Meh. Not sure what the fuss is about these future markets. It only seems to be people gambling for or against the bitcoin price in the future with fiat and settling with fiat. No BTC is ever acquired or sold at all. |
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Yes, no room for the poor here.
Ponder this: Lightning network requires you to open a channel (high fees) and close a channel ( high fees ). Bob and Alice are not going to be buying coffee. I am not going to be using Lightning. I am going to pay 100-500 dollar transaction fees and buy a boat or a house or just sit on Bitcoin.
I'm not sure what country you live in, but in order to buy a boat or house you most probably will need to convert your BTC to fiat. This transaction is liable to be a taxable event, and the government will bend you over and extract their exorbitant taxes. If you try to evade this, the will outright rape you with taxes and penalties if you get caught. If you are fortunate enough to live in a country that wouldn't tax this. Good for you. In most countries, you don't need to convert to FIAT to be a taxable event. Even if you buy a house with Bitcoin, the purchase will be taxed at market value of both assets AND if market value of the Bitcoin used is higher than when you bought it you will also have to pay an additional tax for capital gains on the Bitcoin used. It never had anything to do with physically converting to FIAT as an intermediary step. There are things that you could buy with Bitcoin without anyone ever noticing you did (and thus the possibility to evade taxes)... houses, registered vehicles, etc are not among those. Then it is even worse than I projected. Fuck the governments. |
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Yes, no room for the poor here.
Ponder this: Lightning network requires you to open a channel (high fees) and close a channel ( high fees ). Bob and Alice are not going to be buying coffee. I am not going to be using Lightning. I am going to pay 100-500 dollar transaction fees and buy a boat or a house or just sit on Bitcoin.
I'm not sure what country you live in, but in order to buy a boat or house you most probably will need to convert your BTC to fiat. This transaction is liable to be a taxable event, and the government will bend you over and extract their exorbitant taxes. If you try to evade this, the will outright rape you with taxes and penalties if you get caught. If you are fortunate enough to live in a country that wouldn't tax this. Good for you. |
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Not all of us are suffering from an embarrassment of riches.  Just HODL. You will soon join the suffering. If and when that happens, the "cheap tx fee" will be the equivalent of $500.  If I have a few millions I would be okay with that too. "A Penny saved is a penny earned." There's a reason Ben Franklin is on the $100.00 bill. |
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Well, I am happy that you can do the Bitcoin equivalent of wiping your ass with $10 bills and flushing them down the toilet. I am sure that the alligator lurking at the bottom of the sewer, Jihan Wu, is enjoying your regular feedings. Not all of us are suffering from an embarrassment of riches. Could you please make an orderly exit? I don't think anyone here really has the time to converse with the poor any more. Our time is more valuable. There's a good chap. Gee, you nouveau riche are worse than the old money. No wonder the aristocracy always looked down upon you. |
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Not all of us are suffering from an embarrassment of riches. Just HODL. You will soon join the suffering. If and when that happens, the "cheap tx fee" will be the equivalent of $500. |
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Mother fucking transaction fees are getting out-of-hand.
Trying to move shit to Gemini for tonight's action, and shit be stalling out, yo.
Current fees estimated at ~343sat/byte for 60 min confirmation.
Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit.
My last transfer, the fee was .0008 btc for 1-hr confirmation. Are you really complaining about a $15 fee for a near-instant international money transfer? This fee thing is such a fucking canard. I send many transfers and the fee is always a relative pittance. And its free fucking money really, anyway. I don't understand people whining about fees at all. Well, I am happy that you can do the Bitcoin equivalent of wiping your ass with $10 bills and flushing them down the toilet. I am sure that the alligator lurking at the bottom of the sewer, Jihan Wu, is enjoying your regular feedings. Not all of us are suffering from an embarrassment of riches. |
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Fine, let them do so at their cost then. It's an inherent problem with good things in life, that they are going to get spammed to death if there is no price.
Let there be price then! One of the best antispam filters.
Well, it's not really to their cost as they probably control more than 50% of the hash rate so they collect their own fees. Even if they miss them, they've driven fees up so high that they collect more in general anyway. It's a very neat and nauseating loop. If they did control more than 50% of the hashing power, they would do a 50% attack, like undoing blocks and whatnot. Most mining machines being sold by bitmain, doesn't mean that they control them as well. Bitmain definitely does have the capacity to gather more than 50% of the hash power, if they so desired. However, for them to invoke a 50% attack would be killing their goose that lays golden eggs. One may argue that they would invoke the attack to bolster BCH. However, it is quite clear from Jihan Wu's recent tweets is that he wants to keep his hands in both the BTC and BCH till. |
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.........
The problem with your calculations is that it does not include the 12.5 BTC reward the miners get with each block. That alone rewards the miners about 90.00 USD per tx at the current price. At this point in the game, the tx fees are just extra profit padding. And? Who do you think is the most likely suspect of spamming this network to artificially inflate the tx market? I'll give you a clue.  I suppose you want me to assume that it is miners that are spamming. Why not assume that they are aware of networking effects and that it is to their interest to not spam, but allow as many legitimate transactions as possible? The bcash gang is excluded from this assumption by definition! First of all, you are aware that Antpool, which is run by Bitmain, does not share the tx portion the reward to the miners. Also, BTC.com, also run by Bitmain, runs a transaction accelerator that make you pay to put through your stuck transaction. Bitmain has everything to gain by filling up the mempool with lower fee transactions to collect higher fees and encourage people to give their transaction accelerator a try. |
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.........
The problem with your calculations is that it does not include the 12.5 BTC reward the miners get with each block. That alone rewards the miners about 90.00 USD per tx at the current price. At this point in the game, the tx fees are just extra profit padding. And? Who do you think is the most likely suspect of spamming this network to artificially inflate the tx market? I'll give you a clue.  |
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Maybe I'm naive, but with all these noobs and old-timers alike whining about transaction fees, I worked out some back of the envelope calculations:
The Bitcoin network is consuming about 100 million kWh to process nearly 400,000 transactions per day. That works out to about 250 kWh per transaction, or about a week of modest home consumption, or enough to power 8 typical US households for a day.
The average cost of electricity in the US is 12 cents per kWh which works out to $30 per transaction or 0.0015 BTC at $20k. This is the break-even transaction fee in terms of energy usage. Any less, you're getting a deal and should be happy to wait for confirmation, any more and hopefully your premium speeds things up.
I personally think $30 is a fair price to securely move any amount of BTC to anyone in the world in typically less than an hour, until either electricity costs come down or the network becomes more energy efficient as demand and use dictate. It's way cheaper and more convenient than a wire. And wires are never intended for small amounts. They're for heavy lifting and high priority transfers. Just try and think about trying to send someone several kilos of gold for $30. For better or for worse, BTC has or will become the favored child of savvy millionaires, governments, and institutions to store (HODL!1) and transmit increasingly vast sums of wealth, sans regulation or too much oversight for the time being.
Besides, there already exists a cheaper and more energy efficient way to send crypto: it’s called Litecoin, et al. You want a cheaper transaction fee, switch to a cheaper coin. It’s less than 50 cents to send Litecoin and your transaction is confirmed way faster. Save your BTC transaction fees for heavy lifting. All these arguments about trying to achieve Visa's daily transaction capacity - why? We already have Visa. Do people really need to securely and irrevocably purchase coffee on the world's first and most desirous blockchain? BTC serves a way different purpose than Visa, and I'm happy having both for the time being. Soon enough there will be Xapo, Revolut, and Square charge card options that will work out a cheap way to transact off-chain and settle on-chain once a month or year or whatever floats your boat.
To me, the analogy between to gold, silver, copper seems apt for various crypto. The abundance, demand, difficulty and cost of extraction and delivery costs get factored into each crypto's price. But BTC still has some tricks up its sleeve, like LN and atomic swaps and other inevitable network improvements clever people will eventually figure out. The future crypto ecosystem looks bright to me. And hopefully the carbon footprint will improve as energy sources and blockchain efficiencies shift into the future.
The problem with your calculations is that it does not include the 12.5 BTC reward the miners get with each block. That alone rewards the miners about 90.00 USD per tx at the current price. At this point in the game, the tx fees are just extra profit padding. Furthermore, Litecoin is a competitor. What kind of enterprise recommends that you just use a competitor if you want it cheaper, faster and of the same quality? |
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If you want to talk to a bear go to talk to roach
I'm not a "bear", just tired of the vast amount of lies in bitcoin like people claiming it's "decentralized" when it's not, and people claiming it has better fundamentals than metals when it doesn't. People are pushing these lies for personal gain. It's really the exact opposite of what they claim it is - the MORE centralized bitcoin is, the EASIER it is to manipulate the price higher because the incentive for the small amount of actors who control it is greater. You see the same thing in any altcoin where one guy controls the whole market, he can easily pump it. Centralization is price positive in other words, but these idiots claim the price is going up because "decentralization" LOL. There's only two types of markets, aggregate markets and fraud markets controlled by one person or a cartel. Bitcoin is obviously not an aggregate market for anyone who watches market activity, nor is it decentralized. With all due fairness, someone who is deluded and tells an untruth really isn't lying. Shouldn't we give many of these people the benefit of a doubt? |
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Sadly Bitcoin is broken.
It's basically unusable as a peer to peer platform which was the whole damn point.
I tried to transfer $600 of BTC and still unconfirmed.
BTC's utility is wrecked.
Yes, the current rate to ensure a 1 input 1 output segwit tx goes through quickly is $10.00. Maybe, if your moving around 1000s of dollars worth, that is a deal; but for smaller transactions, that's a ripoff. |
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one that can scale right now to peak-time VISA levels, by design.
Y'all realizer yer fabled LN can't scale to Visa levels without a huge block size increase, right? I can't prove to you that it can, but I believe that it is several orders of magnitude better than a mere block size increase. LN allows the same number of actors to engage in roughly unlimited numbers of transactions with each other. What it does not allow is more actors engaging in transactions. If you think the future is properly just us assholes already in engaging in scads of trades with each other (how many transactions do you do per day?), then LN is probably for you. If instead, you think that the 99.99% of the world that have not yet bought in might possibly be interesting to Bitcoin, then LN has essentially zero to offer you. I will actually have to agree with jbrener on this point. I only make about 1 transaction a week on average. It makes absolutely no sense for me to open up a LN channel. Furthermore, opening up a channel subjects me to a counterparty risk. The other party could transmit an earlier, more favorable tx to the blockchain and rip me off. Yes, if I catch the other party in time, I can invoke a penalty. However, this involves ensuring my Lightning Node is online 24/7 or enlisting a third party to monitor for me. Seems like a malicious hub could invoke DDOS attacks on vulnerable channels and known third party monitors effectively knocking them all offline and hightailing it with lots of BTC. |
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After watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SJm2ep3X_M&feature=youtu.beI have come to the conclusion that on-chain scaling is indeed feasible. My previous objections were that it takes pools too long to verify transactions. Therefore, 1GB blocks would result in many empty blocks being mined. I see no scenario where that would be a consequence. Can you explain? For that matter, how does one quantify 'too many empty blocks'? As long as all transactions are processed with reasonable alacrity, what does the block fullness matter? Currently, there is a bottleneck in the way nodes need to verify transaction included in the previous block before they start including transactions in the new block they are working on. This is why empty blocks are frequently mined if they arrive within about 30 seconds of the previous block. 1GB blocks would compound this bottleneck 1000x. However, nChain is working on ways to relieve the bottleneck. Therefore, my objection would be thwarted. Again, I fail to see why this is a problem. I actually had a significant discussion about a year ago with the author of the leading independent mining SW about this very issue. Though the motivating factor was the nonsense about nonlinear hash time for aberrant transactions. Yes, there is a significant opportunity to improve the threading model within leading Bitcoin clients. However, I don't see how your reply addresses my question. As long as all transactions are processed with reasonable alacrity, what does the block fullness matter? If a 1MB block takes 30 seconds to verify and validate, with the current code, wouldn't a 1GB block take 50 minutes to verify? Or is it not linear like that? I don't know, 1 block with transactions in it followed by 5 empty blocks seems inefficient. However, it appears the BCH team is working on this bottleneck, so why are we debating about my original concerns? The concern is no longer valid. At this time, I believe this would cause a barrier to entry for small start ups that require a full node be run. (New exchanges, information services, mining pools etc.)
If a startup can't lose 0.1 BTC in the noise of its annual CapEx budget, it is likely to be a non-entity anyhow. According to Craig Wright, the initial setup would be $20,000. If I wanted to start a block explorer or a sight like fork.lol, that's quite an outlay, especially since it extremely difficult to be able monetize such an informational sight, to make up the costs. I enjoy these information sights and don't deem them "non-entities." I have heard Craig Wright speak of the $20K figure. But I have not heard him speak of it as a minimum viable investment - merely exemplary. More importantly, $20K (I note that this is a depreciating asset with a useful life exceeding one year) is a drop in the bucket for any real business. Crippling Bitcoin in order to save paying a $5/year subscription to access fork.lol's data is the wrong decision. Perhaps $5/year is trifling to you, but to a minnow like me who constantly consults many information sight, it starts to add up. This would be even more of a burden to the millions of unbanked people Craig Wright wants to help. Also, I suspect many sights would have alternate ways to monetize. I would find it particular irritating to have to watch a 30 second ad or have the web page try to make my computer mine Monero for them. (something which my AV blocks, thank god.) |
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GDAX catching up now
30 Minute chart going positive and recharged again on Bitstamp.
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I’m back to all in. Bought shortly before I put the kettle on. Let’s see where this leads us.
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whistle'n like a motherfucker over here
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Just got an email from Bitfinex threatening to report people to police if they sign up from the US with fake credentials. As if I wanted to user their shady hacked exchange that badly. Good riddance.
land of the free  In the case of Bitfinex, whatever any government's justice system doles out to them would not be justice, it would be mercy; since it would be better than what they actually deserve.  |
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Just got an email from Bitfinex threatening to report people to police if they sign up from the US with fake credentials. As if I wanted to user their shady hacked exchange that badly. Good riddance.
They just want to make sure they have the least possible number of current US victims so the US government does not intervene. Unfortunately for them, they have plenty of past US victims. I'm sure the statute of limitations has not run out, yet. |
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