People who actually use bitcoin must be ignorant of all the much more usable and useful alt-coins. Can anyone think of a good reason to actually use bitcoin vs. ripple/stellar/dash/zcash/monero/nem/...? Maybe it's just cause so many platforms have been built around bitcoin?
None of the coins mentioned above can scale to become a mainstream currency. They're just the most hyped ones.
Blockchain-based coins are hard to scale. The most scalable ones at the moment use a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) instead of a blockchain.
I think that IOTA and Byteball (both DAGs) are the most advanced at the moment in terms of scalability.
In the long term, Ethereum may have potential if they manage to implement sharding.
Another good long term bet is Lisk which aims to scale using sidechains.
Actually there's been a vigorous enough debate happening in the community about how to fix some of these problems and how to move forward toward what Bitcoin will ultimately be that the community and blockchain split.
Yes but these debates have been going on for years with very little progress being made. Bitcoin is growing faster than it can keep up with, it seems.
I mean, segwit was activated. That doubles the capacity of blocks. People just need to upgrade.
Lightning Network is moving quickly. It is live on mainnet, tho still considered unstable.
Schnorr signatures are in development. This will further compress transactions.
People who actually use bitcoin must be ignorant of all the much more usable and useful alt-coins. Can anyone think of a good reason to actually use bitcoin vs. ripple/stellar/dash/zcash/monero/nem/...? Maybe it's just cause so many platforms have been built around bitcoin?
None of the coins mentioned above can scale to become a mainstream currency. They're just the most hyped ones. Blockchain-based coins are hard to scale. The most scalable ones at the moment use a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) instead of a blockchain. I think that IOTA and Byteball (both DAGs) are the most advanced at the moment in terms of scalability. In the long term, Ethereum may have potential if they manage to im…
Last I heard, IOTA had collapsed under the load of all the transactions from speculators, with people complaining it took days to get transactions to confirm. A blog post about this even made it to HN a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15944112 (As far as I can tell it took a much lower transaction volume than the Bitcoin one to cause this too, though there doesn't seem to be that much in the way of useful stats out there.)
This isn't terribly surprising because from the discussions I saw, the entire justification for why it could scale infinitely seemed to boil down to the creator accusing anyone who questioned this of spreading FUD. Byteball may be doing better, but on the other hand it hasn't had the same kind of speculative bubble that's done Bitcoin and IOTA in yet.
I've had a couple of thousand dollars "stuck" across several bitcoin transactions for over four days now (106 hours+), due to low fees suggested by my wallet/exchange.
Something needs to change, because it's currently unusable.
People who actually use bitcoin must be ignorant of all the much more usable and useful alt-coins. Can anyone think of a good reason to actually use bitcoin vs. ripple/stellar/dash/zcash/monero/nem/...? Maybe it's just cause so many platforms have been built around bitcoin?
This is referring to the minimum cost in fees for a transaction to get copied from the mempool to a block. Only when a transaction is in a block is it a valid transfer of bitcoin. Its nothing to do with trading or exchange rates or energy costs or fiat. Bitcoin is working exactly the same as it has always, however now because of the backlog, transaction fees are very high. In the order of Western Union + Visa Fees +…
Most wallets allow you get out of this situation with a clever feature. What you do is raise the insufficient fee after the fact by issuing a new transaction that is dependent on the first one, and adding a large enough fee to the second one. This is known as "child pays for parent" in BTC lingo. That being said, the fee for a good transaction now is around $22 so it might not be worth doing for your $50 send.
Where does this $22 go? What hard ware do I need to set up my own machine to process these transactions and get the fees to keep?
That's why I use Litecoin. Transactions fee are one of the lowest in all of crypto and it's transactions speeds are acceptable. Always within a couple of minutes.
Litecoin is essentially the same as bitcoin with slightly different chosen constants. Bitcoin is optimizing for decentralization, Litecoin is not.
If people actually used litecoin it’d have the same exact problems.
You'll notice the entire Bitcoin community has changed tone. It used to be "this is the currency of the future, down with cash/Visa!" but now you hear "Bitcoin is not a currency, it's a store of value". The wild price swings, slow transactions, high fees, and loq merchant acceptance make it complete garbage as a currency. But as a store of value, none of those arguments apply. It only has to compete with gold bars, w…
I don't see it as a store of value. It's just a very reliable network for sending very big transactions.
If you send 1 million dollars in Bitcoin, a $20 fee is negligible - The reliability of the Bitcoin network makes it worth it.
For smaller transactions you should just use a different coin.
> much more usable and useful alt-coins I agree. I researched Ripple a lot and am sold on it, since it's not just a crytocurrency (XRP Ticker) but is also a protocol that Gates Foundation, AMEX and other banks are using to perform cross-border payments almost instantly and with a lot lower fees and overheads. Are any of the others you mentioned, ex : stellar, dash, monero etc similar to Ripple? If not, what are their…
Stellar is the most similar to Ripple (I think they had code in common at some point). Dash and Monero are a little older, and I don't think they solve the scalability issue in any special way, but are definitely less popular and therefore more usable. I recommend reading forum posts about these different currencies to get an idea of what people think are the most competitive features/pitfalls. You could google somet…
Here is how I would suggest "feeling it out", if you are more technically inclined. Once you think you might want to buy some of a coin buy doing the above, first read a coin's whitepaper to give you a good idea of how it works and if it is just a scam. Then google around for other technical blog posts explaining how that other person, who hopefully has been using it, thinks how it works. Finally set up a node on your home machine (for bitcoin you need to download a ~165 GB blockchain, which is huge, but others are in the few GB to 100 MB range) so you can work with it directly. Then make some small transactions so you know how to do it before you make any large ones. If transacting goes easy with small fees and there are lots of sites using the coin, maybe it has a future.