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BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

blog.bitpay.com

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Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#111

Post by krrrh »

empath75 wrote: post #105
LyndsySimon wrote: post #3

It seems clear to me at this point that the cryptocurrency revolution is now bigger than Bitcoin itself. Years ago, I saw three long-term outcomes: Bitcoin being king and altcoins dying on the vine, Bitcoin being one of innumerable blockchains in use, and cryptocurrencies in general failing to gain adoption. I'm scratching the first outcome off the list, and my pen is hovering over the last outcome.

Many block chains being in use is going to wreck the value of bitcoin long term. People have this bizarre idea that cryptocurrency tokens are ‘rare’. They’re not. It’s trivial to make a new currency or fork an existing one.

Creating new coins is also the easiest way to introduce new features and ideas. We’re overvaluing version 1.0 because it has the biggest install base.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#112

Post by Frogolocalypse »

anonymous5133 wrote: post #108
Frogolocalypse wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of altcoins that have low fees. When you are getting a single company to process your payments, it is always likely to be at a lower cost. The only question is why they're even bothering to store the information in a blockchain. It would just be easier if they used an SQL database. Without the decentralization, it is the same risk profile. They know who you are, what you're spending your money on, and…

Those altcoins don't have the userbase that bcash has. Bcash actually has an active community that is pushing to integrate bcash into mainstream commerce and that's what I like. Store of value is nice but medium of exchange is what really appeals to me personally.

> the userbase that bcash has

The number of transactions on the bcash blockchain gives a different impression of the 'user base'. If you want a faster blockchain with a larger user base, use litecoin. It isn't as secure as bitcoin, because it isn't as decentralized as bitcoin, but at least you don't have all of your purchases recorded (who you are, what you buy, who you buy it from, when you buy it, etc.) by the chinese government. Oh, and you don't have to worry about the chinese government blacklisting your wallet so that they can never be spent either.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#113

Post by _red »

nadam wrote: post #60
LyndsySimon wrote: post #3

It seems clear to me at this point that the cryptocurrency revolution is now bigger than Bitcoin itself. Years ago, I saw three long-term outcomes: Bitcoin being king and altcoins dying on the vine, Bitcoin being one of innumerable blockchains in use, and cryptocurrencies in general failing to gain adoption. I'm scratching the first outcome off the list, and my pen is hovering over the last outcome.

I see 3 scenarios right now: 1. Bitcoin + lighting network solves everything 2. Bitcoin's dominance ends and a more scalable payment-focused currency start to dominate (like Dash) 3. Bitcoin remains the main store of value, and people will convert some of their bitcoins to an altocin to do daily paymnt where there will be debates on the level of decentralization, but is designed to be extremely high (Visa level) tx/s…

>3. Bitcoin remains the main store of value

I think this is probably right. And I would add 2 things

(a) The size and the hash power of BTC give it a HUGE advantage. If you want "immutable proof that you own this specific decentralized block" then BTC is the only game in town. And that comes at a cost (hence high fees because of lots of electricity, computers, ASIC fabs, etc).

(b) Secondly (and I realize this analogy has been beat to death...but), Gold didn't want Silver to exist. The gold industry naturally wanted to monopolize every transaction, but like Bitcoin, it turned out that their very strengths were also simultaneously their weaknesses.

Its an immutable law of economics that BTC isn't going to be able to be all things to all people, so I think its natural that among their various options, they will choose to be the "Store of Value". Ultimately thats the equivalent of being a reserve currency. By capturing the store of value corner, it means that alternatives like ETH, LTC, DASH, IOTA, et al will be valued against and perform a support function to Bitcoin. In a sense, by being the Store of Value, the other cryptos perform support roles that further entrench your position.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#114

Post by ericb »

Frogolocalypse wrote: post #47
ericb wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if the core devs had implemented it.

The bitcoin open source development team doesn't control the node i run. If you want centralized chinese government controlled crypto, there's bcash. If you were actually interested in just cheap fees, you'd use litecoin. It has been around for years. It even has segwit, unlike bcash.

Litecoin has the same small-block commitment.

> If you want centralized chinese government controlled crypto, there's bcash.

That's the pot calling the kettle black. Bitcoin core is China-coin.

The economics of mining mean that there will always be centralization. Mining will centralize where there is free or cheap electricity (ahem, China). Mining will centralize on the hardware of the single manufacturer with the most cost-effective asics (ahem, China). It inevitably centralizes as other miners will fall behind revenue-wise, and not be able to invest enough to provide meaningful hashpower over time.

The small-blocks-prevent-centralization line of thinking is just closing the barn door after the horse is out.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#115

Post by wyldfire »

Is Bitcoin Cash fast because of greater capacity or with low competition to get into blocks?

Better options for cheap + fast transactions: Litecoin or Raiblocks. Litecoin has a great history and community is ready and willing to innovate. Raiblocks has a good story too: doesn't waste the currency's OPEX on proof-of-work, accounts don't face contention on serialized resources like a linear blockchain and delivers no-fee transactions. No crazy experimental-and-vulnerable-to-differential-cryptanalysis like IOTA.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#116

Post by wolco »

Frogolocalypse wrote: post #106
anonymous5133 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah we already did, it is called bitcoin cash lol and it works. The hell with bitcoin's high fees, never again.

paypal works too. I prefer to not record my payments with the chinese government though.

Why? I would be more worried about local governments

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#117

Post by babaganoosh89 »

wyldfire wrote: post #115

Is Bitcoin Cash fast because of greater capacity or with low competition to get into blocks? Better options for cheap + fast transactions: Litecoin or Raiblocks. Litecoin has a great history and community is ready and willing to innovate. Raiblocks has a good story too: doesn't waste the currency's OPEX on proof-of-work, accounts don't face contention on serialized resources like a linear blockchain and delivers no-f…

Both, they have much less transactions and their block size is 8x larger so they can do 8x more transactions/sec. But still pales in comparison to Visa’s throughput.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#118

Post by CryptoPunk »

ryebit wrote: post #88
CryptoPunk wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even called bcash. It's called Bitcoin Cash. The 1 MB maximalists call it bcash because they don't want it to carry Bitcoin's legacy in the public mind.

Labelling everyone who does that "1 MB maximalists" is a little extreme, and is probably why people are irritated with BCH's marketing tactics. To view your statement in a different light.. maybe people don't care for it trying to succeed based on another coin's name, rather than trying to stand on it's own merits. Bitcoin Gold (for all it's problems) doesn't try to insist it's the real Bitcoin. And 90% of the coins…

Bitcoin Cash was a hard fork of Bitcoin to implement Bitcoin's original scaling plan, and original vision to be a "peer-to-peer electronic cash", and includes all account balances from before the hard fork.

You may disagree that it's the real Bitcoin, but it's undoubtedly open to interpretation, and some of its advocates calling it that doesn't justify mislabeling it as bcash.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#119

Post by CryptoPunk »

Frogolocalypse wrote: post #78
CryptoPunk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the growth in transaction volume, it's pretty clear to me it will be the second, or possibly Ethereum will take the role of Bitcoin and fulfil the first: https://etherscan.io/chart/tx

Eth nodes are a quarter of what they were nine months ago. Most people can't even sync a node anymore. None of this is a surprise. This is exactly the outcome expected with unrestrained blockchain expansion. Bitcoin is about decentralization. Every other altcoin, it would seem, is about trying to invent an inefficient paypal.

Bitcoin saw exactly the same drop in full nodes when light clients were first released.

Ethereum still has over two times as many full nodes as Bitcoin.

11,415 Bitcoin nodes:

https://bitnodes.earn.com/nodes/

29,805 Ethereum full nodes:

https://www.ethernodes.org/network/1

>>Most people can't even sync a node anymore.

Totally unsubstantiated.

>Bitcoin is about decentralization.

There's more to decentralization than being able to run a full node on your Raspberry Pi with a 128K modem. Like more than 500,000 people in the entire world being able to write to the blockchain with any regularity, which is not possible with a 1 MB limit on the 10-minute blocks (1.67 KB/s throughput limit). With such limited write-access to the Bitcoin blockchain, the vast majority of the world will have to rely on trusted third parties to hold their Bitcoin wealth on their behalf, since it's impossible for the vast majority of the world to have write-access to the Bitcoin blockchain in order to make use of a private key.

I'd rather Ethereum users poll multiple trusted third parties to validate the transaction data they're seeing, and be able to hold their own private keys, and write transactions to the blockchain with those keys, than Ethereum users be able to validate the blockchain trustlessly, but have to trust third parties, acting effectively as banks, to hold their ether.

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