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Announcing SegWit support

blog.coinbase.com

61–70 of 71 posts

Re: Announcing SegWit support

#61
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly still nowhere close to the free transaction up to €15'000 within of 10 seconds that’s being rolled out across the European banks right now. Bitcoin was supposed to be an improvement upon existing payment methods, so far, it’s not quite there yet.

>> Bitcoin was supposed to be an improvement upon existing payment methods, so far, it’s not quite there yet. Your proposed "better" transaction method is worse in many ways that are important to people on the Internet, namely tracking, non-psuedonoymous, not the physical representation of the money, and many other related issues. It isn't all about speed and cost for people who transact in cryptocurrency.

How important they are to people on the Internet remains to be seen. Until now, privacy and decentralization have not been successful selling points for any technology looking for wide acceptance (diaspora, mastodon, ...)

Re: Announcing SegWit support

#62
post #43

Why is it that sending the wrong kind of coin to an address results in the money being lost? It seems like a rather severe UI bug to inflict on users.

Bitcoin Cash has a separate blockchain (and peer-to-peer swarm, etc) but uses the same address format and checksum as Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash did that on purpose so people's addresses from before the fork would continue to work if they moved to BCH at the fork. Personally I think they (BCH) like the confusion because it keeps people talking about them where Bitcoin is talked about (never mind the confusingly-similar na…

Not with SegWit addresses they couldn't, because the entire point of carrying out the Bitcoin Cash fork was to create something Bitcoin-like that didn't have Segwit and that its well-funded proponents could insist was the real Bitcoin. (They like to call Bitcoin "SegwitCoin".)

Re: Announcing SegWit support

#63
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly still nowhere close to the free transaction up to €15'000 within of 10 seconds that’s being rolled out across the European banks right now. Bitcoin was supposed to be an improvement upon existing payment methods, so far, it’s not quite there yet.

It was so nice of them to, out of the goodness of their hearts, provide such a competitively priced service. It sure seems unlikely that it was at all motivated by competition with alternative financial systems.

SEPA has provided free transfers years before Satoshi even posted his first post, and SEPA ICT's first draft was at a time when Bitcoin was published, but no one had used it yet.

The reason isn't the goodness of their hearts, it's simply a government mandated program to improve the payment infrastructure.

Re: Announcing SegWit support

#64
post #21
post #3

This is good to see for Coinbase users. > A common piece of feedback from customers is transaction fees for sending Bitcoin on Coinbase are too high. For example, around $2.50 for a 1:1 send last week or so. This is on top of the cut they take for purchases. Clients that implemented SegWit were able to charge much lower transaction fees (~$0.15 for confirmation in 20 minutes -- less for longer waits) for the same kin…

Sadly still nowhere close to the free transaction up to €15'000 within of 10 seconds that’s being rolled out across the European banks right now. Bitcoin was supposed to be an improvement upon existing payment methods, so far, it’s not quite there yet.

You may want to look into the Cyprus bank depositor haircuts of early 2013

Re: Announcing SegWit support

#65
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly still nowhere close to the free transaction up to €15'000 within of 10 seconds that’s being rolled out across the European banks right now. Bitcoin was supposed to be an improvement upon existing payment methods, so far, it’s not quite there yet.

You may want to look into the Cyprus bank depositor haircuts of early 2013

That's a good point, but won't do anything for adoption.

Bitcoin will be supported by stores and websites only if enough people use it, and people will use what is most convenient, not what is most secure or most private.

As long as people don't care about privacy, Bitcoin won't succeed. And if people ever care about it, half the users of HN will be without a job, considering they're almost all working at Google/Facebook/Amazon/startups selling private data

Re: Announcing SegWit support

#66
post #21
post #3

This is good to see for Coinbase users. > A common piece of feedback from customers is transaction fees for sending Bitcoin on Coinbase are too high. For example, around $2.50 for a 1:1 send last week or so. This is on top of the cut they take for purchases. Clients that implemented SegWit were able to charge much lower transaction fees (~$0.15 for confirmation in 20 minutes -- less for longer waits) for the same kin…

Sadly still nowhere close to the free transaction up to €15'000 within of 10 seconds that’s being rolled out across the European banks right now. Bitcoin was supposed to be an improvement upon existing payment methods, so far, it’s not quite there yet.

> Bitcoin was supposed to be an improvement upon existing payment methods

Where are you getting that from? People noted as early as 2009/2010(Hal Finney particularly) that it was inherently inefficient for that purpose. And that perhaps people would build addition layers on top of it, but it was always clear that it wasn't some magic solution to payments at any reasonable scale.

Not to mention the value proposition of credit cards for consumers(cash back, fraud protection, various perks like travel insurance ect) has always been obviously superior.

Bitcoin is cool/interesting/potentially part of a well balanced portfolio as an investment with unique properties. But I feel anyone who jumped into Bitcoin because they thought it was going to be great at payments was badly mislead.

Re: Announcing SegWit support

#67
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was kind of his point. Crypto sounds less like a revolution if markets treat it as an asset; as opposed to treating it as a currency.

With all the crypto hacks which can cause you to lose everything, cryptocurrencies are the last place I would want to redistribute any of my current assets.

If you protect your private keys properly (and therefore actually own your bitcoin) it is not feasible for someone to steal it. At least it through a hack. The hacks you hear about are about stealing an exchange’s private keys which are are not adequately protected and are holding BTC on the users behalf.

Re: Announcing SegWit support

#68
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly still nowhere close to the free transaction up to €15'000 within of 10 seconds that’s being rolled out across the European banks right now. Bitcoin was supposed to be an improvement upon existing payment methods, so far, it’s not quite there yet.

Lol. It's advantages are that it's sound money and uncensorable, not faster than visa. Layer one will never scale to superior global currency. It's an immutable, append only database. DCS is a trade-off.

[deleted]

Re: Announcing SegWit support

#69
post #46
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My limited knowledge tells me that BTC will lose its main reason for existence - solution of Byzantine generals problem, allowing trustless store of value. With what I've read about SegWit, it's a practical solution to improve transaction throughput by moving transactions off blockchain, which in turn removes trustlessness from the equation. I'd like to know if my conclusion is correct.

1) Segwit does improve transaction throughput, but it does so by improving the efficiency of transaction storage on the blockchain. 2) The Lightning Network improves transaction throughput by moving transactions off the blockchain, and requires segwit to be active for reasons apart from its transaction efficiency, specifically that it fixes the transaction malleability problem.

1. Actually that is incorrect. SegWit transactions are several bytes larger than old style transactions.
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