Bitcoin is no long the only game in crypto-currency town • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin is no long the only game in crypto-currency town

#81

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi » Thu, Jan 11, 2018, 8:48 PM UTC

jdc0589 wrote: post #15

ericb wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That problem isn't a result of the 10 minute blocks. A 0-confirmation transaction normally is just fine. These are available on Bitcoin Cash.

I honestly don't know a ton about cryptocurrencies, but I though confirmed transactions were.....more or less whole point? can you give me an ELI5 version of why 0-confirmation transactions are ok?

For small transactions, it's often a tolerable risk. You amortize any losses to double-spends and compare that to e.g CC fees.

For larger amounts, you want confirmations, but then it's generally alright to wait a little while for confirmation, too.

Note that replace-by-fee means this only works with Bitcoin Cash.

Re: Bitcoin is no long the only game in crypto-currency town

#82

Post by wcoenen » Thu, Jan 11, 2018, 8:54 PM UTC

unabridged wrote: post #67

perseusprime11 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who cares? Nobody is accepting raiblocks as a payment. There are more engineers working on Bitcoin and far more infrastructure around Bitcoin. All these altcoins are pump and dump schemes.

This is what most people don't get, these technologies are all open source. So even if some random coin comes up with a great new feature, bitcoin can just add it or at worst someone can create a fork of bitcoin with the new tech. The value is not the tech, its the network. Bitcoin has good liquidity and been tested though many drops and spikes. Each time it makes the network more antifragile. No one wants to trust a…

> bitcoin can just add it

Bitcoin is pretty much impossible to change now. It's just too big for that.

Example: Segwit voting was available in October 2016 but didn't manage to get significant miner support, finally got activated in August 2017 after a lot of controversy, and is still not seeing convincing adoption[1]. It seems to be stuck around 10%. If a soft fork is that difficult, then more drastic changes must be impossible.

[1] http://segwit.party/charts/#

Re: Bitcoin is no long the only game in crypto-currency town

#83

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi » Thu, Jan 11, 2018, 9:03 PM UTC

My opinions:

There are not meaningful differences between different proof of work coins. All PoW is based on the same principles, has the same security costs, and the same scaling challenges. Bitcoin remains the top dog and will likely stay that way due to network effect.

PoS could be interesting, but it's largely untested in the way that Bitcoin is. We need to see how mineres/voters behave and whether large holders can exert undue influence. Ethereum is by far my favored coin to see this tested, and if successful, would actually have more security for a given network cost. This is potentially disruptive.

DAG-coins or whatever you'd like to call them seem to like they're getting 'free wins' and I suspect that their security model is not sound. They're interesting but extremely risky.

Ripple is simply not a cryptocurrency by any reasonable definition.

Re: Bitcoin is no long the only game in crypto-currency town

#84

Post by Mc_Big_G » Thu, Jan 11, 2018, 9:10 PM UTC

Craigslist is no longer the only game in classifieds town.

Re: Bitcoin is no long the only game in crypto-currency town

#85

Post by perseusprime11 » Thu, Jan 11, 2018, 10:21 PM UTC

louismerlin wrote: post #37

perseusprime11 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who cares? Nobody is accepting raiblocks as a payment. There are more engineers working on Bitcoin and far more infrastructure around Bitcoin. All these altcoins are pump and dump schemes.

The project is still early stage, but still it promises to be what bitcoin should have been from the start : a decentralized, feeless and instantaneous means of transferring value.

What value?

Re: Bitcoin is no long the only game in crypto-currency town

#86

Post by grey-area » Thu, Jan 11, 2018, 10:29 PM UTC

jstanley wrote: post #39

grey-area wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 0-confirmation transaction normally is just fine. It's really not fine at all. The competition is full confirmation transactions on a debit card or bank account in seconds with much lower or zero fees.

> It's really not fine at all. Actually, it really is. I've been accepting 0-conf transactions for nearly a year and had negligible double spends. https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/zeroconf-payments.htm... The small number of double-spends that did occur since I wrote that blog post I think are mostly due to bad luck (and opportunism) rather than malicious intent upfront, and represent only ~0.1% of payments.

Actually, it really is. I've been accepting 0-conf transactions for nearly a year and had negligible double spends.

So your approach to preventing fraud is... to trust people not to defraud you?

Glad it worked for you with bitcoin and the particular people using your service, but that's not really a good basis for a payment network. There are multiple other problems with bitcoin as a payment network and currency, the delay in transactions (which prompted your experiment in ignoring a key part of the currency) is only one of them.

Re: Bitcoin is no long the only game in crypto-currency town

#87

Post by grey-area » Thu, Jan 11, 2018, 10:41 PM UTC

ericb wrote: post #34

grey-area wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 0-confirmation transaction normally is just fine. It's really not fine at all. The competition is full confirmation transactions on a debit card or bank account in seconds with much lower or zero fees.

Debit and credit-card transactions don't confirm for about 120 days , which is when chargebacks become slightly more difficult . Those chargebacks also cost the merchant not only the price, but a $15 chargeback fee.

Chargebacks (i.e. unhappy customers) are a part of any business. Remedies might be business or legal, but you can't just wish them away by excluding them from a payment solution.

I have no idea why you think that's related to time to confirm that a customer has money to pay for goods, which is an entirely unrelated problem which bitcoin solves badly in comparison to current payment networks, and due to its distributed nature is unlikely ever to solve well.

Re: Bitcoin is no long the only game in crypto-currency town

#88

Post by grey-area » Thu, Jan 11, 2018, 10:47 PM UTC

seanp2k2 wrote: post #30

grey-area wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 0-confirmation transaction normally is just fine. It's really not fine at all. The competition is full confirmation transactions on a debit card or bank account in seconds with much lower or zero fees.

>seconds At PoS systems in the US, it's typical to have to wait 30+ seconds for chip cards to go through. I'm guessing that this has more to do with the PoS system / slow internet connection for the store / slow network on the back-end card network, but cryptocurrencies would need to be sub-minute to be ~acceptable for in-person retail transactions. Until that is solved, until cryptocoins are more than speculative se…

Sure, this varies. If your POS system uses dialup, it can take tens of seconds, if it uses wifi it will be just a few seconds. If it uses contactless it can be sub-second. But in principle it can be as fast as the network and one trusted node.

The fundamental problem with bitcoin is that it is decentralised and trustless, and those two properties preclude fast transactions at a global scale - for that you need a federated system with trust between nodes. If you remove those properties, you're no longer using anything resembling bitcoin, and why not use a system with proper validated parties in the first place?

Re: Bitcoin is no long the only game in crypto-currency town

#89

Post by the_d00d » Fri, Jan 12, 2018, 12:57 AM UTC

jstanley wrote: post #39

grey-area wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 0-confirmation transaction normally is just fine. It's really not fine at all. The competition is full confirmation transactions on a debit card or bank account in seconds with much lower or zero fees.

> It's really not fine at all. Actually, it really is. I've been accepting 0-conf transactions for nearly a year and had negligible double spends. https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/zeroconf-payments.htm... The small number of double-spends that did occur since I wrote that blog post I think are mostly due to bad luck (and opportunism) rather than malicious intent upfront, and represent only ~0.1% of payments.

You just used the same argument that some parents use when they decide to not vaccinate their children. They essentially rely on the fact that everyone else vaccinates so they don't have to. This trend catches on and now measles are at a 20 year high.

Re: Bitcoin is no long the only game in crypto-currency town

#90

Post by SippinLean » Fri, Jan 12, 2018, 1:33 AM UTC

Obi_Juan_Kenobi wrote: post #83

My opinions: There are not meaningful differences between different proof of work coins. All PoW is based on the same principles, has the same security costs, and the same scaling challenges. Bitcoin remains the top dog and will likely stay that way due to network effect. PoS could be interesting, but it's largely untested in the way that Bitcoin is. We need to see how mineres/voters behave and whether large holders…

Good point, Ripple could only be a cryptocurrency if you define that as being "a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses cryptography to secure its transactions, to control the creation of additional units, and to verify the transfer of assets" or some other crazy garbage.