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Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

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Re: Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

#21

Post by gizmo686 »

smokeyj wrote: post #7
HenryBemis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know munch about investing (I do), but 50$ on a 50k transaction that makes a 5k profit, is peanuts and never stopped anyone from investing. Investing is not a sport/hobby for teenagers that rely on the daily allowance.

But you can also pay $50 on a $5 transaction. LN existing on testnet has no bearing on the real world. Who wants to tie up $50 to open a channel and $50 to close it? Small blockers are kidding themselves.

The idea of LN is to reduce the demand for on chain transactions. If this happens, transaction fees will go down and opening a channel will not cost $50.

Fundamentally, Bitcoin needs some form of off-chain transaction. It is just not feasible to record every transaction in a permanent public ledger (let alone one that needs to be synced quickly enough to allow for ~10 minute block times)

Re: Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

#22

Post by ripberge »

Still long on bitcoin, but also wouldn't be surprised if it lost 70% of its value in short term.

He does bring up some great points regarding transaction throughput and the team productivity.

It seems like lightning network is the tool to get a lot of cheap, fast transactions done via bitcoin and turn it into a really useful viable currency.

However, that has taken a long time just to get to test mode. Much of the fate of bitcoin is tied to that github repository and pull requests. There has never been another open source software project with this much money riding on it. Can this team continue to deliver value?

There are other concerns like deflationary spirals, volatility, etc., but my bet on bitcoin is largely a bet on the dev team and whether or not useful pull requests get created & merged and what that velocity is.

Re: Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

#23

Post by feelin_googley »

As I recall, back in the day, SoundForge was the lightest and fastest audio editor for Windows. (On the Mac there were of course many choices for simple editing, going all the way back to SoundEdit16.) It was a little sad to SoundForge sold to Sony. The author should be proud of that software. There was nothing else comparable for Windows back then, to my knowledge. Interesting that he became involved with something as different as Bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

#24

Post by smokeyj »

gizmo686 wrote: post #21
smokeyj wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can also pay $50 on a $5 transaction. LN existing on testnet has no bearing on the real world. Who wants to tie up $50 to open a channel and $50 to close it? Small blockers are kidding themselves.

The idea of LN is to reduce the demand for on chain transactions. If this happens, transaction fees will go down and opening a channel will not cost $50. Fundamentally, Bitcoin needs some form of off-chain transaction. It is just not feasible to record every transaction in a permanent public ledger (let alone one that needs to be synced quickly enough to allow for ~10 minute block times)

> If this happens, transaction fees will go down and opening a channel will not cost $50

Bitcoin can process about ~3.5 tx's a second. The global population is about 7.6B. 1MB blocks are not sufficient..

Edit: For the record I think the obvious solution is both on and off chain scaling. Why it's even a debate I'm not really sure. I blame the illuminati.

Re: Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

#25

Post by sowbug »

smacktoward wrote: post #15
HenryBemis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know munch about investing (I do), but 50$ on a 50k transaction that makes a 5k profit, is peanuts and never stopped anyone from investing. Investing is not a sport/hobby for teenagers that rely on the daily allowance.

The point is that Bitcoin is supposed to be a currency , and nobody is ever going to use a currency that costs you $50 to process every transaction regardless of whether it’s for $50k or 50 cents.

Well yes, but Android was supposed to be an OS for digital cameras, and YouTube was supposed to be a dating site.

Re: Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

#26

Post by namelost »

pmlnr wrote: post #6
stale2002 wrote: post #3

50$ in fees per transaction, I never thought I'd see this day. For the last 3 years, there has been a bitcoin civil war about how to scale bitcoin, as people have warned that the problems we are seeing now would happen. And unfortunately for bitcoin, the side that wanted high transaction fees, and wanted to prevent all scaling won the war. And now we are seeing those problems come home to roost, as segwit (which was…

> Those of us who are fed up with these problems have moved on to other coins, such as Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash. What do you use those for? In the article above the author mentions you were able to pay for dinner, for various bits and pieces in BTC - even for pizzas, as we all know. You can't do that with ETH, BCH, or any altcoin, and you can't use BTC for it any more either. So why move on to other coins?

Stripe maintains a big list of prohibited businesses. Some of these are honest consumer protection. Others are there to try to instil Christian values into our money, for instance you may not use Stripe to sell sex toys.

If you ask Stripe, they'll tell you that these restrictions are there because of the requirements of Stripe's partners. And that is exactly the problem.

If we are heading towards a cashless society (and we are), then we need an electronic payment system that does not consult the Bible before deciding whether to allow your payment or not.

Re: Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

#27

Post by nadam »

These "bitcoin = tulip maina = .com bubble" articles get a bit boring after a while especially if one is relatively deeply involved with the space. This has been discussed at very great depths thousands of times already.

What shows how superficial these articles are is that almost all of these articles (and most of the mainstream media articles) single out BTC, (which is less than 50% of total crypto market capitalization) without going into specifics of the given coin (like discussion of cons and pros of on-chain scalability solution vs. second layer scalability solutions, POW, POS, small/big block sizes etc...)

I think it would be a bit more interesting to speak about the price of a continously rebalanced, market-cap weighted index of the top 10 coins or something for mainstream purposes. This would prevent these articles focusing too much on the current state of BTC (which they cannot really focus on anyway without going much deeper), zoom out a bit more, and put the focus more on the possibilities in the whole evolving cryptocurrency space, which would be more interesting for a mainstream audience (they just don't know, because everybody tells them bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin).

Re: Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

#28

Post by michaelchisari »

bbrx wrote: post #17

Pardon my very limited knowledge about those things, but one thing I wonder and find fascinating about bitcoin is this : I understand that a very limited number of people, probably the initial developers, hold a very hight percentage of available bitcoin. (disregard the rest in case i'm even completely mistaken in that assumption...) Those people have an asset with an incredibly high face value. Of course, the market…

On the flip side of that, how do you build an economy around a currency that front loads such massive wealth inequality out of the gate?

Re: Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

#29

Post by Terretta »

smacktoward wrote: post #15
HenryBemis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know munch about investing (I do), but 50$ on a 50k transaction that makes a 5k profit, is peanuts and never stopped anyone from investing. Investing is not a sport/hobby for teenagers that rely on the daily allowance.

The point is that Bitcoin is supposed to be a currency , and nobody is ever going to use a currency that costs you $50 to process every transaction regardless of whether it’s for $50k or 50 cents.

> nobody is ever going to use a currency that costs you $50 to process every transaction regardless of whether it’s for $50k or 50 cents

That's pretty much how USD wires work. It's markedly worse if going outside the border.

Even at these fees, on friction, fees, and settlement time, Bitcoin still compares favorably.

Re: Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

#30

Post by perl4ever »

Terretta wrote: post #29
smacktoward wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that Bitcoin is supposed to be a currency , and nobody is ever going to use a currency that costs you $50 to process every transaction regardless of whether it’s for $50k or 50 cents.

> nobody is ever going to use a currency that costs you $50 to process every transaction regardless of whether it’s for $50k or 50 cents That's pretty much how USD wires work. It's markedly worse if going outside the border. Even at these fees, on friction, fees, and settlement time, Bitcoin still compares favorably.

I haven't successfully used Bitcoin yet, but it was my impression that the $20 or $50 fee was for a reasonably fast transaction, and you could get slower performance for less. If I'm transferring a large amount of money between financial institutions then I expect to wait anywhere from 24 hours to 3 or more days for it to complete. So I'm wondering if a Bitcoin transaction would be significantly cheaper if you were perfectly happy to wait a day.
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