Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 369 posts

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#271

Post by keymone »

lisper wrote: post #124
bobthepanda wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can literally go to a gold dealer shop; it's like forex for gold. Even in my moderately sized American city there are twenty that show up in Google Maps within a twenty minute drive. And you buy gold and it's physically in your possession; verifying it is easy, and the best part is you can verify it at some other gold dealer if you're super paranoid. With BTC, you have to find a trusted exchange and a trusted wal…

> verifying it is easy Actually, it's not. It's nearly impossible to non-destructively distinguish gold from tungsten wrapped in gold.

meanwhile verifying bitcoin is trivial. hackernews is the one demographic i was hoping would understand that. has something changed?

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#272

Post by keymone »

qeternity wrote: post #144
deevolution wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin advantage: easily and instantly divisible. Gold not so much. Bitcoin advantage: weighs nothing, highly transportable. Gold not so much.

> Bitcoin advantage: easily and instantly divisible. Gold not so much. Not so important for a store of value. > Bitcoin advantage: weighs nothing, highly transportable. Gold not so much. Yet requires an order of magnitude more skill and overhead to handle.

(bangs head on the wall)

> what advantage does it have over gold?

can you point me to words "store", "of" and "value" in the above question?

> order of magnitude more skill and overhead to handle

only if you assume handling gold means dropping the gold bar in your basement and never touching it again?

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#273

Post by keymone »

safgasCVS wrote: post #93
socrates1998 wrote: post #70

It sounds weird, but I think a big part of Bitcoin's, and other crypto's value, isn't in the day to day ability to use it to buy and sell things, it's the inability of the government to devalue it. This isn't as big a problem in many richer countries with relatively stable currencies, but I sure as hell would prefer Bitcoin to anything the Venezuelan government or the Argentinian government would issue. The kinks are…

I'll add to this - As someone who's country is actively looking at expropriation of white-owned land a bank account that NO ONE can access without your permission is hugely appealing. If you're living in a country with functioning institutions you take this for granted

> If you're living in a country with functioning institutions you take this for granted

people in developed world don't even realize how many things they take for granted.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#274

Post by keymone »

rrdharan wrote: post #114
bscphil wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. It's almost hilariously counterintuitive. I recently needed to send a moderate sum of money (4 figures) to someone who lives across the country. There's no obvious reason why this should cost me anything or not happen in the same day. However, * Checks / ACH takes days to close, plus in many situations you might have to actually mail the person a check * EFT seems reliable, but takes days and requires having…

Last week I needed to make a highly time-sensitive transfer of ~20k that had to clear the same day. Chase charged me a flat fee of $25 for the wire (and Ally Bank would have been happy to do it for $20). Chase temporarily froze my account since the payment was so large it was immediately flagged, but I spoke to someone on the phone within a few minutes, verified it was all legitimate, and the transfer was then proces…

is this sarcasm?

> I fail to see how Bitcoin could have helped any of this.

how about:

- not having to pay $25 (btc fee of $0.03 is confirming within an hour, $0.10 is almost guaranted to confirm in 10m)

- "frozen account" is not even a thing

- not having to speak to anyone on the phone

you must be joking.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#275

Post by keymone »

oopsman88 wrote: post #44
chrismorgan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am only quibbling on the statement about fees, not the rest.

The point is that credit cards offer very valuable services in exchange for fees. Bitcoin offers nothing for a higher fee.

really? nothing? do you even know what bitcoin is? the ignorance in this thread is baffling sometimes.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#276

Post by keymone »

cromulent wrote: post #140
briatx wrote: post #10

It has been clear for a while now that Bitcoin is an inferior payment system for the consumer: * The fees are higher. * The risk to the consumer is higher. * The difficulty of use is higher. * It is accepted at an extremely low amount of vendors and even that is falling. So you really how to wonder why people ever thought consumers would use it en masse.

And the maximum transaction rate is 7 per second, so en masse is impossible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem

no longer the case since payment channels and routing between them are the option.

p2p channel payments is only limited by network bandwidth and cpu power between participants. routed channel payments are limited by routing network connectivity and capacity, which is not amazing yet but far better than 7tps.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#277

Post by keymone »

smsm42 wrote: post #238

I am not surprised. I am a programmer with decades of experience under my belt, and I have no idea how to install bitcoin in a way that would allow me convenient use of it. No, I can install the apps, and I can spend a month or two waiting until it downloads the whole 40+G of current blockchain, or I can trust some site that says it'd fix it for me, or I can open an account on any of the exchanges and pray to cryptog…

exaggerating a bit? bitcoin syncs within couple hours unless you run it on the computer you'd gain your decades of experience on :)

every mobile bitcoin app is a lightweight client - it only syncs block headers, much faster but not great for large sums of money.

so for a person that can't tell "browser" from "internet" there's no difference between introducing them to paypal or to bitcoin - it's just an app on your phone and you can press the "send" button.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#278

Post by zaarn »

lisper wrote: post #124
bobthepanda wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can literally go to a gold dealer shop; it's like forex for gold. Even in my moderately sized American city there are twenty that show up in Google Maps within a twenty minute drive. And you buy gold and it's physically in your possession; verifying it is easy, and the best part is you can verify it at some other gold dealer if you're super paranoid. With BTC, you have to find a trusted exchange and a trusted wal…

> verifying it is easy Actually, it's not. It's nearly impossible to non-destructively distinguish gold from tungsten wrapped in gold.

Actually, not that hard. The speed of sound in tungsten is easily twice that of gold, hitting it with a hammer and analyzing the response on the other hand will easily tell you that it's tungsten or gold. In theory, a smartphone app could do it.

You can also test shear forces on the bar, a test you can perform easily at the bank itself (or any of the other material forces tests really). Those do usually require a bit of machinery.

Lastly, you can measure electric resistance. A gold bar will have a different resistance than a tungsten bar, especially if you compare a frequency sweep AC resistance vs DC resistance (if there is a difference, which should be about 20nOhm/m vs 50nOhm/m for Gold/Tungsten, you know the material has a core that is different from the outside).

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#279

Post by acdha »

jchw wrote: post #232
acdha wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That nicely demonstrates my point: you’re a supporter and you use it infrequently with apparently one company. That does not sound like the revolution in personal finance we were breathlessly promised.

I'm a supporter? By what definition of supporter? This may very well be the first time I've ever discussed Bitcoin in a forum. I don't support Bitcoin the same way I don't support Hanes clothing. It's just a thing I causally use. It works. Why are you trying to pigeon hole me personally? Who promised you this revolution, did Satoshi personally?

Oksy, supporter may be too strong. The aspect I had in mind was that even someone who’d gone to the trouble of learning about it and getting setup to use it didn’t really have a need to, whereas for years here and almost everywhere else fanboys were telling us it was going to replace Visa.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#280

Post by adiusmus »

DINKDINK wrote: post #203
adiusmus wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And having money stolen from my wallet because I haven’t logged in recently is NOT useful for a currency.

Goal post moving. You claimed Lightning was a fork of bitcoin which is patently false. You lost your debate.

Lighting as a bitcoin fork is at: http://lightningbitcoin.io/ Which is what I was talking about. No goal post moving.

Have a nice day, bully boy.

Post reply on HN