It works for the local grocery, gas station and hardware store. It doesn't work for e-commerce and buying or selling stuff online.

I'm talking about receiving payments. CC's are kind of one-way (you just pay with them, you are not getting paid). Paypal is two-way.

Receiving payments *is* free and practically non-reversible with BTC, post a few confs.

On the other hand, if you are a merchant, you have huge issues with chargebacks, "tickets" (freezing the tx funds), fees etc. All these don't exist with bitcoin. It's in a class of its own.

What compression are you using?

LRZIP is *very* good for large files (the larger the file, the more redundancies it can find).

(A typical 130mb block.dat will be down to 97-98mb with gzip/bzip2, but can go under 90 with lrzip).

I could say the same for paypal, only it's far worse.

Around 3 out 4 times, I've clicked "withdraw" to my bank, they had to do a "routine check" that would unfortunately delay my funds for at least 1 working day. Oooops. Do you feel lucky clicking "withdraw"? You never know what you gonna get. And the problem is not whether you'll be included in one or two or three 10minute blocks, but entire days to get your money.

Accepting them is indeed free and without fees. Technically speaking, and as far as merchants are concerned (no receiving fees + no chargebacks), it isn't wrong.

Paypal charges you 0.35 + 2-3% for receiving payments.

Actually I counted up to block 401913, so the 0mb block (two blocks later) wasn't in the March 9 average. The next two drop the avg down to 762.

This is not a religious issue to involve "beliefs".



All blocks added today and yesterday (including the 1mb one that got orphaned on 401626), divided by their count.

Block data from:

https://blockchain.info/blocks/1457468990441 March 8 - avg 682kb
https://blockchain.info/blocks/1457555390441 March 9 - avg 766kb*

* Up to 401913. It doesn't include the 0mb block in 401915.

The mempool will continue to have backlogs even with 10mb or 1gb blocks, if there is zero or near-zero cost to broadcast gigabytes of txs.

If miners are clearing them out by including them into the blocks => blockchain bloat.
If they don't => mempool bloat (much better and controlled situation compared to blockchain bloat).

I synced my wallet a couple of hours ago, it was 23h behind. It downloaded 106mb and this includes some overhead.

Blocks full = 130mb+ per day (theoretical max 144mb).

Well, guess what happened.

As for 0.12, from what I understand that's under max mempool limit (which you can set as high as you want, depending your node's ram capacity).

I don't see what's wrong with avg blocksize. Should I take specific blocks to illustrate the point? And if so, what would these blocks be? The 0 bytes ones, or the 1000kb ones?

https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size?timespan=30days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

This is bullshit... we need more crying and bitching that "blocks are full", not a +37% to 52% extra space that 0.65mb-0.73mb blocks allow us

Does this kind of FUD work there?

There is no such thing as "no one will be able to send bitcoins anywhere" if blocks are full. If blocks are full then that automatically means that you are already doing 250.000 txs per day.


Your primary worry should be ETFs and paper gold / paper silver.

My experience with daytrading dash is unique compared to all other alts. It's the only coin that I never worry about when a trade slips in price. The theory is buy low, sell high, rinse-repeat. However if you make a buy and the price slides down, then you are left with the coins and you are not making profit. But that's a bonus with dash: You just have more dash... So, in a way, whichever way the market goes, I'm comfortable either making profit or having more dash Win-win...

(Morpheus meme kicks in) What if I told you that in a large percentage of the rest of the planet, people don't buy coca colas and beers by the 6packs, eggs by the dozens, and fuel by the gallon?


Westerners / people of developed countries are lucky enough to not even have to care about such low fees, hence why I'm condemning the hypocrisy of "ohh fees are too high", "who cares for bloat, let's just buy larger hard disks for hundreds of $$$" and then also raising the point of how easy it is to "destroy value" by reckless moves - and this happens because BTC is unappreciated.

As for those who live in developing countries and value these 3 cents proportionately more they won't complain because they'd lose 100 times that using legacy payment systems to move money around the planet. Immigrants from developing countries know this kind of exploitation by first hand experience, while transferring money back to their countries. This means that while a 3 cent fee might hurt them more, a 30$ fee saving (for using btc instead of western union) would mean (comparatively) enormous savings for them - or a day's of work doing the dishes in some western restaurant. Yes, in that context, they'd happily pay the 3 cents instead of 30$.

As for the 6-8$ of electricity, naturally, tx/s, fees and btc price will rise to compensate. In 4.5 years (post halving for 6+ btc per block) we may be doing 20-50 tx/s instead of 3, and in 8.5 years (post the 3+ btc per block) we may be upwards of 50-100tx/s, on-chain.

This will reduce the pressure for serious fees per tx but if the gains compared to legacy systems are great (and typically they will), then people will be outbidding one another to get the biggest savings by using BTC - so even if the fees don't need to be high, they may end up being high if on-chain tx/s capacity can't scale that much. Right now we are averaging 600-800$ per tx with inclusion costs of 1 to 5 cents, depending the priority. This could escalate to thousands per tx when dust is eliminated, and tens of thousands as people start to flock to BTC to save big money from the legacy systems. In terms of annual money movement, BTC will be doing trillions per year at that point, dwarfing the western unions and paypals. At a 150-230mn/day current pace, we are currently at levels comparable with western union, despite all the wasteful dust txs which drag the average down. And the tx cost is extremely low still.

Prosperous countries will typically be those who have a very good ratio of resources divided to a population. There is also an alternative combination where a country has a very large service sector (usually financial services or something to that effect) inflating their GDP, which is in turn distributed to a small population.

You can see the prosperity pattern in countries like Canada, Australia, Norway, Switzerland (financial services), oil-rich arab states, etc.

Large populations compared to available resources is what will -typically- lead to poverty. When you have hundreds of millions to billions with finite resources => you have serious problems.



http://www.dailyfinance.com/photos/food-price-comparison-around-the-world/#!fullscreen&slide=988845

That's ~3 cents per egg btw (for India).

I think visa has 2.4bn cards, although many might be duplicate (one holder, multiple cards).

The point was that while it is doable, it is not a desirable outcome because it practically stops being a decentralized peer-to-peer version of Bitcoin.

Americans (I guess you are also exhibiting the same pattern even if you are a Canadian) always blow my mind. They are burning fuel by the gallons, they can buy all types of junk for hundreds or thousands of dollars, they've been born in such abundance and quality of life that they can afford to say things like "ohh fuck bloat, I'll just buy a hard disk that costs 300$" (which is the wage of a developing nation worker) and the next minute they'll be saying things like "I don't want to pay 1-2-5 cents in fees" or they'll be pushing for the massive destruction of value, such as in the case of a contentious hard fork, saying that this will somehow lift some obstacle and increase their ...value. It's plain stupidity.

Only people who are taking abundance for granted can be pushing for situations where the destruction of value can be promoted as "solution" to issues that they are lucky enough to don't even have to care about, like the 2-3-5 cents in fees.

You know, there are very poor countries where even the 2-3-5 cents are actually money that one can do something in their life, like buy something to eat. I would respect those if they actually complained. But you know why they would not complain? Because they would understand that all alternative payment systems are asking them not 2-3-5 cents, but 100 times that. The cost to transfer around 200$ over the globe, through a bank wire, a western union transfer or paypal is in the tens of dollars, if you include all fees and commissions.

Last, but not least, there are countries, in which people suffer from fluctuating currency rates and who appreciate Bitcoin's store of value characteristics as their national currency slides downwards. And then there are all those who already enjoy the privilege of being in a country with stable or strong currency and who are like "fuck that, let's now destroy bitcoin's value for the lolz through a hardfork... let's fork the currency because, well... I don't like core devs".

I know I haven't directly addressed the point about the ...video and the fees, but the answer is there, between the lines.

There are no high fees in bitcoin.