581–590 of 659 posts
Transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase in the failure rate of transactions denominated in fiat currencies. (By the time the transaction is confirmed, fluctuations in Bitcoin price mean that it’s for the “wrong” amount.) Furthermore, fees have risen a great deal. For a regular Bitcoin transaction, a fee of tens of U.S. dollars is common, making Bitcoin transactions about as expensive as bank wires.
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Even if XLM was not intended to be used for direct payments, is there anything that actually prevents it from being used for it? From everything I see, it actually seems like a pretty good candidate for actual spending.
Well, if people decide to use it that way nobody can stop them. In my opinion, that would be an inefficient way of using the network, since if you pay with XLM today you need to first buy some, taking a loss on the conversion since you have to go through either eth or btc, then the payee needs to sell it (again with another intermediate currency) to get the money to pay their operating costs, and they'll likely charg…
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…
"You know, you're more of an asset and I'm looking for a medium of exchange" That's a hell of a line to use when breaking up with someone
I've said this elsewhere, but it bears repeating. Bitcoin is capable of handling high transaction volume with low fees. The BCH fork was created to support this case. The BTC chain's devs mostly work for Blockstream, who's business model is to create layer 2 payment solutions, so it's in their interest to choke off the main chain. And it looks like they are succeeding.
All BCH did was increase the block size limit from 1mb to 8mb. It solves the scalability problems in the short term, but will run into exactly the same issues a year or two from now. Then it'll be 32mb blocks, then 128mb, then 1Gb. An O(n) approach won't work in the long term.
The only argument that is ever presented is that huge blocks harm "decentralisation" - not that it cannot be done.
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While true, a gold bar to me has no inherent use. I am not going to smelt it and make jewelry. It is simply a store of value. I think the gold comparison is quite close.
But you're not the only person in the world, so I don't see how this is an accurate portrayal at all. To _you_ it's a value store. To electronics companies it's a consumable used in manufacturing. Same to a jeweler, and to a jewelry consumer it's desired. Crypto has exactly zero real world utility or inherent value. You, Joe Schmoe, do not by yourself and your own desires dictate what does and does not have inherent…
Maybe that's not put very well. Look at it like this.
Primitive civilizations (some of which still exist today) may store their wealth in something like cattle. Often exactly cattle in fact. Obvious real world utility. But cumbersome to trade, can't grow the economy fast, lots of drawbacks and it limit how complex the culture can become.
As civilization gets more complex it moves on to other mediums. Next might be useful metals (tin, bronze, iron). Less immediate use than cattle, slightly more abstracted. Then maybe precious metals or stones, less practical use then the previous stage, even more abstracted. But easier to move around, trade, store and calculate with. Then currency, even more abstracted and even less practical use. Then digital currency in the form IOUs and ledger balances which is essentially what we have now. 0 practical use. Essential for any modern economy.
Point being, "real world use" has nothing to do with value as a currency, a store of wealth or an economic unit in this time and place. The worth is abstracted functionality. And it's entirely possible, in fact even likely in my opinion that blockchains are an evolution along these lines, a next step in abstracting units of trade and ledgers of wealth.
If cryptocurrencies really succeed, we will not need a centralized service like Stripe. Hopefully we will use a 'decentralized Stripe' (as far as I know the Dash Evolution platform will be sometinhg like that. Maybe that is the reason that they did not even mention Dash in the article, despite it being one of the most promising digital Cash system on the market.)
Also there's no way to prove that a few people don't own a majority of the masternodes.
With the huge instamine and the creator's refusual to restart the coin, it's just too sketchy for me to ever trust.
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> 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…
Thanks for posting those infographics; they answer some lingering questions that have lain unanswered for years. I still see one problem, though, which is that the few on-chain transactions that are required (such as topping up a channel) will be far more expensive than in those other blockchains. Like $20 vs. 20 cents. So there are plenty of scenarios where LN fees will still be higher overall.
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They can't see how much I paid for a car when I paid with a cheque either. This is not a problem that I, or 99% of human beings have. Again - what is the darknet supposed to protect me from?
Seriously, I have yet to hear a single legal use case that Bitcoin improves.
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> You can sell your gold bar, and you can sell your private key. I see them as the same and no, I don't own Bitcoins. If there's no support network for your bitcoins, their value is 0, exactly. Even if you assume people stop caring for shiny imputrescible metals, its intrinsic property (of being shiny and imputrescible) pretty much ensures there will always be some demand for gold, and thus it will keep a non-zero pr…
But what does it matter which one has a larger "intrinsic value"? Both prices are determined more by speculation and group consciousness.