueless, but also completely unreliable.

At least when you give a person a gold bar, you know that they now have the gold bar.

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