Bitcoin Forum

It is becoming apparent that there are paid shills participating in every topic to do with the block size debate.

Apparently Mike Hearn simply cannot let a "dead horse" die. :(

I do not work for any company (other than my own) and am not sponsored to make any statement but I will make this statement.

Bitcoin is not suitable for "coffees" and why should it be (as practically no-one in the world is paid in Bitcoin)?

What Bitcoin is very suitable for is "remittance' (sending money overseas) yet so far it has virtually no market share in that sphere (which it should dominate).

Can we start focusing on remittance rather than coffees?

To expand on what I am saying I think that you need to consider this:

Companies like Western Union would go out of business if people just used Bitcoin for remittance (real *disruption* IMO).

i have been saying this for years. but.. here is the kicker...until things like localbitcoins can sort out their large profiteering spread.. the 10% (5%buy for sender 5% sell to recipient) bitcoin is not going to beat WU.

i and many people have done some actual calculations. using $100 or $1000 and using the localbitcoins valuations calculated the amount of bitcoins obtained.. then picked a remote country and calculated the amount of remote native fiat currency it converts to.. and then looked on WU website to copy the same fiat to fiat swaps..

and WU was actually cheaper.. (recipient ends up with more)

edit: ciyam just gave an example in another post of sending $10 to india, suggesting its 0 fee, so i done a quick calculation.. and its 6% "fee"(spread)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1309229.msg13419774#msg13419774

until bitcoin buyers/sellers sorts out the spread (hidden fee) then the recipient will still get less via bitcoin than WU..
sorry but even if bitcoin pretends to have no fee's... there are still hidden costs..

so bitcoin is not perfect for remittances either right now

.. but it could be

THANK YOU!  Finally, someone to tell us what is good for us, make our decisions for us, hold our hands, tuck us in to bed at night, etc.

Now that I have you to think for me, I can get rid of my pesky brain, freedoms, etc.

Not everyone who disagrees with you is a paid shill.  :)

Some wielding massive influence over the argument are paid by organizations with strong incentives to steer the direction of Bitcoin. Perhaps it would be beneficial if you would consider that as well, while you have the conspiratorial part of your brain warmed up and humming.

I am not telling anyone "what they should think" but instead just asking people to take a good look at "the reality" of Bitcoin as it stands now.

Again - no organisation is paying me for my opinion (but welcome to try and bribe me if you like). :D

LOL - I know, sort of like "we are all Satoshi", now we can have a "We are all Mike Hearn" thread :)

I am Mike Hearn!

no, no... I AM Mike Hearn.

Oh, Ohh OHHH!  We are ALL Mike Hearn!

Thanks CIYAM!  You are as always.... amusing and good for a laugh :)

i agree, i'ts like those that are worried all the time about 51% attack, which no miners in his right mind will ever perform against the network

this is the same, the "dev", will sort this out, because otherwise, will just be like hindering the adoption of their investment..

everyone want bitcoin to grow, afterall

It's not quite that simple.  I agree with the Miner example to the extent that in the current environment it would be financial suicide.  It would be such a visual, identifiable 9/11 style attack that you couldn't miss it.  Trust would go by bye, everything would collapse.  Even if it survived it would drop like a rock.  Everything everyone believed about the decentralization of Bitcoin would be eroded in a second.  NO ONE could ever trust it again.

I think the problem with comparing this to the Blockstream Player/Dev situation is that it is a more subtle attack.  It's a slow, manipulative, lying partially media driven, partially censorship empowered movement by a small percentage of the community - who actually DO have the power to stifle innovation and competition.

SUDDEN BRUTE FORCE vs SLOW DELIBERATE MANIPULATION

The new fiat looks and acts surprisingly like the one it looks to displace.

Focusing on long distance remittance needs to be performed by some company that chooses to focus on it just like BitPay did with point of sale. Start a company and make it happen or convince Tony Gallippi or someone else to switch gears.

As for the block size debates, meh, it gives lonely people something to talk about. Who cares.

http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/blocks

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img903/8611/ahvXQq.png



No problem here ... http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img911/3660/V7deXV.jpg

Totally agree.
This is getting ridicolous and I try to avoid to read those comments or whole threads which get opened new again and again.
Definitely shills who try to flame, divide and bring disturbance.
The roadmap is out for this year and I think it's a good one. I would like to have a bit of an increase in blocksize as well but this constant bashing, especially on reddit, is just crazy.

How's the 'coffe' much different from remittance?

Predictable fees/sufficient MB per block means more people using bitcoins and more businesses accepting it, which in turn increase confidence in BTC as well as creates demand for exchanges (or localbitcoins), more competing exchangers reduce the convection fees. All that could create solid ground for direct bitcoin remmitance.

But my personal guess is that, in future, banks/WU will be using their own 'blockchain technology', which could enable them to massively reduce their fees (of course if they're willing to). For that reason, it's not wise to turn BTC into 'one-trick pony'.

Well, you're screwed.  Blockchain Players think you are ignorant and wrong in your opinion.  They don't care about your opinion.  They know better than you, they have the power, and they will do what is best for all.

ALL HEIL BLOCKCHAIN!
The 4th Reich of Fiat

Why is it not good for "coffees"?

1. malleability makes it easy to get a free coffee, so there is reluctance to accept zero confirms
2. if you want to get the coffee value confirmed in 10 minutes it will cost you 4 cents
3. if the coffee shop makes you wait for it to confirm to avoid malleability issues, then your waiting in a line at the coffee desk for 10 minutes, while 20 other people have paid via NFC debit cards or applepay and already left with their coffee. and you start to wonder.. is bitcoin really better right now..

I see, so essentially the confirmation time.

The only issue with this is that there is not to many people that have the need to transfer money overseas on a regular basis.  When it comes to transfering money over seas, these larger companies who would be doing the transfers are making large transfers.  If you have a 10,000 BTC transfer going on and between the time you purchase that BTC to make the transfer and the time it is received, if the price drops $1 USD Per BTC, then whoever will be receiving thie BTC is taking a loss of $10,000.  Those are chances that the overseas companies are not willing to take the chance with.  I know when I am doing over sea transfers, I would not take that chance.

We can't ignore it. Unless we do something right now we're all gonna dieeeee.

well also if bitcoin had 1 million retail stores, where people could use it to buy coffee, baked beans, toilet paper and magazines.. the amount of people using it for daily spends would increase instead people using for yearly savings.. and that would increase the requirement of transactions per second to cope with millions of people doing transactions each day.

EG lets say bitcoin can handle at most 3000-4000 tx's a block.. 144 blocks a day.. only allows for 432,000-576,000 people to do only 1 transaction a day.

lets say out of 2 million people who want to use it once a day.. bitcoin needs to be 4mb. so there is also the fact that user adoption (amount of people just wanting to do 1 transaction, is inhibited.. let alone what i previously said about what people could happily buy without issue or headache.

and lastly it leads on to dcentralised exchanges.. try day trading if 500,000 people are also trying it.. good luck with your 1 trade a day

keepdoing - Account registered in August 2015

CIYAM - Probably one of the most knowledgeable people around here when it comes to the scripting language and op_codes of the Bitcoin protocol.

Funny how the people that understands Bitcoin initimately want to keep to the suggested roadmap, while new accounts, barely older than one year, only post about blocksizes and how important it is to increase the blocksize, in the name of freedom.

keepdoing -  since you are so familiar with the inner workings of Bitcoin, could you construct a raw tx for us showing how you would commit a transaction to the blockchain, and maybe give us an example of different transaction sizes?

Seeing how you think of yourself as being familiar with the protocol construction of Bitcoin, and having a well informed oppinion about the blocksize, it should be a walk in the park for you to explain transactions for us as well.

keepdoing also has an odd obsession with Craig Wright. Very peculiar indeed.

Edit: More like keepgoing. Hehe. Isn't guys?

http://cs323229.vk.me/v323229814/4796/fblsdOxmvUI.jpg

Ya!

You should only worry about something that is worthy of worry. For I do not know what that could be of, I still support meaningful and genuine worry. The blocksize as I know it isn't too much to mind but you must completely respect another's concern. That's just the way I see it.

no shop, in the world of HELL, wait for the confirmation.

VISA/MASTERCARD need 4 days to confirm in the best way ... and 8 days in difficult conditions.

thats because visa has guarantee's.. if there are no funds its INSTANTLY declined.. so that means that even if it does take 4 days to settle(confirm). it dont matter as there is no malleability to worry about..

once bitcoin sorts out malleability then retailers will be happy to accept 0 confirms and wont care it it takes 10 minutes or 1 hour to settle as they are guaranteed to get paid.. just like visa

Do you even realize you want Bitcoin to be something different than it meant to be since the start ? The problem is bitcoin development is overtaken with devs with so different vision where Bitcoin should go versus original Satoshi plans.





Yes, instead of strenghtening zero confirmation transactions (which works relatively reliable today), new plan is RBF (replace by fee) which makes zero confirmation transactions not useable because double spending zero confirmation transactions will become trivial soon, thanks again to current Bitcoin devs steering the Bitcoin to their desired path of Bitcoin used as remitance or store of value only, both with higher fees - but who will use such Bitcoin in first place and why store value there when you will need convert to fiat or other real usage crypto and give fees to centralized exchanges for such conversion ???




Never going to happen with RBF (replace by fee)

Yeah, I'm saddened a bit to see people saying its not good for coffees, as that is what I thought was one of the major benefits of bitcoin, the low transaction fees enable more economic flow, which includes many small purchases. "Not suitable for coffees" seems like a different coin altogether.

As ATguy mentions, RBF will fully deprecate 0 conf, making double spending a transaction a one button affair available to all.

The dream of in-person retail BTC payments, after existing as a brief twinkle in our eye, will be fully sacrificed on the altar of centrally planned production quotas and artificial scarcity.

Bitcoin is wealth storage and transfer for the wealthy and as a settlement layer for banks cutting edge payment processors. Poors may use Doge.  8)

What Bitcoin wallet are you using at the moment?

Core, why?

I guess I can appreciate that. :-\

After reading so many things on the blocksize debate I'm not even sure if there is an answer to it.  Can't please everyone whatever 's done.

Core as in Bitcoin-QT?

yes

not exactly.. infact by making it easier to undo transactions or replace them.. will increase the likelihood of a retailer seeing one transaction. and then once the customer has left the retailer before 10 minutes. the customer simply undoes or changes the transaction adding a higher fee to a second transaction that pays himself..

for a retailer to retain the first transaction the RBF requires the retailer the ability to change values to allow a higher fee to the first transaction to force miners to accept that transaction instead of the second transaction the customer pushes out after leaving the retailer (trying to double spend to make the retailer tx void)

the problem is that if we have a tx that is
1customerbitcoin address (1btc) -> 1Retailerbitcoin address (0.01btc)
                                                  -> 1customerbitcoin address (0.9899btc)     (remember its not 0.99 as the fee is done by not giving all change back)

if a retailer can change the values without needing to have that customers signature.. then the retailer can do this too
1customerbitcoin address (1btc) -> 1Retailerbitcoin address (0.9999btc).
                                                  -> 1customerbitcoin address (0btc)

if anyone can change values without signatures.. then bitcoin is screwed.. and so without screwing the system. only the customer can change values which means a customer can do
1customerbitcoin address (1btc) -> 1Retailerbitcoin address (0btc)
                                                  -> 1customerbitcoin address (0.9999btc)
to ensure he gets his money back, while sipping his free coffee

This is the point to be honest, no matter what they do, there will always be a part of people that's not happy with it, that's human, so I say keep nodes decentralized as first priority and keep working in the good direction for this to happen.

Paid shills...lol umm yeahhh. right.

anyway i disagree with you.  Bitcoin is perfectly suitable for coffees.

Apparently it is just because you say it is - just like the world is really flat. :D

It's fine for any size transaction as amounts large and small are supported
by the protocol and we have seen it in action in both.

The burden of proof is on you to if you want to assert its somehow "unsuitable for coffee".
Appears that its your own personal opinion based on your own biases of what you think
Bitcoin should be.

It is not fine for any size transaction and I'm surprised you would make such a silly statement.

Can you make a transaction with 0.00000001 BTC?

(and I mean literally yourself not a miner)

It has also been pointed out hundreds of times that you can't rely upon zero confirmations so your coffee is going to go cold before you will be allowed to drink it (and if changes are pushed that would allow for tx replacement with a fee then it would be child's play to cheat your coffee vendor).

Dust limits are in place to prevent transactions of no economic
benefit.  That is orders of magnitude smaller than a coffee,
which clearly does have an economic benefit.  Pretty weak
argument.


It's been "pointed out" erroneously hundreds of times.

Absolutely you can rely on zero confirmations since few people are going to risk going to jail for attempted theft over a coffee.  In addition, it is possible for nodes to query the mempool (see Bip35) to detect double spend attempts with zero confirmation.

You don't even show ID to buy a coffee (at least not as yet) so how on earth are people risking going to jail by not paying?

We don't seem to have jails packed full of credit card fraudsters either for that matter.

The point is not an immediate double spend but simply a tx that will confirm too slowly due to a lack of fee (or too small a fee) so that the "double spend" will happen well after you've left the coffee shop (when the original tx is dropped from the mempool).

The core devs have all recommended not to trust zero confirmations yet seemingly you know better than them?

Pretty sure those problems are easily solvable.  99% of people won't be trying to double spend on coffees. 
I'm confident the community will find a way to scale Bitcoin for transactions large and small.

Creating an arbitrary limit where certain transactions are too small to be "suitable"
(and I'm not talking about dust) seems to be overly rigid and defeatist.

Just my opinion...but if you want to try to convince people not to use Bitcoin
for small transactions, I can't stop you.

 

DO NOT USE BITCOIN! BITCOIN IS DOOOOOOOOOMED I TELL YOU.
DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED!

Bitcoin is definitely not suited for coffees. We need more people to start using it before it is even good for remittance. Overall Bitcoin needs to be more popular before we can do anything.

Actually it is very useful right now (as both a store of value and means to send funds nearly anywhere in the world fast and cheaply) and being popular is not why one wants to be involved with disruptive technologies such as Bitcoin.

Yes Bitcoin is getting popularity but gradually and very slowly , some thing should be planned to make is more popular like advertise about Bitcoin and giving out some vouchers.

Totally agree, and another very useful function is saving, since fiat money is already useless for long term saving

There are hundreds of fast and cheap payment method in today's financial world, adding one more bitcoin does not make any difference for coffee purchase (even worse since you have to convert to bitcoin first). But there is not even one single fiat money that is not inflationary, so saving is the most obvious reason people come to bitcoin

I think most of the bitcoiners are driven by such a thought: "I get some bitcoin now and after some years I start to spend it. By that time, fiat money has already inflated so much that my bitcoin value will rise at least several times"

And when the time has come for spending, they realized that they better spend fiat money since those are inflative and widely accepted domestically, so they only sell a little bit bitcoin on exchanges to get fiat money to spend

Being able to directly do person to person transaction on blockchain is cool, but it is just cool, no any real usage strongly demand such kind of functionality, since people will always spend fiat money first, so their interface at both end would still be exchanges. Even when you do international remittance, you have to convert from/to fiat money at both end

Imagine an extreme case: During 2016 bitcoin value rise another 10 times, all the blocks are full at 2MB. Average people can not do transactions due to the fee is now $10 per transaction (So that only $1000+ transactions are reasonably cheap). Would people leave bitcoin? Definitely not, they will do exactly like today's pooled mining, rely on large institutions to do transaction for them cheap and fast

i thought it was solved with the version 0.8 of the client, also it seems that malleability it's more of a exchange, or merchants fault that keep running alternative custom client

i remember that it was mtgox fault at that time, because other exchange did not face this problem

malleability is not just one issue. there are many ways to screw with data and swap transactions, all of which are termed malleability.. yes there were some bug fixes, but there are still ways to twist a transaction to your favour, so its still not good to blindly trust a tx until its confirmed. not yet atleast

its also not good to technically trust a transaction with 1 confirm. because miners sometimes dont simply stale their attempts when there is a solved block by a competitor, and so orphans can make a tx with a confirm appear valid. then seconds/minutes later invalid, because that block became orphaned. and the competing block didnt include your transaction when it raced to first place to throw the other block into orphan

though only 1% of blocks lead to a orphan, and of those orphaned blocks the chances that the competing block didnt also have your tx, is 1 in ~4000 means the odds of a 1 confirm suddenly leaving a retailer with an empty pocket is something line 0.00025% (1 in ~400,000 chance). so people dont worry or talk about that kind of odds much.. but it is possible

thats why even the big names, andreas, gavin, and hundreds of others say
price of a coffee 0 confirms (only 1% of your customers lack morals and want to be a theif)
price of a TV 1 confirm (1 in 400,000 something will go wrong, and it takes 10 minutes to get the TV out of the shops storeroom, so no problem waiting)
price of second hand car 2 confirms
price of new car 3 confirms
price of small house 4 confirms
price of large mansion 5 confirms
bill Gates net value 6 confirms.

although the odds increase massively per confirm to numbers a brain cant quantify, and some people can take the small risk vs customer experience satisfaction, its still worth thinking about how important the item your selling is, vs how long you will make a customer wait vs risk of a miner not staling or immoral thief.

emphasis:
coffee can be bought using zero confirms.. not due to there being no malle.. but the social study that a coffee shop would only have 1% of coffee stolen. and a coffee shop makes enough profit to cover that loss, and would not want to lose more money simply by upsetting customers by making them wait, thus losing future customers loyalty. in short its more about social loyalty to keep profits coming in, to cover potential losses.

but ignoring social studies.. and thinking about bitcoin security/trust of tx's.. malle really needs to be fixed! as it is a risk that shouldnt rely on social statistics, or retailers profitability or customer loyalty to pretend its not a problem

And this is where you are getting things confused - if people can easily get away with out paying for something without any consequence then they will do it (that is human nature and I'm sure you can find many social studies that will back up this statement).

If you simply do a tx with an extremely low fee then it is entirely possible (even likely) that despite the tx being not rejected as dust it won't be confirmed before it is dropped from the mempool (and making blocks bigger isn't going to fix that either - a swimming pool will always fill up with water no matter how much bigger you make it).

Thus unless your coffee seller has checked that the fee looks good enough to confirm within a day (and how does the seller actually really know this?) the coffee buyer can enjoy their coffee and the next day be able to do it again (presumably they would probably not frequent the same coffee shop for fear of being caught but let's just assume that this person is a tourist and so doesn't care about coming back again).

It should be noted that this kind of low fee zero confirmation theft does increase in probability as the mempool size increases - so a more popular Bitcoin will have more of these sort of double spends than a less popular one (another good reason why we shouldn't be so eager to make Bitcoin such a popular payment method and increase the block size).

Please provide proof of this (i.e. video links to Gavin and Andreas at the very least saying just that as I certainly don't recall either of them saying it).

and if you read my post you will see i said ignore social studies and fix malle!!!

but the study was based on % of peoples morals..
but the general population who actually know of bitcoin is 0.1% so a thief who knows about bitcoin is something like 0.001% of general population..

but yes i agree if people know how to steal coffee and get away with it.. the lack of morals increase from 1% of populations to atleast 50%, and making the chance of a bitcoin customer stealing vs fiat customer goes from 0.001% to 0.05%.. then as more general public use bitcoin and 1% of the retail customers are using bitcoin. the chance of a coffee theft is then 0.5%.

i personally do not accept zero confirms.. which is where i disagree with you on your other posts/topics about the whole 'send instantly to other countries' has been said by you

but like i said.. even if the odds are low, its not good enough to just accept the odds of social studies as being low to just let it happen.. but instead fix malle! so there is no problem or chance

andreas has made loads of video's.. but because i proved you wrong about the AUD->INR when you said im lying about stats... and so proved it using real local bitcoin prices.. i will actually bother to watch all andrea's videos again, just for the sake of showing you. as you seem to think people lie, unless they are kissing your ass

I didn't accuse you of lying but you are constantly telling me that "I need to provide proof" to back up my statements so I would think you would apply the same standard to yourself.

I'm happy to just assume that Andreas has said that (he isn't a technical expert so that would be understandable) but I would be surprised if Gavin has said that.

And in either case "appeals to authority" aren't really very convincing are they (especially when we are talking about something that is decentralised)?

I don't believe that I have said "instantly" so unless you are going to provide proof that I did I would appreciate it if you didn't put words into my mouth (I'm not putting words into your mouth).

In any case the topic is about whether Bitcoin is really suited to competing with VISA (or the like) and therefore whether increasing the block size is an urgent matter or not so can we just stick to that rather than going down the path of "ad hominems", "appeals to authority" or the likes.

I don't have a smartphone, and the last time I drank coffee was the 9th December of 1973 (I hated it). So I'm all in favor of restricting BTC to serious payments like remittance, but that's a big market. Millions use remittance services every week, and as a very small business owner, I'm making at least one bank transfer each week. So even with coffee out of the equation, the block size problem remains on the table. You just need to look at the average number of transactions per day. How many are for coffee?

So let's discuss the block size problem.

Currently the Bitcoin network can only support around 7 TPS (transactions per second) but you need to realise for a start that it is not "actually 7 txs per second" as a new block only gets created on average every 10 minutes (so a merchant can't expect a payment confirmation in seconds).

So no matter how much bigger you make the blocks you don't solve the 10 minutes problem (so the X txs per second are actually not *real* txs per second and never will be).

The very design of Bitcoin stops it from being like VISA and this is the point that I have been trying to make.

Bitcoin is not a killer remittance solution. In fact remittances in bitcoin are a tough business. A lot of projects are trying to crack this problem, but so far there is nothing groundbreaking.
So I think bitcoin remittances are not going to be as easy as some people think. Why Western Union despite their awfully large fees is the king of remittance with bitcoin around?

lets say each person made 1 remittance a week
knowing that there are 144 blocks a day and a potential of 4000tx a block (with luck)
4000x144x7= 4 million users making 1 transaction a week.

which is not adequate for the 192million migrant workers (quoted by world bank), thats just over 2%

atleast for now, if bitcoin blocked standard usage and went remittance only, for now we could allow for 2% of total remittance.. but it would need to grow.

the other way of looking at it. is forgetting about remittance.. bitcoin can only allow 1 transaction a week for 4million people to buy.. maybe a magazine or a coffee.. or a GPU.. again not adequate for people wanting a coffee everyday.

lets say people wanted to do 2 transactions a day. one for lunch and one for beer in a bar in the evening.. thats only 288,000 people making 2 transactions a day.. and the problem being that its not going to be spread evenly over each block.. as most people would buy lunch between 12-1pm and beer at 6-8pm so there would be alot of bottlenecks at these times of days..

it would appear as 10 bottlenecks.. 2 bottlenecks per 5 main time zones.. and then no large amount of new tx relays inbetween, just existing tx's finally getting processed in the lull

For sure Bitcoin doesn't scale currently (no-one is arguing that) - the question is about "how to scale it" and just upping the block size is not an intelligent way to do that (which is why the core devs are not proposing to just do that).

Those that support BIP101 are not actually even interested in scaling Bitcoin - they just want to take over the project (that much is clear).

i personally liked the idea of subchains(weakblocks) combined with upping the block limit. that way every ~30seconds, transactions can be 'locked' into mempool knowing they are next in line for the next block (helping confidence in atleast accepting a tx after 30 seconds) and then all those 30second weak blocks being mashed together into the normal 10minute(average) standard block.
i imagine it as the 30scond confirm 'debiting funds' making them unspendable elsewhere(reduce double spend chances), and the 10minute block crediting the recipient.

but i still think they need to fix malle attacksway before worrying about block limits

I read about it but am not yet convinced although clearly having some "proof of work" is better than none at all.

Overall I think that Bitcoin's biggest problem is that because of the issues that txs may never get confirmed means that it is just not suitable for small things. If the Lightning Network or other things are able to solve this then I'll happily change my opinion but for now I would certainly not recommend any vendor to accept a zero confirmation Bitcoin tx.

It isn't like a VISA tx nor a cash one really - so vendors will need to actually understand the problem of zero confirmations (which I think is harder than buying a machine that checks whether or not a fiat note is counterfeit).

subchains. means every 30 seconds tx's are locked into weakblocks and these are then picked up in the order they are made to then form the normal bitcoin blocks. that way if your tx is in the weak block you know its ready to be added, thus helping confidence that it not only will hit a block soon. but also because its in a weak block in 30 seconds.. someone cant then double spend the origin funds as the weak block will ignore those attempts..

as for lightning network.. well once malle is sorted good and proper.. then id like to know how these 'channels' are going to ensure funds move between the parties inside the channel without abuse, and how the settled tx that hits the blockchain will be any better than the several independant tx's people could do onchain.

im hoping it truly does translate (left column) into (right column) so that there is less bloat on the network
https://i.imgur.com/GZT3AG4.jpg

I think you should change your terminology as the txs are not "locked into blocks" but "locked into weak blocks" (there is a very big difference).

If a miner doesn't care to participate then such "weak blocks" would not be included in a new block so their "safety" is not the same as "real blocks".

Who's side are you on again?   :D

I thought 0-conf was working quite well for lower value tx's.  RBF will obviously change that. 

I don't "take sides" but just try and work out what makes sense or doesn't.

If you are able to replace a tx with another (that has a higher fee) then actually you will be able to much more easily cheat (so I don't think merchants will appreciate anything that helps to make that possible).

If the merchant is able to pay the fee to lock in the tx then that might work but I still think you have edge cases (such as the fee not being enough to stop the tx from being dropped from the mempool before it is confirmed).

As there is simply *no way* to know for sure that your tx won't get dropped from the mempool (apart from perhaps paying ridiculously high fees) then there is no solution to this problem.

No such problem exists with existing payment systems so Bitcoin does not really shine in this particular area.

Oh ok. So nothing meant by your opening gambit then:

The "coffee" transactions can be done using services that use off-chain transactions, like Xapo. It's not the ideal solution, because we want people to stick to the Blockchain

and not make it too complicated by introducing secondary services... but it's a workable alternative for those type of transactions. I ignore most of those paid shills, because

I can make up my own mind, but they are successful in spreading confusion. We should actually just debunk their misinformation and continue spreading the truth.  :(

I see - you have made some sort of important point then?

When people are posting as shills and have ad sigs then I think it is entirely reasonable to call them out as being "paid shills" (I am not arguing that they are being paid by anyone other than the ad sig campaign owners).

Also Mike Hearn is on record as trying to take control of Bitcoin (so no words were put into his mouth by me).

Perhaps you think that I am trying to imply that Mike Hearn is paying all the shills (re-reading my OP I can see why you might think that)?

That was not actually what I meant so sorry if I created some confusion with the OP.

I guess most of them do not have enough skill to "go to exchanges -> purchase some bitcoin -> send them to another exchange in another country -> sell them for local currency". I have tried to teach one friend to transfer the fund from another country (she is a 37 years old professor) when she visited me, she said there is so much hassle and she will never do it again, she does not care about the expensive bank fee, she just want fast and easy process of use her credit card

So even bitcoin were used in remittance, it will be some large companies utilizing bitcoin and the end user would only notice the speed and fee advantage. However, if it is operated by large companies, then they are operating more or less like Western Union, have frequent clearing and settlement and do not need blockchain for more than one transaction per hour

I think the reason that some people spend their bitcoins is because they are monetarily illiterate, sooner or later they will realize that spending deflative bitcoin is much worse than spending inflative fiat money, so the end result will be that they would still spend fiat money, unless there is a total crash of fiat money

And politically it is also decent that bitcoin do not clash with fiat money at payment space. Being a value storage is much better than trying to replace the fiat money, which will cause nation wide or world wide sanction from established power. Anyway, it is very easy to limit bitcoin at ISP level, especially when a block become so huge

agreed i still have the majority of my bitcoin income from 2012.. id rather spend fiat first and use bitcoin as only the last resort, and im happy with how that plan is working so far


id say bitcoin trying to clash with governments to become the 'one world currency' utopian dream of libertarians wont happen.. infact by doing that the same libertarians lose 'options/choices' and are then less liberated..

as for taking on fiat payment networks.. i actually think that fiat payment networks can utilise bitcoin and bitcoin can utilise fiat payment networks.. rather than fight them.. but bitcoin does need to grow its usefulness, otherwise it will just stay as the gimmicky currency of geeks..

i think there can be a fair balance of bitcoin and fiat. without one or the other fighting.. but thats just me

Nope, not at all. I'm merely pointing out that you are talking rubbish when you say you are not taking sides. you clearly have.

Nothing wrong with that, you understand. But just be open about it.

And I won't even go into the childish "ZOMG! Hearn is taking over Bitcoin!!"  crap.  

Oh - so what "side" am I on (strange that you know but I don't)?

See Abra & Align Commerce

I've been registered at Abra for a long time but it seems there is no progress

You are arguing with a paid troll (NotLambChop)

Don't expect to come out on the winning side of the argument (or have the last word for that matter)

Yup - I am not trying to "win an argument" or help the paid trolls - if this topic devolves much further I'll just lock it.

I agree. Peter_R seems to be the new Mike Hearn. Paying ChartBuddy to promote BU, buying ads on Reddit, etc...

Really starting to get on my nerves.

Remember, Bitcoin is currently working fine. People are just pressuring and using fear to make the community conform..

AFAIK they're soft-launching in targeted areas for now (Philippines being one of them)

As for remittances it does need a tech-savy person and one someone somewhat familiar with Bitcoin to really leverage the benefits of it.

Personally I use Bitcoin regularly to send money abroad using rebit.ph and it's saved me a great deal of money and hassle.

Oh dear, your nervous tic is back....

Currently bitcoin perfectly cover the biggest shortcoming of fiat money that it can not be used as a long term saving medium, due to all the inflative monetary policy from central banks

The inflative monetary policy will never change because that's how central banks drive the economy. If they stopped printing money then the whole economy will drop into recession

I think bitcoin should focus on those things that fiat money CAN NOT do, not those things fiat money already do

Yep, the biggest selling point for Bitcoin is the fact that i's a true alternative to the imposed-by-the-state economy, if we lose node centralization we lose this special feature of being detached from the same old powers.

@CIYAM what is your opinion of the merits of side chains to solve the 10 minutes problem, and are side chains fundamentally different from the CIYAM project?

Im assuming you meant to say node DE-centralization.

the deflationary nature is about the rarity...

imagine oyster shells.. but only 50 are grown every 10 minutes, then after 4 years 25, and so on. and it was calculated that there would be just 21 oyster shells in the world..

you would see its rarity.. but as you travel from town to town seeing new people. they would look at you and wonder why you are carrying oyster shells with you. they wont sell you a loaf of bread because they only accept IOU parchments signed by the local king, who holds a cetain amount of gold loot that represents the total value of the parchments he signed.
no way in hell would people think a seashell is valuable..

the reason i say that is.. no matter how much you understand or value it.. if other people cannot buy bread with it. or they know trying to find another new person in a distant land is reluctant to accept it for long distance remittance.. then it has limited usage, and those holding it will find less and less things to use it on.. eventually becoming paperweights

we need to expand usefulness.. not limit usefulness.. just because you can buy bread with fiat doesnt mean bitcoin shouldnt bother trying to get walmart/7eleven to accept bitcoin aswell..(although right now timing aint right for that)

I think side chains could be very useful - I think we need to wait a while until we have something to play with before making judgements about that.

In regards to the CIYAM project I'm going to offer no comment at this stage other than to say it won't be a "coin".

Thanks CIYAM, Lauda, and various others for coming around and seeing what is actually going on here and speaking up about it.  There are a few people who I'd given up hope for and figured where likely shilling (formally) but who have surprised me.  I tend to err on the 'safe' side and hopefully I've been underestimating the community.  Ultimately it is the community will have the greatest impact on how distributed crypto-currencies evolve and how revolutionary they will be for humanity.

Thanks for your reply CIYAM. In my view one of the most promising aspects to blockchain technology, and one that is not susceptible to the "10 minutes" problem, is utility in the realm of digital certificates, such as authentication of identity and/or permissions, for data access, using built-in asymmetric key pairs. This is of very high utility in communication, commerce, and web data management across the board, in numerous industries outside of finance, above and beyond the buying of coffee and sending international remittances.

I know exactly how you feel. Next time I'll have the foresight to moderate important (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1305286.msg13417954#msg13417954) threads so trolls don't foul them up with nonsense. :-\

http://imby.com/valatie/files/gravity_forms/2-b7630dff50dd9ce9d746e1119cafc43f/2015/03/Your-Vote-Counts-e1411653019429.jpg

Thanks for creating this thread and for your valuable technical input. I always enjoy reading what's written by the real professionals in the XBT space, although it takes more and more effort to wade through the garbage that is written each day.

People will not use Bitcoin as a currency as long as inflationary currencies exist as an alternative. Assets of an inflationary nature (fiat currency) will always be disposed of first, deflationary assets (bitcoin) second. This supports your statement that Bitcoin is very useful in a use-case such as remittance.

Bitcoin is valuable in three key ways:
1.  It's scarce
2.  The monetary policy is perfectly transparent and predictable
3.  It is censorship-resistant.

Therefore it's primary use (90%) is wealth preservation. It is not and will not be used as a currency. There are major innovations occurring in cryptofinance that resolve the "payments" use-case that many people here and at /r/bitcoin seem so preoccupied with. Attempting to modify XBT to compete with these other technologies is counterproductive at best- ideally Bitcoin development is focused on supporting items 1-3 as mentioned above, and ignoring the noise (psyops?) that is designed to delay/disorient/divide Bitcoin developers.

You're forgetting that Bitcoin can be transferred instantly anywhere in the world, making it perfect as a currency AND as a store of wealth.
It is already being used as a currency and will continue to grow.
 

Transaction and settlement are two different things. Bitcoin transactions occur "instantly" (or as fast as the network can propagate the signal), but "settlement" takes at least 10 minutes. Perhaps more importantly XBT settlement is probabilistic rather than deterministic, so it is largely incompatible with modern legal systems.


Let's see some examples of present-day use and evidence to support your hypothesis.

Yep, we all know this... (and "settlement" on credit card systems takes far longer.) 
This has been said 1000 times on this forum already. yaawwwwwwwwwwwwwnnnnnnnnnnnnn..........................

Dude,
you live on Bitcointalk..... yapping.
Whose doing the coding?

I think more than likely they will grab the blockchain technology, ram their name on it and then tout it as their new innovation (that they of course invented either to direct lies or by ommision) to grandparents who do not know any better while charging the same or more for the privilege or using a company with history and 'trust'

However it happens you have to remember that BTC now has first mover legacy, same as eBay and Amazon did with the internet; they got so big and so powerful that even now, 20 years later EVERYONE associates those two companies with the be all and end all of all internet commerce and that is what BTC will become, inevitably there will be other coins out there that will for certain niches but as most Americans associate .com with their country code they will not even have a clue that it was never intended for commerce but military communications and that .us is actually officially theirs.

Btc has gotten to 54% now?

That is a huge lead and something very special is going to have to happen to break the billions that vc's and individuals, businesses and speculators have put into it.

I did have an point to this post but my train of thought went off a tangent and plummeted down a cliff :p

https://github.com/ciyam/ciyam/commits/master

FYI - last commit was on new year's day (and I tend to push commits at least once or twice per week).

How about you actually try making some valid points rather than trying (and failing miserably with) personal insults?

I don't see a problem with the 10 minutes delay. My email software checks for new mail every 10 minutes, and that's fine. I guess it isn't an issue with remittance either. The problem really is in the number of transactions.

There are over 100,000 transactions every day now, I wish, and I guess we all need BTC to be able to handle 100,000 transactions per hour.

The delay is not an issue for remittance but it is an issue for "buying coffee".

If you can't confirm a tx then you are giving someone a coffee in the hope that they haven't purposely paid zero (or a very low) tx fee that might result in the tx being dropped from the mempool before it ever got confirmed (allowing the person to then repeat this).

The only way you can really prevent this problem is going to be allowing child tx's to pay for parent ones (which itself could cause problems).

At this stage the Bitcoin network doesn't even recognise this (although some nodes do) so you enter into a very murky area when you get involved with 0 confirmations.

200,000 average (https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=30days)
but lets say a person wants to do 1 remittance a week.. thats only 1.4million people doing it, to equate to 200,000 a day.
so we do need to increase capacity to allow upto 192million people (the world remittance population)
along with making it cheap to actually do remittance.

so im kind of glad that right now its more expensive to remit from fiat-btc-fiat right now, because bitcoin blocks would bottleneck with huge amounts of people using it before its ready to cope with capacity,

i would say that if bitcoin could scale to just 19mill users, then it would be a success, taking 10% of the remittance market, but that requires a 15mb block limit, so i dont expect that any time soon. but 15mb is more achievable eventually compared to 24mb (daily usage per day * 24 hours) to get similar tx but hourly instead of daily

As Bitcoin is currently responsible for practically zero remittance txs then I guess it has quite a lot of time to scale up (so we don't have a "panic" situation in regards to the block size due to the remittance market).

If you think that I am wrong then please post proof of the huge amount of remittance that Bitcoin is currently doing.

i dont treat it as panic.. but more so.. frustration that scaling for new 'potential' is stagnant

People are not "not using" Bitcoin for remittance due to scaling (the average person wouldn't even understand this topic).

If you increased the block size by 10x I seriously doubt you'll see any further progress in the Bitcoin remittance area (as that is not what is stopping it).

never said the blocksize is preventing remittance.. i said that by not scaling it is hindering new potential..

potential for more people to happily transact without having their transactions bottleneck for an hour
potential for people to transact without being arm twisted into paying a 4cent fee
potential for millions of people to transact to buy simply things from webstores on a regular bases
potential for many alternative uses

i think what is hindering remittance is that people either need to sign their life story away to exchanges just for a 1-2% spread when moving fiat, or pay 9% to use independent brokers on o-t-c or localbitcoins, so the user friendliness and costs are hindering remittance

These are interesting statements, now replace your oyster shells to cyberspace cubes. These cyberspace cubes are value containers, they can contain enormous amount of value, and the value inside those cubes keeps growing every year. When you want to spend, you only need to locate your nearest local dealer to exchange value streams in those cubes to your local currency. Feel the difference?   ;D

Is this the proper metric? Remittance is a use case, sure, but for me, bitcoin's principle use case is as decentralized (robust and censorship-free) cash and store of value. Gauging adoption isn't necessarily that easy. But more importantly, adoption comes in a distant second place to engineering concerns regarding scalability (i.e. scale vs. scalability).

I happen to use bitcoin for remittances and suspect more companies will follow suit when they learn about the savings! 

can you explain to some of the younger bitcoiners what platforms you use to do the fiat-btc-fiat that ends up being cheaper than WU, as that would help people to teach others of how they should be remitting, as oppose to using WU

This!

On the subject of remittance, here's some insight from the guy who was part of rebit.ph, probably most successful bitcoin remittance company:

https://medium.com/@Cryptonight/bitcoin-doesn-t-make-remittances-cheaper-eb5f437849fe#.yfjxzpqik

tl;dr: it doesn't make it much cheaper but it helps to circumvent SWIFT network. But on the other hand, SWIFT doesn't really sit idle and recently announced major improvements (blockchain technology):

http://realworldchange.swift.com/GPI.cfm?rdct=t

So again, focusing only on remittance sounds like pretty bad idea imo.

rebit.ph model was not really where bitcoin remittance should go..
by being the company that takes in dollars and the same company that gives out the peso, means there was no need for their internal data center to use bitcoin. apart from saving a little bit of money on datacentre needs

and having kiosks set up to take in the cash at both sides was extra costs/ spread variance..

but, if there were independent bitcoin brokers who only charge 0.5% spread, where buying btc and selling it would cost 1% total

meaning
where WU charges $10 (50% on a $20 transfer, or 20% on a $50 transfer, 10% on $100 transfer) people can send
$10 via bitcoin and only cost $0.10c
$20 via bitcoin and only cost $0.20c
$50 via bitcoin and only cost $0.50c
$100 via bitcoin and only cost $1

it would make it worth while to use bitcoin for amounts under $1000, ... which is the amounts most people send (small value).

but as i said, the problem is not with bitcoin.. as its proven to be cheaper to run bitcoin as oppose to a different datacentre model with all its programmers, security and it guys.
the problem is the spreads at either side.

so although many can see the dream of sending $10 to the Philippines and it only costing 10c... the reality is that independent brokers wont want to work or have the risks of fraud when handling cash for just 0.5% profit

That's exactly what I've been saying for years. Bitcoin isn't cheaper to use than other services because of the exchange cost in to and out of local currencies.

If you start talking about intelligent people sending money then it's a different story. I have some Chinese friends that regularly send money home to China. My friend and his family in China have a joint account at the Industrial and Commerical Bank of China (ICBC). When he wants to send money he deposits it in his ICBC account and his family immediately goes to their local branch in China and withdraws it - ZERO FEE. He tells me it costs more to call his family and tell them the money is there than it costs to send it. I had no luck convincing him to use Bitcoin.

We can all do this using this free method (which I do regularly). Log into the Bill Pay section of your online account services, and add the intended recipient as a new payee. You will need to enter the contact details including name, address and phone number of the organization or individual you wish to pay. Schedule a payment. Once you have chosen a payee, enter the amount you wish to pay and the date on which it should be received. It is also possible to set up an automatic, standing payment.

If you use limit order on exchanges, you can even make some money when you do such conversion. This is especially true when you are a dealer on localbitcoins, you will gain 2-3% at least on both ends  :) 

Most of my workers are Filipina.

I buy coins on coinbase, pay
them for their services, and
they sell the coins back
to their bank account on coins.ph.
Each worker has their own account
on coins.ph

A few other workers in other countries
use local sites to do the same.

Yep, it really is that simple.
Coinbase even provides a
report I can give to my
accountant at the end
of the year for any realized
P/L based on bitcoin price fluctuations in
between the time I bought the coins
and when they are paid out.

19 millions users, that's nice but it's a bit far-fetched to talk about a goal in a market where BTC still hardly exists. I prefer to set an objective in terms of transactions per hour, or per day. We should focus on what needs to be done to allow the number of transactions to grow ten-fold.

So that's 2 millions per day, or perhaps 100,000 transactions per hour. With the coffee issue set aside, so the 10 minutes delay isn't a problem.

What average person using Bitcoin will use a limit order or become a localbitcoins dealer to send a few bucks to their kids. No one sees the value in Bitcoin for the occasional send of cash.

On the Chinese side of things it is very simple (and of course free) to open up an account with one of the major Chinese exchanges (identity verification will take maybe one day) and you can then connect a Chinese bank account (from any of the major banks) to your exchange account (it will only cost around 10 RMB to open up a bank account assuming you want a debit card).

Typically the withdrawal fee is 0.5% (with minimum withdrawal amounts typically set at 200 RMB) so unless the sender is copping a lot for purchasing Bitcoin it is a very simple and cheap method for paying Chinese.

Note that it will generally take around 2 days to complete the RMB withdrawal after receiving the BTC deposit.

Last time I sent a TT from Australia I believe it cost 30 AUD (which from memory was the minimum fee) and it also took a couple of days so if I was an Australian wanting to pay Chinese in RMB even I could only get BTC for 10-20% over the current exchange prices it would be cheaper to use Bitcoin for small amounts (say around 100 AUD) than to use TT (and I am assuming that other methods such as WU would not be much cheaper).

Wow. You must have some really stupid co-workers. Who would sell their Bitcoin with halving just around the corner? You should really introduce them to Bitcoin.

Wow.  You must be really stupid to not realize most of people's income isn't disposable.

I do encourage them to try to save a little bit.

Yeah! I agree with you. If we keep this block size panic issue many investors will run away so it will not be good for Bitcoin. We need to start this crap panic and start to present real measures

Limit order is not specially difficult for any normal user