151–160 of 255 posts
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I think GP means that if you have $100 in your bank it'll still be there tomorrow, not randomly erradicated by volatile swings in the market or stolen with no way to get it back. That said this is only true if you have faith in your government.
But when has government betrayed that faith (in recent times, say after WWII)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
to give just 1 example.
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I'm not as negative as you are, I think this is all very interesting, from the outside looking in. It really helps understanding the pros and cons of our monetary system, the good and the bad. It's pretty educational I think. Of course it's sad for people who invest money they can't afford to lose, but really "investing" in cryptocurrencies is more like playing roulette than anything else and they should've known bet…
I don't really know why this is being downvoted, BTC and cryptocurrencies are really interesting economically. Even if they have no direct impact on society as a whole it's valuable to see proposed alternatives to our banking and financial systems put forward and discussed in detail (e.g. it really exposes what a bank / government actually provides)
But yeah, technically and economically it's pretty fascinating I think. The only downside is that the very high valuation makes it hard to have a reasonable discussion with people on either side of the fence. It's not longer a fun classroom experiment when billion of dollars are involved.
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Just to pick up on this one small point: as I understand it, the cashback you get with a credit card is more or less taken straight from the card processing fee charged to the vendor, which of course, raises prices overall and is therefore not really cashback at all. Without the fee, you would likely have just paid a lower price in the first place. The only party benefitting from the cashback scheme is, of course, th…
Having the sender pay the fee seems like an obstacle for consumer adoption. I agree that consumers are never going to use cryptocurrency vs. credit cards to pay if: 1) It costs them money to use 2) No cashback It would be interesting to test a cryptocurrency where the recipient payed the fee, and could optionally send cashback. I'm not exactly sure how this would work, but the incentive structure would more optimally…
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I paid ~$0.60 to transfer ~$900 of Bitcoin the other day. For that amount it's not too bad, but you'd pay basically the same if you are paying for a $3 coffee. The transaction fee is based on the byte size of the transaction, not the monetary amount, so in it's current form it doesn't make sense to use Bitcoin for low-value transactions.
> fee is based on the byte size of the transaction Aren'y all bitcoin transaction really close to the same size? The amount being transferred doesn't change the size an integer contain 1 and another container 1,000,000,000 take the same amount of space (32 or 64 bits) because the spec says so. I thought transaction fees encouraged miners to include your block in a transaction.
Imagine two wallets each with a total of 1 BTC. One wallet just received a single transaction with 1 BTC and the other is funded with 10 transactions of 0.1 BTC. The wallet with 1 BTC as an input only needs that single proof to send the whole BTC, while the wallet with 10 0.1 BTC inputs needs to submit all of those proofs to transfer the 1 BTC, effectively 10x the data.
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> One of the hugely compelling benefits of cryptocurrencies is they entirely eliminate the necessity for such middlemen taking a cut and driving up costs for the parties actually partaking in the transaction. Don't all bitcoin transactions require a transaction fee in order to get processed these days?
Yes. There is no such thing as a free transaction, because payment methods and networks take work to administrate. I mean, take cash. It's expensive to make, to process, to transport, to safely store. These costs are, obviously, passed on to the users of cash in the aggregate. Cryptocurrency transaction fees are just very direct, but it's the same deal. The difference is that clearly inefficient transaction costs, li…
The only reason that Visa and Mastercard have such high fees is because it's a duopoly.
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What are you talking about? The dollar loses to inflation every year. A 1990 dollar is $1.87 in 2017 dollars.
>What are you talking about? The dollar loses to inflation every year. A 1990 dollar is $1.87 in 2017 dollars. Which is precisely why you don't leave money sitting in a 0% savings account. You invest it in equity , not a currency. Fiat is designed to lose value through inflation. Thats how the system works. Expecting to hedge against inflation by dumping your money in another currency is insanity. The only way is thr…
Bitcoin has been a great hedge for those who can access it in Venezuela.
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I paid £0 to transfer £10000 the other day. I had to split it into two transfers of £5000 but otherwise it was free to transfer between two completely separate financial institutions.
On the other hand, they fund that ability off significant fees whenever you buy something with a debit/credit card. You rarely see those fees, but the shop does, meaning the shop has to increase prices of everything by a couple of percent to cover it - and usually don't provide a discount when you're paying by cash.
Does Ethereum not have an escrow like Bitcoin where a 3rd party can confirm a transaction first? But also, if it's really as easy as replacing some arbitrary address with another I'm surprised Coindash wasn't more careful.
If the ICO implements that, there's no protection from someone replacing the ICO address.
If buyers use escrow contracts, they have to confirm their transactions before the ICO closes, so for typical hard-capped ICOs you don't have much time to verify things. When the crowdsale's website is displaying wrong information, there's no other source, and the sale is rapidly approaching a hard cap on contributions, there's not much you can do.
A better defense against this type of attack is to use the Ethereum Name Service, and publish the address well in advance. It would also help to use crowdsale structures that don't incentivize a mad rush, such as:
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Having the sender pay the fee seems like an obstacle for consumer adoption. I agree that consumers are never going to use cryptocurrency vs. credit cards to pay if: 1) It costs them money to use 2) No cashback It would be interesting to test a cryptocurrency where the recipient payed the fee, and could optionally send cashback. I'm not exactly sure how this would work, but the incentive structure would more optimally…
You don't need a new cryptocurrency for that. Just lower your prices for people paying with BTC/ETH/... to adjust. (Doesn't solve the potentially bigger issue of insurance though, but I think that has to involve some third party)
edit: On second thought, you are probably right. With the right wallet ui you could just provide a simple discount or cashback that covers the transaction fee + % cashback at the point of purchase that's covered by the recipient via a contract, or via rules that the recipient publishes.
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That's the definition of insurance. The problem with bitcoin, if you think that's a problem, is that there's no obvious way to implement this scheme. You'd have to insure your coins to a third party but then you'd probably have to give them some control over your wallet so that you can't just "steal" your own coins and make a claim. But clearly people want this type of guarantee so I think the cryptopunk dream of hav…
I can think of at least two real-world uses where cryptocurrency is a better choice than fiat: (1) sending money overseas with very low transaction fee, and (2) transacting on the black market.
Except that fluctuations in the conversion rate make this very touchy, especially if you're talking about a significant sum of money. Also, sending crypto anywhere outside of a handful of developed nations is fraught with difficulty because recipients need to be able to convert bitcoin into spendable money which often involves risky in-person meetups and gigantic markups on the conversion rate.