511–520 of 659 posts
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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.
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If they "cancel" the transaction but it later ends up getting mined, who pays the fee for the return transaction? Regardless of the answer, variable and large fees really do make this sort of transaction a minefield.
If money came in after an hour, they would immediately send an email to the customer asking for a refund address. My understanding is that the customer ate the first fee and Stripe ate the second. We ended up offering free shipping to a bunch of disgruntled customers.
There are actually bitcoin users out there who aren't up-to-date on how long it takes to process a transaction?
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The argument that makes sense to me is that Bitcoin is just “Digital Gold”. But I don’t really understand why gold has so much value, so maybe it’s not really a good answer. It’s kind of like saying “Maybe Bitcoins will have value for a long time just like this other non-valuable, non-transaction asset that’s had value for a long time”...
Gold has value because it's shiny, doesn't oxidize, is malleable enough to easily form conspicuous jewelry, is much rarer than base mining elements, and is not cheap to extract. The not oxidizing and rarity are key. E.g. platinum is also not cheap. Aluminium is close but it's orders of magnitude more common, and still oxidizes a little.
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BS. Bitcoin had small casual transactions up until recently. It was one of its main selling points. Again, people don't like Satoshi's endgame vision. This is working as designed. Bitcoin was designed to evolve into this. It was not intended to stay static; it's in the whitepaper. Break out of the groupthink. It's worth realizing when everyone around you is being irrational.
Satoshi expected Bitcoin to scale to Visa-levels of 100 million transactions per day. He expected the cost of a transaction to be less than Visa forever, not just while nobody was using it.
Try to find a quote and paste it. It's a useful exercise, because it forces you to constrain your thinking. Either from the whitepaper or from http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/
I don't think Satoshi said this, but I'll be happy to admit to being wrong.
In fact, here is Satoshi's clear and complete vision from the very beginning:
http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/16/
Total circulation will be 21,000,000 coins. It'll be distributed to network nodes when they make blocks, with the amount cut in half every 4 years.
first 4 years: 10,500,000 coins next 4 years: 5,250,000 coins next 4 years: 2,625,000 coins next 4 years: 1,312,500 coins etc...
When that runs out, the system can support transaction fees if needed. It's based on open market competition, and there will probably always be nodes willing to process transactions for free.
Satoshi Nakamoto
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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…
> You have to a) pay to open up a channel with each person you wish to use it This simply isn't true. You open one channel and then payments are routed over channels to your destination. It's no different to TCP/IP in this way and the reason why that analogy is used a lot in describing the network Having a one channel single destination can be done with Bitcoin alone and the new timelock transactions - the purpose of…
Why not just delete the rest of your post and just leave this? This once sentence is what really drives all of the rest of your breathless hype. Naked greed. It's the only thing the entire crypto "space" has.
Lightning network is pure vaporware. It was "coming any day now" when Mt Gox collapsed. It's still coming soon. It will always be coming soon.
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> Please unpack this statement. Which part of the Bitcoin system is functioning incorrectly? The payment system part. One of the main reasons why Satoshi created Bitcoin in the first place. As someone who got into Bitcoin in early 2011 (but left when things got crazy around 2014), it's utterly laughable to me that Bitcoin now can't even be used as a payment system. And that the fees per transaction are roughly the sa…
But isn't increasing the block size limit still just a temporary fix? Wouldn't Bitcoin Cash also be rendered useless as a payment system if it was handling a similar volume of transactions as bitcoin?
I'm still incredulous that Bitcoin has resisted changing to block size limit for so long, given that it was only a security measured Satoshi implemented a year into Bitcoin's life, not only kind of fundamental design feature. I rarely use Internet acronyms, but, smh....
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> Please unpack this statement. Which part of the Bitcoin system is functioning incorrectly? The payment system part. One of the main reasons why Satoshi created Bitcoin in the first place. As someone who got into Bitcoin in early 2011 (but left when things got crazy around 2014), it's utterly laughable to me that Bitcoin now can't even be used as a payment system. And that the fees per transaction are roughly the sa…
But isn't increasing the block size limit still just a temporary fix? Wouldn't Bitcoin Cash also be rendered useless as a payment system if it was handling a similar volume of transactions as bitcoin?
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His entire comment is about the differences between BTC and Monero and Bitcoin Cash that make the latter two more desirable. Not sure how your interpretation is remotely accurate.
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.
Well, it isn't just the "size of blockchain" that is the problem. The idea that people want an irreversible system to perform commerce on the open internet seems to be a fundamental issue as well. That and all the other problems like no central bank to regulate money supply, no good secure way to store them, etc.... I have yet to see any of these issues be solved in any crypto.
In short, perhaps the entire idea of a crypto currency isn't a very good one at all...
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In Zimbabwe you can.
Sometimes I wonder what percentage of the people talking about all the things one can do with bitcoin in Zimbabwe have been to Zimbabwe and done those things.
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The reason is that life is not really that simple. People pick people/assets/things based on reputation and popularity and not technical or practical merit. Gold is used as a store of value despite the fact that it is 1. volatile 2. hard to store 3. hard to buy/sell and 4. hard to transport.
Gold at least has some unique purposes besides a store of value. Over half of it is used for jewelry and commercial reasons, so at worst it can be considered an over-speculated commodity. Bitcoin literally has nothing going for it besides being the current market leader.