Bitcoin Forum

It is over folks.  The Bitcoin has now 'jumped the shark' (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=jump%20the%20shark).  

Because the transaction fee is now >.40USD, bitcoin transactions are more expensive than Visa swipe fees.  

Core has successfully forced a fee market of very expensive transactions by preventing others from increasing transaction capacity via larger blocks.  Satoshi wanted big blocks.  Yet, core has wrestled control and forced an unnecessary limit to block size thus creating their fee market.  All this with the idea of later providing relief via an off chain fee to go into their pockets.  Lightning is years away and fees are only going up from here.

Bitcoin is finished.  

if people dont understand how.. this old post explains.
yea gmaxwell tweaked it in 0.13.2 to not work for latest average block in the hopes it adds some reactivity to pretend to alleviate it. but its still a problem



still not sure..
go open a spreadsheet document and run some averaging scenarios for yourself, see how easy it is to cause an upward rise even without demand being constant.

many pools are/have decided to avoid using cores built in average fee feature. but nodes will still end showing an average of fee's, if pools used it

I don't know if Bitcoin is finished, but some time ago everybody was talking about the positive things Bitcoin brings. Very cheap transactions where a big point. It's not the case anymore. But at last we can handle many transactions per second. Oh i forgot, we can not. thank god we are decentralized....
All i see is talk about the price. People forget the technology. To bad.

Sure, IF bitcoin was being used as a currency, this might be a valid argument--but it still wouldn't have jumped the shark.  But it's not a great currency.  It's a great investment and a decent store of value.  For those two things it matters a hell of a lot less what the network fees are.  If you buy stocks, you end up paying a lot more than $0.40 to buy any amount.  That's how I see it anyway.

Transaction fees can and are still cheaper than most fees for traditional money transfer services. The fee is also more predictable when you go to send unlike with other money transfers such as PayPal.

If segwit is activated and used, then we can handle more transactions per second than we do now. Once layer 2 solutions such as the Lightning Network and sidechains get started then we will handle much much more tps than right now.

That's weird but true. If Bitcoin is nothing more than a speculators toy then it's massively successful. You're one of those "glass half full" kind of people, aren't you? LOL

fee's are cheaper for the western developed countries half of the time.. but expensive for developing countries all of the time
if segwit is activated no guarantee of extra tx count. infact even if 100% of people used segwit the tx count will still end up being 7tx/s (as oppose to 3tx/s now).. but in 2009-2013 the metric was about 7tx/s capability anyway..

as for cores promise of fee discount if segwit activated.. thats a fake discount. pushing the price up and then discounting only part of a transaction and only the transaction of their feature.. wont even bring average prices down to levels of pre 2016

as for LN.. thats just a side service for those that want/need it. dont be stupid to think everyone needs it and dont expect it to be bitcoins end goal.

as for sidechains.. be honest and call it what it really is.. an altcoin! .. then try not to be so happy about coaxing people to think altcoins are better and stick to thinking about bitcoins network

we should not be driving users down a one way road into permissioned services by pushing up the permissionless system

I didn't realize VISA is now offering censorship-proof transactions and a store of value which, done correctly, can not be seized.

Oh, that's right, VISA doesn't offer those things and that's why a comparison between VISA and Bitcoin is ridiculous.

Those screaming for on-chain scaling think they need censorship-proof transactions when purchasing a coffee and a doughnut.

Governments around the world continue to implement increasingly strict capital controls and the reason Bitcoin has value is because people can use it to avoid those controls. Confirmation speed and fees are inconsequential in the face of that utility.

nothing against LN for a small niche side service that is optional for small regular spenders like gamblers, adsense and faucet raiders.. but dont scream that LN is the end goal and solution to bitcoin scaling

Dude, you realize those things were the rallying cry of forum members when we first came here. These people now all want free money, profit, rape and pillage the neighboring town, gamble, sig campaign and sell for drug money, premine altcoins and rape-pillage-profit. That hippie shit is long gone at this point.

If the fee continues to climb, all that will happen is that people start using an alt to store and move money. Ether has rather blotted it's copybook, but at some point an alt will emerge that will solve most of bitcoins problems.

It only takes one alt to make the breakthrough...

The question is, which one?

it's kind of obvious - ltc. but no one seems to want to use it. features don't matter compared to trust and bitcoin has the trust. however i've already pretty much given up buying stuff with it because of the expense and if i do continue to buy with crypto then i'll be looking for other options.

its kind of more obvious.. Gmaxwell loves his monero.. just wish he stopped negatively messing with bitcoin and calling it a fake positive

He also mentioned a store of value. If I were made to choose now, I'd would prefer to have Bitcoins than any currency, especially Euro. Bitcoin is unstable, but trouble in the euro land will undoubtedly bring investors in. People want to leave some doors open, they still are paid in fiat and want to keep using it, but they also want some Bitcoins and gold/silver just in case.

U$ Dollar is the place to be for the next few years,

Chinese will cash out of BTC to prop up the Yuan trying to compete with the ever soaring U$ Dollar.
The recent BTC dump was just the beginning.
We are looking at least 4 years of this new environment, maybe 8 years, if Trump is reelected.
http://in.reuters.com/article/us-global-markets-bitcoin-idINKBN14P1ID


 8)

FYI:
Simple Fix to BTC Fee problem, use Altcoins instead.
Litecoin & Dogecoin are both PoW and both dominated by the China, just like BTC,
LTC & Doge are faster and cheaper to send.

yeah i have been thinking about this too. if fees are going high and transactions are slow how can mass adoption happen? i like bitcoin but it would really be naive to think that there can be no better altcoin out there. there are so many ways to design coin features suited for different purposes

If this continues to happen the market of micro-transactions is gonna die completely. Maybe another coin could fill that purpose.

Id pay more the visa anyday to be able to use my btc. Does not bother me one bit.

Both Doge and steem work great for microtransactions (because 1 doge fee in the case of doge and no fee in the case of steem). But people seem to want a coin that has low fees, handles microtransactions AND is a store of value. It's the last bit (store of value) that is the problem.

If it continues with high fees and slow transactions bitcoin will never left the speculation and investment currency status. Investors will continue using it, because it's profitable, but the stores won't accept it and most persons won't want use bitcoins.
Bitcoin goal is to be a currency used in daily life, but it's too far to happen, unfortunately as there are some problems with the transactions facility.

Why not activate Segwit and get more transactions in per block? LN will be years more away if Segwit does not get activated soon. Politics is what's causing this "stalemate". But have no fear, sooner or later somebody has to give way and do a selfless act for the good Bitcoin.

because segwit even after activation is not a promise/guarantee of more transactions. even with 100% utility only expect 7tx/s the same expectation as bitcoin had 2009-2013

because LN can function now, the whole malleation war cry is empty.. due to multisig requiring 2 signatures meaning some malicious person cannot double spend against the other because both sides need to sign. what gets broadcast into a block is accepted by both sides.

also LN is not the end solution for scaling. its just a service on the side. not all bitcoin users will see advantage/need for LN.

Yes, Bitcoin will hit 2,000$ at the end of this year. I'm a very positive person about bitcoin even though now it's only 900$ but I believe it will rise up highly with the rumor of bitcoin banning from china.

it is a currency and it should be a currency if we want to see higher prices, otherwise get comfortable with more volatility and each year going down to 200 and up again and then back....
bitcoin has never supposed to be an investment only, even satoshi in the white paper calls it digital cash, because it is supposed to be money and if we continue down this path of fighting over paying more fees we are harming bitcoin.

I doubt bitcoin will be over unless we have a third world war and there are no longer computers and the internet. As long as these are around even higher fees won't make savers and investors shy away, but it might hit the large consumer base using bitcoin as a real currency, buying and selling stuff.

That moment when optimal fees suggested by the wallet were used and the transaction is still not confirmed more than 30 minutes later. Should have just used my fucking debit card yo  ;D

Higher fees is very disappointing. Sooner or later bitcoin users will return to the banks once again. I was right in my prediction that bitcoin is not a revolution against the corrupt and unfair banking system but rather an another form of enslaving people with higher fees. But even though the fees is higher, I still love bitcoins because it provides me more income much higher than my fiat salary monthly. 

The funny thing is, same people complaining about fees and lack of blocksize increase are anti segwit which raises the blocksize to 2mb+ while fixing things that are needed for the future in order to make bitcoin more private, plus add better support for lightning network and sidechains. Only people against segwit are either idiots or government paid trolls. There will never be a blocksize increase without segwit so your choice.

Indeed, whitepaper says digital CASH. Bitcoin can NEVER be cash with big blocks, because big blocks centralize the network by making the nodes harder to run, it will eventually end up in a situation where nodes are only run by server farms = bitcoin is dead as a decentralized censorship resistant tool aka cash. Not to mention SegWit adds support for Schnorr sigs and other cash-friendly features. So we have people complaining about lack of block increase and about SegWit, when being pro-big blocks and anti-SegWit is exactly what being anti-cash means.

A member of Trump's government is a Bitcoin enthusiast, if this makes people dump BTC, what would make them buy in your opinion? :D
LTC? Really? Ltc has been dying for a long time now. There's no coming back, LTC doesn't offer anything that would attract new investors.

Mean while over at the bitcoin obituaries library, "Stanley call the scribe, we have another, bitcoin is dead post to add to the list"   ;D

Bitcoin was intended to be a new form of money and one that you could use on daily bases which includes many transactions for a very small fee. Today i do not see much of this. I see a storage of value and a place to invest, but i don not find it that exciting as the idea it once was.

Yep, Satoshi wanted microtransactions.  But some idiot named Maxwell thinks the network is better when configured to serve the purpose he personally is interested in.  Maxwell thinks a settlement layer is the best mode.  He doesn't like the other modes.  Since Maxwell holds the commit access, he can push his SegWit and LN onto the network and call these 'updates' while and the same time telling everyone to go start their changes as a new fork.

SegWit is the alt.  Don't let Core tell you they are improving bitcoin.  They are building their alt right on top of the bitcoin protocol.  LN and SegWit are alts.  Just because 'Core' is behind them, don't get suckered into thinking that is bitcoin. 

Satoshi anticipated 8MB or bigger blocks and microtransactions.  Somehow, Maxwell become more powerful than Satoshi. 

That is very true and this is maybe what the OP was thinking about. The advantages of Bitcoin as a regular payment network is beginning to weaken in a way. Maybe a decentralized and censorship resistant form of currency was not meant to be used for regular payments.

Yes you are right  bitcoin transactions are more expensive than Visa swipe fees,
but i don't agree if bitcoins is finished, because the developers and the peoples whom care about bitcoins are making solution for this problem.
They are making solution with segwit although it is still not yet be activated by all of users bitcoins
It is mean bitcoin is not finished.

if the sender and receiver both have an account in the same exchange the transfer fee is 0

As long as person X can send any amount of money between different borders for less than $1 US, then Bitcoin has it's advantage over one aspect of the financial world. <Remittance services> Yes, VISA might be cheaper, but VISA is not a currency, the fiat being send is the currency.

So if you want to compare apples with apples, then you would use a service like Xapo for instance, where the off-chain transactions are FREE. < Fiat - VISA vs Bitcoin - Xapo >

But will you trust exchanges with your bitcoin? Think about it, most of the super huge scams came from exchanges like Mt. Gox. Then you would probably think twice when you keep large amounts of bitcoins in these services. They indeed give you some leeway when sending bitcoins to co-members but there is a great chance that they can just run away with it since they have control over you bitcoins.

No no I don't feel Bitcoin is finished, it is about time the community comes together and makes a determined call how to end this high fees. We can't let Bitcoin go down the drain. One way would be to avoid the exchanges and I have been avoiding exchanges due to the past scams and also many had advised to stay away from the exchanges. There has to be other ways right? To fight this for good of Bitcoin??

When the sum of money gets so large to require that level of

trust is required as said above the fee becomes less significant

not to mention visa is not anonymous, with bitcoin you can choose more than one wallet for every new addreess and be virtually anon

but it's true that if bitcoin was to grow even more the fee would increase agin with the current block limit, and it would lead eventually to expensive fee...

OP you are forgotting that with visa and mastercard sending money abroad will cost you 25-50 euro in basically 100% of the case...

That fees still lower compare to other payment processors where charge a minimum of 1% upto 3.5% per transaction + upto 0.35$ per send. bitcoin is still has the lowest fees in moving money globally.

But how often do you move money globally? Most people will move it within a county and there are cheaper ways to do this then Bitcoin. If you want to change the world, then it is not enough to be more or less as good as the others. You need to be better.

Anyone who is still comparing Bitcoin to VISA is out of their mind.  There are plenty of altcoins we can change our Bitcoin for that have superior qualities to VISA and Bitcoin for everyday transactions.  

This is the new gold and at $0.40 to send thousands near instantaneously anywhere on the planet free of censorship or government control it is an absolute steal.  

They are not comparing to VISA outright, they are just pointing out that the fees are really turn to a problem and basically it will destroy one of the very good features of bitcoins, which is having low fees. With fees almost the same with Visa there would be lesser reason why we should use bitcoins. $0.40 is small if you are indeed sending thousands. What if it's just a few dollars, like $1 to $5? Then that fee will be really relevant.

That's what altcoins are for.  They are your checking account, Bitcoin your savings account. 

Yes indeed. Like if you are dealing with amounts that would result to the fees being less than 1%. So that would mean, 0.40/1%, so any deal beyond $40 is acceptable and anything below that would result to a fee higher than 1%. To keep it low, we all must deal with anyone using bitcoins above $40. Which is impractical.

Following that argument. Do you think every other guy would be willing to accept your POT Coin, your MAID Coin, your XRP Coin, your REP coin, your whatever altcoin you have right now. I don't think so. People will not trust altcoins and would prefer to deal with bitcoins. If you offer coins other than BTC, I don't think it will get you so far.

And this 'exchange' is owned by Blockstream - who decided not to charge any fee?  Yeah, right.  And pigs fly out of my ass too.

I'll take any altcoin that I can exchange easily as payment...maybe at a slight mark-up as a convenience fee.

Money is money...it all spends about the same.

Maybe not POT or MAID, but definitely Doge or Steem. Bitcoin isn't built to be used as a currency, there is the hoarding aspect thanks to limited supply, and the transaction delay aspect and the high fees aspect. At some point an alt will make it to the big time, only one has to succeed out of the thousands, and then we're in a new chapter for cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin was actually built by its creator Satoshi to be a currency.  Then Greg Maxwell came along and decided to convert the system into a settlement platform instead.  He forced the network fees up >>1000% to drive traffic into his Blockstream owned private lightning network.  The whole fucking thing is a scam.

8MB blocks don't cause 'centralization'.  That is total bullshit. 

There is no need to provide for nodes with very horrible bandwidth.  People all over the world are streaming bandwidth heavy movies all day long. 8MB is nothing.  If we lose a few nodes on 1200 baud modems, it doesn't amount to 'centralization'.

hmm. i ain't so sure about that. that would put a lot of small time node operators out of the game. someone reported an 80gb upload for one day last week. that's far, far more than many people could get away with in a whole month. not everyone involved in bitcoin lives 2 metres away from their cabinet in south korea.

Exactly.  Why would I spend 2 bucks on a beer using bitcoin when it could quite possibly be worth 4 bucks in years or even months time?. 

There's no suitable altcoin yet but that is why there will be soon enough.

Altcoins have value thanks to their ability for you to trade them for Bitcoins, when enough people realise the value of holding Bitcoin as a speculative asset another coin will materialise as a way to spend their Bitcoin holdings in a more user-friendly fashion than on the Bitcoin blockchain or via transferring to fiat.  Like in times before the credit or atm card, this will enable you to have the immediacy and convenience advantage (like cash) with the sacrifice of security (bank vault or transfer).  It is quite possible that there will be several altcoins that perform this function and a merchant will preferentially price goods denominated in their currency of preference.

In light of the current prices, the Bitcoin has not 'jumped the shark'. The price of bitcoin has drastically dropped from the $1,000 levels that when you compute for fees you would be paying $0.2-$-0.4 per transaction. Now we're back to same fees but is lesser when converted to dollars. We would however reach the problem again once the prices comes back up.

LTC & Doge are still faster & cheaper to send.  ;)

 8)

You don’t really think that, do you? Let compare other popular worlwide services like as Moneygram and will see for $10 from Europe to USA the estimated fees with bank account or credit/debit card are $5.99. The same even though much more cheaper with western union where the fees are $0.99 and payment day varies from 2-6 business days. Of course I don't advocate that I feel happy with these transactions fees but I am confident in the future after segwit activation and LN networks for micro-payments we will have better fees and confirmation times.

Segwit will never be activated , Chinese Mining Pools are blocking it.  ;)

 8)

Bitcoin : A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. <Quoted from the Bitcoin White paper> Did I miss any of this, or are Bitcoin still a peer-to-peer version of electronic cash? The only thing that has changed, is the fact that 3rd party services are more commonly used and not directly as the white paper stipulated.

So we did lose the plot, when we have to work through other financial institutions to make transactions with Bitcoin. These tx's are still relatively cheap, but once you add the fees charged by these services, it becomes expensive.

about the utility of LN in regards to peoples false ideals of the fee's they expect.


anyone also notice how blockchain.info removed the "days destroyed" stat.
this is because if you analyse that stat against other stats, it reveals that people DONT on average do several transactions a day or week.

many peoples funds are used once every 5 days. some peoples funds sit for months and yes years. thus something like LN with a 10day n-lock is useless utility for these people who do 2 or less tx per channel period.

so dont expect "cheap" tx fee's as the norm because LN isnt designed for people that only do 2 or less tx's per LN channel period.

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next we have the CLTV which when confirmed(settled) stops funds from being respent for the CLTV period (laymans: much like banks/paypals 3-5business day delay on ''funds available", or like bitcoins blockrewards 100confirm maturity)

so people who do desire 'regular' spending wont want to have funds maturing for a few days.

however, LN have a scheme/plan for that too.

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an LN hub can circumvent the CLTV maturity by revoking the funds to a destination in the CSV revoke (https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0112.mediawiki#Retroactive_Invalidation) commitment to push the funds into a new LN channel. meaning an LN hub can lock peoples funds permanently into LN contracts.(laymens: bank chargeback/reclaim)

LN actually initially wanted to penalise users by taking all their funds to the LN hubs non multisig address(fraud penalty).. as the ultimate penalty.. but morally they should only use the CLTV and CSV features to reset a new LN contract* to then get the customer to agree a new honourable agreement of who owes what. suggesting that due to CLTV its better to just use LN than resettle again.
*https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0112.mediawiki#lightning-network

so LN hubs can actually hold funds to ransom and even if you broadcast your own copy, they can CSV revoke to honourable put funds back into a new LN agreement.. or maliciously allow the hub owner to take the funds into his own private ownership (non multisig).

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yes i left the best for last because i know people are itching to say they will save on costs if they need to do more than 2 transactions per channel period...

lastly there are the internal penalty fee's too.
LN have come up with many penalties. such as, if there is a multihop transaction happening.
you can be penalised for not promptly agreeing to it, as it would cause a extra delay on the other commitments agreements.
you can be penalised for not signing your agreement
you can be penalised for attempting to spam/DDoS the hub with excess data
you can be penalised for sending the wrong agreements to be signed by the hub

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they actually envisioned a 0.006btc fee as a minimum entry into a channel ($4-$7 at this weeks volatile price) to cover their expectant fee's over time. yet again rules out micro payments of developing countries where $4 is 2weeks wage (cuba, georgia, etc).. $4 is 1 week(Kyrgyzstan, gambia, ethiopia, etc)

imagine having to deposit a week or 2 wage just to cover fee's for a 10 day lock. before you factor in how much you would deposit ontop to actually spend.

the problem with the devs, both calculating the onchain fee war and the LN fee penalty acceptability. is they are thinking with a western world mindset of being only slightly cheaper than paypals 20-30cent fee. before the devs would even consider lowering their 'spam' limiter down. they should spend a week outside their basements and travel the world and experience currency usage outside of the corporate america setting.

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overall summary
LN is not the ultimate scaling solution. it is and should be just a niche/side voluntary service much like third party exchanges are.. for things like gamblers, faucet raiders and day traders who usually spam the blockchain frequently.
however malicious spammer who want to spam the blockchain will avoid LN because LN defeats their malicious purpose. thus LN wont mitigate intentional spammers.
also infrequent bitcoin users (under a few times a week) wont need/want LN due to the settlement delays and the costs of setting up/settling would be more then just paying someone direct onchain infrequently

its sure that nowdays the price and the bitcoin fees are turning into a pain but currently its still payable because we pay more in our local services and with bitcoin we actually getting a good profit + a good servic which has no comparison in the whole world. but soon it will be started to be neglated and bitcoin transactions will be smaller in compared with todays date.maybe we should think of some offchain transactions which can save some fees

your thinking of it from the narrow ideal from the euro/american mindset.

40cents is only a few minutes minimum labour in developed countries.

but

40cents is HOURS of minimum labour in MANY developing countries.

being charged 2+ hours labour to buy groceries in any country is a laugh.. and if you think that is acceptable, then please go travel the world

High fees for Bitcoin transactions can be a big problem since this cheap fees is a major reason why people love Bitcoin. However, if in comparison to Paypal it is still competitive then maybe it can still be fine. I am more concerned of Bitcoin's falling value this week.