Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin is losing it's dominance as a direct result of the greed of the miners. There is no technical reason for keeping the blocksize so low, it's simply politics and human nature: miners are left to decide in their own short term interest and against the interest of the users. This is exactly how old banking behaved and it's sad to see a great dream killed by greed and pointless bickering.

I have paid in excess of $200 in mining fees in the last month. This is forgone revenue coming directly out of my pocket for a business that does not depend on Bitcoin or crypto. This is on par with fees paid to traditional payment gateways at similar volume. I'm already working at adding the option of a leading altcoin which I won't name and passing the Bitcoin fee to the users. It's just a small business but the tide is slowly but surely turning against bitcoin in the payment arena.

The idea that Bitcoin can act as a "store of value" and only deal with large transactions is delusional. Bitcoin is technically inferior to many of the new altcoins, it's only redeeming feature is the strong network effect it has gained, everybody speaks bitcoin so it makes sense to buy and trade in bitcoins. Once end users switch to newer and better performing altcoins, Bitcoin is dead.

There are plenty of reasons for not changing the block size limit, especially not when better solutions are available. You need to educate yourself before you write nonsense.

This tells us nothing and is an entirely irrelevant metric without other data. How much capital did you move, how big were your transactions, what fee-rate did you use, et. al.

Yeah, let's move from a decentralized Bitcoin to a centralized altcoin because Bitcoin == banks? ::)

This is bullshit. Bitcoin is superior to all altcoins in many ways.

Then why are you here, whining? Go away already so we can work on actual improvements that will provide real scaling.

It is true that the miner fees are increasing and somehow it even reach as high as 3 dollars per transaction. But to say that bitcoin is dead is not true. If you notice what Japan did in bitcoin transaction, a large exchange has an application that will be used by almost all Japanese and if the Japanese will use the same app in exchanging bitcoins then they will not suffer a huge fee instead they can make a transaction free or in a lower fee.

I think that something like that should not be considered as something strange, after all people are really happy: BTC price has made another all-time high just after breaking the previous one few days ago, so the BTC holders are making money, same with people that got bitcoins for investment purposes: they make profit too, just from having this cryptocurrency on their wallet.
Such a thing is encouraging them in such a belief even stronger: after all, they knew about cryptocurrencies before all that "stupid" crowd: they have made money before them, so they consider themselves as some kind of an elite, but this is not true. You can say that you are in the group of "bitcoin elite" if you are one of the early adopters, you cannot in other scenario  at least that is my opinion.

Ever watched Animal Farm?

Miners are greedy and this is normal.How bitcoin will survive without miners?
Maybe LN/Segwit is the solution,or maybe not.
I`m greaming about a  cryptocurrency free from transaction fees.

Statements like these are too vague and thus nonsensical. I could construct a transaction that requires several hundred dollars in fees. Example:
- Take the *recommended (changes constantly)* fee-rate of 200 satoshis/byte.
- Create a transaction that is 100 000 bytes large (100 kb).
- 200 x 100 000 = 20 000 000 Satoshis = 0.2 BTC = ~360$ at current prices.

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You need to know how to actually use Bitcoin to avoid these and take advantage of times where the fee-rate is low. Keep in mind that knowing how to send and receive Bitcoin != *actually knowing how to use Bitcoin*. Those are just the basics.

SW + LN are the first stepping stones.

Nothing in life is free.

Bitcoin still experimental and incomplete, and when active developers are trying to improve it, a few people motivated by greed taking the most out of this opportunity and holding the development back.

Don't worry even if Bitcoin dies the same miners are heavily invested in other altcoins as well and they will let them to reach high as $2000 to take their billions of dollars while you are worried about utility.

This is a sentiment I'm having since quite a while, but for different reasons.  It is inherent in its design.  The small bloc is indeed a problem, but it is part of its "frozen" design.  My take on crypto currencies is now this: there are two kinds of crypto currencies: there are bitcoin-like, which are "immutable", frozen for ever ; and there are centralized developer coins, like ETH, DASH, Monero etc.... who have the habit of hard forking and evolving, but are also centralized with god-like dev powers that can do anything, any time.

Almost all of them have terrible design flaws ; but those that have centralized evolution, can try to improve ; the others are what they are, for ever, with their flaws.  The principal flaw of almost all crypto is the terribly deflationary nature of them (ironically, it is boasted as their monetary superiority), which turns them into speculative assets, and will never allow them to become reliable main stream currencies.  That said, them being highly volatile, but often also quite high-priced assets during their "time of adoption" (that is, when greater fools are still flowing in), they can be USED to transfer value and act as a kind of "payment channel", on the condition of getting in and out again very quickly (due to volatility, which would turn a payment otherwise in a speculative operation).

When using crypto as payment system, actually, the coin you use is in fact of no importance, from the moment that the customer can get them easily on exchanges, you can easily convert them back, and the transaction happens quickly, reliably and at low cost.   There can be extra requirements, and my own take is that the main reason to go through the hassle of using crypto for payments, is that it is a payment that cannot easily be done with the normal fiat system.  So one might like to use an obfuscated chain like monero, or ZEC.  (I wouldn't trust DASH too much for that, even though it is still better than bitcoin or litecoin in that respect).  If you're not into crypto speculation, on the side of the customer, or on the side of the merchant, there's no reason to keep the coins for any longer than needed (volatility risk), so the longevity of the coin doesn't really matter, it only serves for this particular payment.

Of course, you might want to use a crypto that does have *some* reliability and *some* volume, because of the hassle of implementing the payment system, you can't change the portfolio of currencies you accept for payment every 5 minutes.  So using crypto number 500 on coinmarketcap is maybe not a good idea, but if you hit in the first 50 ones, that can do the thing.

Using crypto as a long term "store of value" doesn't really exist in my mind: only long term hodler speculators are in this for a long time.  They don't want to "hold" their value, they want to become "immensely rich".

The nasty thing with crypto "immutability" is of course that it cannot really evolve ; so in as much as design errors are frozen in, and tech gets old, the only thing to do is leave the chain for a more modern one. 

you have no idea what you are talking about.

this has nothing to do with bitcoin's dominance and has nothing to do with your claims about it being decreased.

nobody is stopping you, maybe introduce your business here so we can use it when it became so much better when you switched to an altcoin.

again i am anxiously waiting for you to introduce your business to us so we can check it out and see the effect switching to an altcoin had on your business.

Do you think the average user cares about centralization ? Does the average Apple user care he's in a golden prison ? Bitcoin has value only if it's useful in making transactions, that's it. If Bitcoin loses that ability, it will fall like a house of cards. A few individuals might care that there is no central government taxing or freezing their hoard, but they are irrelevant in the grand scheme, they will be left with poker chips which they can trade in a select club of ex-millionaires.

The window of opportunity to fix this clusterfuck is closing fast. The fees are rising exponentially and already make up a non-negligible part of the miner revenue. This means miners will compete for it and plan their capital investments accordingly, and are forced by the market to compete. Because capital costs are the dominant expense in mining, we are are quickly shifting from situation where fees are a nice windfall for miners, to a situation where fees are already priced in the existing mining hardware. When fees will make up half of the mining revenue and will be essential in recovering sunk costs, good luck convincing any miner that he should forgo that revenue and return to negligible fees that the network is more than capable of supporting.

Lead devs and pool owners need to lock themselves in a room and not get out until they have committed to fix the fees issue by any means necessary in at most 6 months. Mark my words, we are on the deck of the Titanic and the band is playing.

There are plenty of decentralized altcoins and some are strong enough. OP, please implement that, show the people that alts are not as bad as some Bitcoiners want so badly to believe.

Oh yes.

To make blocks scarce thus forcing the fees up.
To force people into segwit with meagre potential increase in blocksize.
To force off chain transactions benefiting "you know whom."
To keep Bitcoin for the selected few and not as Satoshi originally intended.

Give it up.

Trying to win an argument on behalf of your master(s) by insulting others, way to go.

Decentralized? Maybe.
Strong enough? Not even close.

There isn't a single altcoin which can come close to bitcoin. Mayyybe monero because of the darkmarket acceptance. The others are completely worthless. Vendors don't want shitcoins, they all want bitcoin. As soon as they get their shitcoin from the buyers, they convert them immediately to bitcoin. While bitcoin itself is volatile against USD and many sellers want to stay on the safe side with USD, many other keep their stash as btc. Not ltc, not eth (not a viable trading currency and its not designed to be one), not dash, nothing but btc. Btc is the ground zero for all crypto currencies. It is the tree of life. Alts are only branches of this big tree. You may have adventures between the branches but you'll come back home sooner or later.

Ironically, I believe it was designed with microtransactions in mind, hence the greater divisibility. Well, let's just see if they'll find a way to make it a payment option again. For now, I'd treat it more as a commodity or store of value but not a mean of exchange.

Jeez Lauda, harsh... A noob with some comments about his real world experience of the Bitcoins.

I think you need to take a break from replying to franky and jonald.

 ::)

Centralization is the reason drug companies in the united states can get away with marking up drug prices 1,000% and people have to pay it due to the market being centralized and alternatives not being available.

Centralization is the root cause of many major issues plaguing society which reduce living standards, educational standards, health standards and are the main cause of corruption and misery in the civilized world.

If people "don't care" about centralization maybe they should start caring so we can fix things and improve circumstances for the better?

I had this argument recently with someone else on this forum: I think there is a lot of indication why centralized systems which "are easier to use" are largely preferred over decentralized systems, even if those last ones give you a higher sense of freedom.  This is one of the reasons why I think that decentralized crypto currencies will never take over the fiat system, or even come close.  (another reason is of course that most crypto has fallen in a speculative deflationary spiral).

When we look at several decentralized systems that existed before, and that have fallen out of favour, we find:
1)  the internet structure
The internet had a largely decentralized structure in the beginning.  In fact, it was its main invention !  The internet was invented as a military protocol to not have a single point of failure, let us not forget that.  The inventors of the internet had a decentralized P2P mesh structure in mind, so that when you bomb 2/3 of the network, the remaining 1/3 is still functioning.    Well, we see that, even though there is still some heritage of that, economies of scale have driven the structure of a mesh in rather wheel-and-spokes hierarchies, and very often, for your internet access, you rely on just a few commercial options.  You don't connect with a wire to your neighbours, who connect to their neighbours who ....
The internet is not entirely centralized either, there is no single boss of the internet, but there are main points of failure, where law enforcement can impose its rules and "look at everything", which wouldn't be the case in a true peer-to-peer network as it was intended.  It is not a mesh.

2) internet social content
the internet allows you to set up your own little web server at home.  You are entirely the master of that content.  You can run your own blog, and nobody can censor you (apart from the above centralization, which can censor your IP).  Almost nobody does (apart from people having content on Tor hidden servers).  People use centralized providers of these services, where they take an account and pay a modest sum for the service provided, or accept their personal information to be commercialized to get free access.

3) using centralized services like facebook.   Everything you do on facebook, you could do it with a home-installed blog.  The whole idea of the internet was to allow people to link content ; you could give restricted access to different users.  People prefer a centralized big company to do that for them.

4) discussion.  Usenet was a decentralized discussion system, that was entirely censor-resistant.  People dropped it to go to centralized discussion forums, because at least, there was a central boss (the admin) and his police (moderators) that kept rule and order.

5) storage.  You can buy huge amounts of storage for little money.  People put their stuff on the centralized "cloud" for easiness of access, and not to be bothered.

In all these categories, there are minorities sticking to their freedom and doing the decentralized thing.  But they are not the mainstream.

So, for payment systems, it is similar.  It is even worse, because trustless decentralized payment systems have an *increasing burden* on users as the network grows.  In fact, this is somewhat similar to usenet, which also had an increasing burden when its network became large (and ended up crumbling under it, with daily volumes of messages of several bitcoin block chains a day). 

A centralized system that works sufficiently well to allow people to do their thing, even if they are moderately badly exploited, seems in general to be preferred by the mainstream public, rather than the little bit of hassle of doing a decentralized thing yourself and taking responsibility for it.

You get it, Well Done.   :D :D

Store of Values don't require millions of Dollars spent every month to keep them running.
If you can't stick it under your bed and forget about it for 10 years, it is not a store of value.

Feel free to ignore Lauda (known extortionist, & BTC Core Troll)


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It is true that the miner fees are increasing and somehow it even reach as high as 3 dollars per transaction. But to say that bitcoin is dead is not true. If you notice what Japan did in bitcoin transaction, a large exchange has an application that will be used by almost all Japanese and if the Japanese will use the same app in exchanging bitcoins then they will not suffer a huge fee instead they can make a transaction free or in a lower fee.
[/quote]Its really a great idea so that bitcoin users need not pay higher transaction fees and continue using bitcoins.I think technologically advanced japanese have once again shown a new way to solve higher transaction fee problem

In my view transaction usage is not the one much concerned. It has got lot many usage than the cryptocurrencies that have been existing often. There are several altcoins that provide transaction free without any fee. So if those coins were used for transaction the conversion through exchanges will cost them. Even when bitcoin is not used as a transaction token people will use it as an investment and for several other needs. Only few users might switch to altcoins mentioning transaction fee as an issue.

the idea behidn which bitcoin can act as a store of value is not idiotic or without sense like you think, bitcoin can act better thn altcoin, bitcoin can be used liek a currency and japan is already doing so

you can't do the same with any altcoin, their value is meaningless they are just pump and dump for now

anyway solution are coming, the problem is only one the consensus, and again miners have no fault here, i'm repeating this because apparently not many are awere about it, it's the users that determine the fee not the miners

Blocksize is limited because when the block is increase it may result to a network attack please research this topic before creating shit post.
Paying higher fees for faster transactions is an option you dont have to actually pay it, the bitcoin network is fine though you can send and receive bitcoins in just minutes or hours.
If you're already into altcoin, so why are u here?
Im sure you will regret that decision when bitcoin reaches $500000 in 2030.

1) yep... 2) bullshit... 3)maybe idk... 4) Titanic is at the bottom of the ocean so you are one of these the things... A scooba diver that has somehow managed to go 12,000 under sea level and is playing a waterproof mp3 player... A Person i would like to buy drugs from.... Or your just bat shit nuts.... And The first one only applies if the we meant you and your friends.... If not either gimme the drugs or go get professional help.

   I think that one of the main problems is that there are a lot of people that don't realize the negative effects of centralization