I know this whole "bitcoin is pointles" meme gets upchuckles on hacker news all day long, but at this point it's pretty embarrassing that this level of ignorance continues to persist.
As it turns out "sending money over the internet" is kind of an important utility for the modern world, and nothing does it as well as Bitcoin. This is why it's now a trillion dollar global economy.
That's great for you that you're in a position where you never need to send money over the internet, and you have people who you trust that can manage all your money for you without robbing you, but that's a privilege not everyone in this world has.
Please stop denigrating shit that you don't understand. Bring proud of ignorance is not a good look, and it really is embarrassing that a community that's supposed to be somewhat technologically sophisticated has bought in so hard to this ignorant-ass take.
I think I agree with your sentiment, but saying that nothing is as good as Bitcoin for sending money over the internet, and that’s why it has value, is just really not a compelling argument.
Yup.
And that key feature of "sending money over the internet" thing hasn't worked out very well so far
I've been in it, found the entire system wanting, and got out. May get in again to enjoy gamble in speculative bubbles, but as a technology, it is still in the early and massively-sucking and increasingly-sucking days.
Like railroads in the 18th century, they utterly changed society, but most investors lost their shirts along the way.
Scalability, inconvenience, insecurity, and transaction fees all suck to varying degrees at varying times.
It used to be that transactions would take 5-10 minutes to confirm, and that seemed mildly inconvenient but acceptable due to low costs. Now, it varies wildly, e.g., between 61 and 426 minutes in the last week [1]. I just bought software last night and the transaction cleared in fewer seconds than I could notice, and that network handles orders of magnitude more transactions than does BTC.
Costs. BTC transaction costs used to be astonishingly trivial. Now, they fluctuate wildly depending on network congestion, and average well over $20/transaction. [2] This is nuts. A BTC transaction has to be over $750 to be better than break-even compared to a 3% credit card transaction fee. The days of buying a pizza with BTC are long gone, unless you want to pay more in fees than for the pizza. But it might make sense for buying a Tesla, if your fiat-exchange costs on the input side are not too high.
Inconvenience and insecurity. You can either keep your BTC with someone else, which means you don't control it ("Not your keys, not your coin", see also multiple exchange hacks and/or exit scams), or you must roll your own. This involves first, extensive research to avoid selecting a wallet that has either been deliberately designed to steal your bitcoin, or just has unknown vulnerabilities. Then, you need to have absolutely solid key management to avoid both having your BTC stolen bay targeted malware attacks, or losing it because you lost your key, crashed your drive, etc. I find this daunting with a solid tech background, getting individual users to successfully and conveniently do it is not going to happen.
Paul Graham made an excellent point about this yesterday [3]
In short, without MASSIVE improvements, BTC and many other cryptos are nothing more than gambling on vaporware.
And that is ignoring the deliberately engineered-in catastrophic energy consumption, which is literally more than the energy consumption of entire countries, when we need desperately to be cutting energy usage to minimize anthropometric global warning
Sure IFF [4] the system could be scaled to handle billions of transactions per day at a cost of pennies per transaction (compare with ACH network costs), and with a usable and secure UI/UX, sure it WOULD be fantastic.
But over a decade since those promises, all of the metrics: scalability, security, transaction time, costs, are tracking in the wrong direction.
I really wish someone could point me to some cruptocurrency that has these solved. I'd genuinely like to see it and would use and advocate for it.
But until then, I can only hope they enjoy their gambling.
I know I'm just a single point of data, but I routinely buy things on the Internet with Bitcoin that cost $200-300 USD. I always set the fee to just under a dollar and have never had any issues with the transaction being confirmed within 20-30 minutes, including in the last few weeks.
Of course, paying with Bitcoin saves the seller about 3% of the final cost, and they need not worry about chargebacks, which saves them more money in the long run, so they offer a discount when crypto is used. It's a win-win for me and the seller.
> Of course, paying with Bitcoin saves the seller about 3% of the final cost, and they need not worry about chargebacks, which saves them more money in the long run, so they offer a discount when crypto is used. It's a win-win for me and the seller.
But where are the benefits for the buyer? I have to go out of my way to buy BTC, when I’m paid in USD, and the value changes so quick that if I don’t want to hold BTC the buying the exact amount will be difficult, get to deal with fun taxes at the end of the year, and all of this because “fiat is bad” and to give up my rights to a chargeback. And then one day SHA256 will be broken, as all hashing functions eventually are, and then what?
Interesting, I was several years ago seeing the transaction delays climb into the hours, but not the fees (ya, maybe I should have set my fees higher, just went for average). I wonder how much variance there is in the network and if you are just lucky, or somehow frequently get picked up in maybe a less busy part of the network, or if there's some attribute you unconsciously use that gives your transactions so much better than average performance? Either way, enjoy your advantage while it lasts!
I've done multiple txs in the last few weeks - all with "normal fees," 2 took 3 days to get a single confirmation. 1 took ~24 hours, although these were the outliers, several other txs happened in normal time frames.
It's possible the app I use is just bad at calculating fees, but I'm thinking yeah that guy got lucky.
Ah yes, the optimal way to send money over the internet must surely involve burning up an amount of electricity which could’ve powered my house last week
Also you have to have absolutely perfect OpSec at all times. Otherwise you run the risk of someone on the other side of the world stealing all your money and there is absolutely zero recourse.
I’m undecided on Bitcoin. Happy to be called ignorant, but only if you can explain why. There are many ways of transferring money across the internet. Why is Bitcoin special if that’s the reason for its value? Genuinely want to be won over.
You can buy your coworker a pizza with your credit card today. At most the fee would be 3%. From start to end the whole process would take no more than 5 mins. Plus, pretty much every decent pizzeria on the planet already accepts it as payment.
The BTC transfer fee is something like $20 now, more than the cost of a pizza, and the transaction might take like an hour to clear? Maybe it's fine if you don't mind overpaying, aren't too hungry, or you enjoy cold pizza.
> BTC transfer fee is something like $20 now, more than the cost of a pizza, and the transaction might take like an hour to clear? Maybe it's fine if you don't mind overpaying, aren't too hungry, or you enjoy cold pizza.
Segwit transfer is currently at $0.003, and a transaction with enough fee processes instantly. It takes 6 confirmations for a guarantee (but that will settle over the next hour). Pizza deliveries get paid in cash through many extensions that provide BTC2CASH purchase.
I can bet you buying a pizza in Spain with Spanish currency using a US card will charge you a foreign exchange fee.
> I can bet you buying a pizza in Spain with Spanish currency using a US card will charge you a foreign exchange fee.
That sounds like a personal choice. There are plenty of banks that don't charge fees for purchasing in foreign currencies. Monzo and Revolut both spring to mind here in the UK, and I believe both are now available in the US.
Most of the other ways require a trusted third party. The position of the trusted third party is attractive to rent-seekers and often generates conflicts of interest. Automating the position of trusted third party with an algorithm has value, not because the algorithm works better than a reliable third party, but because it doesn't have any interests of its own that could come into conflict.
Bitcoin itself is not at all the best tool for this job, its value comes from the fact that it happened to be first. It's valuable for the same reason antiques are valuable.
> There are many ways of transferring money across the internet.
Only through a centralized intermediary (e.g. PayPal), which may block the transfer, freeze funds, deny access, go bankrupt, etc. Bitcoin allows direct peer-to-peer money transfers (a bit like cash but digital).
> Why is Bitcoin special if that’s the reason for its value?
Personally, I feel that the censorship resistant and pseudonymous p2p money transfer is a nice feature but the killer feature is that it's a money that can't be manipulated by any one entity. Its rules are pretty much set in stone. Since it is politically neutral, it is well suited for becoming an internationally accepted store of value / currency.
Not quite. The miners collectively decide what rules to follow. A majority of them forming a cartel to collectively skip certifying certain transactions is completely in the realm of what’s allowed by the network.
> Not quite. The miners collectively decide what rules to follow.
I don't mind being nitpicked but what you wrote is more incorrect. Miners can't unilaterally decide what rules to follow even if a majority of the hash power formed a cartel. Non-mining nodes also validate the rules and would reject mined blocks that violate consensus rules. The worse that a majority cartel of miners could do is perform a double spend attack or bring the network to a halt but that's hardly surprising.
Yes. But if the minority gets wind of that, it could create its own hard fork and keep out known members of the cartel in the future. Something like the opposite happened with Ethereum in response to the DAO hack, when the majority rolled back a transfer of ethereum by a minority of wallets that followed the rules as written but were against the intent of the rules.
Crypto is often sold as 'anarchy with rules' but it's not really that. Nor is it oligarchy as is the case with fiat and central banks. Crypto is in fact democratic. I wonder whether that's why it's unpopular in certain circles.
...at 4 transactions per second and $20 / transaction. Assuming nothing interferes to drop the hash rate; in China, transactions have been banned although mining is still legal.
You're thinking is limited to your experience only.
PayPal charges a big percentage to send money to friends overseas. 3.9% + $0.3 in my experience, some countries may be higher, how is that lower than Bitcoin's fees?
As it turns out "sending money over the internet" is kind of an important utility for the modern world, and nothing does it as well as Bitcoin. This is why it's now a trillion dollar global economy.
That's great for you that you're in a position where you never need to send money over the internet, and you have people who you trust that can manage all your money for you without robbing you, but that's a privilege not everyone in this world has.
Please stop denigrating shit that you don't understand. Bring proud of ignorance is not a good look, and it really is embarrassing that a community that's supposed to be somewhat technologically sophisticated has bought in so hard to this ignorant-ass take.