If you're buying a coffee or are a retailer with a POS terminal, you need the transaction to go through fast.
With blocks getting issued in either one minute or 30 minutes, your main problem is confirmation time, not fees.
If you can do it with 0-conf, obviously fees are not an issue. You are confirmed even if the transactions goes in 10 blocks.
But 0-conf is ...well... double-spendable.
No. I'm saying that with limited size blocks, there is no fee which guarantees you a place in the next block since others may be bidding higher than you. Even you have a fee of $5, if everyone else is at $5.01, you're out of luck, even if a miner really wanted your $5.
It's a paradox only because you mentally choose the losing side. You could make an equally valid paradox saying you will always beat the "loser" by paying 5.02 as he would always pay 5.01 or less and thus be left out due to space scarcity... lol?
Wait, I thought we were comparing to parcel delivery services. Which one does that?
Parcel delivery services overcharge you to avoid dynamic charge.
If they feel, for example, that their cost is 1.3$ to 4.5$ depending the workload, destination, economy of scales during certain circumstances of mass deliveries etc etc, they may charge you 5$ "just in case", so that they always make profit.
Bitcoin is far more efficient and that's not a problem, it's a feature in the sense that you don't need to pay more than you have to.
So, for example, if first-block inclusion fees fluctuate between, say, 10 cents and 30 cents, yes of course you could be paying a "fixed" dollar to be always in and I could give you an answer like that, but you would be overpaying by doing that. If you pay 31cents though you'll be relatively assured of inclusion (unless you hit a miner where he is not even interested in your peanuts compared to the block subsidy and mines 0-txs). Still you might be overpaying a bit compared to a riskier 20 cents.
Actually there is a market gap here for some kind of website / service that monitors broacasts, sees when txs are included and finds out
precisely what the cut-off for first block inclusion is by seeing which went through and which didn't in prior blocks (provided prior blocks actually mined txs and were not 0-tx blocks). I feel that bitcoin-qt's estimations could be improved and from what I read, the same goes for light clients.
The genius part of Bitcoin is that is more than an engineering work, the design understands basic economic and psychological principles (game theory), and unite them in an environment, where everyone can join voluntary.
It is genius but it can't cover everything. It didn't forsee the aggressive takeover through a developers schism which wants to fork the currency and create a precedent of the currency splitting again and again in the future because devs disagree and promote division.
Money can't be forked / have the supply diluted / create 2 parallel currencies of believers in BTC and believers in BTCC - and then in every critical junction have this happen again and again. This is bullshit. The human component vulnerabilities were underestimated and I feel Satoshi's warning back in August might be true: If the fork succeeds he will be forced to officially declare it a failure.
From what I'm seeing in the poll:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1331385.0...it's up to 77.2% for "no" and "probably no". Now, that's way too low for my risk-aversion preferences... I don't know if I can "afford" a 23% uncertainty or risk (going by the wisdom of the crowd). According to my assessment the risk is actually higher because the substance is solid.
The thing is, every democratic process can be used to create rifts.
Let's say you have a community and then you have 10 issues to solve.
You start with 100 people who vote 50-50 in every single issue.
After the first round / first issue, and if it involves "heated" debates people have split in 50-50 and may have hostilities between them, like we do right now with "core / classic".
Then in the second issue, let's say the 50% who thought they were "friends" because they sided on the same side of round 1, may be in opposite sides in issue number 2. For example say after a classic fork some disagree about where classic should be going and create a new fork.
So community is now divided in 4 parts
-25% voted yes in issue 1 / voted yes in issue 2
-25% voted yes in issue 1 / voted no in issue 2
-25% voted no in issue 2 / voted yes in issue 2
-25% voted no in issue 1 / voted no in issue 2
In the third voting about a third issue, the community will have split in 16 parts.
That is problematic and can never be applied to currencies.
If it does, the currency is useless - at least as store of value which requires confidence. The assumption that most people will side with the miners even if they disagree may hold some truth, but even so if you lose even 10% in each round that sticks with an old fork for ideological reasons, then you have created 16 currencies over the first fork and 2 consequent decisions in each fork - while losing a good chunk of people in the process and preventing a whole lot of others from coming onboard due to the constant "cell division" in each "democratic rift" or "free market choice" or whatever term one may use. It's a weird mechanism.
It's a united we stand / divided we fall situation.
Poll
