Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion

[bargainbin]

...
The other day I got 250$ in paypal. From sender to recipient's bank account (=my bank account) I lost 20$ in various fees and conversions - and it took 4 days btw because there was a weekend in-between and a "random security check" by paypal that got me +1 day delay.
...

You should probably stop using PayPal & try Bitcoin. Hasn't occurred to you?

I'm waiting for ebay to start accepting Bitcoins

(insert meme here "still waiting" / skeleton).

PayPal can afford to charge its fees because people like yourself are willing to pay them. Because eBay is free to not accept irreversible Beanies. Because free market.
Lrn2free market, AlexGR

True. Still ebay and paypal dominate the online selling market, so not much choice out there if you want to hit a large pool of potential buyers. It's like paying the pimp, lol.

No. PayPal is just one of the payment methods available on eBay. You chose to use PayPal.
That said, eBay is far from the only online marketplace.
It's the only one worth using tho, because already explained.  

At some point -we can always hope it'll happen- perhaps we'll be able to do the same through decentralized markets and bitcoins or altcoins, that actually get decent volume in terms of listings and transactions.

yeah, I understand the console version of Open Bazaar or whatever is available.

Edit from above: The ability to reverse transactions is essential for eBay, and most online trading, to function. Beanies might be trustless, but the guy selling you alpaca socks is not. You send BTC, get dick instead of alpaca socks, wat do nao?
That's where PayPal & its exorbitant fees comes in.
That's where credit cards come in for lower-risk transactions.

Yeah, from one perspective that is true. Still ebay and paypal makes a somewhat arbitrary choice that while the risk is there, it will be entirely shifted to the seller's side. The buyer is placed on a pedestal where he can do no wrong, allowing him to scam a seller with any excuse possible.

That's because it minimizes headaches & maximizes profit -- their rational self-interest. If eBay could make more money by shifting the responsibility onto the buyer, trust me -- they would. But it don't work good like that.
So they don't.
Also: free market; don't have to justify dick. Don't wanna use PayPal? Don't wanna use CC or checks? Feel free to vote with your feet & take your business to AlphaBay

[1714725195]

1714725195

[Fatman3001]

But, that's irrelevant.

The problem is that genuine transactions aren't getting through.

You can stick various types of stamps on an envelope and depending the accumulated value of the stamps you can ask for first priority, second priority, express, etc.

If, on the other hand, you don't buy stamps that add up to the proper value of even the basic service, your mail will be rejected.

The legitimacy of the intent of the sender is not in question in that case but his level of intelligence is in question - if he expects to conduct his business by not paying what he should.

In bitcoin it's actually better because you have hope that even at 0.4cents or 1 cents, you can get confirmed after a long wait - or you might even get added for free (!).

Now, if people don't know how to set fees, or what fees are appropriate, that may be related to ignoring how BTC is used, or some design failure of the user-interface which is inadequate in warning the user about whether he needs 1c-2c-5c etc and how long it will take for his confirmation. Still, I think with 0.12 you can RBF and bump up your fee and be on your way even if you got it wrong the first time.

What it definitely isn't: a block-size issue.

Because fees add capacity. Got it!



However, my point was that I thought a situation where large numbers of genuine transactions got stuck in the mempool was a situation we wanted to avoid. But as Mike Hearn predicted, users aren't just magically using the correct fee. Almost every fee is 0.0001. Which used to be a very good fee, but today it will get you stuck.

Edit: So basically the situation is like this: the fee market doesn't work because users are insufficiently aware of the issue, and even if it did "work" it seems there are much more than 1MB per block worth of genuine txs at times.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin



Explanation

[rebuilder]

AlexGR: Who should decide what the fair price of a tx is?

[billyjoeallen]

Regarding fees and blocksize:
People use the best option they have until a better option materializes. This should be obvious. What is going to prevent people from using an altcoin when one becomes a better option, other than censorship and DDoS attacks? 

I watch Shark Tank and it has given me a good idea how successful investors think. Is the idea proprietary? What is the barrier to entry for competition? Is management skilled and motivated?

If you are not investing in a proprietary idea, You have to be investing in the skills/motivation/track record of management. If you aren't investing in at least one of those two things, you are throwing money away.

So knowing that, is Bitcoin a good investment?

[becoin]

Who should decide what the fair price of a tx is?

Competition between miners.

[rebuilder]

Who should decide what the fair price of a tx is?

Competition between miners.

Sounds good to me! The old supply/demand dynamic, right?

Now, who should decide how much demand there is for tx?
Who should decide what the supply of tx is?

[Fatman3001]

Who should decide what the fair price of a tx is?

Competition between miners.

So, Bitcoin Unlimited then?

[luckygenough56]

up or down ?

[BitUsher]

Regarding fees and blocksize:
People use the best option they have until a better option materializes. This should be obvious. What is going to prevent people from using an altcoin when one becomes a better option, other than censorship and DDoS attacks?  

I watch Shark Tank and it has given me a good idea how successful investors think. Is the idea proprietary? What is the barrier to entry for competition? Is management skilled and motivated?

If you are not investing in a proprietary idea, You have to be investing in the skills/motivation/track record of management. If you aren't investing in at least one of those two things, you are throwing money away.

So knowing that, is Bitcoin a good investment?

All other altcoins are primarily used for speculation alone and have little if not any utility. One has to take a "shapeshift" exchange cut to even spend them. This could change in 5-10 years, no doubt, but it is unwise for people to recommend others to gamble into a testnet scam rather than simply offloading to fiat if they are unhappy with bitcoin. If someone wants to invest in an altcoin because they really believe in it and understand it than so be it... but those threatening to divest into ETH* are mainly doing so as a scare tactic.

No matter how big the blocksize is won't solve our problems. We can still easily doublespend 0 conf txs (without RBF), and waiting 2-3 conf (min recommended) isn't fast enough and will never allow bitcoin to go mainstream. We need Segwit ASAP and multiple payment channel solutions to allow for secure instant tx's and scalability. Allowing spam to drop off and go offchain temporarily is a good thing and will motivate our community to use payment channels instead of simply stuffing everything in a block in a sloppy manner.  

* I would love to hear of a hypothetical use case of Ethereum that wouldn't be better done through Bitcoin or Oracles.

[bargainbin]

^How's that solar mining farm of yours going, all good?

[Fatman3001]

Regarding fees and blocksize:
People use the best option they have until a better option materializes. This should be obvious. What is going to prevent people from using an altcoin when one becomes a better option, other than censorship and DDoS attacks?  

I watch Shark Tank and it has given me a good idea how successful investors think. Is the idea proprietary? What is the barrier to entry for competition? Is management skilled and motivated?

If you are not investing in a proprietary idea, You have to be investing in the skills/motivation/track record of management. If you aren't investing in at least one of those two things, you are throwing money away.

So knowing that, is Bitcoin a good investment?

All other altcoins are primarily used for speculation alone and have little if not any utility. One has to take a "shapeshift" exchange cut to even spend them. This could change in 5-10 years, no doubt, but it is unwise for people to recommend others to gamble into a testnet scam rather than simply offloading to fiat if they are unhappy with bitcoin. If someone wants to invest in an altcoin because they really believe in it and understand it than so be it... but those threatening to divest into ETH* are mainly doing so as a scare tactic.

No matter how big the blocksize is won't solve our problems. We can still easily doublespend 0 conf txs (without RBF), and waiting 2-3 conf (min recommended) isn't fast enough and will never allow bitcoin to go mainstream. We need Segwit ASAP and multiple payment channel solutions to allow for secure instant tx's and scalability. Allowing spam to drop off and go offchain temporarily is a good thing and will motivate our community to use payment channels instead of simply stuffing everything in a block in a sloppy manner.  

* I would love to hear of a hypothetical use case of Ethereum that wouldn't be better done through Bitcoin or Oracles.

Are you one of the devs?

Is this the hubris that allows them to act this way?

[AlexGR]

Because fees add capacity. Got it!

Fees don't add capacity. They introduce antispamming disincentives to make use of existing capacity in a rational way.

Bitcoin is a p2p protocol that can be subject to numerous p2p attacks, including blockchain bloat attacks, mempool bloat etc - provided the fees are low and that there are co-operating miners that accept near-zero-cost txs for inclusion.

However, my point was that I thought a situation where large numbers of genuine transactions got stuck in the mempool was a situation we wanted to avoid.

First: Why? What will happen if the mempool is full? We've seen stress scenarios, we've seen what happened when private key lists were handed out - the network managed it pretty well. In the pre-0.12 scenario, let's say some nodes crashed due to lack of memory or something. Now this is fixed with mempool management parameters so you don't need to worry about that.

Second: If you can get txs relayed for near-zero-cost, then what's to say that you won't fill the mempool easily, even with 10mb blocks, by broadcasting 10 times the volume of current spam txs?

But as Mike Hearn predicted, users aren't just magically using the correct fee. Almost every fee is 0.0001. Which used to be a very good fee, but today it will get you stuck.

0.0001 (fixed) is 0.04$ per tx and it almost certainly will get you in within the first few blocks.
0.0001 per kb is in reality 0.000025 / 0.01$ for a 250byte tx so you'll wait until you bump it up.

There is nothing "very good" about it. It's way too low. Near zero cost fees attract near zero cost abuse. Plus it is not futureproof (the network will not be secure at this level, even if you have 2-10-30mb blocks). Plus it does not replace mining subsidy as it should be doing. Plus it does not give any serious motive to miners to mine the txs when the fees of 1mb block don't even get them 1% of the block reward.

Edit: So basically the situation is like this: the fee market doesn't work because users are insufficiently aware of the issue, and even if it did "work" it seems there are much more than 1MB per block worth of genuine txs at times.

The fee market works. If someone's wallet is crap in dealing with fees, then they should use external sites to determine what to pay. If they made a mistake, they should bump their fee up with RBF.

AlexGR: Who should decide what the fair price of a tx is?

In the presence of a rational mining market, the miners.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin



Explanation

[BitUsher]

Are you one of the devs?

Is this the hubris that allows them to act this way?

I am a developer, but have not contributed much to Core besides some testing and comments. Your question is somewhat nonsensical as core is an open source process where any developer can participate(yes, some odd pull requests will be ignored... but I have witnessed new contributors have pull requests accepted. )

As a developer the whole concept of Eth is an act of supererogation and unnecessarily dangerous.

Rather than attack me, Please explain to me a hypothetical use case for Eth that wouldn't be better executed with Bitcoin and oracles besides exciting investors because they hear words like "Turing Complete" and "Blockchain 2.0". I am genuinely open to listening to any hypothetical use cases.

[yugo23]

But, that's irrelevant.

The problem is that genuine transactions aren't getting through.

You can stick various types of stamps on an envelope and depending the accumulated value of the stamps you can ask for first priority, second priority, express, etc.

If, on the other hand, you don't buy stamps that add up to the proper value of even the basic service, your mail will be rejected.

The legitimacy of the intent of the sender is not in question in that case but his level of intelligence is in question - if he expects to conduct his business by not paying what he should.

In bitcoin it's actually better because you have hope that even at 0.4cents or 1 cents, you can get confirmed after a long wait - or you might even get added for free (!).

Now, if people don't know how to set fees, or what fees are appropriate, that may be related to ignoring how BTC is used, or some design failure of the user-interface which is inadequate in warning the user about whether he needs 1c-2c-5c etc and how long it will take for his confirmation. Still, I think with 0.12 you can RBF and bump up your fee and be on your way even if you got it wrong the first time.

What it definitely isn't: a block-size issue.

Because fees add capacity. Got it!



However, my point was that I thought a situation where large numbers of genuine transactions got stuck in the mempool was a situation we wanted to avoid. But as Mike Hearn predicted, users aren't just magically using the correct fee. Almost every fee is 0.0001. Which used to be a very good fee, but today it will get you stuck.

Edit: So basically the situation is like this: the fee market doesn't work because users are insufficiently aware of the issue, and even if it did "work" it seems there are much more than 1MB per block worth of genuine txs at times.

More than that, the fee market can't work.

It can't work because the absolute number of transactions that have to be done is still the same! All those transactions stuck aren't just transactions of a few cents, they can't just be grouped together.

[yugo23]

Because fees add capacity. Got it!

Fees don't add capacity. They introduce antispamming disincentives to make use of existing capacity in a rational way.

Bitcoin is a p2p protocol that can be subject to numerous p2p attacks, including blockchain bloat attacks, mempool bloat etc - provided the fees are low and that there are co-operating miners that accept near-zero-cost txs for inclusion.

Your argument is valid only if you consider that the size is big enough to let the non spamming transactions go through. It seems like it's not really the case from the stats I saw 5 pages ago :/

[bargainbin]

>There is nothing "very good" about it. It's way too low. Near zero cost fees attract near zero cost abuse.
If miner include those [near zero] tx now, what will make them reject them later?
>Plus it is not futureproof
Subsidizing miners with block rewards isn't future-proof. It's done to let Bitcoin grow up without having to earn its keep, like sending your kid to school [instead of putting her to work as soon as she can walk].

[Fatman3001]

Are you one of the devs?

Is this the hubris that allows them to act this way?

I am a developer, but have not contributed much to Core besides some testing and comments. Your question is somewhat nonsensical as core is an open source process where any developer can participate(yes, some odd pull requests will be ignored... but I have witnessed new contributors have pull requests accepted. )

As a developer the whole concept of Eth is an act of supererogation and unnecessarily dangerous.

Rather than attack me, Please explain to me a hypothetical use case for Eth that wouldn't be better executed with Bitcoin and oracles besides exciting investors because they hear words like "Turing Complete" and "Blockchain 2.0". I am genuinely open to listening to any hypothetical use cases.

RIght now?

Just about anything, because the blocks are full.

[a7goo]

probably the new block size will be a "nature" consequence of these big tx to be processed...more fee = more power!
What do you think?