Bitcoin Forum

Hey all,

From the BitInstant trip to Macau, Roger and I got to sit down with the CalvinAyre.com people and do a quick video interview about Bitcoin. It's all very basic stuff, but CalvinAyre's demographic is the gambling community, so this is prime targeting at this point in Bitcoin's progression :)  And wow Angelia Ong was smokin!

"One of the more popular discussion panels at the recent Social Gaming Asia Summit 2012 featured BitInstant’s Erik Voorhees and Roger Ver discussing the Bitcoin ‘crypto currency’ and its potential impact on the global gaming industry. The dynamic duo wowed attendees with their description of a payment system that offered both transnational convenience, security and anonymity. CalvinAyre.com’s roving reporter Angelia Ong was sufficiently intrigued to corral Voorhees and Ver for an in-depth followup."

http://calvinayre.com/2012/12/21/business/bitcoins-impact-on-global-gaming-industry-ao-vid/ (http://calvinayre.com/2012/12/21/business/bitcoins-impact-on-global-gaming-industry-ao-vid/)

I love the work that you guys do!

But Erik, why do you say Bitcoin has no fees?

I doesnt (if you opt to not include fees in your tx).

Two answers:

1) Bitcoin can be sent without a fee. This is a fact.

2) The normal fee that is included with typical transactions is so god damn tiny that it may as well be nothing. A fee that is a fraction of a penny is not even worth discussing.

I don't know.. it just rubs me the wrong way kind of like some kind of a salesman who wasn't entirely honest with me about his product/service. Yes it's true you can send bitcoins without a fee but this has consequences, consequences that for many are not practical to deal with and therefor they pretty much need to pay a fee. And a super small fee isn't equal to no fee.

I don't know why, you can't just be honest and say "The fees are practically nothing and plus they're optional!" - that would sound a lot better to me than telling someone "Bitcoin has no fees!" and then they research it and they learn "Oh wait, seems like there are fees here after all.. Hmm if they lied about this, what else did they lie about??".

Do you know where I'm coming from?

We have a hard enough time with skepticism and wild theories as it is, I just don't see why it would be a good idea to risk making things even harder on us and our case for Bitcoin.

This wording is way better.

I hear you Hazek. Sometimes I say it in the way you described, sometimes I say "no fees".  Again, because they're so tiny I don't see a signficiant difference between "no fee" and "super super tiny micro fee".

If you tell people that it has "extremely low fees" they are just as likely to think that means like, 1% or something, because that is extremely low for money transfer. Consider $10,000 transfers, and 1% becomes significant. But with Bitcoin, $1,000,000 can be sent with a "fee" of half a penny. As far as I'm concerned, this is a fee-free transfer.

See where I'm coming from? :)

Erik, don't you get a lot "Free! What is the catch?" looks when you say that.

I generally get that when I try to say it is free. People wonder what are
the incentives to run the network.

I do but I disagree with you on this one. Half a penny, however insignificant and small, just does not equal zero.

But anyway, I'm a big fun of what you do, I just like to speak my mind and this one line of an otherwise excellent interview irked me a bit so I had to bring it up.

Yeah, the no fees part also rubs me the wrong way.
And let's not even talk about the fees for exchanging fiat into Bitcoins or the other way around.

Everyone who wishes to promote bitcoin should never say "no fees". That's is simply not true.
And while fees for transfering bitcoin right now are negligible, that is not going to be the case in the future! Remember, the block reward is going away and by that time fees will have to become higher to keep the network (the miners) alive.
Saying "negligible fees", or even "100 times less than any existing common payment methods" intead of "no fees" is just so easy, it is not worth imo to lie about this and risk compromising your image and the image of bitcoin.

I think the best description is "fees equal to fractions of a penny."  Everyone knows what a penny is and most people know what fractions are :)

Mathematically speaking 0.000000000000000000000000000000001 is considered zero, even though it's really not.

When you're only given a few short moments to explain an idea you don't need to drone on about how 0.0005 BTC is worth less than half a penny, so the fees are so low that they can be considered negligible.

Zero fees! Done!

If you've hooked the person enough to really look into it, they'll figure it out for themselves.

I usually try to use the qualifier "essentially free" when explaining bitcoins.

This doesn't bog things down with all the details, conveys the message, and is still truthful.

this is how i would handle it. "basically free".

and given how our banksters mis-state things all the time...

Nice interview, gratz folks, keep up the very good work, I enjoy a lot..

I've seen so many of these terms floating around here that I have to react. This pisses me off. You could say "practically speaking", but most certainly not "mathematically speaking". Same goes for "mathematical certainty". Mathematical certainty is exactly 1, nothing less, making nothing in real life mathematically certain. Mathematics are exact, there is no room for such approximations. /rant

You could also say "Almost zero fees! Done!". This way no one will mark you as a liar later on.

I say this too, adding that this is a per-transaction fee, not depending on the amount.

When you tell people that sending an email is free do they ask, "what's the catch?"  

And therein lies your answer. If someone asks, "well, what's the catch?" you should respond by comparing it to email. All money is digital anyway, so why does it cost so much to transfer data from one bank's server to another bank's server? It's ridiculous. When people realize that they are paying significant money so that a bank can make a database entry (and take three days to do so), they will realize that it's not Bitcoin's free transactions which are "weird" but rather it's the banks' operations which should be viewed with far greater skepticism.



If someone came to you and asked how much it cost to send an email, would you tell them it's free? Because it's not. There is a tiny marginal cost to doing so, both in the extra few CPU cycles which cost electricity and also built into the cost of the ISP's monthly bill.

Nothing is perfectly free, and nothing is perfectly safe. But I tell people Bitcoin transfers are free, and I tell them they're safe. Once they understand that they're dealing with an amazing new system, and they'd like to discuss the nuances of it, then I'm happy to do so.

(also let me clarify, that I have nothing against people saying there are tiny fees with Bitcoin... It's not wrong to say that upfront, I just think either way is fine and it often depends on the context of the conversation and the audience)

finally got a chance to view this.  lol, Erik looks smitten.  Roger played it more cool.  ;)

i like this.

This is a valid discussion. Saying bitcoin has no fees is sleazy salesmen-like bullshit.

Even if the fees are small now... If any significant portion of any countries economy was transacting then the fees would grow quite large to keep the networks new load viable.

And then we are still talking about the magical fantasy dream that you can actually do all your day to day transacting with bitcoins, and not exchanging in and out of fiat currency which is way higher fees and swings than regular credit card transaction fees will ever be...

You guys do a lot to promote.  

Could you all please review this before you give interviews.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Public_relations

and if the USA turns the money supply 10x to pay off debts

and bitcoin keeps rising, reaches $200/btc

a .0005 fee would be 10 cents

The fees are so low that people don't believe you. A true "First World Problem" with Bitcoin.


"Less than a penny" is currently true (at U$20, the suggested fee becomes exactly 1 penny), fast and impressive. I'll stick with that for a start.


I agree. Transaction fees are crucial for the long term viability of Bitcoin's deflationary aspect. People have to understand from the beginning that the fees are designed to sustain the blockchain later.

The fee may be small, but its importance to understand Bitcoin is not.

Sorry that this is turning into fee thread. Nice interview.

There are cases when not knowing about a 1 penny fee can screw you. If you need to pay exactly some amount, so you acquire exactly that amount and then find out that to send it without a fee you have to wait 2 days or something that 1 penny or less means you need to do another acquire-bitcoins transaction.

Plus if you are talking with anyone who will eventually want more information you'll have to be like "oh... yeah, miners get the fees", "hmm, fees?".

just call 'em donations ;) and if you dont donate they might hold your transaction hostage till a hero comes along

I agree that if you're going to mention the tiny fee upfront, the best way to say it is "fees are less than a penny."

You guys have swayed my opinion slightly... so I'll try to use the "less than a penny" phrase more often ;)