Bitcoin Forum

Since the fees keep rising and the mempool is always flooded because the 1mb blocks are overflowed beyond its confines, I could foresee wallet services making arrangments with Bitcoin merchants, gambling sites and others to make transactions with them through an internal ledger. Settlement will come later on the blockchain.

Blockchain.info is in an excellent position to start this. Soon we'll see recommended merchants inside their wallet.

I want to hear your opinions please.

Sounds like that would be going in the direction of trusted third parties and away from the original 'distributed consensus' Bitcoin was supposed to be promising.

Yes, very likely and probably more appropriate for certain situations.

As for blockchain.info itself, this may interest you:
https://blog.blockchain.com/2016/05/16/announcing-the-thunder-network-alpha-release/ (https://blog.blockchain.com/2016/05/16/announcing-the-thunder-network-alpha-release/)

---

Most online wallets are already "third parties".
This solution would be for people who wish to transact faster and
"aren't concerned" with Bitcoin's real designed intention and purposes.

All of this to reduce the fees correct? if so then I doubt it if they can sustain in long term. but if they are willing to do this for free why not.

I think what he is proposing is just to keep most transactions out of the blockchain and then settle them after a period of time, as an example lets suppose I send 1 BTC to address A and the owner of address A sends 0.4BTC to address B that I own, what the OP seems to be proposing is that instead of two transactions, we settle the difference and I make a transaction of only 0.6BTC this way there is only one transaction instead of two, do this for many transactions and it could be possible to diminish the number of unconfirmed transactions.

It looks like an dependence over a third party to overcome the correlation. As they don't support bitcoin unlimited, the prevailing mining difficulty could have forced to come up with such a plan. Even when the fee is high people understand the truth behind I, now for someone it's hard to trust a third party supporting blockchain.info

Last I heard this is walmart's pricing for wire transfers.

http://i65.tinypic.com/2m3si04.png

Walmart is MUCH cheaper than their competition, btw.

It makes me wonder if the fuss over "expensive bitcoin transaction fees" is exaggerated and blown out of proportion.

Better yet what we could do is just vote for certain people that would make these decisions for us. They could decide to make more bitcoins, increase the block size, you know, do whatever they want to pretty much. Once that's achieved we're good to go. Wait...  this sounds familiar. Oh! Because it's fiat!

when i started using bitcoin i did it because it was a stand alone decentralized currency that i didn't need anyone to use. this means i build the wallet myself, make the transactions myself and broadcast them myself, and i could even mine them myself long time ago.
apart from mining if we want to start using third parties i think i am just going to use my bank instead. it doesn't have fees in my country. and just keep bitcoin as investment.

I am using blockchain.info since 2014 and I haven't faced any problem yet with them. They provide good service, good infrastructure to transact bitcoins but again, the core essence of bitcoin is that keeping third parties away from the transaction and as even though Blockchain says, "Be your own bank", one has to keep his funds with blockchain.info in order to transact. It's less about blockchain's trust and more about involvement of a third party in the transaction.

that is a big ass NO for me. because nothing about this sounds like "bitcoin" to me. blockchain.info is a bad service with bugs and it is unsafe as a web wallet to begin with and adding something like this, although may interest some people i never like it.

if Coinbase or a web wallet like that which is working off-chain and similar to banks offer something like that and it helps adoption (although i don't like that either) i can see it as helpful since it can bring more average Joe and help adoption with merchants also.

Blockchain.info is all about security and for that reason they do not store any private keys on their side. Why would they implement a closed ledger that would attract a lot of negative attention from hackers? There are already third parties doing this with off-chain transactions, like Xapo and people would rather use them.

I would rather want to see Blockchain.info beefing up the security and closing all the holes. ^smile^

Right. well then maybe bitpay is in a better position to hold user funds that will eventually be used to pay merchants.
Bitpay bypassing the blockchain in favor a closed loop centralized system might be the slap in the face poeple need to understand just how bad the situation has gotten.

But i think if blockchain.info was to leverage LN payment channels they could pull off a system in which they dont actually control anyones private key but they can facilitate "BTC payments" to merchants.

blockchain.info holds "channels"  to all the merchants, and users hold a channel to blockchain, or somthing...

problem is, payment channels are not available, and they are theoretical a headache to manage, not sure the sunk cost to blockchain.info and the users sunk cost of learning how to use / manage a "channel" is going to be worth it, if you can pay a few dollars to avoid a headache you'll pay for the no-problem-easy-way every time.

I'd love to be proven wrong, but somthing tells me LN V1.0 is going to have problems, some technical, and some really bad user-friendliness types of problems that leads to poeple losing money cuz "not watching their channel properly" or something...

we need to experiment in that direction, but we also need to realize its not a viable solution untill its proven itself. and maybe we can all also recognize that even LN will require FAR larger then 1MB blocks to actually work( unless, you subscribe to the idea that a TX's signature is weightless... )

rising the blocklimit isn't a band-aid solution its a requirement in all scenarios.

how we go about doing it...

through centralized means with an authority setting arbitrary subsidies on certain types of TX?
or
through decentralized consensus mechanism relying on economic incentives to keep block's sized based on supply/demand?

its our choice. sorta.

If blockchain.info starts to have this types of internal ledger just like coinbase and xapo than they will loss their charm of being a true bitcoin web wallet. They will be same as centralized payment processors and talking about internal transactions between merchants there may be fee in % which will cost you more if you are sending more than 1BTC compared to what you have to pay to send that 1BTC in normal bitcoin transaction.

there is no fully decentralization anyway, people are still using exchange which are centralized service, to spend their bitcoin, if bitcoin was serious about decentralization we would have a buil-in wallet exchange

it seems that people after all don't really care about this kind of decentralization, they just want security at all cost...as for blockchain info i hope they fixed all their security hole that were there in the past

We will see what happens with this blockchain.info outage that's happening at this very moment.

nah, it is going to suck as a service then.
so far they have added the option to buy bitcoin through their website and i haven't been seeing good reviews so far.
and for this option, unless they offer big discounts and no addition fee then i can see it take of but that is impossible to do, because such services will require some additional fees and the merchants aren't just going to offer discounts.

It is good if they do this and given their market share,they are in a position to convince the merchants.
I am sure other wallet will also follow the suit taking leaf from blockchain.info book.

Like it or not that is the current situation. By now the mining pools may have already chosen which implementation they want. And the majority are still running Core. It will be in the hands of the wallet services and the merchants now to be creative in making transactions cheaper for Bitcoiners. It might be a good way to market their services to the users too.

The problem with the current fees for Bitcoin transactions is that they do not really scale.
Micropayments are practically impossible right now, adding around 0.0015 BTC in fees for a transaction worth 0.003 BTC is pretty expensive.

im guessing you havnt seen blockstreams elements "liquid" which is the internal ledger between a few exchanges

I am a little confused with what you said, but if I understood it correctly then my reply to your post would be there is a trustless way to do it. Activate Segwit and then deploy the Lightning Network.


No, I am afraid not. But if it is being done already then it might become the trend soon. Blockchain.info is in a good position to do this.

There is really not much to be done about that since the fees depend on the size of the transaction and the amount transacted is irrelevant you could be sending 100BTC and the fee will be the same so it seems to be a good idea to use LTC for small transactions.

Agreed. Me too, start using bitcoin because of this reason. I can pretend everything will be the same when the fees of any transactions increasing. Peoples using bitcoin with low fee reason. As what you said, better back to bank account if this going too bad next year. Bitcoin is not special anymore if it have same fee like another third parties.

No. It will be the trend whether you think it will suck or not.


What reviews? I have not seen any in both good or bad. It does not have to get a review. The point of that feature is it is there if you need it. So you cannot judge anything from what you are saying.


I am sure the wallet services and merchants will think of something to get the Bitcoiners to use their services. Nothing is impossible here. Think about the time when you first heard about cryptocurrencies. You obviously did not buy Bitcoins when it was really cheap. Look where you are now. Spamming the forum for your signature campaign to get Bitcoins.

I don't think that the higher fees and the increasing rate of the fees is a sign that the blockchain.info is getting worse because for me it is a sign that the bitcoin is getting better every time the fee increases because of the volume of users that are continue increasing day by day. So we should accept the fact that because of the great progress of bitcoin then the fees are getting more expensive.

we should think of ways to fix this problem not try to come up with ways of going around it and trying to use other weird methods of going around the problem, that is called erasing the problem instead of fixing it.
bitcoin was fine before the spam attack and we need to go back to those days one way or another.

why use services such as blockchain.info.
it is 100 times easier to do it off the chain, which means using some services such as xapo or anything like that which are working off the chain and become accounts instead of using bitcoin. and that means trusting third parties and going back to Paypal,... and eventually paying higher fees and be subjected to all the rest of the problems that exist.

Blockchain.info is the number one used by bitcoiners. Mostly BTC users has an account in blockchain.info, as myself made my very first wallet address from it. I think it is the official wallet addresses for bitcoin. So even the fee is rising, it is not a big deal because we trust it.

Whenever I play bitsler, a gambling site, I always use blockchain.info when I withdraw my funds. The reason is that withdrawals will automatically appear on you wallets balance in just seconds. Another reason why I use blockchain.info is when I send bitcoin to other wallets in the same site even without the confirmation made the btc is already appearing on my wallet and can already be spend.

FTFY

many people start from there because it is easy and online (on the web) but they all move on when they learn more about bitcoin and understand the risks involved with using a web wallet such as blockchain.info which is known to have bugs and has at least one major incident which lead to people losing a lot of money (the usage of random.org incident on their wallets)

you are wrong.
there is no such thing as "official bitcoin wallet".

the fees aren't rising in blockchain.info and it doesn't matter if you use that or any other wallet it is bitcoin itself and the network that demands this size of fee for the time being.

then you are making a big mistake. trusting blockchain.info doesn't mean you won't lose your bitcoin at some point because you were using a web wallet.

What do you mean we? Core has already made a solution, the big blockers and the Gavinistas too have their solutions. The problem here is the mining pools are not upgrading to activate Segwit, to Bitcoin Unlimited or whatever is out there.


It is not a question of why. It is how every Bitcoin service evolves. It is also not a matter of what I want but a matter of what I think the trend might be.